3. Camilleri in Translation

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Camilleri’s novels on Montalbano, which are edited by Sellerio, have been translated into English by Stephen Sartarelli for the publishing house Penguin. Stephen Sartarelli is an American poet and translator; he has translated important Italian authors such as Umberto Saba and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and he has been working on the translation of Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca for fifteen years. He is the translator of Camilleri’s novels on Montalbano both for the American and British book market. Both Camilleri and Sartarelli were awarded the CWA International Dagger Award for Translated Crime in 2012 for the Il campo del vasaio (The Potter’s Field). Thanks to Sartarelli’s translations, Camilleri is greatly appreciated by English readers.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Sartarelli is faced with Camilleri’s multilingualism, which renders his role full of difficulties; the translator must take into account that the language used by Camilleri cannot be overlooked. However, as Sartarelli (2002) remarks, the dialectal forms used by Camilleri are inherently local and they cannot be rendered with local English varieties in translation. He observes that
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Montalbano’s world of cops, hoods, lovely ladies and eccentric petit-bourgeois could hardly be made to speak American ghetto jive or Scots or Faulknerian Mississippian or any other geographically specific idiom without appearing absurd (Gutkowski, 2009: 8).
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

This does not mean that the translator cannot intervene and nudge the language in a certain direction. In fact, Sartarelli decides to create “new spaces” in the target language; for instance, he managed to coin a new expression, curse the saints, whose original Sicilian expression was santiare, and he noticed that many reviewers cite this expression when praising his work (Sartarelli, 2002). Yet, as Sartarelli (Sartarelli, 2009; Sartarelli, 2017; Sartarelli, 2002) has reminded his readers on many occasions, the book market in the USA is a rigid one, especially as regards translations. Unlike the British book market, the American one is not tolerant of linguistic experimentation and foreign works need to be “Americanised” in order to be accepted. As he points out, the majority of Americans do not read translated books, do not watch foreign movies or listen to foreign music (Sartarelli, 2002); on the other hand, American authors are constantly translated worldwide.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

In this section, three of the novels translated by Sartarelli’s will be examined; they were translated into English with the titles The Shape of Water, The Scent of the Night1 and The Paper Moon and were published in 2002, 2007 and 2008, respectively. The purpose is to analyse both the strategies and the solutions adopted by the translator and to understand the reasons for the success of Sartarelli’s translated versions.
1 The version for the American public was entitled The Smell of the Night and it was published in 2005 by Viking Penguin, New York. The version used for the analysis is the one published in Great Britain in 2007 by Picador. As for The Shape of Water and The Paper Moon, I used the versions published by Viking Penguin, New York.
Tartalomjegyzék navigate_next
Keresés a kiadványban navigate_next

A kereséshez, kérjük, lépj be!
Könyvjelzőim navigate_next
A könyvjelzők használatához
be kell jelentkezned.
Jegyzeteim navigate_next
Jegyzetek létrehozásához
be kell jelentkezned.
    Kiemeléseim navigate_next
    Mutasd a szövegben:
    Szűrés:

    Kiemelések létrehozásához
    MeRSZ+ előfizetés szükséges.
      Útmutató elindítása
      delete
      Kivonat
      fullscreenclose
      printsave