| Summary: | Prose texts are traditionally divided into narrative texts and informative-explanatory (non-fictional) texts. However, there are “frontier texts”, which share characteristics of the first and of the second type – their prototype being the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. To this hybrid category belongs the essay La toison de Madeleine (2000) by art critic Daniel Arasse, devoted to the fundamental attribute of Mary Magdalene in Western iconography, i.e. her long hair. Written in the form of a monologue, the essay features, alongside the usual linguistic structures which recur in explanatory texts, words and expressions of oral French (colloquial terms and phrases, interjections, puns). The study of its two existing Italian translations (Artemide, 2005; Einaudi, 2013) reveals how difficult a decision it is for translators – but also for editors – to reproduce, in the translation of an “art criticism essay” (a textual typology associated with an elevated style), a use of the language that deliberately breaks the rules of the genre: even the most successful translation (Luca Bianchi for Einaudi) fails to be fully consistent in its lexical and syntactic choices.
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