Hans Christian Andersen's Valdemar Daae. A target text-oriented study of three iconic Italian translations

This work wishes to present three different translations of a long story by Hans Christian Andersen, at the crossroads of translation studies and education. Andersen’s fairy tales are now well-established in Italy thanks to their first appearance in the translation by Maria Pezzé Pascolato in 1903. Her trailblazing work set the mark for the translations considered for this analysis: Nuove novelle by Mary Tibaldi Chiesa (1938), Fiabe di Andersen by Alda Castagnoli Manghi and Marcella Rinaldi (1954), and eventually Fiabe e storie, celebrating 200 years from Andersen’s birth, translated by Bruno Berni (2005). As Tibaldi Chiesa states in her introduction to her translation, “Andersen is close to us: true art crosses boundaries, its homeland is as wide as the world itself”. It seems that the need to make the foreign element resurface in translation is a first step towards a world without barriers or differences, as the beauty of imagination and literature is a shared heritage among cultures. Focussing on the story of Vinden fortaeller om Valdemar Daae og hans Døttre (The wind tells the story of Valdemar Daae and his daughters), a descriptive, diachronic analysis of the target texts may help to understand how each translation contributed to the formation of young readers’ imagination through time. The pedagogical approach can shed light on the language used to make readers familiarize with the foreign and cultivate fantasy, in a story that encompasses a wide range of human emotions and descriptions of the natural environment that come full circle at the end.