Abstract
This essay aims to examine in a comparative perspective both the Arabic and the Italian versions of Amara Lakhous’s novel Clash of civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. The author refers to the Italian novel as a rewriting and not a translation claiming to “Arabize Italian and Italianize Arabic”. However, as I will prove in this paper, Lakhous’s rewriting shows an asymmetrical relationship between the two languages since Italian is more prevalent in both versions at different levels. Consequently, the two texts constitute two different steps of the same creative process that begun in 2001 and ended in 2006 when Lakhous published the ultimate and perfected version of the text in Italian.
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