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The criticism of the variants in Italy has been practiced for at least seventy years, at least by that sage of a commentary on the corrections of the vulgar Petrarca that Contini published in 1943, and was defined by Cesare Segre as "the safest tool to grasp the functioning, and the functionality, of the textual elaboration, going back far enough from the "definitive" form of the texts, and allowing to capture a part of the dynamism that sustains and prepares their staticity "(C. Segre, literary text, Einaudi 1999). However, the common reader, and unfortunately also a good part of the criticism, believes that it is very little and that all the editions are equivalent, or - in cases where the differences are macroscopic - conceives as "to read" only one among the versions prepared by the author. Yet the texts live on variations, and no author is interested in the style or content of his works, which, having the possibility, does not decide to at least retouch his texts over time. The case of an author like Umberto Eco est is interesting because, as a writer of worldwide success, his works are translated in very short times (but it was not for his first novel) in all the main languages and «there is no else a strict and fussy reader as a translator, who must weigh word by word. And the various translators realize that there is a contradiction, here you wrote north instead of south, that a sentence lends itself to a double interpretation because maybe a comma is missing, and so on. " text of Umberto Eco's novels changes slightly from one edition to another, while foreign translations reflect different stages of the text's evolution. The article will show an example from chapter 9. Paris according to two Italian editions, and some translations (Czech, Polish, English, French, Spanish, Catalan, German).
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