The People Could Fly, by Virginia Hamilton. A Translation Proposal.

African American awards winner Virginia Hamilton has marked the children’s literary scene of the last decades. Throughout her young adult novels, science fiction and picture books and much more, she tackles a wide range of topics important for the young readers, especially focusing on the Black identity. Granddaughter of a former slave on Virginia plantations, she grew up hearing the stories of her ancestors, telling her and her siblings about the harsh life they had to endure and the restrictions imposed on her people. Despite all the sufferings, she was always fascinated by the ability of those enslaved to survive, and was inspired by their strong hope. For this reason Hamilton pursued her studies in American folklore, which allowed her to research where she found the source of their strength. After a brief study on the main features of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and a overview on the development of children’s literature in the USA, this paper focuses on the translation of children’s book The People Could Fly by Hamilton, a folktales collection with illustrations which includes a selection of tales belonging to the African American tradition. Originally told by enslaved storytellers, these tales feature talking animals, tricksters, and supernatural elements, but most of all they tell of the hope for freedom. The dream of running away from enslavement, that only for someone became reality, is hidden by allegories and symbols in the stories, which narrate about the riddles and tricks used by the witty characters to outsmart the powerful master. The hereby proposed translation aims to follow the most recent translation theories, which deem as central the understanding of the novel by the target readership, but which recognize at the same time the invisibility of the translator. As expected, the process of translation highlighted several compelling and at times complex features of the African American folktales’ language, and consequent challenges in the realization of the final work. The peculiarity of the dialect sometimes used by the author, the oral features of the text and the themes the book addresses required the application of specific strategies during the translation process which are outlined and discussed in the final section of this work.