The French notes-citations in the manuscripts of Solomos's The Free Besieged and the Original Texts : a comparative reading

The apparent or latent French notes-citations in the manuscripts of Solomos's The Free Besieged reveal both the multilingual nature of Solomos as a reader-copyist and the translingual character of his writing process. Relevant to the latter is the fact that Solomos often proceeds in translating the French passages he reproduces into Italian, without necessarily the context revealing the existence of the French original. More specifically, in recording the notes-citations, Solomos exhausts both the monolingual option of copying (French) and the interlingual possibilities of translating word for word into Italian or of faithfully rendering it in a mixed language (French-Italian). The target of this paper is to compare the Italian translations to the French original texts, aiming on the one hand to identify any discrepancies in Solomos's translation options, and on the other, to examine Solomos's interlingual, if not translingual, process of translating as well as the phenomena of code switching and cross-linguistic influence resulting from it.