Il Grande Gatsby in lingua italiana: analisi comparativa delle traduzioni in italiano e proposta di traduzione

Thanks to his works, Fitzgerald became known as the spokesman of the Jazz Age, the decade named “Roaring Twenties”. Through his novels and short stories he conveyed the atmosphere of that time, the feeling of carefreeness that lingered among the prominent people and their consequent disillusions. In Italy, the translators tried to transpose all this in versions that could be appreciated by the Italian audience that felt itself rather distant from the lifestyle depicted in The great Gatsby. When the first Italian translation appeared, a decade after the publication in the United States, the Italian people had already been experiencing totalitarianism for years. The translation targeted a female audience and was issued monthly in the series “I romanzi della Palma” by Arnoldo Mondadori Publisher.

It was not so chronologically distant from the original, but the Italian readers could not empathize with the characters because of the different social and cultural backgrounds, although Giardini had tried to adapt the language of the book in order to make it more appealing to his readers.

The novel had much more fortune in Italy after the end of World War II, when Fernanda Pivano proposed to Alberto Mondadori to re-write the story to express at its best Fitzgerald’s intentions. Choice that turned out to be the more appropriate, for her version has been the most read one for many decades and even is now. However, in order to make the novel the most suitable possible for the Italian audience of that time, Pivano had to adapt some terms of the original and make them more comprehensible or appropriate. Therefore for an Italian reader it could seem for example that Gatsby had earned all his fortune from the under-the-counter selling of alcohol in innocent pharmacies, while the original term was drugstore, that in English has a double meaning: a shop that sells consumables or, as it was translated in Italian, a chemist’s. Of course the best fitting solution was not the latter, but Pivano thought that it would be more comprehensible for the readers that maybe could not know what a drugstore was.

But this is not the only solution that could raise some eyebrows among nowadays readers. For example, the term football had been translated by Pivano in calcio, although they are two different sports, because football was not so popular and known in Italy at that time (in fact the English word for the Italian calcio is soccer and not football). And again, the cocktail mint julep is explained generically with the paraphrase un cocktail alla menta, while it is a very specific cocktail prepared with mint and bourbon.

In this perspective it seems that Pivano had tried to adjust the language to the audience’s knowledge and tastes as much as possible.
The problem of the adaptation has been a complex issue for the translators that later had to be confronted with the novel. In 2011, seventy years had passed since Fitzgerald’s death and ninety since the publication of the novel. The world had been evolving increasingly fast and what in the ‘50s was unknown or extremely far from the Italian people has now become of common use.

This makes 2000s translators face a complex issue: change the original to adapt it to the readers’ tastes or leave it as much as faithful as possible? If in the ‘50s the problem did not exist, because it was thought that everything had to be as more comprehensible as possible, nowadays, thanks to the globalization and the faster spreading of information, the readers know much more about foreign countries and their cultures. For this reason, translators such as Franca Cavagnoli, Feltrinelli, maintain that “Accepting the stranger -the foreign -as such, without assimilate it, should be the ethical aim of translation”, quoting French translator and theorist of translation Antoine Berman.

That is why she has decided to leave some terms in English, to make the reader feel that the story is located in another country, in order not to distort the nature of the book too much. Therefore she left the miles instead of convert them in kilometres, she did not translate the names of cocktails such as the above mentioned mint julep and left street for the names of New York’s streets instead of translating in strada. The aim is that of pushing the readers towards the universe of the author, immersing them into the atmosphere, the customs and practice of those specific place and time.
Tommaso Pincio, Minimum Fax, opts for a language that is less “modern” and a bit outdated, but with the same goal of expressing the style of the Twenties at its best. In his opinion, trying too much to modernize is what makes a version old in the future.
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