Different Wor(l)ds: Pier Maria Pasinetti's Self-translation

Abstract

My final thesis is an analysis of the phenomenon of self-translation. In particular, it is focused on Pier Maria Pasinetti’s work. He was born and grew up in Venice, where his father was a physician and his mother belonged to the Ciardi, which was a family of landscape painters. He received his degree in literature from the University of Padua. He continued his education at Oxford, Berlin and finally in the United States where he first published two short stories in the Southern Review. During his studies abroad he learned English, French and German at a proficiency level. Pasinetti divided his life between Los Angeles and Venice, he led a double life between two different realities and he was able to feel completely at ease with it. This double existence is reflected in his work of self-translation, which, in my opinion, may have been done to build a connection between these two contrasting cultures. His first work to be analyzed is Rosso veneziano. From the comparison between Italian and English translation it can be deduced that Pasinetti self-translation is too literal. Moreover, the English edition lacks of two elements: the expression of Pasinetti’s writing style and the display of character’s accent. Pasinetti’s self-translation of La confusione is more interesting and complicated to be analyzed. In fact, it brings to surface the puzzling question of where the limit between self-translation and re-writing is. If the Italian edition is entitled La confusione, the English edition is entitled The Smile on the Face of the Lion. The English version presents a lot of changes in the body of the text too. Moreover, La confusione becomes Il sorriso del leone when its second edition is published sixteen years later.