The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories: translations by Nico Orengo of the Burtonesque world

Abstract

The goal of the present study is to investigate how Nico Orengo approached the translation of Tim Burton’s collection of poems The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories. Instead of just examining the style of the writers of the same genre and the strategies used by the translators of it on a theoretical basis, it is focused on the strong collaboration Burton creates with his Italian translator, on the specific difficulties Orengo faces during the entire process, and the creative and unique solutions he finds out. The most influential theories of Translation Studies are proposed to explain how the translator got out of the cultural specific references or the rhyming peculiarities and several useful ways in which translation difficulties can be solved are offered as alternative proposes to the official translation.