Original scientific paper
Italian Translations of Ivo Vojnović’s Dubrovačka trilogija (Dubrovnik Trilogy)
Smiljka Malinar
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Following the initiative of Italian Slavist Arturo Cronia, Dubrovačka trilogija (Dubrovnik
Trilogy), the most famous and the most successful work by Ivo Vojnović,
was translated into Italian and published in the edition Teatro di tutto il mondo in the
year 1965. Cronia accompanied the translation with an extensive commentary. In an
earlier article, published in 1963, Cronia focuses especially on the Italian version of
the first one-act play of the Trilogy, Allons enfants, which he ascribes to Vojnović
himself, adducing as evidence a manuscript he found in the year 1939 in a private
library in Zadar. The other two one-act plays, Suton (Twilight) and Na taraci (On the
Terrace), were translated by Carmen Cronia, the scholars’s wife.
This was an unusual situation, because the translator of the first part of the Trilogy
into Italian was at the same time the author of the original work, which allowed him
considerable creative independence, which usually is not permitted in cases of literary
translations. It gave an excuse to Arturo Cronia to claim that the Italian version is more
mature and artistically more successful than the Croatian original. Croatian scholar
Frano Čale, analysing Vojnović’s creative approach and emphasising the creative potential,
pregnancy and evocativeness of Vojnović’s language and its specific Dubrovnik
character, opposes Cronia’s statements about the translation that has outshined the
original. Carmen Cronia, in the role of an “ordinary” translator, offered a reliable, yet
not slavish translation, limited to minimal transcodification, within which she made
an effort to evoke the local colour and the linguistic stratification of the original.
Keywords
Ivo Vojnović; Dubrovačka trilogija; Arturo Cronia; Carmen Cronia; talijanski prijevodi; Frano Čale
Hrčak ID:
17405
URI
Publication date:
9.1.2006.
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