This essay considers Camillo Sbarbaro’s translation of L’Intersigne, a fantasy tale written
by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in 1867 dealing with the weird experience of the narrator in a
Breton presbytery, which cannot definitively be categorized as a dream or a hallucination.
In Sbarbaro’s text the narrative of this oneiric experience tends towards a rewriting that
minimizes or even standardizes the narratological features of the original, which was
intended to have a dream-effect on readers. However this loss is compensated by a gain in
terms of intertextuality, since, especially in descriptive or lyrical passages, the personal
voice of the translator – himself a well-known poet – creates meaningful intertextual
echoes for Italian readers.
