Translator’s “Visibility”: E. Teza and His Translation of Pushkin’s “The Undertaker”

Abstract

The article deals with the issue of translator’s “visibility” using the translation of Pushkin’s short story “The Undertaker” published by Emilio Teza in the literary journal “Ateneo Veneto” in 1884 as an example. This translation was chosen for two main reasons: firstly, its historical meaning for intercultural relations between Russia and Italy as the first Italian translation of Pushkin’s short story; secondly, its translator – a well-known academician from the late 1800s, whose research concerned different areas of philology, linguistics, and comparative studies, as well as translation. As a result, despite then-predominant domesticating strategies, different elements in the target text reflect Teza’s personality and thus prove his “visibility”. The research started from the scrutiny of the translator’s biography, allowing the contextualization of this translation at a precise moment in Teza’s life. Through the contrastive analysis of the source and the texts several translatologically relevant units were identified. Afterwards, the translation strategies and shifts applied in their rendering into Italian were analysed. The scientific novelty lies in the application of such analysis to a previously unstudied text. The research led to the following conclusions: in the rendering of Russian realia, the target text is characterized by an overall domesticating strategy, typical of late-1800s translations and often correlated to the concept of translator’s “invisibility”. However, the presence of detailed footnotes reflects Teza’s personality as an ethnographer, thus making him “visible”. The presence of Tuscan dialectal forms in the target text hints at the translator’s biography, who in 1884 was living in Pisa. In addition, an example of linguistic interference from Serbian can be seen as a reference to Teza’s multilingualism. Therefore, it was proven that the translator’s personality can become “visible” by thoroughly analyzing linguistic features and translation shifts.