I have been reading Lily Tuck’s concise Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante, the biography of one of the greatest figures of postwar Italian literature, best known in the States for her 1957 novel Arturo’s Island. Tuck’s book is a fascinating study of literary fortunes, and it begins with the claim that, “had Elsa Morante and her husband, Alberto Moravia, been French, they would have been as much celebrated as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.” The comparison seems a bit invidious, but it does at least put front and center the goal of the biography — to question why Morante isn’t better appreciated as a world writer than she is. (It must be said that in Italy it is only fairly recently that Morante has been canonized.) Might the answer lie at least in part in the declining prestige of Italian as a world language?

Don’t expect the number of students learning Italian to experience a growth spurt anytime soon. On Wednesday the College Board announced that the Italian Language Advanced Placement Program is, to borrow the title of Curzio Malaparte’s classic WWII work, kaput. The program, which had been offered since 2005, had been slated for elimination since last year (Brainstorm loyalists will recall Mark Bauerlein’s post about the impending threat to the program and the effect its shelving could have on incentives for high schoolers to study the language and administrators to offer it). Trevor Packer, vice president of the College Board, said that the decision had been made to continue to support only those programs that would not lose more than $500,000 a year — a number that the AP Program in Italian, like those in Latin literature, French literature, and computer science, couldn’t make. (The number of students taking the AP Italian tests rose to 1,930 in 2008, up from 1,597 in 2006, the first year the test was offered.) But in the case of Italian, there were no other AP Programs devoted to the language and culture (there is still, for example, a Virgil AP Program to blunt the blow of the elimination of the more ranging Latin Literature AP Program), and an outside group, the Italian Language Foundation, was founded to help raise funds to underwrite the losses. Packer described the foundation’s efforts as “valiant” — it came up with around $650,000 in donations by appealing directly to groups through its website — but it ultimately wound up short of the $1.5-million it needed to stave off the program’s elimination. (Quoted in the LA Times, the foundation’s president, Margaret Cuomo, laid the blame at the feet of the Italian government, saying she was “deeply disappointed” in the lack of financial support it provided.)

Italian is facing some frankly poor prospects — and this has been reflected as well in the elimination of academic jobs and departments (at least one big state university, Oregon State, axed its Italian program last year). Care to guess how many works of fiction and poetry were translated into Italian last year?

Fourteen.

According to Chad Post at the University of Rochester, the Bill James of translation statistics, Europa Editions brought out five; Bitter Lemon, two. FSG also published a pair. Among university presses, only Harvard and Yale produced original translations from the Italian (collections of poetry by, respectively, the Renaissance writer Jacopo Sannazaro and the 20th-century Crepuscolarismo figure Umberto Saba ). Even in a book market that doesn’t favor translation, Italy fares badly: By comparison, 47 works of fiction and poetry from France were translated into English last year, 25 from Germany, 21 from Japan, and 20 from Russia. Spain could count 15.

Based on those numbers, I’d say it’s a pretty good bet that Elsa Morante’s claim to obscurity will remain unchallenged — although, at least when it comes to important Italian novelists and poets, hers will certainly not be a monopoly.