The bold initiative to publish “The Golden Bough” in its unabridged version

The publisher Luni has dealt a fatal blow to European publishers (who remembers now that, in the distant past, Italy marched through Europe at the head of civilisation?), by publishing a cult classic: "The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion" by James Frazer (accurately translated and edited by Fabrizio Bagatti). The complete 1915 edition of the work comprises twelve volumes (Luni has just released the ninth: The Scapegoat), and in Italy it had hitherto been available only in drastically abridged anthologies or translations of the single-volume edition that Frazer himself prepared in 1922 to improve the circulation of a text that was otherwise prohibitively difficult, verging on the inaccessible. These anthologies, however, offer only a meagre glimpse of what is, in its entirety, a monumental, dizzying ethnographic repository of myths, rites and beliefs from classical antiquity to the present day, and of the grandiose attempt to place them within the light of pure rationality and understanding. Over the years, poets and writers (such as Eliot, Joyce, Yeats and Lawrence), philosophers (Wittgenstein, Girard, Bataille, Cassirer) and psychoanalysts (Freud, Jung), who, whilst perhaps rejecting or even overturning Frazer’s excessively positivist conclusions, appreciated and made use of his wealth of data and his unrivalled anthropological harvest.

The Luni edition is the first complete edition in Italy, as previously there was only the single-volume edition published in 1950 by Einaudi (at the direct instigation of Pavese and De Martino, great admirers of Frazer) in the version by the distinguished and ill-fated Lauro De Bosis. The Luni edition is also the only contemporary complete translation of Frazer’s work, and this publisher (in the person of Matteo Luteriani) is no stranger to publishing ventures of this kind – that is to say, monumental ones – having recently also published a six-volume complete edition of Firdausi’s Shahnameh, the ‘Persian Homer’ as he is commonly referred to for the sake of Western analogical convenience. These works, running to thousands of pages, represent a necessary counterpoint—and almost an antibody, if not a form of allergic reaction—to the age of audiobooks and generative AI, while also exuding something romantically Don Quixote-like and fruitfully anti-modern. It is that touch of madness, typical of true-blue publishers caught between the world of accounts and the literary realm, that is necessary for the publication of multi-volume works, perhaps stretching over years or even decades; works exposed to the vicissitudes of the publishers themselves, the editors and even the readers, who may not even see them through to the end.

In the past, these publishing ventures – providing a country with an indispensable publication – were more common and left an indelible mark on a publisher’s catalogue, establishing their reputation for posterity. Adelphi, for example, was founded to publish Nietzsche’s works – rejected by the left-leaning and ideologically driven Einaudi – a task it succeeded in and which subsequently defined it forever (though it did not fare quite so well with Schopenhauer’s works, which sadly petered out after the first few volumes). In Italy, the Einaudi ‘Millenni’ series once stood out, in which Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi appeared in six massive volumes, as did the Mondadori ‘Classici’, in which the complete works of Goldoni are contained in fourteen volumes. Even France, second to none in chauvinism, has erected memorable editorial monuments to its own authors. In the Pléiade, for example, one finds Saint-Simon’s Mémoires in eight volumes and Voltaire’s Correspondance in thirteen. Finally, one must not overlook the critical contribution—incalculable in terms of knowledge—that this sort of unabridged work offers compared to anthologies or crude facsimiles, allowing one to form a well-rounded picture of authors who would otherwise be misunderstood or viewed through a flickering slit. In this regard, the shift from the distorted Nietzsche of the infamous "Will to Power" to the more fragmented, problematic and ultimately unassimilable Nietzsche of the "Posthumous Fragments" is particularly telling.