ABSTRACT
In the last 15 years, the English-speaking literary panorama has witnessed the rise of a compelling body of texts produced by Nigerian women writers who have condensed the literary focus onto women’s reality both at a national and at an international level. Interested by the rise of women writers who are offering insight into what it means to be a woman in Nigerian contemporary society, the Italian publishing scene has come to promote the translation and publication of such works more and more often in the last ten years. Drawing on these premises, the chapter deals with the case of Lola Shoneyin’s novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010) and its Italian translation Prudenti come serpenti (2013). Through the methodological frameworks of translation and gender studies, the chapter aims at exploring the linguistic reframing strategies the Italian translator employed to (re)purpose the narrations of female characters into an alien cultural panorama. Since translators are not the only reframing agents, the chapter also investigates the paratextual apparatuses of both the English and the Italian editions of the book, in order to assess what kind of strategies are being used to present such a book to both an English- and an Italian-speaking readership.
