MARINELA PRIFTI
DOI:
Abstract
This article examines the reception and translation of Italo Calvino’s works within the Albanian cultural and literary context between 2011 and 2024. Focusing on translation as a form of cultural mediation, it analyzes how Calvino’s metafictional and allegorical narratives have been interpreted, adapted, and integrated into Albanian literary discourse. Drawing on a review of translated editions, critical essays, and academic studies, the paper identifies the principal linguistic and stylistic challenges encountered by translators in rendering Calvino’s complex syntax, narrative irony, and layered semantics. The discussion further situates these translations within Albania’s post-communist literary transformation, a period in which Calvino’s poetics of lightness and multiplicity resonate FGJH 44 12 / 2025 with evolving aesthetic values and a growing intellectual openness. By mapping both translation strategies and critical reception, this study highlights translation as a central vehicle for intercultural dialogue and as a creative practice that rearticulates Calvino’s universality within the Albanian literary polysystem.
Keywords: Italo Calvino, translation, reception, stylistic equivalence, narrative irony, linguistic creativity, literary mediation.