“Gender and Translation: a European Map”

The article focuses on the European state-of-the-art regarding the intersection between gender and translation studies, offering and updated account of the activities, projects and research that currently conform the European map of the field with a special emphasis on the Italian case

Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies.

Jane Austen sells. She sells in all possible ways, her novels have been adapted for the cinema and the stage, they have been rewritten as comics and graphic novels. Jane austen is a cultural icon. The interest in her life is so strong that many biographies have been written in order to recover new facts and details. The places where she has lived and the places depicted in her novels have become tourist sites for literary pilgrims. Austen is a cross-over phenomenon, with regency costume balls recreated in her name and an endless proliferation of her works in all media. My essay will investigate Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a mash-up novel which has become a real cultural phenomenon of the last decade and will demonstrate how it can be considered a serial narrative. If as Henry Jenkins asserts, seriality implies the unfolding of a story over time through a process of “chunking” (that is creating meaningful parts of the same story) and of “dispersal” (that is breaking the story into more parts and in more genres and media), mash-ups seems to do this.  Austen’s story remains as a “story hook” which pushes the reader to come back to different products for a continuation of the same story. So, if on the one hand, seriality occurs within the same text, the story-telling of Austen’s stories across genres and media is part of a seriality process

“Destabilising the Canon: a Survey and a Bibliography of Intertextual Critical Theory”

intertextual theorie

A Languaged-Self: Translating Aritha van Herk’s Novels

The article deals with the multifaceted difficulties of translating Aritha van Herk's novels into Italia

Using and Abusing Gender in Translation. The Case of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own Translated into Italian

This paper is part of a corpus-based research on gender in translation aimed at showing how gender is used and/or abused in the translation of literary texts from English into Italian. Drawing upon feminist theories of language and translation and feminist practices in translation, it is our intention to show how gender is manipulated in translation in an attempt to define feminist translation strategies. Translating a feminist text does not necessarily imply that the translator working on that text is a ‘feminist’. In Italy, moreover, it is very hard to find cases of declared feminist translators as compared to other countries, such as Canada or Spain for instance. Our interest, therefore, lies in the possibility to frame specific strategies as feminist and to see if in the corpus of texts we are analyzing they are carried out or not. The second part of the essay focuses on the first example of our study: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and three of the translations that have been published in the Italian context

“Writing or Translating Otherness?”

Starting from the recent debate on World Literature and Transnational Literatures (Damrosch 2003; Ascari 2011; Moretti 2000) we will demonstrate how this discussion is strictly related to the idea of translation as a hermeneutical category. If postcolonial writers defined themselves as “translated men” (Rushdie 1991:17), migrant writers adopt a new language deeply influenced by their mother tongue but enmeshed with the ‘adopted’ one. It is a language of loss, belonging and identity. Transnational writers are subjects in transit, people who, for economical, political or personal reasons, move across national borders. Still anchored to their past nonetheless they are deeply influenced by the languages and cultures of the host country(ies). The term ‘trans’ indicates the passage among different cultures and languages and the trespassing and widening of national borders. The essay is divided into two main parts: 1) a theoretical approach aimed at a) outlining the recent debate on World Literature and Transnational literatures, b) rethink the fruitful discussion within Translation Studies in the last decades, and 2) a second part which will provide a textual analysis of a novel, Con il Vento Nei Capelli, written by a Palestinian woman novelist, Salwa Salem

Translating the ‘Other’ for the Western World for more than a decade: Incredible India! campaigns

When we analyse and translate tourist texts promoting or dealing with nonWestern destinations we certainly have to take into account the weight of postcolonial discourses in the representation of these places in the tourist field. Many ex-colonies have become popular tourist destinations, while the detritus of post-colonialism have been transformed into tourist sights, including exotic peoples and customs; artefacts; indigenous lifestyles and cultural heritage (Craik). Therefore, if tourism reinforces postcolonial relationships, tourist texts are deeply embedded in colonial discourses. Some scholars have argued that tourism is a form of “leisure imperialism” and represents “the hedonistic face of neocolonialism” (Crick 322). Hall and Tucker have dedicated a volume to the relation between postcolonial thought and tourism referring back to Edward Said’s seminal work on Orientalism (1978) and to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989), both works which outline the ontological and epistemological distinction that has been made between the Western world and the ‘Other’. Encounters with the non-Western have always provided fuel for myths and mythical language and tourism has developed its own promotional lexicon and repertoire of myths (Selwyn), and as a matter of fact, otherness can be an element that makes a destination worth a visit. Studies have demonstrated how the representation of the ‘Other’ is closely linked to the popularization of accounts of travels and explorations in imperial lands (Pratt; Spurr), and sadly this representation is still part of tourist place promotion (Hall and Page). It is a fact that tourism plays a central role in transforming collective and individual values through ideas of commoditization (Cohen), which implies that what were once cultural displays of living traditions or cultural texts of lived authenticity become cultural products that meet the needs of commercial tourism, as well as the construction of a supposed heritage. Such a situation leads to the invention of traditions and heritage for external consumption that meet visitors’ conceptions of the other (Helu-Thaman; Cronin et al.). A good example of representing a non-Western destination at an international level is the Indian campaign Incredible India launched in 2002 for the European, Asian Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays N. 21 – 05/2019 125 and Middle East markets (Kant). Undertaken by the Government of India to promote India Tourism all over the world, the campaign was released by Ogilvy and Mather India in media print, internet and television. My analysis wants to outline how the main themes of the campaign (yoga, Ayurveda and other spirituality-related concepts, Indian cultures and culinary traditions and festivals all around the country, the cultural heritage and the natural resources) have been developed through time in order to ‘translate’ the uniqueness of India for the Western tourist in the last 15 years. The campaign Incredible India has been developed and renewed over the past few years and is still ongoing. My analysis will follow two stages: in the first I will deal with linguistic and visual techniques that create a determinate idea of India as a tourist destination, in the second I will compare texts in English with their translation into Italian, and specifically the creation of a campaign aimed at Italian tourists

Riscrivere i testi sacri in chiave femminista: The Passion of New Eve di Angela Carter

Analisi linguistica del romanzo di A. Carter The Passion of New Ev

“Convergenze e sinergie tra traduzione e studi comparati: una rassegna critica”

L'articolo propone un'analisi dell'attuale dibattito su studi traduttori e letterature transnazionali-World literatur

Clinical features of headache patients with fibromyalgia comorbidity

Our previous study assessed the prevalence of fibromyalgia (FM) syndrome in migraine and tension-type headache. We aimed to update our previous results, considering a larger cohort of primary headache patients who came for the first time at our tertiary headache ambulatory. A consecutive sample of 1,123 patients was screened. Frequency of FM in the main groups and types of primary headaches; discriminating factor for FM comorbidity derived from headache frequency and duration, age, anxiety, depression, headache disability, allodynia, pericranial tenderness, fatigue, quality of life and sleep, and probability of FM membership in groups; and types of primary headaches were assessed. FM was present in 174 among a total of 889 included patients. It prevailed in the tension-type headache main group (35%, p < 0.0001) and chronic tension-type headache subtype (44.3%, p < 0.0001). Headache frequency, anxiety, pericranial tenderness, poor sleep quality, and physical disability were the best discriminating variables for FM comorbidity, with 81.2% sensitivity. Patients presenting with chronic migraine and chronic tension-type headache had a higher probability of sharing the FM profile (Bonferroni test, p < 0.01). A phenotypic profile where headache frequency concurs with anxiety, sleep disturbance, and pericranial tenderness should be individuated to detect the development of diffuse pain in headache patients