I would like to present the latest novel by Said Ahmed Mohamed, Babu alipofofuka (\'When Grandfather came to life again\'), published at the end of the last year. The mine will be only a first, preliminary and very inadequate attempt as, I am sure, this work will challenge us for quite a few years. In fact, after five realistic novels the author has adopted a new technique, turning to magic realism as he himself defines his work, but perhaps it is a too limitative definition. He depicts our world in a near future, when Tanzania and other African countries will have already undergone the process of globalization. The results are disastrous: impoverished and dulled masses are governed by a handful of immensely rich, powerful and arrogant persons mostly of foreign origin, deprived of all human qualities, who have thrown away any inhibition and deliberately sunk in all sorts of physical and moral debasement; nothing embarrasses nor frightens them anymore as they feel unpunishable.

This article deals with the translation into Italian of the Swahili novel Utengano by Said Ahmad Mohamed, which was published in March 2005 under the title `Seperazione`by an Italian Publishing House, Rubbettino Editiore. Translation is a very important form of intercultural communication, which can provide contact with new readers, expected and unexpected ones. In the following pages I will decribe the main features of my translation of the novel Utengano, highlighting the main differences between the first version, that I produced as an appendix to the M.A. thesis, and the manuscript that I submitted to the publishing house.

I would like to present the latest novel by Said Ahmed Mohamed, Babu alipofofuka (\''When Grandfather came to life again\''), published at the end of the last year. The mine will be only a first, preliminary and very inadequate attempt as, I am sure, this work will challenge us for quite a few years. In fact, after five realistic novels the author has adopted a new technique, turning to magic realism as he himself defines his work, but perhaps it is a too limitative definition. He depicts our world in a near future, when Tanzania and other African countries will have already undergone the process of globalization. The results are disastrous: impoverished and dulled masses are governed by a handful of immensely rich, powerful and arrogant persons mostly of foreign origin, deprived of all human qualities, who have thrown away any inhibition and deliberately sunk in all sorts of physical and moral debasement; nothing embarrasses nor frightens them anymore as they feel unpunishable.

The Swahili novel, a literary genre lately appeared in Tanzania, has undoubtedly found a brilliant and mature expression in the works of the Zanzibarian writer Said Ahmed Mohamed. His novel Utengano, published in 1980, is a unique work in the Swahili literary production of the Seventies and Eighties, with regard to both the themes treated and the very elaborated style of the author, who has given a dense and homogeneous quality to this genre, which is by definition open and composite, totally different from the short story, the organisation of different elements representing a challenge to the capacities of a writer in terms of composition. In this paper I will focus on a feature of Utengano which, in my view, points out to the good achievement of a novel, namely the author`s utterance of a leitmotiv or general abstract idea creating cross-references and symbolic relations between the different levels of a literary text. The leitmotiv I found in Utengano is the idea of dynamism, in other words motion, energy that produces changes, which permeates the whole work unifying the different levels of expression. These latter will be analysed separately to allow a clear exposition, but the dialectical relationship between the `what` and the `how´ represents the key to the reading of this novel.