A cura di Margareth Keanneally e Aurelia Martelli
by Enrico Ganni - Despite the severe cultural restrictions imposed by the Fascist regime, in the 1920s and 30s the Mondadori publishing house made great efforts to internationalize its publishing list and to introduce literary genres little known to Italians before that time. Thus motivated, they created two new series: “La Medusa”, dedicated to great writers like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Virginia Woolf; and “I libri gialli” (literally “Yellow…
by Aurelia Martelli - Between November 20 and 23, 1989 Franco Fortini (translator of Goethe, Brecht, Milton. Kafka, Flaubert, Proust and other authors) held a seminar on translation at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples. In this series of lessons (now collected together in one volume as Lezioni sulla traduzione), Fortini dealt with the complexity of translation, arriving at a synthesis of all the elements that condition the…
by Giulia Baselica - In this interview Claudia Zonghetti, translator of Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, tells her story and welcomes us into her world: a world of words, of doubts and reflections, but, above all, of emotion. And she does so with that deep insight and simplicity, combined with a light, yet down-to-earth approach, that is so typical of her. From this conversation with Zonghetti a portrait emerges…
by Giulia Baselica - In this review of a remarkable text by Antonio Prete, I have tried to give the reader a taste of some, though by no means all, of the many aspects of translation examined by the author. It is an invitation to read All’ombra dell’altra lingua. Per una poetica della traduzione, which in itself invites the reader to set out on a long voyage of adventure through…
by Anna Battaglia - This article describes a teaching/learning experience: the translation of the first story from La Maison de Claudine (My Mother's House) by Colette (1922), Où sont les enfants, where the female narrator describes a place from her childhood, at a distance of forty years. It is only through careful reading, aimed at bringing to light the key features of the text, that one can arrive at a…
by Paola Agosti - The Premio Agosti is an annual prize for Best Translation which Paola Agosti and her brother Aldo have named after their mother, Nini Castellani Agosti: firstly, because she was an acclaimed and prolific translator, and secondly because theirs can actually be defined as a family of translators. Their grandmother, Cristina Garosci, translated from Polish; Nini’s brother, Emilio Castellani, is famous as the Italian translator of Bertolt…
by Susanna Basso - Alice Munro once declared in the course of an interview that when reading her old stories she sometimes thinks she would do them differently. She has actually done so with this old story of hers, whose title, Home, is in itself the promise of a return. Thirty years have elapsed from the first to the second version of her text and what has occurred within the…
by Christiane Nord - It is commonly accepted that anybody who sits down to write a text has at least a vague idea of the audience they are addressing. In text or discourse linguistics there seems indeed to be almost no debate regarding the assumption that the addressee, or rather the idea of the addressee that the author has in mind, is a very important criterion guiding the writer's stylistic…
by Mauro Pala - For Gramsci language plays a major role in developing a theory of social emancipation. Accordingly, language must be analyzed against the backdrop of external determination and in this context national cultures or the expressions of two fundamentally similar civilizations can be mutually translatable. The principle of translatability thus applies to the entire construction of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis: translation becomes the necessary criterion of mediation between…
by Massimo Bonifazio - Luca Crescenzi’s essay Melancolia occidentale (Western Melancholy) provides a new interpretation of Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). In 2010 Crescenzi edited a new Italian version of the novel, translated by Renata Colorni with a new title, La montagna magica (The Magic Mountain). Crescenzi’s essay considers Mann’s novel in the light of the ancient tradition of melancholy (an impulse towards death pervading the whole…
L’officina del traduttore
“tradurre” al Salone del Libro di Torino