Turning Turtle and the In/visibility of Ecofeminist Metaphors in Italian: Translations of Katherine Mansfield’s At the Bay

Close reading of Mansfield’s rhetorical praxis reveals that her recurrent, and at times obsessive, use of botanical and zoological metaphors, both as lexical substitutions and semantic similitudes, was at the service of a strategic ecofeminist and anti-colonial agenda. Building on such premises, this paper ascertains, through an analysis of several Italian translations of her New Zealand short stories, how Mansfield’s semantic extension of nature has been interpreted and appraised by her translators.