Toponyms in retranslation: Ottavio Fatica’s "Middle Earth"

Abstract

The fact that Tolkien’s stories were primarily linguistically inspired is evidenced not only by his meticulous attention to anthroponyms and toponyms to ensure they fully described characters or places, but also by the musicality and connection between sound and the named object. The toponyms in The Lord of the Rings create a political and geographical world: the locations in the novel, reprised and quoted in the various languages of the peoples of Middle Earth, refer to a shared history and make the fictional world more vivid and real. For Tolkien, anthroponyms and toponyms were so crucial to the correct experience of his universe that he devised a guide for translators. Given its status as a literary classic, The Lord of the Rings has undergone numerous retranslations. This contribution aims to investigate the retranslation of place names by examining the two Italian versions: the first by Vittoria Alliata and Quirino Principe, published in 1970; the second by Ottavio Fatica, published between 2019 and 2022. The contrastive analysis of this contribution aims to: 1) explore the different interpretation introduced by the retranslated toponyms; and 2) understand how toponyms reflect the translation strategies of the two translations.