«Mais vraie, pouvais-je encore l’être?» Plurilinguisme et enjeux identitaires dans la traduction italienne de Vera de Jean-Pierre Orban

At the crossroads of the Latin and Germanic worlds, Belgium has been, since its creation, a ground for both meeting and confrontation between different languages and cultures. Born in the Liège suburbs, grandson of Italian immigrants, a life shared between Belgium, Africa, England and France, the writer Jean-Pierre Orban perfectly embodies this identity tear. His first novel – Vera (2014) – tells the story of a young girl of Italian descent living in Clerkenwell, London, who adheres to Fascism in the deceptive hope that this ideology will forge an identity for her. The French of the narrative voice mixes with the English spoken in Vera’s country of birth and with the Italian and the Romagnol dialect that she uses with her family. This article analyses the Italian translation of Orban’s novel (Gremese, 2016). After having identified the relationships between the languages used by the Belgian author in his text, we will examine the translational choices made by Micol Bertolazzi in terms of plurilingualism. This analysis will allow us to understand how the identity issue, which plays a central role in Orban’s novel, is reflected in the Italian version and the extent to which the translation departs from the original text.