Focussing on the commissario di polizia and investigatore privato at home and abroad - a case of the other's gaze?

The narrative genre of the Anglo-American detective story continues to capture the interest of thousands of readers all over the world, thanks to their translations into an infinite number of languages. As a consequence, the investigations of police inspectors and private detectives of the calibre Mike Hammer, Nero Wolfe, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple are well known on a worldwide scale. This contribution takes inspiration from the above works in order to examine a lesser known sub-genre, that of the Italian detective story, which is nevertheless gaining popularity with English-speaking readers, not only in translation (e.g. the novels of Camilleri, Lucarelli and Varesi), but also for the very fact that a number of the novels have been written in English by Anglo-American writers, such as Dibden, Jones, Leon, Nabb, and are set in various parts of Italy. The analysis focuses on the linguistic strategies that the authors on the one hand, and the translators on the other, adopt with a view to creating and maintaining the Italian identity of the protagonists in their professional environment. First of all, it will be seen how the authors frequently rely on the cultural knowledge of their Anglo-American readers to decode a text that contains many Italian terms and expressions; secondly other strategies will be highlighted that serve to facilitate an understanding of the Italian culture, such as explicitation and the inclusion of explanatory notes. As far as the texts in translation are concerned, results of a brief contrastive analysis will be given to show to what extent the same strategies are adopted to delineate the Italian identity of the protagonists and their surroundings and to facilitate comprehension. In this culturally oriented perspective, the aim of this contribution is to comment on the other’s gaze of the police inspectors and private detectives in their Italian environment in a narrative that abounds in code-mixing with the clear intention of bringing the reader closer to the country in which the investigations take place.