“L’eterna influenza francese” Classici russi per il tramite del francese all’alba del Terzo millennio

Abstract

The article deals with a bad practice introduced anew in Italian publishing: translations from Russian through intermediate French versions. Three Italian translations – The trial of Brodsky, a Chekhov’s and a Grossman’s short story – are shown to be dependent from French versions, then causes and consequences of their lexical and stylistic detachment from the original text are analyzed, a detachment inescapable in second-hand translations, on principle alien to a philological approach.