In an increasingly globalized world, cultural contact becomes a crucial subject, thoroughly explored by Franco-Rwandan writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse. Her novel, Tous tes enfants dispersés (2019)/All Your Children, Scattered, illustrates intercultural dynamics through the experiences of characters between Rwanda and France. Mairesse addresses cultural hybridity, interbreeding, intercultural dialogues, cultural resistance, and women’s issues. Blanche, the protagonist, embodies this complexity by navigating between her Rwandan roots and her life in France. The novel highlights the transmission of traumas and cultural values across generations, illustrating the resilience of women in the face of historical challenges. Intergenerational relationships, particularly between Blanche and her mother, Immaculata, reveal the tensions and solidarities in preserving collective memory. Mairesse’s work is a profound reflection on the importance of memory, resilience, and dialogue in building bridges between cultures, thus offering a valuable contribution to intercultural literature.

The article deals with the relationship between the verbal mood and the grammatical category of person in the expression of modality defined as “the grammaticalisation of the speaker’s (subjective) attitude”. The inflectional verbal mood in the Italian sentence is observed with the aim of describing the way in which it operates, along with other grammatical categories, in the act of indicating different communicative functions of the utterance and various meanings of the deontic and epistemic modality. First, a very close relationship between tense and mood is noted, showing how temporal values of different tenses may be accompanied by modal meanings. The main attention is focused on the relationship between the category of verbal mood and the category of person in the act of indicating various speech acts, as well as other types of modality. Direct and indirect expressions of speech acts are taken into account.

Building on the broad meaning of the word “culture” and the ubiquity of cultural contact in contemporary societies, this article reflects on the representation of cultural contact in three French language novels: Pas Pleurer (2014) by Lydie Salvayre, Allah n’est pas obligé (2000) by Ahmadou Kurouma, and Hiver à Sokcho (2016) by Elisa Shua Dusapin. Salvayre, a renowned French writer whose mother tongue is Spanish, portrays the contact between French and Spanish cultures as a harmonious coexistence. The Ivorian novelist Kourouma, on the other hand, depicts cultural contact as a confrontation of two contrasting cultures: the central and seemingly superior French culture, and the peripheral and exotic Malinké culture. Marked by this biculturality, Kourouma makes no secret of his problematic relationship with the French language and culture and bases the structure of his novel on a confrontation of cultures. The Franco-Swiss author Elisa Shua Dusapin sees the contact between two different cultures, French and South Korean, as a devastating and threatening shock, which ultimately turns out to be enriching. The three authors reject both the hierarchisation of cultures and a black-and-white vision of the world. Their respective texts, imbued with a wide range of culturemes, are both pleasing and instructive: they transmit unconceptualized knowledge and thus justify the cultural and social significance of literature.

Contrastive analysis of phoric encapsulation in Czech and Spanish based on corpus of legal sentences. The article aims to examine the typology of textual cohesion mechanisms in Spanish and Czech, especially in legal texts of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It focuses on the phenomenon of phoric encapsulation, a cohesive mechanism which consists of condensing and summarising preceding (anaphoric encapsulation) or following (cataphoric encapsulation) textual segments. The typology of phoric encapsulation is explored, distinguishing between grammatical and lexical elements. The function of grammatical proforms such as pronouns and adverbs, as well as nominal syntagms and connectors, is detailed. In view of the terminological variety related to the concept, the term phoric encapsulation is proposed and translation strategies from Spanish into Czech are analysed, using a corpus of legal texts. The topic is approached from a contrastive perspective, assessing whether the distribution and typology of encapsulation mechanisms are maintained in translation. Questions are raised about translators’ perception of these elements and the possible modification of their semantics in the translation process. Translational patterns are classified, focusing on changes in semantics such as explicitation, recategorisation or implicitation. The analysis of judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU in Spanish and their translation into Czech reveals the presence of encapsulators in stereotypical constructions, common in the legal genre. The tendency towards a certain literalness in translation, especially in the preservation of the semantics of encapsulators, is highlighted. A close relationship is observed between encapsulation and the use of discourse markers, evidencing grammatical patterns in the Czech translation.

Chaim Potok’s first work, The Chosen (1967), was very well received and quickly became a bestseller that was translated into many languages. For the American author, it marked the beginning of his literary career. All his works are set within the Jewish culture and abound in Hebraisms, usually transliterated into English, the language of the original text. This is often a challenge for the translator, who must decide whether to transliterate them into the target language, find an equivalent in that language, adapt them to the spelling or simply leave them as they appear in the original version. The Chosen was translated into Spanish in 1969 by Rosalía Vázquez Tomás, who took on the challenge of finding an adequate solution, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. If it is always necessary to have a thorough knowledge of the culture from which it is translated, in this work it is even more evident, since a large number of concepts that do not have an equivalent either in English or in Spanish to date go hand in hand with it. This article analyzes 38 Hebraisms used in the translation of The Chosen. It first explains their meaning, presents the passage from which they have been extracted in the two languages and comments on various aspects (presence in English and Spanish monolingual dictionaries, morphology of the words, frequency of occurrence, spelling, etc.). Attention is also given to some Yiddish words that appear in the work. The article ends with a series of conclusions and translation proposals.

The article examines the relations between selected functions of narrators established by Gérard Genette within the category of the narrative voice and the axiologic system conveyed by the texts in the selected novels by Michel Houellebecq (*1956) Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994, translated as Whatever by Paul Hammond in 1998), Les Particules élémentaires (1998, translated as Atomised by Frank Wynne in 2000), Plateforme (2001, translated as Platform by Frank Wynne in 2002), La possibilité d’une île (2005, translated as The Possibility of an Island by Gavin Bowd in 2005), La carte et le territoire (2010, translated as The Map and the Territory by Gavin Bowd in 2011), Soumission (2015, translated as Submission by Lorin Stein in 2016), Sérotonine (2019, translated as Serotonin by Shaun Whiteside in 2019) and Anéantir (2022, English translation titled Annihilation to be released 19/09/2024). Drawing on the narrative theories of Gérard Genette, Vincent Jouve, Susan Suleiman, Algirdas-Julien Greimas and Herbert Paul Grice, the study explores how Houellebecqian prose maintains a critical dialogue with its narrators with the help of authorial distance, and an empathizing author emerges in his work. It also examines how Houellebecq’s position can be compared to those of Zygmunt Bauman, Václav Bělohradský and Václav Havel. Finally, it examines how the author transcribes a specifically Houellebecquian concept of antihero as a means of adequately reflecting the contemporary human condition, of rediscovering the sense of life of the contemporary man and his bearings in the world.

The article aims to describe the stories about Ippolito Nievo’s death, as depicted in various genres of texts from the 1960s to the present. These texts exhibit a combination of essayistic and narrative elements, incorporating both factual information and the authors’ imaginative interpretations. The popularity of the topic is closely tied to the prevalence of conspiracy theories, which have gained significant traction in recent decades. Furthermore, it should probably be placed within the Risorgimento revisionism current that radicalized in the seventies of the last century and represents a broader trend of revising official historical accounts. Among the texts identified, four were selected for an in-depth analysis both from the point of view of the content and from the point of view of the authors’ approach and their formal choices. These texts do not lend themselves to a simple classification of the literary genre, falling somewhere along the continuum between a narrative essay and a novel.