Perché il Gattopardo non è Servalo, né Ghepardo, ma Leopardo

Résumé

Why is il Gattopardo not Servalo, nor Ghepardo, but Leopardo? A contribution to the translation of the title of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel «Il Gattopardo» – The paper suggests a new approach to the problem of translating the title of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel. My hypothesis is that Lampedusa used the word il gattopardo not in its modern sense of ‘serval’, but in its ancient Italian and dialectal sense of ‘guepard’, ‘leopard’, and he represented under the title «Il Gattopardo» an image of a Leopard.