Of course there is something here and there I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. Cesare Pavese’s correspondence with Anthony Chiuminatto: a collaborative translation strategy?

The Italian writer Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is also known as an ‘Americanist’, or populariser of American culture, mainly thanks to his work as a translator in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1929 and 1933, he entertained frequent and detailed consultations by letter with his Italian-American correspondent Antonio Chiuminatto. Pavese’s requests were mainly lexical, focusing especially on slang and idiomatic expressions. The Pavese-Chiuminatto correspondence is thus explored, examining their collaboration, how it worked and developed, and extracting Pavese’s metalinguistic reflections on slang and language in general. Finally, the epistolary is framed within the notion of ‘collaborative translation’, in order to understand Chiuminatto’s contribution to Pavese’s famous translation activity and the possible implications for his well-known role as an Americanist.