Towards a postcolonial translation : Patrick White's Voss in Italian and French

Abstract

This thesis examines the novel Voss (1957) by the Australian writer Patrick White with the aim of defining a) potential issues of translatability and ethics arising from the text’s postcolonial hybrid culture b) the actual issues posed by two translations into Italian and French - respectively, Piero Jahier’s L’esploratore (Einaudi, 1965) and Lola Tranec’s Voss (Gallimard, 1967). In analysing the source text and the two target texts, the thesis applies a postcolonial critical perspective. From a theoretical point of view, the uncertainty and fragmentation inevitably associated with cultural constructions are recognised in the wake of poststructuralist and deconstructionist criticism, yet the use of a coherent and systematic approach to textual analysis and textual planning is accepted from a methodological perspective as a necessity for a progressively-oriented activity.