Translating Italy For The Nineteenth Century

In the early nineteenth century the theory and practice of translation received special attention in Italy, a country that was still trying to define itself. Translation, particularly from English, became a means of enriching the Italian language, culture and literature, laying the foundations for the construction of a new national identity.

Translating Italy in the Eighteenth Century offers a historical analysis of the role played by translation in that complex redefinition of women's writing that was taking place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. It investigates the ways in which women writers managed to appropriate images of Italy and adapt them to their own purposes in a period which covers the 'moral turn' in women's writing in the 1740s and foreshadows the Romantic interest in Italy at the end of the century. A brief survey of translations produced by women in the period 1730-1799 provides an overview of the genres favoured by women translators, such as the moral novel, sentimental play and a type of conduct literature of a distinctively 'proto-feminist' character. Elizabeth Carter's translation of Francesco Algarotti's II Newtonianesimo per le Dame (1739) is one of the best examples of the latter kind of texts. A close reading of the English translation indicates a 'proto-feminist' exploitation of the myth of Italian women's cultural prestige. Another genre increasingly accessible to women, namely travel writing, confirms this female interest in Italy. Female travellers who visited Italy in the second half of the century, such as Hester Piozzi, observed the state of women's education through the lenses provided by Carter. Piozzi's image of Italy, a paradoxical mixture of imagination and realistic observation, became a powerful symbolic source, which enabled the fictional image of a modern, relatively egalitarian British society to take shape.

This book provides an in-depth study of translation and translators in nineteenth-century Ireland, using translation history to widen our understanding of cultural exchange in the period. It paints a new picture of a transnational Ireland in contact with Europe, offering fresh perspectives on the historical, political and cultural debates of the era. Employing contemporary translation theories and applying them to Ireland’s socio-historical past, the author offers novel insights on a large range of disciplines relating to the country, such as religion, gender, authorship and nationalism. She maps out new ways of understanding the impact of translation in society and re-examines assumptions about the place of language and Europe in nineteenth-century Ireland. By focusing on a period of significant linguistic and societal change, she questions the creative, conflictual and hegemonic energies unleashed by translations. This book will therefore be of interest to those working in Translation Studies, Irish Studies, History, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies.

Translating Italy in the Eighteenth Century offers a historical analysis of the role played by translation in that complex redefinition of women's writing that was taking place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. It investigates the ways in which women writers managed to appropriate images of Italy and adapt them to their own purposes in a period which covers the 'moral turn' in women's writing in the 1740s and foreshadows the Romantic interest in Italy at the end of the century. A brief survey of translations produced by women in the period 1730-1799 provides an overview of the genres favoured by women translators, such as the moral novel, sentimental play and a type of conduct literature of a distinctively 'proto-feminist' character. Elizabeth Carter's translation of Francesco Algarotti's II Newtonianesimo per le Dame (1739) is one of the best examples of the latter kind of texts. A close reading of the English translation indicates a 'proto-feminist' exploitation of the myth of Italian women's cultural prestige. Another genre increasingly accessible to women, namely travel writing, confirms this female interest in Italy. Female travellers who visited Italy in the second half of the century, such as Hester Piozzi, observed the state of women's education through the lenses provided by Carter. Piozzi's image of Italy, a paradoxical mixture of imagination and realistic observation, became a powerful symbolic source, which enabled the fictional image of a modern, relatively egalitarian British society to take shape.

Medieval Italy gathers together an unparalleled selection of newly translated primary sources from the central and later Middle Ages, a period during which Italy was famous for its diverse cultural landscape of urban towers and fortified castles, the spirituality of Saints Francis and Clare, and the vernacular poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The texts highlight the continuities with the medieval Latin West while simultaneously emphasizing the ways in which Italy was exceptional, particularly for its cities that drove Mediterranean trade, its new communal forms of government, the impact of the papacy's temporal claims on the central peninsula, and the richly textured religious life of the mainland and its islands. A unique feature of this volume is its incorporation of the southern part of the peninsula and Sicily—the glittering Norman court at Palermo, the multicultural emporium of the south, and the kingdoms of Frederick II—into a larger narrative of Italian history. Including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Lombard sources, the documents speak in ethnically and religiously differentiated voices, while providing wider chronological and geographical coverage than previously available. Rich in interdisciplinary texts and organized to enable the reader to focus by specific region, topic, or period, this is a volume that will be an essential resource for anyone with a professional or private interest in the history, religion, literature, politics, and built environment of Italy from ca. 1000 to 1400.

The search for general laws and regularities in Translation Studies gained new momentum in the 1990s when Baker (1993) promoted the use of large electronic corpora as research tools for exploring the linguistic features that render the language of translation different from the language of non-translated texts. By comparing a corpus of translated and non-translated English texts, Baker and her research team put forward the hypothesis that translated texts are characterized by some “universal features”, namely simplification, explicitation, normalization and levelling-out. The purpose of this study is to test whether simplification, explicitation and normalization apply to Italian translations of children’s books. In order to achieve this aim, a comparable corpus of translated and non-translated works of classic fiction for children has been collected and analysed using Corpus Linguistics tools and methodologies. The results show that, in the translational subcorpus, simplification, explicitation and normalization processes do not prevail over the non-translational one. Therefore, it is suggested that the status of translated children’s literature in the Italian literary “polysystem” (Even-Zohar, 1979, 1990) and, from a general viewpoint, all the cultural, historical and social conditions that influence translators’ activities, determine translation choices that can also tend towards processes different from those proposed by Baker.

"Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation provides the most complete record possible of texts from the early periods that have been translated into English, and published between 1929 and 2008. It lists works from all genres and subjects, and includes translations wherever they have appeared across the globe. In this annotated bibliography, Robin Healey covers over 5,200 distinct editions of pre-1900 Italian writings. Most entries are accompanied by useful notes providing information on authors, works, translators, and how the translations were received. Among the works by over 1,500 authors represented in this volume are hundreds of editions by Italy's most translated authors - Dante Alighieri, [Niccoláo] Machiavelli, and [Giovanni] Boccaccio - and other hundreds which represent the author's only English translation. A significant number of entries describe works originally published in Latin. Together with Healey's Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature."--Pub. desc.

This book presents and analyses twelve different writings from 19th century Italian literature on the topic of translation. With the exception of their original publication and some earlier reissues, these texts have never been republished in the 20th or 21st centuries and have remained in the shadows for about two centuries. Nevertheless, they provide a very important testimony to the lively interest in translation and the debate that characterized this specific period of Italian literary culture. The few international studies that deal with 19th century theoretical reflection on translation in Italy often focus only on some scattered contributions of a few influential writers (e.g. Leopardi and Foscolo). In this regard, this book could spark new investigations on the subject. While it is commonly thought that reflections on translation during the century analysed in this book came almost exclusively from Germany, France, and England, the debate on this topic was alive and well in Italy during that time and produced many interesting original ideas. Some of the topics discussed by the authors presented here, such as language hospitality, foreign translation, authorial translation, importance of translation in the receiving culture, among others, are presented in an original way that anticipates twentieth-century reflection. Above all, they demonstrate Italian intellectuals’ awareness of the observations on translation originating from other time periods and nations. Although studies on the theory of translation in Italy are often hoped for, they are still rare and undeveloped, and have yet to examine the texts published in this book. The academic awareness of the origins of translation studies in other countries, on the other hand, is more advanced. This book aims to be among these studies.

Translating in Town uncovers administrative and cultural multilingualism and translation practices in multilingual European communities during the long 19th century. Challenging the traditional narrative of nationalist, monolingual language ideologies, this book focuses instead upon translation policies which aimed to accommodate complex language situations with new democratic principles at local levels. Covering a time-frame from 1785 to 1914, chapters investigate towns and cities in the heartland of Europe, such as Barcelona, Milan and Vienna, as well as those on its outer rim, including Nicosia, Cork and Tampere. Highlighting the conflicts and negotiations that took place between official language(s), local language(s) and translation, the book explores the impact on both represented and non-represented monolingual and multilingual citizens. In so doing, Translating in Town highlights the subtle compromises obtained between official monolingualism, multilingualism and translation, and between competing views on official and private translation and transfer techniques, during this fascinating era of European history.

MACHINE GENERATED CONTENTS NOTE: PART 1 TRADING AMERICA: CIRCULATION OF IDENTITIES, GOODS AND CULTURAL PRACTICES: Re-Translating America's Words: A View from Beyond / Mario Corona -- Fun in the Cup: From the Italian Espresso Bar to the Globalized "Starbucks Experience" / Eva-Sabine Zehelein -- Disneyland in Europe: Or, How to Translate "Cultural Chernobyl" into Cultural Shock "Therapy"/ Simona Sangiorgi -- Mainscreening America: Cultural Translation in US TV Series/ Gianna Fusco -- Foreign Route of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, 1949-2009/ Alessandro Clericuzio -- La linea della palma in Brooklyn: Sicily and Sicilian America in Alberto Lattuada's Mafioso/ Francesca De Lucia -- PART 2 RE-WRITING STORIES ACROSS THE MEDIA: Coloniality, Performance, Translation: The Embodied Public Sphere in Early America/ Elizabeth Maddock Dillon -- Left in Translation: Mirror Images of Italy and America in the Italian TV Version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun/ Valerio Massimo De Angelis -- Transformation of Wilderness from the Aesthetic of the Sublime to the Aesthetic of Life: Into the Wild as a Palimpsest of the American Myth of Nature/ Paola Loreto -- Eternal Frame: Photographs, Fiction, and Falling Men in Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer/ Francesco Pontuale -- In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Art Spiegelman's Representation of Trauma in the Comic-Book Form/ Stefania Porcelli -- Translating Comics into Literature and Vice Versa: Intersections between Comics and Non-Graphic Narratives in the United States/ Paolo Simonetti -- PART 3 LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION BETWEEN THE US AND ITALY: Never-Finished Job: Translating H.D.'s Trilogy into Italian/ Marina Camboni -- Translating with an Accent: The Importance of Sound, Orality and History in the Works of Italian American Women Poets/ Elisabetta Marino -- Between God(fathers) and Good(fellas): To Kill, To Slur, To Eat in Tony Soprano's Words/ Cinzia Scarpino -- PART 4 POLITICAL AND CULTURAL MODELS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC: "Let Trade Be as Free as Air:" The "Liberal" American Revolution and the Early State-Building/ Matteo Battistini -- Conservative Translation of European Classical Liberalism: William Graham Sumner's Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America/ Gabriele Rosso -- Ethnic Press and the Translation of the US Political System for Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1924-1941/ Stefano Luconi -- Against the Stream: American-European Transnational Contacts During the Nazi Years. A Labor Perspective/ Catherine Collomp -- Translating Italian Americanness in Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas/ Fulvio Orsitto. Publisher's note.