Translating into Italian Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915)


Abstract


Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) setting is considered the first feminist literary utopia centred on a land inhabited and governed by women. During the geographical and metaphorical journey of three male characters through fictional locations in South America, they gradually question the working mechanism of the patriarchal order, discussing the hegemonic discourse, binary opposition, and the culturally embedded assumptions about gender. In the following essay I will analyse some passages from the Italian translation Terradilei (1980) by Angela Campana and Terra di lei (2011) by Anna Scacchi, with a short reference to Franco Venturi’s version, published in 2015, in order to discuss the complex concepts of the active presence and creativity of the translator in the text, a self-sufficient node in a dynamic web, connected with the principle of fidelity in translation.

Keywords: female utopia/dystopia; professionalization of women; depression; independence; poietic encounter

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