Tradurre al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī (Il pane nudo, 1982) di Muḥammad Šukrī: neg(ozi)azioni di scritture

This paper deals with the autobiographical novel al-Hubz al-hafı (For bread alone, 1982) by the Moroccan writer Muh. ammad Šukrı and its translations in French by Tahar Ben Jelloun and in Italian by Mario Fortunato. Through the concepts of “domestication” and “foreignisation”, Lawrence Venuti brings out the complex connection between ideology, culture and translation, where activity of translation implies the exercise of a certain form of violence on the text. This is particularly evident in translations from Arabic – considered a peripheral language – to the so-called dominant languages: to be “accepted” the Arabic text is generally required to adapt to the norms considered as “universal” for a Western literary taste. Starting from this assumption and through the analysis of some passages of the French and Italian translations of Muhammad Šukrı’s autobiography, we will try to highlight how some choices by Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mario Fortunato in their translations reveal their standpoint in the French and Italian cultural and literary fields.