(Re)traduire la violence dans l’autosociobiographie. le cas d’En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule d’Edouard Louis en Italie

The publication of a third Italian translation of Édouard Louis’s French novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule in 2024 – just ten years after its original release in 2014 – raises important questions regarding the treatment of verbal violence and popular speech in the text. These two aspects have traditionally been neutralized in literary translation, in line with dominant literary norms that Louis explicitly aims to subvert by giving voice to the dominated classes. The first two Italian translations (2014; 2016) largely standardized the diastratic features that characterize the morphosyntax of direct speech (Tallarico 2018). Drawing on Samoyault’s (2020) framework, which conceptualizes translation as a violent operation, this study examines whether – and how – the 2024 retranslation restores Louis’s project in comparison to the earlier translations. Using the concepts of acceptability and adequacy, the author adopts a contrastive sociolinguistic approach to investigate lexical, morphosyntactic, and phonetic features. The analysis reveals that the translator appears to preserve the sociolinguistic connotations, expressivity, and imagery embedded in phraseological units, and draws on morphosyntactic features shared by various regional varieties of Italian popular speech to recreate the voices of the dominated classes.