CIVITAS EDUCATIONIS Testi, lingue e culture

Abstract – What is the impact exerted by literary images in the context of translation and at which level of intersection do they meet in the field of critical reading of the text? One of the main objectives of comparative literature is the study of the foreign dimension of the literary text, the relation that the literary work entertains with the linguistic and cultural universe within which it co-exists and operates. The literary text creates at various levels - writing, reading and media use – encounters between languages, culture, and collective imagination and at the same time interchanges, manipulations and renderings of meaning. Exploring the foreign dimension of a literary creation requires that the analytical or interpretative project one is elaborating, takes into consideration the strictly textual, linguistic and cultural aspects that characterize the work, most importantly the translated version. Starting from these premises, the analysis proposed here, providing an operative exportable model for the text, focusses on processes through which the images of the Other exert a formative role in the various contexts in which the construction of the translated text is devised. This makes it possible to attribute a cultural influence in conjunction with a linguistic one, while reflecting on the translation, which is an increasingly topical issue nowadays, in the framework of the constant redefinition of identity to which we bear witness.