Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Male di luna by Luigi Pirandello
Translated into English by Ellen McRae
Ellen McRae has recently been awarded a PhD in Italian
and Translation Studies from the University of Auckland, New
Zealand. Her thesis, entitled “Translation of the sicilianità in the
Fictional Languages of Giovanni Verga and Andrea Camilleri”,
aims to demonstrate the ways in which the act of translation assists
and shapes readers’ understanding of other cultures. Her
research draws on translation theories concerning the visibility
of the translator, the links between translating and travel writing,
and the view of translation as a subjective, creative process. Her
analysis considers the translators’ treatment of the four specific regional
elements of dialect, idiom, metaphor and culturally specific
items, and tests their accordance with these theories and with the
translations’ effectiveness in rendering the regional aspects of the
texts. She is a strong advocate of the translator’s preface, and an
article on her research in this area entitled “The Role of Translators’
Prefaces to Contemporary Literary Translations into English:
An Empirical Study” will appear in the forthcoming Translation
Peripheries: Paratextual Elements in Translation, Bern: Peter Lang.
During her doctoral studies, Ellen worked on a contract basis as an
editor and translator of academic and literary texts. She is currently
expanding her work in this area while continuing her research and
preparing her findings for publication.
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is a major literary figure,
not only in Italy, but, on a smaller scale, throughout the world.
Although his works were written in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, they contain certain basic themes that will
always remain relevant, in any part of the world: the search for
identity, the difficulties of human relationships, our quest to make
sense of life when it is impossible to do so, isolation and alienation.
Pirandello’s fame rests mainly with his role as an innovative
playwright, particularly with non-Italian speakers, but he was
also a prolific author of poems, essays, novels and short stories.
His devotion to short story writing, in particular, was remarkably
constant and longstanding, from “La capannetta” when he was