The semantic ambiguity in Andrea Camilleri. Proposal for a "non-standard" translation

Abstract

 Andrea Camilleri, author of successful detective novels published in numerous foreign countries, didn’t write in an Italian standard language. All his works uses an interlanguage that has been described as an hybrid between Italian and Sicilian dialect. Even if there are many novels that are characterized by the use of dialectal marks – e.g. Ragazzi di vita by Pasolini, or Quel pasticciaccio brutto di via Merulana by Gadda, - Camilleri is the first writer who makes this choice in an area of literary genre with a commercial vocation. This made it as an exception and a challenge for his publications abroad. The publishers have had to consider if it would be correct to try a translation of his language, at the expense of a reading facility, or remove the dialectal contamination. Most of them have chosen this last option, even if many translators advanced alternative proposals. The focus of this discussion is the axiom that the reading difficulty of Camilleri’s novels comes up at the moment of translating them. This work wants to propose a different approach. The starting point is based on a simple observation: The lexicon adopted by Camilleri also hinds the reading to an Italian reader. Only a minority of Italians speaks and understands the Sicilian dialect. The polysystem problems which entail the translation into a target language already exist in the source text. If so, the dialect adopted in the detective novels of Camilleri covers an unprecedented function: to place the reader – also the Italian one – in a decoding game. We will try to take out Camilleri from the debate about the translatability of the dialect to place him in a parallel and wider framework: the framework of the author that play with the language and its semantic ambiguity.