Barbara Julieta BELLINI

French and German are respectively the second and third most translated languages on the Italian book market, preceded only by English; nonetheless, only a small percentage of all literary works in their original version get to be translated. By choosing which novels to translate and which to discard, editors suggest an anthology of works that they deem worthy of reading and so they promote a certain vision of literature. For this reason, we may ask ourselves how the transfer happens: who has an interest in selecting foreign literature and which criteria do these gate-keepers apply in doing so? Which different editorial identities is it possible to discern?
An analysis of the Italian editorial market and of a corpus of translated and consecrated authors will help us identify the agents engaged in the transfer of contemporary novels from the French and German literary fields into the Italian, as well as the strategies that they deploy to gain symbolic capital throughout their mediation activity.