11 results
2 - Gianna Patriarca: Self-Translating as a Strategy of Re-grounding
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp 27-56
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Summary
Finding a ‘Voice’ as an Italian-Canadian Woman
Gianna Patriarca is one of the major voices in Italian-Canadian literature. The term refers to a body of literature produced by over one hundred authors of Italian background living in Canada; some of them were born in Italy and moved to Canada afterwards, while others were born in Canada to Italian parents. Their literary products show two main features. Firstly, they principally deal with the phenomenon of migration and its related issues; secondly, their works are characterised by an extensive multilingualism, which constitutes ‘one of the distinctive features of the literatures of the Italian emigration’ (Loriggio 2021, 805). Their texts are written in Italian, French, English and regional dialects. Alongside the extensive use of CS, several Italian-Canadian writers also practise self-translation; for instance, Mario Duliani translated his French novel La ville sans femmes (1945) into the Italian La città senza donne (1946). Likewise, the Quebec author Marco Micone selftranslated Gens du silence (1996) into the Italian Non era per noi (2004).
The beginning of Italian-Canadian writing dates to 1978, thanks to the writer Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, who was also editor of the literary magazine Books in Canada. He was the first to realise the existence of an impressive literary production that attempted to express itself and be recognised alongside the official Canadian literature in English and French. To this end, in 1978, he published Roman Candles, an anthology of literary works produced by seventeen Italian-Canadian writers. Moreover, in 1978, D’Alfonso, one of the most influential figures in the group, founded Guernica Editions, the publishing house that played a key role in promoting Italian-Canadian writers. The date therefore marks the birth of Italian-Canadian writing as an officially recognised body of literature. It also marks the emergence of an increasing self-awareness and self-consciousness about the relevance and importance of these works; as the writer and academic Joseph Pivato claimed, ‘[…] we had discovered a literature about ourselves, and the great responsibility which this entailed’ (1998, 13). These writers became aware that they had created a set of writings that required and deserved the same space of expression and accreditation as mainstream literary productions written in English and French.
4 - Licia Canton: Rewriting the Italian Mother (Tongue, Land)’s Legacy in Self-Translation
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp 85-110
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Summary
Growing Up in a Cavarzeran Community in Montréal
Licia Canton is another representative of the Italian-Canadian literary movement. Her story retraces the steps followed by Gianna Patriarca and Dôre Michelut, and it echoes the stories of many other Italian-Canadian migrants. She was born in Cavarzere, a small town in the province of Venice. In 1967, when she was four years old, she moved to Montréal with her family. Being forced to leave her native land and start a new life in a new territory was a painful and distressing experience, which has thenceforth marked her personal and professional lives. In the essay ‘Writing Canadian Narratives with Italian Accents: The Pink House and Other Stories’, she writes that, while she used to be a talkative child in Italy, in Canada she became shy and did not speak much (2019, 60). The experience of being voiceless, which is common among Italian-Canadian authors, especially female ones, triggered her need and desire to retrieve her voice, which subsequently inclined her to write. Indeed, in the same essay, she declares that she was able to find her voice only when she began writing (2019, 60).
Canton shows a great interest in migration and minority literature, with a sharp focus on Italian-Canadian literature. She has explored this theme in both critical and creative writing. Among the critical texts are Writing Our Way Home (2013), Conspicuous Accents (2014), Writing Cultural Difference (2015), and Writing Beyond History: an Antholog y of Prose and Poetry (2006). These anthologies collect the literary creations (both prose and poetry) of several Italian- Canadian authors. Among the literary texts that investigate migration from a less academic perspective is Almond Wine and Fertility (2008), where the author portrays the encounter between Italian and Canadian culture, and The Pink House and Other Stories, a collection of 15 short stories.
Among her many achievements, Canton was the recipient of the Premio Italia nel Mondo, that celebrates Italian excellence in the world. This award started in New York in 1994, when the famous Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti was awarded.
1 - Revoicing Female Migrant Identities through Creative Multilingualism
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp 9-26
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Identity and Migration
In her book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, Yasemin Yildiz introduces the notion of the monolingual paradigm (2012, 2).1 This paradigm establishes that people possess one language only: their mother tongue. The relationship with the mother tongue is believed to set the boundaries defining who we are. It links us to a well-defined and exclusive ethnicity and culture, affecting the way we operate and function within a specific community (2012, 2). This paradigm does not exist in nature; rather, it is a sociopolitical construct that emerged in the eighteenth century, and which reminds us that this world ‘is not one but is ruled as one’ (Ponzanesi and Merolla 2005, 6). As a matter of fact, the monolingual paradigm serves the purpose of organising our world, defining individuals and communities on both a personal and a collective level (Yildiz 2012, 2). Despite the attempts at imposing this paradigm on individuals and society, Yildiz claims that multilingual practices nonetheless continued to exist and survive. She defines them as postmonolingual, a term which describes their ‘struggle against the monolingual paradigm’ (Yildiz 2012, 4).
As mentioned in the Introduction, this struggle has become particularly evident in contemporary societies, where people are constantly on the move, crossing and inhabiting multiple linguistic, physical and cultural spaces. Their movements trigger a rethinking of the relation between individuals, place and language. Indeed, ‘traditional representations based on the supposed unity of people, culture and territory do not hold’ (Wilson 2020, 214). The alleged unity of people and language is also challenged. Constituting a movement to a different linguistic environment, migration breaks the constitutive relation between language and identity. It disrupts the grounding of the self in the mother tongue, forcing migrants to renegotiate and redefine their selfhood and rethink taken-for-granted concepts, such as home and belonging. For this reason, migrants have often been defined as ‘translated beings’ (Cronin 2006, Polezzi 2012). In order to function within the new community, the way they perceive and relate to reality has to be redefined and transferred from one linguistic and cultural dimension to another:
translation takes place both in the physical sense of movement or displacement and in the symbolic sense of the shift from one way of speaking, writing about and interpreting the world to another. (Cronin 2006, 45)
Conclusion
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Book:
- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp 143-146
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The present book has explored the connection between migrating, writing and self-translating within transmigratory contexts, specifically investigating how transmigrant authors use language to negotiate and reframe their identity against the backdrop of the monolingual paradigm. Starting from the premise that writing and translating are not only linguistic and cultural processes but also self-reflexive practices, they have been examined in conjunction with a process of redefinition of the self.
To this end, I selected a corpus of four transmigrant authors of Italian origins, who moved to English-speaking countries. The aim was to work with a language pair, that to date, has been mainly neglected. Indeed, while the relation between English and Italian in writing and translating has been investigated in several articles, so far it has not been the focus of any specific volume. The decision to work with Italian and English was not only connected to a personal interest (as I am an Italian speaker who lives and works in the UK). The focus on Italian and English also allowed me to investigate the subversive power of the former and the role played by multilingual practices in reshaping the borders and dynamics between dominant and dominated languages. By juxtaposing Italian and English on the page, or writing in both, the authors in this volume rewrite the borders between linguistic systems, challenging the norms that dictate language dynamics and redefining whether and how languages assert themselves within the context of globalisation.
The choice to focus on Italian was also connected to its specific connotation with respect to the monolingual paradigm. Like mentioned in Chapter 1, the concept of a mother tongue acquires an interesting value within the Italian context, where dialects, standard and regional Italian coexist. Given this connotation, the Italian language perfectly allows an examination of multilingual practices as postmonolingual, a point that has been put forward in this volume. The writing and self-translating performances of the authors can be considered postomonolingual, ‘as they survive, exist and emerge’, against the monolingual paradigm. Indeed, all the writers in this corpus were never fully included in the monolingual paradigm, yet they conceived of themselves as monolinguals and attempted to establish relations with a unique mother tongue.
Voices of Women Writers
- Using Language to Negotiate Identity in (Trans)migratory Contexts
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo
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- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 01 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 10 October 2023
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This book investigates the practice of writing and self - translating phenomenon of self-translation within the context of mobility, through the analysis of a corpus of narratives written by authors who were born in Italy and then moved to English-speaking countries. Emphasizing writing and self-translating As practices, which exists in conjunction with a process of redefinition of identity, the book illustrates how these authors use language to negotiate and voice their identity in (trans)migratory contexts.
Frontmatter
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp i-iv
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5 - Francesca Duranti: ‘Trans-Writing’ the Self through Acts
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp 111-142
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The Link between Author, Character and Narrator in the Autofictional Novel
Francesca Duranti is the pseudonym of Maria Francesca Rossi. She is a popular Italian writer who has published fourteen books, such as La casa sul lago della luna (1984), Come quando fuori piove (2006) and Un anno senza canzoni (2009). She has won several literary prizes, such as the famous Premio Campiello, or Premio letterario nazionale per la donna scrittrice. She is also well-known abroad, and her novels have been translated into eighteen languages. Her books explore the connection between life and art, illustrating fiction as a reflection of life and vice versa. For instance, in Effetti personali (1988), the protagonist Valentina is a translator who looks for ‘her self’ through writing and translating. Her lack of ‘personal effects’ becomes clear to Valentina when, in leaving her, her husband removes the name plate from the front door of what used to be their apartment. This moment marks the beginning of her quest, as she embarks on a professional journey, which is nonetheless deeply connected to a personal need and purpose. In Un anno senza canzoni, the protagonist is a young girl; in the background, Duranti depicts a solitary and empty Milan, abandoned by people on holidays. Alone in her room, the young girl starts writing a diary in order to reflect on her life. In this novel as well, the exploration into life is therefore interwoven with the act of writing, which Duranti sees as two different yet indissoluble moments of one's existence. The stratagem of the diary makes this interconnection even stronger, as the girl is literally transposing her life into a narration. Alongside her career as a writer, Duranti is a prolific translator who has also engaged herself in an experiment of self-translation. This unique episode in her literary career will be the focus of this chapter, which investigates the bond between living, writing and self-translating in Sogni mancini/Left-Handed Dreams.
Duranti was born into a rich Italian family, where she grew up bilingual and learned, simultaneously, to speak Italian and German. Moreover, as a child, she also learned English and French (Dagnino 2021). This means that she grew up ‘with two or more languages from the beginning’ and never knew ‘a purely monolingual state’ (Yildiz 2012, 121).
Introduction
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Book:
- Voices of Women Writers
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp 1-8
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In 2022, the Haslemere Educational Museum hosted an exhibition about bird migration, aiming to expand people's knowledge of this phenomenon, and to inform and arouse concern about the decline of many summer migrants, a problem that is being increasingly reported worldwide. For instance, in January 2023, an article in the Guardian signalled that, due to the climate crisis, the number of UK's winter birds is in sharp decline.
In the meantime, European newspapers and TV news talk about the migrant crisis in Europe, highlighting its effects and consequences for society. As an Italian, I am very familiar with these discourses; our press coverage continuously reports about a supposed migrant invasion, portraying the country as invaded by refugees and asylum seekers.
Taking these two facts into account, two considerations emerge. The first one concerns the different attitudes towards birds and people's migration. Bird migration is considered natural, necessary and unavoidable; like Dingle and Drake state, we tend to see animal migration as an ‘essential component of the life history and ecological niche of the organism’ (2007, 113). On the other hand, we are reluctant to accept human migration. In order to stop and delimit it, we build walls and make citizenship laws stricter and stricter. Nonetheless, the movement of people is not an unprecedented phenomenon. The general assumption is that ‘because a phenomenon is highly visible, contested and difficult to administratively manage, nothing like this has happened before’ (Mayblin and Turner 2021, 10). This is not true. People have always moved, and their movements have shaped the world as we know it.
The second consideration is that, far from being in decline, human migration is increasing more and more. According to Global Trends (2022), over the last decade, the number of refugees has doubled. On the one hand, this increased mobility is the result of people's innate curiosity and restlessness, of free borders and movement, which leads them to leave their comfort zone and explore new shores; on the other hand, it is the consequence of war, persecution, poverty and global warming.
References
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Book:
- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp 147-157
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Contents
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp v-vi
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3 - Dôre Michelut: Coming to Terms with the Mother Tongue
- Elena Anna Spagnuolo, Aberystwyth University
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- Voices of Women Writers
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- Anthem Press
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- 01 March 2024
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- 10 October 2023, pp 57-84
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The Emergence of a Multilingual Paradigm
Dorina Michelutti, better known as Dôre Michelut (the Friulian version of her name), is also an Italian-Canadian author. She was born in 1952 in Sella di Rivignano, a town near Udine, in the region of Friuli. Her family migrated to Canada in 1958 and settled in Toronto. After graduating from high school in 1972, she spent five years in Florence, studying Italian at the University of Florence. She returned to Canada in 1981, where she continued to study at the University of Toronto. Meanwhile, she began to write and publish in literary magazines. Her first book of poems, Loyalty to the Hunt, was published in 1986 by Guernica Editions. In 1994, this book also appeared in the French version, entitled Loyale à la chasse. In 1989, she published Coming to Terms with the Mother Tongue. In 1990, in cooperation with five writers, she published Linked Alive and the simultaneous French edition, Liens. In 1990, she also published Ouroborous: The Book That Ate Me, containing poems in English, Italian and Friulian. In 1993, she published A Furlan Harvest, a collection of poems written in Italian, English and Friulian, by women of Friulian descent living in Canada. After 1996, Michelut started travelling and working around the world. In 2005, she received a Master of Arts in Applied Communication from Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. She died of cancer in Oman in March 2009. She was teaching advanced speech, multimedia and technical communication at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane.
Michelut's works have appeared in many literary publications and have been anthologized both in Canada and Italy. Her literary production constitutes a form of experimental fiction, that is, a form of writing defined by its innovative nature. She continually breaks linguistic, narrative and stylistic norms and conventions, combining different styles and discourses. On the level of content, her poems are thematically obscure, difficult to analyse, and engage the reader with different levels of interpretation. Through this innovative approach to writing, ‘discursive borders are constantly relativized and transgressed, thereby intensifying the work's migratory character’ (Frank 2008, 20). This inventive approach is also evident in her experiments with different poetic forms, such as a series of renga, an Asian form of social poetry.