American Comics and Italian Cultural Identity in 1968: Translation Challenges in a Syncretic Text

Translation supports the construction of a national identity through the selection of foreign texts to be transferred to the target language. Within this framework, the effort made in the 1960s by Italian editors and translators in giving new dignity to comics proves emblematic. This paper aims to reconstruct the reception of American comic strips in Italy going through the issues of Linus published in 1967 and 1968: the selected cartoonists (e.g. Al Capp, Jules Feiffer, and Walt Kelly) participate in the cultural debate of the time discussing politics, war, and civil rights. The analysis of the translation strategies adopted will reveal the difficulty of reproducing the polysemy of metaphors, idioms and puns, trying to maintain consistency between the visual and the verbal code, but primarily the need to create a purely Italian cultural discourse.