Retranslating Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in Modernist and Post-modernist Italy: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

A corpus-based analysis is employed to study the literary style's evolution in eleven Italian retranslations of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The aim is to examine how and to what degree the literary movements have affected the target texts. During the twentieth century, increasing criticism, scepticism, and distance concerning the world's traditional vision and life were reflected in post-modernist literature, although in different ways across the European countries. New literary forms took place also in Italian literature. Woolf's novel's modernist features are a case in point to test Berman's Retranslation Hypothesis, which states that further retranslations tend to be text-source-oriented. This close-reading analysis partially confirms the proposed theory and indicates that the examined retranslations also remain relatively distant from the modernist and post-modernist experiments in Italy.

Keywords: Modernism, Postmodernism, Retranslation, Corpus-based translation studies, Empirical translation studies, Literary translation

JEL Classification: Z13