Ricerc@Sapienza

This article provides an overview of German translations of Italo Calvino’s major narrative and non-fiction works. A general presentation of editions and translators from 1957 to 2007 is followed by a discussion of Calvino’s ideas on the translation practice and by a linguistic analysis of the way his titles have been translated into German. Drawing on a detailed comparison between the stylistic choices of the editors and the pragmatic features of the originals, it is suggested that the complex connotative issue of the Italian titles has been fully reproduced into the target-language in only some cases. More frequently, even slight changes concerning single words or the word-order in a phrase have resulted in significant losses at the semantic and pragmatic level. It is argued that such effects have to do with both linguistic constraints and the semiotic role of titles, depending on a network of subtle cultural references. In the concluding section, some considerations about the topic of literary translations are suggested and a stricter collaboration between traductology and contrastive linguistics is upheld as necessary.