Shaping Post-War Society through Children’s Literature in Translation

Adult ideology has always tried to shape children’s literature in translation according to its inherent main goals, as showed in the didactic and moralistic role attributed to children’s literature. Thus, in order to provide books for children which could fit the established canon in those terms of morality and didacticism, texts were subjected to manipulations, which resulted, in the end, in a different text from the original. Indeed, the canon of children’s literature provides that a book for children must be didactic and moralistic and teach the children to stay at their place. As far as adaptation is concerned, Riitta Oittinen and Zohar Shavit perceive it in two different ways. For Shavit, adaptation is the proof of the inferior status of children’s literature within the main literary system, as non-canonized literature and addressed to members of the society who had no great importance. Oittinen, on the other hand, believes that if we try to define adaptation and translation as separate issues, we face a dilemma, as we are mixing terms on different levels: when translating, we are always adapting our texts for certain purposes and certain readers, both children and adults. The translation process as such brings the text closer to the targetlanguage readers by speaking a familiar language. Domestication is part of translation and not a parallel process. Thus, in her work, the scholar, by examining the Finnish translation of Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, concludes that the principle of domestication was given by the 1940s and 1950s Back to the list 14 translational norm in Finnish children’s literature. In fact, domesticating cultural references as much as possible is carried out in order to help the children identify with the characters and understand the story better. In a country recovering from war, where foreign cultures were not well known, such norm was reasonable. This present work intends to focus on the role of children’s literature in translation in Italy during 1950s, focusing on Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie as case-study, as a way of shaping the cultural and social order of the after-war and reconstruction, in order to identify the dominant ideology and its constraints imposed on children and their literature.