Nomi propri nelle traduzioni polacche di "Il fu Mattia Pascal" di Luigi Pirandello

Abstract

The necessity of fi nding or producing a precise counterpart or equivalent proper noun in a target language has often been considered the main, if not the most diffi cult problem of translation. Generally, modern times have eliminated the need to translate people’s names and surnames, and signifi cantly reduced the need to translate the names of places, organizations, companies, projects and objects. The main reason for this is that the verbatim form and wording of the original name has become a fi xed identifi er of the named subject, contrary to past times when it was more variable and not formally stabilized. It is not only the transfer of meaning from one language to another, but also the rendering of the complexity of an author’s language that determines the diffi culty of a literary translation. The objective of this article is to analyze two Polish translations – one by Maria Grąbczewska and another by Stanisław Kasprzysiak – of an Italian novel ‘‘The Late Mattia Pascal’’ by Luigi Pirandello, with an emphasis on the translation of proper nouns. The analysis focuses on names, surnames, nicknames, toponyms, names of newspapers, and their counterparts in Polish.