A Unique Type of Love: Translating Female Friendship. Translation proposal of the essay “First Love” from the book First Love: essays on friendship by Lilly Dancyger

This thesis focuses on the book First Love: essays on friendship by Lilly Dancyger and it includes a translation proposal of its opening essay, “First Love”. The paper has two aims: on one hand, to investigates the most prominent themes of the book, such as friendship, grief, childhood trauma and sisterhood, and on the other, to create a translation that does justice to the original while conveying the author’s voice to the Italian audience. The thesis first introduces the book, the author and the main topics, before focusing on its genre, namely creative nonfiction and, more specifically, the collection of essays. After providing an overview of the essays contained in the volume and a summary of the translated essay, I present my translation, followed by a commentary that illustrates the main problematics encountered during the translation process, that is lexical, syntactical and cultural problems. Finally, the thesis strives to highlight how important these subject matters are especially in today’s cultural context and aims to make them more accessible to a broader audience by offering an Italian version.