There are no examples of the playful function of the Sicilian language in the two novels, but there are still cases in which the translator has had to deal with wordplays and puns. Many of these are linked to the figure of Catarella, not present in the first novel and introduced in the second. Catarella is a character of low intelligence, only employed at the police station because of his family ties. He uses a language defined as italiano maccheronico [macaronic Italian], his enunciations are not coherent which, apart from being funny, also causes confusion from time to time. I chose to highlight one of these Catarella-moments and two others not linked to him. In the first example, Montalbano and Catarella are talking about his “venereal sickness,” which he understands as something that comes and goes, confusing the verb venire [to come] with the adjective venerea [venereal]. In her solution to this semantic problem, Margit Lukácsi chose to keep the image of the illness, as vérbaj [blood disease] is a synonym for syphilis, but she connected it with nosebleeds which come and go, thus conducted to the meaning that vérbaj [blood disease] is, in Catarella’s mind, bleeding that comes at certain intervals and stops.

 

 

The second example is the comment made by secretary Ferdinand Biraghìn: the joke is possible because tenore in Italian means both tenor [singer] and style, tone, manner. Since in Hungarian there is no such polysemy, the translator used the word veleje (velő) which means bone marrow, but also essence, and so diverted the joke from the field of singing voices to structure: eleje [beginning], veleje [essence, substance, core] and hátulja [ending]. In the English translation, the joke works the same way as in Italian, but it is not (and cannot be) the case for the Hungarian version: the words chosen by the translator seem like a good solution to the problem albeit the result is a little less amusing.

 

 

The third example contains Montalbano’s slurred words when he wakes up from a nightmare in the hospital after being shot: he is scared that because the bullet compromised his intestines, he will have to eat mushy food. The doctors in the room try to guess his words, which, obviously, rhyme with the original word. In the Italian excerpt, it is all substantives that end in the same morpheme (-[p]ine), which results more natural. In Hungarian, the words also rhyme, but among them there is also a verb (lelövöm) [I’ll shoot (him)]. It is also interesting to note that the second set of words (scarpine [small shoes] and mezőkön [on fields]) could sound absurd from the inspector’s mouth, the third set (rapine [robbery] and lelövöm [I’ll shoot (him)]) is linked to his profession, which makes it more plausible, but also means that the translator tried imitate how out of context the words were while choosing them, not only the rhyme pattern.