Dalla traduzione all’auto-traduzione. Quali cambiamenti linguistici comporta la “divulgazione culturale”?

Through the supplied theoretical background and translating examples, the paper aims to highlight the inevitable necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in the translation process. It aims to show that Translation Studies, like most scientific branches, cannot stand in isolation of the substantial findings of other disciplines. Linguistics and pragmatics, which have been predominant for many years, should therefore be regarded in close connection with other disciplines like for example human sciences. At a theoretical level, the paper starts from the ontological valence of language and the common identity of human beings (e.g. Augustine of Hippo 1841, 1841a). As a common root between languages and cultures, the common identity alludes to wider scientific research fields for the interpretation of foreign texts (e.g. H.G. Gadamer 1993, 1960/1990). It suggests the need to observe the translating experience, reasoning forward from the strict empirical and phenomenological points of view, in order to extend the perspective to further reflections on language and on the cultural function of linguistic signs by involving human studies. At a pragmatic level, examples of interlingual translations – by writers who are both authors and translators of the original text – are given in order to focus on the potentialities of each language and on the linguistic and cultural opportunities translators have in their encounter with the alien other. The starting point is a question posed by Umberto Eco (1996) – “What happens if the translator of a text is the author himself?”. Three translations of this kind are analyzed in the paper. The first two are English speeches written and translated into German by writer and artist Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916-1991). The third one is the Italian translation by the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce (1882-1941) of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the eighth chapter of his novel Finnegans Wake. In contrast to the Joycean constructive approach to translation, the paper also shows the “interpreting and translating effort” undertaken by Hildesheimer of the first 56 lines of the text Anna Livia Plurabelle (Hildesheimer 1991a). The comparison between Joyce’s fulfilled self-translation and Hildesheimer’s “paraphrase” aims to highlight the linguistic and cultural challenges enclosed in both traditional and self-translations. Through a series of examples, the paper aims to evaluate the arduous and challenging experience described on the one hand by Hildesheimer’s idea of “untranslatability”, of the “impossibility” to reformulate a text as it originally was, and on the other hand by Joyce’s need to re-invent and re-create corresponding expressions, showing the many linguistic and cultural potentialities that a language has.