Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and was a graduate of the University there. After six years in the Army he worked as an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education, as a lecturer in Phonetics and as a grammar school master.

This paper examines the Italian translation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, focusing in particular on the language of narration, ‘Nadsat’. This invented argot, based on English but including a good deal of Russian vocabulary, contributes to the novel’s grotesque humour and to the narrator’s manipulation of the readers. In Floriana Bossi’s Italian translation, the Russian influence on Nadsat is almost completely missing; she draws instead on Italian and dialectal vocabulary.

This results in a considerable change to what in the source text is a very foreign-sounding argot. I investigate the effect that Bossi’s approach has on the humour of the narration and on the audience’s potential involvement with the main character. Notions of violent language and the violence of translation are discussed, as is the extent to which Bossi’s approach is shaped by linguistic incompatibility, target-culture poetics, and ideologies about the role of the translator. Links and resources URL: BibTeX key: search on.