Translating Alice Munro’s “Deep-Holes”: Linguistic Tools and Strategies for a Case Study

Up until now, Alice Munro's short stories have encountered a progressively warmer response from the Italian reading public thanks to the masterfully crafted translations by Susanna Basso, well before the writer herself won the Nobel Prize in 2013. From a translation point of view, however, decoding Munro's short stories seems somewhat like trying to uncover and find a a way out of those "deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum" that Munro's attributes to her characters' seemingly ordinary and seamless lives. Due to its complexity from an interlinguistic translation's point of view, this paper aims at analysing mainly "Deep Holes", one of Munro's short stories, through the most suitable critical tools provided by Translation Studies, with the aim to identify those specific underlying patterns of meaning relying on different textual levels and conveyed through precise linguistic strategies that create its complexity. Therefore, this paper will eventually use "Deep Holes" as a case study, attmpting at tracing and clarifying the framework of sense and linguistic structure of Munro's narrative discourse out which to encode an interlinguistic translation that aims at reproducing Munro's refined stylistic code, as far as linguistic differences between source language and target language allow it.