Henry Lawson. Franca Cavagnoli, Ed. Racconti. Rome, Italy: Idragomanni, 2014 [Book review]

Henry Lawson (1867–1922), a prolific writer of short stories and poems set in the bush in the Australian colonial period, is well known for his attention to characters and dialogues and for the use of a sharp writing style that matches the harshness and severity of life in the Australian outback be- tween the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

Racconti is a collection of short stories by Lawson translated into Italian by Translation Studies students supervised by Franca Cavagnoli (the Italian translator of Mark Twain, David Malouf, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee and others). Cavagnoli reviewed all of the students’ translations, wrote the afterword, a contextualising chapter on the history and culture of Australia in the colonial period, and maintained oversight of the whole publication. Racconti includes some of the most iconic short stories by Lawson, such as “A Double Buggy at Lahey’s Creek” and “The Loaded Dog,” here with the titles “Un calesse doppio a Lahey’s Creek” and “Il cane carico.”