Analysis and translation of D’Avenia’s narrative: "Resisti, cuore. L’odissea e l’arte di essere mortali"

Abstract

In the world of publishing, fundamental but often forgotten or considered of little relevance is the sector of translations, may it be of a book, novel or article, into a language different from the original. Nevertheless, it is precisely the translator's work that tries to decompose and then reconstruct the original artwork to bring the voice of the author to other countries and to different cultures, just like Livius Andronicus did with Homer's wonderful Odyssey, which thanks to him became accessible to the Romans. A translation of Alessandro D'Avenia's “Resisti, cuore” through the Odyssey and theory is a master thesis on translation from Italian into English. The novel examined for this translation, written by a contemporary Italian author, implies a path that unfolds through both theory and techniques, and which is constantly in a dialogue with the epic masterpiece both in terms of content themes and specific translation choices. In this paper, the author's style is analyzed as a starting point in order to justify the translation on the basis of syntactic and lexical choices, the historical context, and the peculiarities of the two languages. A little research on the state of the art, also delving into the author himself and the work's connections with the Homeric poem opens the dissertation, to penetrate then into the actual translation and the problems and challenges it entailed in seeking the most optimal solutions, illustrated in the second and third chapters.