Luciano Foà

Luciano Foà was an Italian translator and publisher, founder of Adelphi Edizioni. Throughout his life-long career, he worked for his father at L'Agenzia letteraria internazionale (ALI), collaborated with la Nuove Edizioni Ivrea, served as a director at Einaudi for over 10 years, and founded his own publishing house, Adelphi, in 1962.

Biography

Early years and career

Luciano Foà was born into a family of Italian Jews. Back in 1898 his father Augusto Foà, aged only 21, founded the first agency to handle the rights of foreign authors in Italy: L'Agenzia letteraria internazionale (ALI). A self-taught translator from English, German and French, he considered translation to be ‘one of the most powerful creative acts’. He was collaborating with literary agents across all Europe, in Italy he represented such authors as Huxley, Kipling, Joyce, Kafka, Conan Doyle, Camus, and many more. Though he never made a fortune, he became an important figure in the world of literature.

In 1937, Luciano Foà met Roberto Bazlen, who became a lifelong friend and had a profound influence on Foà. Bazlen made him get to know Adriano Olivetti who was planning to open a new publishing house la Nuove Edizioni Ivrea. Foà joined the project and worked for Olivetti in 1941–1943. Sent by Olivetti, Foà often travelled to Switzerland searching for specific books, or to establish contacts with editors. On one of these trips, he got to know Carl Jung, on another occasion, he met Allen Dulles.

In 1943, following the German occupation of the Italian peninsula, the family was forced to flee. Augusto Foà didn't survive the escape attempts, he was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Padova. In the end, Luciano Foà managed to escape to Switzerland. Foà was first interned in a labor camp and later granted parole in Geneva. There he met many other Jewish intellectuals and anti-fascists, with whom he began to consider new publishing ventures. Foà became close friends with Alberto Zevi, who was also Jewish and an anti-fascist persecuted by the regime. Foà returned to Italy after the war and took an official position at ALI.

In 1945, Foà translated Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls which was published in serial form in Vittorini's magazine Politecnico. As recalled by his friend Giuseppe Marcenaro, Foà never aspired to become a writer himself, he only tried one and left the attempt after one page. As recalled by his daughter Anna Foà, in these ten years the families of Einaudi and Foà were practically inseparable and spent dinners, vacations and holidays together. Foà saw the mission of Adelphi in publishing books of high cultural value that had been overlooked by everyone else. As put by his granddaughter Benedetta Grasso, through the catalogue of Adelphi, he dreamed ‘to recreate the atmosphere of a Vienna's cafe in Italy’. They were followed by George Gurdjieff, Georg Groddeck, René Daumal, and many more.

For 35 years, Foà combined his work as a publisher with that of a translator and editor. Under the pen name Luciano Fabbri, he translated at least two books by Joseph Roth, as well as titles by Konrad Lorenz, Hoffmansthal, Robert Walser, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.