Chapter 19. The rationalisation of time references in the Italian translations of L’Étranger

The purpose of this study is to examine what strategies the Italian translators of Camus’s L’Étranger have adopted to ensure the preservation of the special treatment of time in the novel. Through a contrastive analysis of the three texts in question, with particular focus on the latest retranslation, I demonstrate that in spite of the similar possibilities offered by the Italian and the French temporal systems, the two Italian translations show interesting differences in the usage of perfect tenses (especially passato prossimo and passato remoto) and temporal deixis. A tendency towards rationalization of time sequences, in particular, emerges in the translators’ numerous attempts to restore the non-linear temporal constructions of the source-text to a traditional sequence of tenses in Italian.