Il plurilinguismo nella letteratura italiana contemporanea e problematiche di traduzione in arabo. L’esempio di Passavamo sulla terra leggeri di Sergio Atzeni

In the plurilingual novel Lightly We Passed on Earth by Atzeni, the history of the Sardinian people is told by a “guardian of time” to an eight-year-old boy. In turn, the boy passes the rod of the island’s historical memory to the reader, thus assigning him to safeguard this cultural heritage. In the context of plurilingualism, evidence of the encounter between the peoples who lived on the island in the novel, Atzeni inserts a few Sardinian words that he rarely explains. He also plays with the invention of language: he uses a real language, Sardinian, of which he invents its origins, ‘bending’ the meaning of words based on the phonetic suggestions coming from them. At the end of the novel, he inserts a glossary entitled The Language of the Ancients, in which he attributes the secret etymology of words to an ancient monosyllabic Sardinian language that was forgotten in time. The present paper seeks to 1) analyze an Arabic translation of the novel by reflecting on how the works characterized by blending the Sardinian and Italian languages are translated into Arabic and 2) examine the translator’s strategies in solving problems concerning transferring the image of Sardinian people and the language invented by Atzeni to the Arabic reader.