Henri Michaux’s Voyage en Grande Garabagne (1936) and Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947) pose problems of various kinds to the translator. One of the most important is undoubtedly the treatment of neology. In both texts, neologisms are an extremely visible and functional element, which aims at creating strange worlds, different from the one that surrounds the readers. My contribution will analyze the translation strategies adopted for the rendering of neologisms in the Italian versions of the two texts. Of particular interest is the fact that both texts have been translated twice. The very same title, Viaggio in Gran Garabagna, has been chosen for the versions by Liliana Magrini and Carla Vasio (1966) and, later, by Jean Talon Sampieri and Gianni Celati (2005); L’Écume... has been translated for the first time with the title Schiuma di giorni (by Augusto Donaudy, in 1965) and a second time as La schiuma dei giorni (by Gianni Turchetta, in 1992). Given the distance that separates the first versions from the retranslations, it will also be possible to study the rendering of neologisms in diachrony.
