My brilliant translator / La traduttrice geniale? Creativity in translating the Neapolitan background of Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale into English.

Through an analysis of the best-selling novel L’Amica geniale, written under the pseudonym of Elena Ferrante, in which Naples, its suburbs, its associated culture and its language are portrayed, this essay focuses on the cultural aspects of translation and on how the specific linguistic and cultural context expressed in the book have been rendered for the American audience in the translation by Ann Goldstein. The background of the novel and Ferrante’s specific and particular linguistic choices might be difficult to catch and to make clear to the reader of the target text as they often have no exact correspondence in the target language and imply a certain degree of creativity by the translator. Starting from some views on the role of the translator when facing a culture-bound text and from the possible translation strategies which can be adopted in rendering ‘culturemes’, in the present qualitative analysis the language and the culture-specific items of L’Amica geniale will be identified and categorized and their translation will be analyzed to answer the general research questions on how the representation of the Neapolitan culture/environment has been reproduced, on which strategies have been used and with which results and to what extent this translation can be seen as an act of creativity.