Literary retranslation, as a product and as a process, is one of the most interesting topics within the branches of Descriptive Translation Studies and Translation Criticism, allowing scholars to gain insights into the various factors – linguistic, socio-cultural and ideological – that determine changes in translation norms and strategies over time. However, despite the existence of an ever-growing number of case studies focusing on the retranslations of literary texts, extensive research is still needed to pin down the manifold influences behind this complex phenomenon. This article briefly discusses some examples of retranslation into Italian of English and American “classics” in the light of a number of theoretical hypotheses on the nature of editorial retranslation, trying to draw attention to its economic and ethical implications.
