Arising from an acute dissatisfaction with blandly general or abstrusely theoretical approaches to translation, this book sets out to show, through detailed and lively analysis, what it really means to translate literary style. Combining literary and linguistic approaches, it proceeds through a series of interconnected chapters, to analyse Italian translations of the works of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. Each chapter thus becomes an illuminating critical essay on the author concerned showing how divergences between original and translation tend to be of a different kind for each author. A concluding chapter examines six passages in English and Italian demonstrating how a study of the differences between the two versions leads very quickly to an awareness of which was the original language and what the essential problem was for the translator.