When Peanuts Became linus Re-Contextualisation through Translation

In the 1960s the Milanese booksellers Giovanni Gandini and Anna Maria Gregorietti acquired the rights of publishing Peanuts and other important American comic strips from the United Feature Syndicate. In 1965, in the wake of the success met by Charlie Brown’s stories printed in book form by their publishing house Milano Libri (Arriva Charlie Brown! and Povero Charlie Brown!), they founded Linus, the first Italian comic magazine designed not for an audience of children but for an adult and cultivated public. The idea was born from the conversations with a group of intellectuals, Ranieri Carano, Elio Vittorini, Umberto Eco, and Oreste Del Buono, who met in their bookshop in via Verdi in Milan. Time and space are key issues with regard do Linus from different perspectives: historical, cultural, and translational. First, the gap between the affirmation of comics in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century and the reticence to accept them as a serious genre in the Italian periodical press until the post-war period (with Elio Vittorini’s Il Politecnico as a pioneering magazine). Secondly, the serialization of comics, which found in the monthly magazine an ideal format. Finally, the need to translate a language and a sociocultural context with which the Italian readership was just then slowly becoming familiar. As a cultural project, the translation of Linus involved technical, ideological, and linguistic challenges of which the reader was constantly informed. The translators had to re-contextualize the comics for the Italian audience, resorting to strategies of both domestication and foreignization, ultimately solving cultural problems linguistically and creatively, through adaptation and transcreation.