Translating Culture: An interview with Isabella Vaj. Translated by Richard Braithwaite (London, England).

After watching the film adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner (2003) on SKY Cinema, I decided to introduce this artistic work in my language and translation classes at Master’s level. Khaled Hosseini is “an Afghan living in exile” (Hosseini 2009: 7) and in the novel he expresses his transcultural identity. Also, The Kite Runner is an international best-seller, it has been published in 40 countries and has been variedly represented in interlinguistic and intersemiotic translations. The Italian rendering by Isabella Vaj, Il cacciatore di aquiloni, has been published by Piemme in two separate editions, one including a glossary of the words in Farsi, the author’s mother tongue, the other containing 40 photographs, mostly by Luigi Baldelli, and a preface by Khaled Hosseini. In 2007 Mondadori published an abridged version approved by the author as an audiobook. The movie was released in Italy in 2007. So I was all set to acquire this material for my lessons, when, one day, while I was browsing in a bookshop at Fiumicino Airport, another book caught my eye: Il cacciatore di storie by Isabella Vaj, with an introduction by the author of The Kite Runner. I bought it and read it on my way to and from Bergen. I was truly fascinated by this original book, which gave me an insight into the world of Hosseini. Moreover, at the end of each chapter, gracefully introduced by a tiny bird carrying a bulb in its beak , Isabella Vaj, inspired by the memories and emotions evoked by reading, translating and writing about Hosseini’s fiction, tells her own stories as they are vividly remembered, fresh from her childhood and adolescence, and in doing so she (re)discovers her world through the world of Hosseini, bringing us close to both of them. The following interview, aimed at unveiling the relationship between cultural translation and creativity, was conducted via email on 15th February 2010.