IT331 TRANSNATIONAL STORIES IN ITALY
Term 1, week 4:
Questions of voice, authorship and translation:
Fortunato and Methnani, Immigrato; Lakhous, Divorzio all’islamica a viale
Marconi.
Chapters/sections for discussion in the seminar:
 Immigrato: Introduction by Fortunato
 Divorzio: Sofia’s narrative, pp. 79-89
 Divorzio: Issa’s narrative, pp. 90-99
 Divorzio: Sofia’s narrative, pp. 100-110
Authorship
 Who ‘owns’ the story of migration?
 Are these autobiographical novels?
 As a reader of these novels, how do you relate to the author? Who holds
‘authority’?
Voice
 What is the significance of ‘voice’ in these novels, in terms of: having a voice;
speaking out and speaking for; testimony.
 How do we hear ‘voices’ in these novels: accented voices, dialects,
multicultural voices > polyphonic narratives?
Translation
 How do these novels foreground translation?
 Think about the ‘translation’ of names, key terms; the encounter or exchange
between languages.
 Think about everyday acts of translation; cultural translation as well as
linguistic.
 Transnational identities, voices, and texts: is this Italian literature?
from Wail S. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives:
 ‘Translation, in other words, is both carried out and received within a
domestic discursive field that sets the condition for it and also inevitably lifts
the translated work from its original context and reconfigures its meaning.
Over and beyond the impossibility of total “fidelity” at the linguistic level, the
work acquires the added dimension of being not only of the culture
from which it emerges (say, a novel from Egypt), but ultimately about
that culture in its totality (a novel about Egypt, tout court, rather than a
particular event, idea, historical period, or whatever else it may be for
Egyptian readers). Less directly but no less importantly, it also becomes a
novel about the receiving or target culture, since consciously or
unconsciously, readers look for an image of themselves reflected in the
1 Jennifer Burns, H4.11, j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
mirror of a “foreign” novel. Moreover, such a novel also ultimately
becomes about the relations between Egypt or Islam or Arabs or the
“East” (however the work may be marketed to, and/or received by, the
reader) on the one hand, and the U.S. or the “West” on the other hand
(however that may be constructed by translator, publisher, reviewer, and
reader). Such reconfiguration is inevitable in any literary translation, which
is not only an aesthetic but also a cultural (or cross-cultural), discursive, and
political activity’ (p.30).

‘translational literature’: ‘By that I do not mean all immigrant writing, but,
strictly speaking, those texts that straddle two languages, at once
foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation’ (p. 32).
‘Minor literature’ (Deleuze and Guattari) has three key characteristics:
 ‘in it everything takes on a collective value’ (p. 17);
 ‘in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’ (p.
16);
 ‘everything in [these novels] is political’ (p. 17).
Select bibliography:
Burns, Jennifer, ‘Borders Within the Text: Authorship, Collaboration and Mediation
in Writing in Italian by Immigrants’, in Jennifer Burns and Loredana Polezzi, eds,
Borderlines: Migrant Writing and Italian Identities (1870–2000) / Borderlines:
Migrazioni e identità nel Novecento (Isernia: Iannone, 2003), pp. 387–94.
——, ‘Language and its Alternatives in Italophone Migrant Writing’, in Jacqueline
Andall and Derek Duncan, eds, National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian Colonial and
Postcolonial Cultures (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 127–47.
——, Migrant Imaginaries (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013) *in particular, chapters 3
(‘Home’) and 4 (‘Place and Space’)
Comberiati, Daniele, Scrivere nella lingua dell’altro: La letteratura degli immigrati in
Italia (1989-2007) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana
Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Hassan, Waïl S., Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab
American and Arab British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Palladino, Mariangela, ‘Divorce and Dialogue: Intertextuality in Amara Lakhous'
Divorzio all'islamica a viale Marconi’, Language and Intercultural Communication,
14.3 (2014), 287-303.
2 Jennifer Burns, H4.11, j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
Pezzarossa, Fulvio, and Ilaria Rossini, Leggere il testo e il mondo: Vent’anni di
scritture della migrazione in Italia (Bologna: CLUEB, 2011).
Spackman, Barbara, ‘Italians DOC? Posing and Passing from Giovanni Finati to
Amara Lakhous’, in Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (eds), Postcolonial
Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp.
125-38.
Wilson, Rita, ‘Cultural Mediation Through Translingual Narrative’, Target:
International Journal of Translation Studies, 23.2 (2011), 235-50.
3 Jennifer Burns, H4.11, j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk