There's a 'tense' for every activity under heaven: strategies for choosing verbal tenses in literary translation from Chinese into Italian.

The translation I’ve recently carried out of Liu Heng’s novel "The Happy Life of the Garrulous Zhang Damin" has offered me the occasion for some reflections upon the management and treatment of verbal tenses throughout the translation itself. The beginning of the novel may be seen as a still of Zhang Damin’s own family, taken (as we can realize in the end) after all the episodes making up the main plot have been narrated, while its very conclusion riminds of Chaplin’s typical fading out, where the main character walks away along a solitary road, turning his back to us. The chronological nature of the events taking place between such visual start and conclusion require from the translator some substantial choices as regards the verbal tenses to make use of in the metatext.