摘要：That the translation by Gaetano Rando of the late Rosa Cappiello’s Paese fortunato (1981) should be reprinted, 25 years after its 1984 first edition, in the ‘Australian Classics Library’ of Sydney University Press, says something about the significant place the English version has achieved in the body of migrant literature. It has attracted far more attention in Australia than in Italy where of course it was first published. The controversy it aroused is part of the story and briefly summarised in the capable preface written by Nicole Moore. The narrator’s criticisms of Australia have caused unease among Australian critics, although, as Sneja Gunew observed, reviewers made the mistake of making ‘the author, the narrator, the woman, the migrant converge in a spurious unity’.1 For her, the novel ‘inflates migrant oppression to such absurdist proportions that in its very excessiveness it becomes a force of renewal and imaginative energy’ (517). Despite many stimulating observations, I note that ambiguities created by translation have led Gunew to make unsustainable claims of intertextuality of Oh Lucky Country with Dante’s Inferno.ey’s v
