Lost in Translation: perdite culturali nel passaggio dall’arabo all’italiano

Abstract

This article investigates the Italian language rendering of some colloquial expressions, idioms and proverbs in the Egyptian vernacular that have been cited in literary works. The aim is to verify any cultural losses due to the difficulty of translating social and anthropological realia of Egypt. This article does not pass judgments on the strategies adopted by the various translators or on the correctness of the translation. Its aim is rather to find equivalents of expressions closely related to local Egyptian referents. In proposing the various solutions, the anthropological sources of the said and or of the term will be analyzed. This research could start an inventory of the losses deriving from the lack of cultural equivalence in literary translation, through a comparative method between the Arabic, Italian and possibly English versions of the text. The corpus is a list of idiomatic expressions and cultural elements from two stories by the Egyptian writer Yūsuf Idrīs: Arḫaṣ layālī (“The Cheapest Nights”), a short story published in 1954 in a collection that bears the same title and the second story Bayt mīn laḥm (“House of Flesh”), published in the collection that bears the same title in 1971. Both stories were originally translated into Italian by Luisa Orelli and published in the collection Alla fine del mondo in 1993.