Translating the Lottery: Moral and Political Issues in Pietro Chiari's La Giuocatrice Di Lotto and Its French and English Translations

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of the Italian author Pietro Chiari's novel La Giuocatrice di Lotto (1757), Jean Antoine Lebrun-Tossa's French translation Le Terne à la Loterie (1801), and Thomas Evanson White's English translation The Prize in the Lottery (1817), exploring how the three versions of the novel deal with specific moral and political issues attached to the topic of the lottery. By combining literary analysis with perspectives from book history and cultural history, the article explores translation as a socio-historically situated discursive practice that takes place not only on the textual but also on the paratextual level. The article's major argument is that the three versions of the novel produce significantly different perspectives on the lottery as a moral and political problem, situated in different historical, national, and cultural contexts.

Translating the Lottery: Moral and Political Issues in Pietro Chiari's La Giuocatrice Di Lotto and Its French and English Translations