The Expression of Temporality in the Italian Translations of Albert Camus’ “The Plague”

Abstract

The Expression of Temporality in the Italian Translations of Albert Camus’ “The Plague”. Albert Camus' The Plague, written between 1942 and 1947, was re-translated into Italian in 2017, more than seventy years after its first publication. In the last two years, Camus' work has been rediscovered and reread, due to the topicality of its contents and its extreme closeness to the current period. Yasmina Melaouah's new translation, produced for Bompiani in 2017, has contributed to the new success of this work, through a new approach to Camusian language and a reinterpretation of the temporality of the novel, which pervades the entire narrative. Starting from an interdisciplinary basis composed of reference studies on retranslation, temporality, narratology and the language of Albert Camus, this contribution aims to analyse from a linguistic point of view the recovery of past forms in Camus' work in the present, with a view to the future, through a comparative analysis of the first translation made by Beniamino Dal Fabbro in 1948 and the last one, by Yasmina Melaouah. Like any new translation that fixes the canon of books considered classics, the 2017 retranslation of The plague enriches our imagination as a form of knowledge of current events: in particular, the expression of temporality allows us to reinterpret present time. As the first translation has done since its publication until 2017, the retranslation of The Plague brings the values in which the meaning is contained closer to our contemporariness, which is understood as humanity advances, by the knowledge we have of ourselves. The analysis of the strategies of translation of temporality allows us to observe how these values are transmitted by the two Italian translations, and how The Plague still accompanies us in our understanding of a present that was already foreseen over seventy years ago.