A Thousand and One Voices of Where the Wild Things Are: Translations and Transmediations

This chapter sets out to explore the different voices that can be heard in the first Italian translation and the more recent retranslation of a classic picturebook: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Picturebooks derive their meaning from the relationship between words and illustrations. Lawrence Sipe defines this interrelation as “synergistic,” and shows how the reader’s oscillation between the verbal and visual material can be seen as a form of “transmediation”. However, this interpretative process turns out to be more complex as picturebooks come to life through the adults’ reading performance. Thus, the chorus of the discursive presences detectable in children’s texts and in their translations (O’Sullivan, Comparative Children’s Literature), such as the voice of the narrator and of the translator, is joined by the voice of the adult reading aloud. Since retranslations act as sounding boards for both textual and contextual voices (Alvstad and Assis Rosa), the aim of this analysis is to identify the changes of the voices in the translation (in 1969) and retranslation (in 2018) of Sendak’s chef d’oeuvre.