La ricezione linguistico-stilistica di Proust in Italia. Le traduzioni di Ginzburg, Fortini e Caproni

The seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu were translated into Italian for the first time between 1946 and 1951 by the Einaudi publishing house, some twenty years after the last volume was published in France. The “exceptional team” of translators included: Natalia Ginzburg for La strada di Swann (1946), Franco Calamandrei and Nicoletta Neri for All'ombra delle fanciulle in fiore (1949), Mario Bonfantini for I Guermantes (1949), Elena Giolitti for Sodoma and Gomorra (1950), Paolo Serini for La prigioniera (1950), Franco Fortini for Albertine scomparsa (1951), and finally Giorgio Caproni for Il tempo ritrovato (1951).The project aims to describe the linguistic and stylistic reception of Proust in Italy through an analysis of the three Einaudi translations by Ginzburg, Fortini and Caproni. Where useful and possible, the analysis has been enriched in several places by a comparison with the text of the subsequent Mondadori edition (1983-1993), translated by Giovanni Raboni; this comparison was not always possible due to inconsistencies between the source texts adopted by the translators. Each analysis has been structured into a section dedicated to vocabulary and one reserved for syntax. Although the range of phenomena is subject to variations determined by the specific tendencies of the texts, as far as vocabulary is concerned, the most common forms are: 1) linguistic ennoblements, 2) colloquial and expressive forms, 3) foreignisms and Italianisms, 4) technical terms and idiomatic expressions. The reference categories identified for syntax are: 1) syntactic refinements, 2) rationalisation of periods, 3) iterative phenomena. The translations have always been studied in relation to the historical and linguistic context of the target language, also taking into account the editorial aspect: as this was the first complete translation of the Recherche, the publishing house Einaudi took on the task of spreading awareness of the great French novel. Secondly, we also considered the personal output of the selected translators, who were writers and poets. The linguistic-stylistic analysis was then combined with the study of paratexts, any critical essays and, where possible, epistolary material. Studying an author's version involves the difficulty of arriving at a unified vision of their style: translators are often torn between the desire to be “faithful” to the source text and a more personal impulse, stimulated by linguistic and interpretative idiosyncrasies. By mediating between these two aspects, this project attempts at reconstructing the idea of Proust and of the Recherche that the three Einaudi translators developed and conveyed.