Due casi limite dell’autotraduzione: ‘Il castello dei destini incrociati’ di Calvino e ‘Il Capitale’ di Marx

Abstract

This essay deals with self-translation or auto-translation, considered as an activity at the interface between the creative act of writing and the “imitative” act of translating. The definition of the expression and its differentiation from translation on the one hand and from autonomous writing on the other is yet to establish, and so is the status of the target text as a translation or as an “original”. The essay proposes to examine two special cases of self-translation into French, in which the author is not the only editor of the translated text, but revises and authorizes the work of a translator. The first one regards Italo Calvino as a self-translator of his novel Il castello dei destini incrociati, the second one Karl Marx, revising the translation of the first volume of Das Kapital. It will be shown that for both of them, the French language functions as a sort of constraint in the process of translation. In both cases, it stimulates invention, leading to a kind of réécriture, that is to say a continuation of the original.