Translating Leonard Michaels’s New York City: the rendering of multiculturalism and multilingualism of Leonard Michaels’s short stories into Italian translation

Abstract

This thesis deals with the translation into Italian of multicultural and multilingual New York City, as portrayed by American writer Leonard Michaels. The author of this thesis has been concerned with delivering a literary translation of selected passages from The Collected Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) which could effectively render the cultural and linguistic stratification of his work. The first chapter provides a brief biography of the author and the historical and literary context in which he lived and published, in order to better frame his work. The second chapter describes the world of Leonard Michaels’s short stories, focusing on his diverse characters, who belong to different cultures and speak different languages, and on New York City, chosen as the environment where these cultures merge to generate a new one. Excerpts from the stories illustrate this complex scene and the techniques employed to describe it. The third chapter illustrates the translation process of this panorama into Italian language and culture, with a focus on the speech of the characters and on the characterization of New York City. The parallel translation of some short stories is provided. The final chapter is devoted to considerations about the common traits between Michaels’s and the Italian vision of New York as a cultural melting pot, which helped the translation of this environment into one close to the Italian sensibility.