Curzio Malaparte, born Kurt Erich Suckert (1898–1957), was a fabulist, a trickster, and a master of obfuscation, talents that served him well on the page and, as he slid away from his fascist past, in later life too. It is thus not inappropriate that the first English-language edition of the “diary”—I’ll get to those scare quotes in due course—of his time in early post-war Paris draws on two differing predecessors.1 The first (Diario di uno straniero a Parigi) came out in Italy in 1966, the second in France the following year. Stephen Twilley, who has now translated the Diary into English, notes that the typewritten manuscript delivered to the Italian publisher by Malaparte’s family was in chaos. The French editors complemented chaos with carelessness and—when Malaparte was less than respectful about some members of France’s cultural establishment—censorship.
Twilley thinks that “there must be at least two versions of more than half of the Diary.” With no access to primary sources, his version is a “sort of hybrid.” It involved reconciling (and sometimes supplementing or correcting) the two earlier editions, neither of which is “particularly authoritative.”
That can be said of other significant portions of Malaparte’s work, although for them death cannot provide an excuse. The original reports Malaparte filed for the Corriere della Sera from the Axis and Finnish sides of the Eastern Front (some of which were actually written in rather more comfortable Rome or Capri) were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. This happy obliteration allowed Malaparte to claim that the reports that are the basis of the definitive edition of Il Volga nasce in Europa (The Volga Rises in Europe, 1952)—in my minority opinion, his greatest work—also included passages written by the bravely outspoken correspondent who had previously fallen foul of the censor. Maybe.
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