Discussion

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most accurate as it provided readers with different points of view on Rodari from various actors in the field of children’s literature including Italian scholars such as Poesio and Pino Boero. The most inaccurate source was the 2004 edition of Contemporary Authors Online because the works by Rodari were presented as a mixture of original works and translations in English, and the description of Rodari’s works is a patchwork of comments selected from the 1991 Children’s Literature Review again published by Gale.

With regard to translation, none of these sources mentioned Patrick Creagh or Sue Newson-Smith for the UK editions of Rodari’s works. On the contrary, Jack Zipes is named every time The Grammar of Fantasy appears in the text.

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Alemagna), scholars (Jack Zipes) and professional translators (Antony Shugaar), who became the channels through whom the voice of Rodari reached the American public (also in visual terms, with the picture book One and Seven). Moreover, for Zipes and Shugaar, it was their knowledge of the Italian literary culture that initiated the translation and publishing process for Rodari’s works in the US, an indication of the growing importance of the figure of the translator on the book market.

The diachronic analysis of the paratextual material (peritextual and epitextual) has shown a variety of critical sources that commented on Rodari’s works in English translation for a diversified public of educators, parents, and teachers. The circle of initiators for Rodari’s books in English made use of all sources at their disposal to diffuse translations in the UK and the US, the most recent editions being also available online.

The peritextual material for the UK editions between 1965 and 1976 rarely referred to Rodari’s books as “translations”: the name of translators only appeared in the publishing information inside each book. The US editions, on the contrary, gave more visibility to translators, also in view of their status in the field of adult literature. It is necessary to mention that the UK editions of Rodari’s books in English were primarily aimed at children²⁰⁹ except for Tales to Change the World selected and adapted by the American scholar Jack Zipes, whereas the US editions targeted an adult readership given the presence of an introduction and translator’s note (The Grammar of Fantasy) or the biography of the translator (Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto). The biographical information on Rodari changed on book jackets the moment he won the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1970, actually presenting him as an international author not confined only to his homeland, Italy. From then, each and every book offered a short biography on Rodari with reference (in the case of Dent) to previous and future books in translation by the same author to show continuity in Rodari’s production. This marked a

209 As indicated by the advertisements for Dent, for example, where also the age of the prospective public was suggested.

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growing interest in Rodari’s works before his temporary disappearance from the UK market between 1976 and 2008, which corresponded to the negative trend in translations analysed in section 1.2.

The epitextual material provided information mainly on Rodari, with rare references to translation. Whenever reviewers attested the presence of a translator (seldom mentioned by name), it was for comments related to the ability or inability to communicate the voice of the original. Whenever the translator worked well, Rodari’s texts became fluent and the supposed interference of Italian elements, such as proper names for characters or geographical names in Italian, did not hinder the readability of the English text. This may account for the expectations of the target culture towards translation, which should be able to blend foreign traits with the target language in such a way as to make readers feel comfortable with the text. In reviews, Rodari is also often paired with other well-known authors to give readers a taste of what his writing sounded like. Alice, the Wombles, The Little Prince, served the purpose of guiding the reading experience onto familiar ground and of bringing Rodari closer to established writers for the target public.

If the image of Rodari for the lay public was shaped through the paratextual material in books and in dedicated magazines, the specialised public had access to other sources that highlighted other aspects of Rodari’s life. These sources described the Italian writer in different ways, either against the background of his native social and literary context (Children’s Literature Review, The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature), or on the basis of English sources (Twentieth Century Children’s Writers, Contemporary Authors Online). The common objective of these sources was to provide an overview of the life and literary career of one of the “international representatives of Italian children’s literature” (Bell, 1978: 1482). Excluding Twentieth Century Children’s Writers and the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, which accounted only for some of the works by Rodari and not his life, the other sources all gave a description of Rodari’s life sometimes including his active political life in Italy. Particular relevance was given to the Hans Christian Andersen Prize, as well as the other prizes he won in

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Italy for his works. The information provided depended much on the declared purpose of each encyclopaedia, but also on the initiators that edited the volumes. This was true especially in the case of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature edited by Jack Zipes, where Zipes’s name appears as translator for The Grammar of Fantasy but no mention is made of the translators who worked on Rodari’s texts in the UK.

These premises provide an introduction to the linguistic analysis in Chapter 4, where the general tendencies of translated texts known as Universals of Translation are introduced before studying specific examples taken from four of Gianni Rodari’s books in English translation. The categories analysed have been selected to see how the Italian voice of Rodari was preserved or “drowned out” (O’Sullivan, 2005: 118) by the voice of the different translators, in the UK in 1965 and in 1971, and in the US in 2008 and 2011.

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