Der umwerfende Sänger

Il "Gelsomino" di Gianni Rodari in Austria tra traduzione e riscrittura. L'edizione Jugend & Volk del 1983

Abstract

In 1983, three years after Gianni Rodari's death, the Austrian publishing house Jugend & Volk published Hilfe, Benjamin singt! Abenteuer eines umwerfenden Sängers, the third German-language version, in chronological order, of his novel Gelsomino nel paese dei bugiardi, published in Italy in 1958 by Editori Riuniti. The Austrian translation follows the 1961 translation by Egon Wiszniewsky for Kinderbuchverlag (East Berlin) and the 1966 version by Ruth Wright for Thienemann Verlag (Stuttgart). It is therefore the first and only one to be published posthumously. The Jugend & Volk version by Hilde Leiter presents numerous anomalies at various levels: translational, linguistic, structural. In a brief introduction, the contribution outlines the reception of Rodari's works in German-speaking countries, with particular reference to Gelsomino nel paese dei bugiardi and the author's other novels. The body of the contribution analyses the translator's rendition from a linguistic, semantic and more generally translatological perspective, considering the main deformations and comparing them, where necessary, with earlier versions, as well as with Rodari's original. The analysis will continually question the translator's attitudes towards the problems posed by the Italian text, in an attempt to identify recurring choices and divergent or convergent tendencies, either of an unconscious nature or the result of intentional choices, which sometimes border on rewriting. The conclusion proposes to reconstruct the position of Hilde Leiter's German text in the "micro-constellation" of Gelsomini in German, both in terms of its translation manifestation and in the context of its reception in the German-speaking countries