From Italian to Slovene

Translating the Italian Past Conditional (Condizionale Composto) in Three Contemporary Literary Works

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to analyse – from a translation and contrastive perspective – the Slovene counterparts of the Italian past (or compound) conditional (condizionale composto) in three contemporary literary works: La rabbia e l’orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride) by Orianna Fallaci, Seta (Silk) by Alessandro Baricco and Sogni di sogni (Dreams of Dreams) by Antonio Tabucchi. The occurrences of the Italian past conditional (78 in total) are grouped according to their function, and within every functional category the Slovene translation possibilities are determined and commented upon. When the Italian past conditional is used to express the so-called “future in the past”, which is its most frequent function in the analyzed texts, its main Slovene counterparts are the prihodnjik ‘future tense’ and, when “flash-forward” narration is used, the preteklik ‘past tense’. The second most frequent past conditional – the modal-evaluative one – is usually translated with the pogojnik ‘conditional’ or the preteklik (when modality is part of the lexical meaning of a verb). The Slovene equivalent of the past conditional in the apodoses of conditional sentences is almost always the pogojnik.