ABSTRACT
Recreating the visibility of the original text in a new text — a crucial element in any literary translation, not least of a work by Italo Calvino — is not ensured by merely striving for 'accuracy'. Even for languages as close as Italian and Danish, different ways of coding images linguistically are at play, that is, different ways of depicting extra-linguistic situations and events and turning them into 'lines of black letters on a white page'. This chapter analyses Calvino's text and its Danish translation, and explains a series of typological and normative differences, primarily connected to the use of spatial particles. It argues that these differences give rise to quite substantial differences in the conventional imagery employed in the two languages, differences that are evident in the translation and affect the visions that are being brought into focus by the new reader.
