The Economic Parasitism of Women by Vernon Lee in an Italian translation

“I believe that ‘Women and Economics’ ought to open the eyes and, I think, also the hearts, of other readers, because it has opened my own to the real importance of what is known as the Woman Question” (Vernon Lee, 1902: 71). In 1902 Vernon Lee reviewed Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics for The North American Review arguing that women must change their cultural identities. This essay was then repeated in 1908 as The Economic Parasitism of Women which was later translated by Carolina Pironti, an intellectual Neapolitan lady, and appeared as the introduction to the Italian version of Gilman’s work. Following the tradition of translation studies, a pragmatic comparison between the source text and the target text will allow to identify the translation strategies used by the Italian lady. Since the complexity and richness of Vernon Lee’s prose, full of rhetorical elements aimed to promulgate the writer’s thinking, this work explores how the source text is translated and transposed linguistically, conceptually and culturally about the specific issue of the “Woman Question”. In Vernon Lee’s work the use of rhetorical strategies becomes also an instrument of political propaganda to support her “radical” ideas. In addition, the analysis aims to verify whether in the translation process from English into Italian some relevant elements are lost and/or gained and to find out in which way the issue of women’s economic dependence is represented by Pironti through her linguistic choices.