Entendre ces silences : traduire, transmettre et refléter Entendez-vous dans les montagnes… de Maïssa Bey, en italien et en anglais

Abstract

Listen to those silences: translating, communicating and reflecting Entendez-vous dans les montagnes…by Maïssa Bey, in Italian and English

Maïssa Bey is a French-speaking Algerian writer whose first works were published in the 1990s, during the "black decade" of the civil war that ravaged Algeria. Algerian people, especially women, of whom the author is an integral part, are the protagonists of her stories and novels that aim to break the silences and censorship, to explore the small stories hidden behind the big story. This article aims to analyse the Italian and English translations of Entendez-vous dans les montagnes..., a novel published in France in 2002 and in Algeria in 2007. The Italian translation, published by Astarte in 2020, is by Barbara Sommovigo, who had already translated Bey’s Puisque mon coeur est mort in 2013, initiating an almost paradigmatic author-translator relationship that allows for an effective approach to a short but complex text like Entendez- vous dans les montagnes... The English translation is by the American Erin Lamm, and is the result of her doctoral thesis, with a clearly more academic intention than the Italian text, whose publishing house Astarte aims to communicate voices from the shores of the Mediterranean. In fact, Bey's work travels between two languages and therefore between two cultures, the French and the Algerian, which intersect in the pages of the story like the lives of the three protagonists. An Algerian woman, an elderly Frenchman and Marie, a young blond woman, meet in the same compartment of a train to evoke memories and thoughts, which lead them to the past and recent history of Algeria, through painful pages among which is evoked the loss of the author's father, killed in 1957 by French soldiers. It is a difficult task for the translators to render this multiplicity of themes and languages from the title: for a French-speaking reader, there is a strong reference to both a line from the Marseillaise and an Algerian patriotic song (Min Djibalina). The Italian title is therefore changed to Dietro quei silenzi…, while the English title is purely literal, Do You Hear in the Mountains... This is just one of the translation choices that will be analysed in this paper, in which the comparison between the strategies and techniques used in the two translation works will be constant, creating a perpetual dialogue with the original text, in the image of the friendship that now exists between the author Maïssa Bey and the two translators.