Translating The Infinities by John Banville

Abstract - John Banville’s talent as a prose stylist is widely recognized. The polished elegance of his phrases constitutes a continuing and fascinating challenge for his translator, due to the intricacies of the source text, its manifold registers and lexical choices. In his novel The Infinities, in Italian Teoria degli Infiniti, John Banville takes cue from Kleist’s Amphytrion to devise a novel where classicality interweaves with science and science fiction through the invention of a world where the ancient gods intermingle with the humans while waiting for the death of Adam Godley, a famous mathematician who explained how an infinity of worlds exist and interact with each other. To translate this book I had not only to work extensively on lexis and style, but also to do considerable research to render the many literary and non literary references. Some examples of these struggles with the source text during the translation process are given in the present paper.