1.1 Translation as a Metaphor for Diasporic Writing
This study revolves around a corpus of narratives by Italian-Canadian writers Mary Melfi , Nino Ricci and Frank Paci that have been translated into Italian and are concerned with the notion of return . Before delving into the discussion of these texts, this Introduction will take a virtual tour of the scenario against which this study set; a scenario populated by concepts such as translation , narrative and returns.
For many centuries, translation has been described through the use of various metaphors, such as the activity of building bridges between cultures, or the act of being faithful to someone, or walking in the footsteps of the author. Such metaphors have been analysed in depth in an edited collection by James St. AndrĂ© (2010), Thinking Through Translation With Metaphors, and in Translation as Metaphor authored by Rainer Guldin (2016). Moreover, the root of the word âtranslationââfrom the Latin trans (across) and latio, past participle of the verb fero (carry)âis exactly the same as the root of the word metaphor âconstituted by the word meta (across) and fero (carry). The root of the terms âtranslationâ and âmetaphorâ in the Western tradition (which differs from other traditions, as demonstrated by Tymoczko 2007) shares the idea of transposition and dislocation. In this respect, as affirmed by Guldin (2016, 19) âearly Western definitions of the concept of metaphor already contain a theory of translation as passage across bordersâ. Metaphors and translation have in common the existence of an internal split between signifier and signified, between the literal and figurative pole and, at the same time, the solution to overcoming it (Guldin 2016).
This implies that there has always been something in the process of translation that was best understood indirectly or by analogy, by a change in perspective, by moving things aside. This book will concentrate on translation as a metaphor for return and will analyse it in conjunction with the idea of writing as a metaphor for translating. Both metaphors, which invoke the idea of circular movement and reflexivity, originate from studies of translation in migratory settings, which have pointed out the existing analogy between migration and translation . These studies not only indicate âthe increasingly metaphorical way in which the word âtranslation â and, to an extent, also the word âmigration â are being usedâ (Polezzi 2012, 346), but also stress the complexity and centrality of these two concepts in contemporary society to the point of defining the condition of the migrant in this multilingual world as âthe condition of the translated beingâ (Cronin 2006, 45), and even arriving at the statement that âall human beings can be said to be migrating to some degreeâ (Inghilleri 2017, 205). 1 This âtranslationalâ condition is described by Bhabha (1994, 247) as a process of signification produced as a consequence of displacements, migrations, relocations. Translation can be thus considered as translocation, âas a sort of wandering or nomadic existence of a text in perpetual exileâ (Bandia 2014, 274).
By using the word âmetaphor â, however, I do not want to run the risk, as suggested by Sara Ahmed (1999), of exoticising and idealising migration by dismissing it as a rhetorical device and ignoring that it is empirical and experiential; it impacts on the daily lives of millions of people and has often to do with violence and trauma. Rather, with this book, I propose to read the translation of fiction that deals with migration as a sort of migratory movement, as the following pages will clarify. I will focus more specifically on the translation into Italian of Italian-Canadian Anglophone writing , a body of literature that appeared in Canada for the first time more than forty years ago, and was produced by second-generation Italians, the offspring of those Italians who left their country for the USA and Canada in the 1950s and 1960s. This type of writing can be situated within the paradigm of diasporic writing , drawing on the work of Avtar Brah (1996), Donna Gabaccia (2000) and Robin Cohen (2008), or post-migrant writing , according to Pasquale Verdicchio (1997a) and Graziella Parati (2005) (who uses also the term âpost-ethnicâ), as the majority of Italian-Canadian writers are either second-generation immigrants or they immigrated to Canada from Italy at an early age. Italian-Canadian writing is thus, arguably, post-migrant because it deals with the aftermath of migration rather than just migration itself.
The term âdiaspora â, however, represents for me a better heuristic term which I deem more suitable for the highlighting of the characteristics of this post-migration . Diaspora derives from the Greek dia (through) and sperein (to scatter). It signifies âdispersion fromâ; it refers to the concept of a locus, of a home , from which the dispersion occurs. If, as William Safran states (quoted in Cohen 2008), the classical use of the term âDiaspora â (written with a capital D) was confined to the Jewish experience, since the period 1960â1970 not only has its meaning been systematically extended to describe the dispersion of Africans, Armenians and the Irish, but also, from the 1980s onwards it has been used to include different categories of people such as âexpatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnic and racial minoritiesâ (Cohen 2008, 1). Thus âdiaspora â does not refer exclusively to people who were forcibly expelled from a homelandâthe so-called âvictim diaspora â (Cohen 2008)âbut also to people, such as Italians, who migrated voluntarily in search of work, as affirmed by Gabaccia (2000) in her informative work on the subjectâthe so-called âlabour diaspora â (Cohen 2008). Cohen (2008) explains that what characterises diaspora as a concept is the dispersion from an original homeland; an often idealised homeland to which the diasporic subject fantasises about returning and an ethno-communal consciousness shaped by a relationship to such a homeland. It follows that the concept of homeland is quite salient in this scenario. Although social constructionist critiques of diaspora in the 1990s have sought to challenge the foundational idea of homeland and the discourse of fixed originsâpreferring to use, for example, the notion of âhoming desiresâ (Brah 1996, 180)âthe importance of homeland, whether considered in real or imaginary terms, has been reinstated in recent studies of diaspora . Thinking of homeland is fundamental, as the concept of return analysed in this book implies the existence of a home or a place to which one might wish to return .
I therefore think that it is legitimate to include here a discussion of diaspora in relation to Italian migration , not only because this has already been done by scholars such as Gabaccia (2000) 2 and others before her, and because, according to Gabaccia (200...