by Richard Dixon

The World Machine is a vivid novelistic portrayal of rural life in postwar Italy. Its narrator, a small-time farmer, is one of life’s misfits, a young man who generally manages to play his cards wrongly. He is the keeper of a great truth: that people are machines built by other beings who are machines themselves. Our true destiny is to build ever better machines so that society can become a techno-utopia in which friendship can be established among all people on earth. These notions bring him into conflict with the Church, politicians, his family, and his long-suffering wife.

Paolo Volponi’s unique novel examines the relationship between rural existence, nature, the subversive idealism of a society still firmly anchored in the past, and fast-changing modern city life. The narrator’s ideas are extravagant and yet perhaps they are infused with a grain of truth, and his preoccupations about the role of technology seem as relevant today as they were then.

Published in 1965, La macchina mondiale won the prestigious Strega Prize that same year.

This translation by Richard Dixon was published by Seagull Books in 2024 to celebrate the centenary of the author’s birth.

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The World Machine

• by Paolo Volponi
• Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon
• Original title: La macchina mondiale (1965)
• 236 pages
• Publisher: Seagull Books (2024)
• ISBN: 978-1-803-09376-5
• Treat your bookshelf to a taste of Italy! Order the book here.

Richard’s Translators Aloud reading from The World Machine can be found here.

This book has been translated thanks to a contribution awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

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Paolo Volponi was born in Urbino, in central Italy, in 1924. After graduating in law, he worked for Adriano Olivetti and became director of social services at the Olivetti factory in Ivrea, northern Italy. His first volume of poetry, Il ramarro (1948), was followed by Le porte dell’Appennino, for which he won the prestigious Viareggio Prize in 1960. He published his first novel, Memoriale, two years later, followed by La macchina mondiale (1965), Corporale (1974), Il sipario ducale (1975), Il pianeta irritabile (1978), Il lanciatore di giavellotto (1981), Le mosche del capitale (1989), and La strada per Roma (1991), for which he won the Strega Prize for the second time. He died in 1994.

English translations:

• Memoriale (1962) – translated by Belén Sevareid as My Troubles Began (Grossman: New York, 1964); The Memorandum (Marion Boyars: London, 1967)
• La macchina mondiale (1965) – translated by Belén Sevareid as The Worldwide Machine (Grossman: New York, 1964; Calder and Boyars: London, 1969); translated by Richard Dixon as The World Machine (Seagull Books / University of Chicago Press, 2024)
• Il sipario ducale (1975) – translated by Peter Pedroni as Last Act in Urbino (Italica Press: New York, 1995)
• Il lanciatore di giavellotto (1981) – translated by Richard Dixon as The Javelin Thrower (Seagull Books / University of Chicago Press, 2019)

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