Abstract

Lana Bastašić, born in Zagreb in 1986, grown in Banja Luka (Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina), schooled in Belgrade where she graduated, published in 2018 the novel Uhvati zeca (Kontrast publisher, Belgrade). The novel soon becomes a huge success in the Western Balkan area so as to reach three more editions (2019, 2021 and 2022) in Sarajevo/Zagreb and one in Slovenia (2021). In 2020 the novel was awarded the European Prize for Literature and in 2021 the Premio Latisana per il Nord-Est, which she shared with her Italian translator, Elisa Copetti. After that, in 2021 the book gets published in the United States of America by editor Restless Books (New York) in the author’s own self-translation. The aim of this research is to extrapolate and analyze a series of translation examples in order to determine the applied strategies and the deviations from the original text caused by the author/translator’s hybrid-self. The investigation will also take into consideration the awarded Italian translation and compare the solutions, focusing especially on the transposition of culturally specific elements that this novel is abundant with, given the fact that it mostly takes place in Bosnia and Herzegovina before and after the war in the ‘90s. The research objective is to find out how the author handles her role as a translator, how many and what kind of authorial liberties does she allow herself within the rigor of translation and with what results, if compared to the Italian translation.