Pictures and History: Translating Comics in Italy on the Threshold of 1968

Translation, as part of a polysystem (Even-Zohar, 1990), contributes to create the desired representation of a culture. It is a tool used by patronage – political parties, governments, publishers, and the media (Lefevere, 1992) – to shape, with the help of professionals, the aesthetic, political and ideological identity of a nation, through the choice of foreign texts to be transferred to the target language. Within the framework of an effort to give new dignity to comics in Italy, from Vittorini’s editorial policy in Il Politecnico to Eco’s observations in Apocalittici e integrati (1964), this paper aims to explore the reception of American comic strips just prior to 1968 and during the protest movement, as well as to analyze the discursive strategies adopted in translating texts. In 1965, the intellectuals gathered around the publishing house Milano Libri gave birth to Linus magazine and offered adult readers comics that refer to key historical and social events, combining entertainment with a critical interpretation of contemporary reality (e.g. Jules Feiffer’s satirical strips). The cartoonists describe American society, focusing on politics, civil rights, integration, and human alienation. These motives take shape in the syncretic nature of comics, consisting of words and pictures. The analysis of the target texts will show the difficulty of reproducing the polysemy of metaphors and puns, trying to maintain consistency between the visual and the verbal code (Zanettin, 1998). Furthermore, the translations allow us to identify the historical need to create a purely Italian cultural discourse.