ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the type of translational process and its interdependence with geographical and cartographic imaginations. In particular, it examines the work of a contemporary writer, Antonio Tabucchi, who, as much as Jules Verne, can be considered both a master of translational fiction and an extremely geographically minded narrator. Translational mimesis is the aesthetically codified employment of mimetic strategies to represent heterolinguality on an intratextual level through a medium which is normally unilingual. For Sternberg, a specialist in both modernist fiction and biblical narratives, translational mimesis could almost be considered as a synonym to hetero-lingual mimesis, except for the emphasis that it places on the dynamism of the mimetic process and on the transformational features of what is represented in polylingual discourse. For Sternberg, conceptual reflection does not so much retain the verbal forms of the foreign code but rather 'the underlying socio-cultural norms, semantic mapping of reality, and distinctive referential range, segmentations and hierarchies'.
