Agatha Christie (1890-1976) has always enjoyed great success in Italy, and her works have been consistently published in Italian translation since their first re- leases. Since translations of Christie’s early works appeared in Italy during the time in which the country was ruled by Mussolini’s Fascist Party, they had to comply with the regime’s requirements in order to avoid being censored. Therefore, unsur- prisingly, Fascist-era translations are hardly ever complete; these translations were re-edited and reprinted multiple times throughout the years and were the only available choice to the Italian audience at least until the 1980s, when the publish- ing house that held the rights to Christie’s novels commissioned new ones. In order to see whether and how the approach to translating Christie has evolved with time, this paper sets forth to examine three different Italian versions of Christie’s 1935 novel Three Act Tragedy: the first translation published in 1937, a re-edition of that first translation published in 1986, and a retranslation released in 2019. The paper is divided into three sections, each of which analyzes one feature of the translations. The first is devoted to how mentions of premarital relationships and family are de- picted in translation; the second discusses politics-related alterations, specifically references to Jewish characters and the Catholic Church; the third focuses on the stylistic interventions made by the translators and/or editors to the source text. The results show that the 1937 translation not only omitted elements that might have been deemed problematic to the Italian Fascist regime, it also worked to promote Fascist values regarding family. None of these alterations were rectified in the 1986 edition, despite the fact that editors did intervene in the original translation. Chang- es motivated by stylistic reasons can be identified in all the translations, yet only in the 2019 translation can these interventions be seen as relatively minor.
