5.1 Micro- and Macro-Narratives of Return: Discussion of Findings
This chapter will discuss the findings of the textual analysis of code-switching in Ricci’s trilogy (1990, 1993, 1997), Paci’s Italian Shoes (2002) and Melfi’s Italy Revisited. Conversations with My Mother (2009) in light of the social narratives of return circulating about the translation of these works into Italian (Ricci 2004; Paci 2007; Melfi 2012).
5.1.1 Return, Code-Switching and Translation in Paci, Melfi and Ricci’s Works
The analysis of code-switching in the texts by Nino Ricci, Frank Paci and Mary Melfi, as shown in Chapter 4, confirms some of my earlier assumptions (see Chapter 3) on the role of code-switching. First, because it shows how the code-switched items categorised in our corpus of writing are also common in other diasporic writing and, second, because it shows that code-switching involves linguistic areas which are also likely to be code-switched in oral conversation; for instance, naming, exclamations, discourse markers and cultural references. Code-switching thus appears to be a mimetic device employed to give the reader a flavour of the linguistic behaviour of the Italian-Canadian diasporic communities in Canada. In the corpus of novels and memoir analysed by Ricci, Paci and Melfi, code-switching is often used to quote or reproduce the speech of the characters of these narratives.
By stressing the mimetic nature of code-switching, in this context, I therefore emphasise the fact that code-switching constitutes an imitation of social phenomena rooted in diasporic communities, and that literature is not completely detached from social life but that the two constantly impact on each other (Iser 1993), a statement that reinforces the importance of seeing narrative in its links with social reality, as understood in poststructuralist narratology and in the social sciences.
In an interview (2018, see Appendix G1), Ricci corroborates these ideas about the mimetic nature of code-switching by saying that in the Lives of the Saints’ trilogy he was trying to know his characters by letting them speak their dialect. However, he goes on to say that although strict realism would have required only dialect, “it was hard to research proper spellings and vocabulary, particularly given that dialects often shifted even from one town to the next” and, in addition, “almost no one would have been able to understand it” (Ricci 2018). This attention for the speech of his characters is part of what many of Ricci’s reviewers have praised about the author, saying that he had recreated, especially in Lives of the Saints, a place with real people, genuinely depicted, and had written in a highly realistic style, relying on “a detailed representation of the world of the story for its effect” (Canton 1990, 55; see also Doughty 2016).
Similarly, Frank Paci (2003, 138) underscores the mimetic nature of literature, as we have seen in the previous chapters, saying: “when you’re dealing with the immigrant experience, you’re sometimes dealing with simpler states of consciousness that have to be rendered in so-called realistic ways, which more properly should be called mimetic ways”. Mary Melfi (2018, see Appendix G3) also stresses the importance of language in her memoir, saying that “language is a big part of one’s identification with a culture” and that, following the death of her parents, not having anyone with whom to communicate in the language of her youth, the Molisan dialect, puts her in “no man’s land” or on a “desert island”.
If the mimetic aspect of code-switching is thus important for these writers, another important aspect of it, underlined in our discussion in Chapter 4, is its fictional nature, that is its pragmatic function and its role in the construction of a narrative. The presence, in Melfi, Paci and Ricci, of categories of code-switching—such as social positioning (in items such as paesano , podestà, mezzadro), vocatives (in items such as figlia mia, cara), politeness markers (in items such as buon viaggio, auguri, scusi), exclamations (in items such as mamma mia, Dio mio, Madonna), directives (in items such as sta zitto!), discourse markers (in items such as mbeh, bene) and cultural references (in items such as la bella figura , la miseria , la festa della Madonna, il malocchio)—confirms that code-switching is linked to the narratological concepts of focalisation, voice and plot. That is to say, code-switching is linked to the position of narrators and characters within the narrative and to their feelings and evaluations of events. This is so because, code-switching is indeed used as a foregrounding tool to emphasise or reinforce a speech act, either the illocutionary force of it or its propositional content (Martin 2005; García Vizcaíno 2008). Second, because, according to various scholars of code-switching, code-switched culturally specific items are often the focus of attention in a given communicative act (see, e.g., Backus 2001). Furthermore, code-switched names (in our case, referring to social positioning), vocatives, discourse markers, politeness markers, exclamations and directives, can tell us something about the perspective or point of view from which a story is narrated (see Maschler 1994; De Rooiji 1996), since they signal the direction of the mental and emotional efforts of the people involved in a communicative event. The items of social positioning mentioned above, in poststructuralist narratological terms, represent the psychological, ideological, spatio-temporal and phraseological (see Munday 2008) point of view from which the narrative is constructed. Moreover, the construction of such a narrative relies on the often emotionally charged contraposition of focalisations and voices (concepts borrowed from narratologists such as Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Bal 1985; Currie 2011) between narrators and characters or between characters. This has been especially evident for items such as paesano (person from the same village/country, Italian) in Ricci’s trilogy, which alternates (and at time merges) the focalisation by the young character/narrator with the voice of the adult narrator and the focalisations (and voices) of other Italians and Canadians of non-Italian descent. This can be seen in the item la bella figura (making a good impression) in Paci’s Italian Shoes (2002), which alternates the focalisation and voice of Mark Trecroci and those of his relatives, and in the item la miseria (poverty), in Melfi’s Italy Revisited. Conversations with My Mother (2009), which alternates the focalisation and voice of Mary, the character/narrator, and those of her mother/character.
All these instances of code-switching have been analysed in order to discuss the concept of return, both in the source texts and in their translations, and to better understand, through close textual-linguistic analysis, the meaning of return in these texts and in the discourses surrounding them. The interesting finding stemming from the analysis was that the pivotal code-switched terms or concepts found in the texts also appeared to have been selected in the paratextual material—that is, the book blurbs or book prefaces—as we have seen for Paci and Melfi. This proves that code-switching participates in the ideological construction of these narratives. As we have already said, focalisation is not just a technicality, but is always present in the narrative (O’Neill 1994). Before the narrative voice speaks, it is positioned in space and time by an implied author who is the primary focaliser. The implied author’s focalisation and voice are the starting points in any narrative construction and control the ways in which narrator and characters are positioned, how they position readers and translators, and how the narrative plot is constructed. In this part of the chapter, I will dedicate special attention to the ideological implications of the narratives constructed in the texts analysed and their links with extratextual reality.
If we include the notions of focalisation, voice and plot within a narrative framework informed by poststructuralist and sociological concepts (Somers and Gibson 1994; Somers 1997; Baker 2006, 2014), as presented in Chapter 3, we can say that focalisation and voice are ideological and manipulative devices that construct narratives by selecting certain elements, according to the concept of selective appropriation (Somers and Gibson 1994; Baker 2006, 2014) (thereby also creating exclusions), which are then weaved together into a plot that makes sense. Focalisation, in a sense, can be linked to selective appropriation, as it concerns the focus of attention and with the concept of framing (Baker 2006)—that is, the ideological position from which a story is put together by an author for a specific readership. The focus of attention and the framing of my entire discussion has been anchored on the concept of return. This is because return is a pervasive element in diasporic writing (and particularly in Italian-Canadian writing). It is such a pervasive element that it can be understood, as observed in Chapter 3, as a masterplot, or even very close to a “metanarrative” in narrative theory terms (Somers and Gibson 1994; Baker 2006; Abbott 2008), as it is a dominant and widespread narrative in contexts of migration and diaspora.
Return is a concept linked not only to physical journeys, but also to imagined ones, and to the expectations and fantasies related to it. Moreover, it is a perfect locus for the mixing of diverse focalisations, focalisations by those who migrated and returned, those who migrated and did not return, and those who did not migrate but came in contact with or welcomed the returnees. The pervasiveness, flexibility and fictional/imagined aspect of return has made it possible for the concept to be used in metaphorical ways, by translators or publishers in Italy, for example, who have discussed the translations of the corpus of novels and memoir analysed in these chapters in terms of return. The metaphorical use of the concept of return in this context has also made me use it as a metaphor for translation, not only with reference to written translations, but also to the source texts themselves, through the analysis of code-switching.
Before moving to discussing metaphors of return, however, it is useful to summarise the ideas about return that have emerged from a close linguistic reading of code-switching in the source texts and their translations in the corpus of writing by Paci, Ricci and Melfi. As we have seen, Melfi, Ricci and Paci all deal with the question of return in similar but also slightly different ways.
reminding the reader of the character’s foreignness and, in the use of mixed Italian and English in Canada but also of mixed dialect and Italian in Italy, of the hybrid nature of their culture.
In order to make sense of the concept of return in Ricci, we thus focused on those code-switched items that referred to how characters were positioned or positioned themselves in the village; what it meant to leave that village for a transatlantic journey and then return to it years later; and what it meant to be a paesano in Canada, allegedly a “person from the same village” but often a person from no village at all, and to define yourself as neither Italian nor Canadian or, better, Italian in Canada and Canadian in Italy, as Vittorio’s self-definition while in Italy seems to imply.
Vittorio’s return to his native village in Molise in Where She Has Gone is motivated by the fact that he wants to establish the truth about his family—that is, to discover who is the father of his half-sister Rita. He wants to recall details of his Italian childhood and reintegrate them into his life in order to make sense of himself (Anselmi 2016). His return journey is set into motion in the aftermath of his incestuous relationship with Rita in Toronto, which was full of ambivalence and contradictions, and with whom, in Where She Has Gone, he had become closer and closer. This transgressive relationship, according to Zucchero (2016), mirrors the transgression of Vittorio and Rita’s mother Cristina, and works as a metaphor for their experience of immigration and assimilation. Vittorio and Rita’s transgression is a symbol for resistance to their own cultural heritage but, at the same time, their desire to create a new home for themselves in Canada. This return trip is thus emotionally charged and represents an attempt by Vittorio to accept the hybrid and contradictory image of himself as a second-generation immigrant.
However, the truth that Vittorio is looking for remains unreachable. Vittorio does not discover the identity of his half-sister’s father and even his own scattered memories will prove misleading, as is evident in this statement:
It was plausible that things had happened that way, though there were a hundred other ways they might have happened that were just as plausible. (Ricci 1997, 199)
The code-switched formulaic expressions of politeness uttered by Vittorio are few and stereotypical: he does not speak much Italian and forces himself into the language in order to be able to enter a cultural sphere, that of Italy, which, despite being somehow part of himself, is perceived as distant. As Baldassar (2001, 11) affirms, talking about her own return from Australia to her parents’ village in the Province of Treviso: “I felt I belonged to a family, to a village that was not familiar to me, that I did not know. The people I encountered felt the same: I was one of them but at the same time I was a stranger.” This encounter, she continues, highlighted the fragility of relations of kinship generated by migration.
Similarly, Vittorio needs to build this sense of belonging again, since home is not a given concept but, rather, one that needs time and effort to construct. He will eventually find himself at ease in the village after spending some time there, but this new home he has built is not the one he fantasised about. It is one he has created by the very act of arriving in Italy. Theorised within a diasporic context, home is an act of constant remaking.
These contrasting perspectives hinted at by code-switching in this part of the trilogy are a reminder that this is a type of writing that deals with dislocation in space and time and, as such, problematises the notion of a stable plot. The plot of Ricci’s novels evolves constantly within the three novels. The narrator of Where She Has Gone (Ricci 1997), who has gone back to Italy to confront his past, partially renarrates the same plot found in Lives of the Saints (Ricci 1990). This happens because he is a different focaliser from that in Lives of the Saints (Ricci 1990), a focaliser who is trapped by feelings of strangeness and awkwardness as a result of emigration. The plot thus changes because of the protagonist’s confrontation with other villagers’ own narratives and with his own changed perspectives due to his different spatial locatedness as an Italian-Canadian man occupying a place of memory in a different time (twenty years after leaving the Italian village).
Perhaps there are always these moments that can’t be accounted for, that can’t be made to fit, as if the story of a life, to verge toward the truth, should always imply at every instant the dozens of other versions of things that must be suppressed to make way for a single one. (Ricci 1997, 318–319)
Ricci’s narrative also reveals that return involves a fascination with origins: the return to Valle del Sole represents a return to where it all started. This fascination with the myth of origins found in Lives of the Saints, for example, through the narration of the legend of Gambelunghe, which can be considered a narrative “of paradise lost” (Dvorak 1994, 60), as it depicts the prosperity of a past town and contrasts it with the present status of deprivation. The use of mythology is justified by Nino Ricci himself in an interview with Jeffrey Canton (1998), where he explains that there is a mythology connected with the experience of immigration in general that draws on the history of Western mythology (that of Ulysses, Aeneas and the like). A popular topic in such mythology is that of paradise: the myth of a difficult present and a much better future. As stated by Ricci (Canton 1998, 136–137), the Italian emigrant starts dreaming of a paradisiacal world, a sort of grail, long before emigrating to the new world (either America or Canada). However, reality does not match the myth and, instead of Paradise, the immigrant in the new world often finds Hell. They thus start the slow process of turning the world they left behind, the old country, into Paradise. The immigrant is nostalgic for a world, a sense of wholeness, that is lost—one that they cannot replace, or even place anywhere. In an immigration setting, mythologies are important because they connect immigrants to the people and the culture they left behind, and function as a way of making sense of the experience in the new land, enabling them to better confront their respective futures (Dvorak 1994). In a sense, as stated by Mullen (2004), a nostalgic return to an immigrant past can be an attempt to establish roots in Canada, a way of building an authenticating narrative that hopes to offer the Italian diaspora in Canada a sense of belonging to this nation.
It seems nearly all of us, immigrant or not, seem to operate on some myth of return of the sort Northrop Frye talks about, the hope of recapturing some lost wholeness or lost innocence. That hope underlies most quest myths and most religions and, I think, informs the experience of immigration as well.
You can’t step into the same river twice. You can’t do it. The river has moved on without you. You can only go back to someplace that has changed in ways you haven’t been part of, just as you yourself have changed.
I wrote the books because, after wanting to disown my immigrant background for my entire childhood, I suddenly realized there was something very interesting about immigration, and that its story tied into a lot of other stories that form the basis of western civilization and also raised a lot of interesting questions about identity and the concept of home and, yes, the concept of return.
Return, in Ricci, is thus linked to a renewed perspective on a world he had discarded, disowned, similar to the situation for Paci and Melfi, and on the understanding that the story of his parents’ migration is part of a much broader and universal narrative.
In Paci, there is a similar fascination with the notion of origins. The code-switched items analysed in Italian Shoes (Paci 2002) revolve around the notion of la bella figura (making a good impression) and to items denoting social roles, such as mezzadro (sharecropper), padrone (landowner) and professore (professor). These were used to foreground the different focalisations and voices of the characters in the story around themes such as public display, class identification, the meaning of beauty and truth. These items were analysed conjointly to stress the fact that, through a reflection and a reworking of a system of beliefs based on la bella figura , an item which also signals plot development, Mark, while back in Novilara, revisits his understanding of his family background and origins and, eventually, comes to an appreciation of them. The idea of origins is first evoked in the suggestion that writer Margaret Lawrence in Sex and Character (Paci 1993) had given to Mark—that is, to write about his Italian background where the world began for him. Origins are understood in Paci as the return to his parents’ humble origins, especially those on his father’s side, who were mezzadri (sharecroppers). This is a return to the soil, to the humus, which is understood as the return both to humbleness and to vitality.
Although Mark has already been in Italy for a while, he is struggling to understand what this return means for him, as a person and writer. The code-switched item la bella figura is used to describe this sensation. What he sees around him is beautiful, as he visits beautiful Italian cities such as Pesaro, Venice, Florence and Rome, but he feels that such beauty can also disguise sickness. He feels, indeed, that language on the printed page, which he calls “black blood” (Paci 2002, 9), has made him sick. Also, language itself can become sick, he adds, and as a result it needs to be cleaned (Paci 2002, 16–17). Mark is thus trying to scrape away from the surface of his language and the world the unnecessary, the excess, in order to reach the point where it all started, in order to get rid of that oppressive sensation that makes him feel stuck.
I went back to the small city and countryside that my parents came from in the Marches. It was my way of discovering who they were. And, of course, in discovering who I was as well. And discovering the other Italy that my parents couldn’t give me. The Italy of the beautiful countryside and the people and the way of life. The Italy of Venice and Florence and Rome. I didn’t agree with everything, of course, because I was raised in a different mindset. And it wasn’t all beautiful. But it was my way of making atonement, I suppose, to see my parents in a better light. And to appreciate their sacrifices.
A cool breeze came from the vines. I could smell the juicy grapes and leaves. In my hands and hair. All over my body. A sudden shiver ran through me. I could feel my father’s presence inside me, his bashful grin, his life in this valley, all that he had left to come to the new country. (Paci 2002, 118)
Mark at the farm, by reliving some of his father’s experiences, can feel his presence inside him and starts to understand him better, to reintegrate into his life narrative the narrative of his father and relatives. Mark, therefore, metaphorically, brings the dead back to life, given also his belief in the revitalising power of death, as seen in his fascination with the catacombs. This realisation will coincide with the start of his writing. Writing, defined as “black blood”, is a means by which the dead can be brought to life. Thus, the return to origins is a return to creativity, to the writer’s creativity, and as such, is not definite or concluded, but a step towards Mark’s formation as a person and writer.
Afterwards, because they had very little voice, I felt it my duty to be their voice in the new country. To write about them and all the other immigrants like them who came over to make a new life for themselves. All those who aren’t criminals and don’t get all the print and the screen time. The real and unsung heroes and heroines.
The immigrant community that Paci is serving with his return is not that of the Mafiosi but one of ordinary and simple people.
The return as an attempt to preserve the past and bring it to the present is also at work in Melfi’s Italy Revisited. Conversations with My Mother (2009). Melfi wants to find her “connection with the Almighty Past” (Melfi 2009, 10), to offer the little girl in her “some food for thought”, “to feel less lonely” (Melfi 2009, 10).
For Melfi, thus, the return is a journey of the memory (as the memoir does not narrate a physical trip) and is symbolically connected to food, as we have seen by analysing the code-switched items linked to Southern Italian recipes, such as the like of fiadoni, biscotti, involtini and peperoni arrosto. Food is linked to memory because it is linked to language. As Mary says: “For an Italian a tomato doesn’t have the rich, red flavour of una pomodora” (Melfi 2009, 33). A specific dialect code-switch such as pomodora, then, is capable of adding extra taste to a tomato by triggering specific memories related to the context of the consumption of that particular food.
Eating Easter bread gives you the illusion you’re travelling in space, weightless, speeding towards the outer regions of a heavenly place… One bite, and I’m sitting next to my late zias and joking with them. (Melfi 2009, 284–285)
In the kitchen miracles are commonplace. [...] when you’re in the kitchen, your search stops. You don’t need special attention. It has been given to you – your survival assured, your body reaffirmed, reappraised, you can relax and seize the day. What a delight! (Melfi 2009, 332)
Mary, according to her mother, has often rejected her recipes because, according to Mary, too much has been written about Italian food and one might think that there is not much else to say about Italian culture. However, Mary is in a phase of her life in which she is reclaiming aspects of her cultural background that she had previously rejected, and, thus, everything that revolves around Italian food becomes a means for satisfying her hunger for memories. Through food preparation and food sharing with her family, the memoir seems to say, it is possible to return home again and again.
There are more important things to do in life than looking for your roots. When I was growing up the only roots we’d look for are the ones you’d eat. (Melfi 2009, 46)
The information I acquired from learning about my mother’s past did provide a better understanding of what made her tick, and it also provided a better understanding of why I was broken. Did it fix me? I can’t say it did fix me, but it didn’t make me any worse. Fixing someone like myself would be plain impossible. I would have needed God to come by, and make a miracle happen. And God didn’t come by.
Fascination with origins, a sense of guilt and impossibility characterise the concept of return in these writers. These elements are even more evident if we look at the role played by translation in the construction of such a return.
Through the overlapping of focalisations and the contradictions of the plot, these narrators portray how the world is experienced by second-generation immigrants whose identity narrative is represented by this constant going back and forth between cultural worlds. Such a narrative can be compared to a journey, but one without return, made of constant new departures and arrivals. Given that return has been analysed through the lens of code-switching, which is a device that hints at translation and is often accompanied by a translation, we can say that the impossibility of returning is the impossibility of translating but, at the same time, it is what activates translation.
The use of formulaic expressions by Vittorio in Where She Has Gone (Ricci 1997), the “imperfect” Italian used by Mark in Italian Shoes (Paci 2002, 27), and by Melfi in Italy Revisited. Conversations with My Mother (2009)—as Melfi states that she cannot speak Italian (2018, see Appendix G3)—point towards a fracture in the linearity of the text.
There was a smell in the air once, a crispness like the sun-cleared chill of mountains, that stirred something so deep and well-known in me, so forgotten, that I felt my body would burst with the pressure of remembering; and for an instant then the past seemed a kind of permanence I might wake into suddenly as into another country, all the present merely a shadow against it, this country road, this farm, this house. (Ricci 1993, 47)
The Italian space remembered by the narrator in Where She Has Gone is situated in an irretrievable past, and yet it causes pressure so as to be translated into the visual memory of the present. Similarly, in Italian Shoes Mark’s sudden memory of his father comes to take possession of his body and space, and in Italy Revisited. Conversations with My Mother a bite of the Easter bread brings Mary’s deceased aunts into the kitchen. If we look at these examples, translation can thus be understood as the revisiting of the memory of a missing moment (Verdicchio 1997a).
The mixture of languages signalled by code-switching—and, specifically, the hybrid code-switched items analysed in Paci and Melfi—that indicate the presence of an Italo-Canadian language (Vizmuller-Zocco 1995), can be considered as the “trace, the remainder”, in Bal’s (2007, 110) terms, of the language the subject cannot speak. Code-switching makes the text deferred, never reached; it often contributes to multiplying the ambiguity of the words. In Verdicchio’s (1997a) terms, the foreign word is a taboo, a violently imposed incapacitation that withholds the promise of translatability (Bal 2007). In this sense, code-switching points towards the impossibility of translation, the fact that “translation is always tentative, approximate and incomplete, an unfulfilled promise” (Bal 2007, 110).
As with translation, returns are incomplete. Each time the past is revisited, its plot is transformed by the positioning and focalisations of the people who revisit it, so that what is looked for is always unreachable. Returns, like translations, are made of contaminations. The constant passage from one language to another in the texts by Melfi, Ricci and Paci and the constant presence of specific code-switched items that are repeated again and again serve the purpose of signalling the transformative nature of translation and its cyclical nature. In this context, code-switching is transformative because it operates by signalling the development and transformation of characters and narrative plots. This transformation is made possible by the fact that code-switching creates constant movement as it hints at multiple frames of reference. Narratives of return are thus translational narratives. This is also shown by the fact that translation is also often physically present in the source texts following the code-switched items. Although it has been said in Chapter 3 that this might undermine the force of code-switching, I believe that this is not the case. The presence of the two languages next to each other, presence that is not justified by a need for clarity, given that the English translation would be sufficient for a comprehension of the text, points towards the importance of that coupling, that doubleness. I understand the presence of code-switching and its translation as significative per se (see Grutman 1998; Casagranda 2010), as it hints at the connotative function of code-switching as a textual destabiliser, given that it points to the idea of meaning as something that needs to be constantly negotiated. Translational narratives, such as those analysed in this book, fictionalise and make visible translation and call for further translations and journeys.
5.1.2 Return, Code-Switching and Translations of Melfi, Ricci and Paci’s Works
The further journeys mentioned above are represented by the translations La terra del ritorno (Ricci 2004), Scarpe italiane (Paci 2007) and Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (Melfi 2012). More specifically, the translation project that culminated in La terra del ritorno was initiated with the intent of returning the first book of the trilogy, Lives of the Saints (Ricci 1990), to a more authentic language, the language that belonged to it, as the translator explains (Iacobucci 2011)—in this case Italian, one of the languages code-switched in the novels. Code-switching, translation (along with the setting of the novel) thus initiated a further journey of the text, another phase of the journey initiated by the original text, as Iacobucci (2011) calls it.
The analysis of the treatment of code-switching in the translation of our corpus of writing was based on the premise that it was especially difficult to preserve the pragmatic force of code-switching in the Italian translations given that the language of the target texts was also one of the languages of the code-switches (see also García Vizcaíno 2008). Moreover, it took into account linguistic studies forwarding the view that a sort of naturalisation or standardisation (Franco Arcia 2012) is a common strategy used to tackle code-switching. Also, narratological/stylistic studies have stressed the fact that, in translation, there is a tendency to reduce focalisation by removing ambiguities and spatio-temporal deictics, and by changing modality (Munday 2008).
The analysis of the translations of our corpus of novels and memoir has shown differences in the treatment of code-switching, especially between Fazi Editore (Ricci 2004) and Cosmo Iannone Editore (Paci 2007; Melfi 2012).
If we compare La terra del ritorno (Ricci 2004) with the source texts, we notice that the italics that originally accompanied the code-switched items are not present on most occasions, as Iacobucci (2018, see Appendix G4) explains that, for common Italian terms such as mamma (mum), maestra (teacher) and the like the italics in the Italian translation would have not made sense. Moreover, the code-switched items are often altered—either dialect is turned into standard Italian, or the misspelled form (including the transcription of the Molisan variety of dialect spoken by Ricci’s parents as it is currently pronounced) is corrected. Also, in a very small number of cases, Italian is turned into dialect (expressions or songs that the translator, from the same region as Ricci, wants to convey in her Molisan dialect). As Iacobucci (2018, see Appendix G4) explained in an interview, her task was that of “verifying and eventually ‘adjusting’ the popular local sayings, the proverbs, the exclamations, the popular songs present in the text”. For example, she translates partly into Italian and partly into her Molisan dialect (the refrain section) a traditional Molisan song that Nino Ricci has put in English in Lives of the Saints (Ricci 1990). Also she translates into the Abruzzo dialect a very popular song from Abruzzo (“Fly, fly”) (at the time during which the region of Abruzzo included Molise) called “Vola vola” that was partly in Italian in Ricci’s trilogy (1990, 1993, 1997) and partly in a dialect (the refrain) that she defines as Italianised, a dialect based possibly on the transcription of what Ricci had heard at home. 1 Iacobucci (2011) has claimed she corrected that dialect in order to get closer to the original pronunciation of the song.
In the Italian-Canadian writing of the first period, the period in which my work is situated, multilingualism has been one of the most important elements. In the Anglophone writers that I translated, the quotations in Italian or dialect are an integral part of the personal or family related memories of the author. Words become the concrete tools to witness a world that was left behind but to which one belongs and wishes to recreate.
I tried to make as clear as possible the use of words and definitions, that appear in dialect and Italian in the original text, using the italics to reproduce them in the translation. Every insertion of references of this type in the English version represents indeed the necessity to re-read words apprehended within the family and carriers of ways of being, living and believing, which are part of the world of emigrants almost like an umbilical cord never cut off.
In Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre, almost all code-switched terms, including a pivotal item analysed such as la miseria (poverty), are kept in italics. Although often the misspelled and grammatically incorrect items are corrected into standard Italian in translation, as is the case for Ricci and Paci, at times this does not happen, such as for the names of certain traditional dishes. Interestingly, the translation also preserves the literal translation or paraphrase of the original code-switched items in the source text, stressing even more the doubling effect created by code-switching. Moreover, a vocative such as “cara”, which is not always italicised in the source text, it is always italicised in translation, contributing to strengthening the contrast of focalisations between mother and daughter.
In the authors that we translated and published, this element [multilingualism] is present, but not in a relevant way, except for the memoir by Mary Melfi, in which the precision of the reconstruction of the life of a peasant family in the first half of the last century has required a series of dialect definitions irreplaceable and precious not only as they invoke objects and habits of a past, but also for the conservation of the local linguistic heritage.
It is true that Italy Revisited. Conversations with My Mother (Melfi 2009) contains possibly the highest number of dialect items referring to cultural references, such as food and agricultural life, but it is also true that there are many code-switches in Paci’s (2002) Italian Shoes, and that, often, the code-switches that are signalled by italics in translation in both works also refer to non-dialect terms and more common terms such as bella figura, miseria, cara, figlia mia, thereby implying that there was a conscious decision by the translators 3 beneath these choices. Moreover, not only Norberto Lombardi’s comments and those by translators Gabriella Iacobucci and Silvana Mangione, but also the presence of italics for items not italicised in translation in all the works analysed (but especially in Scarpe italiane and Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre), signal that translators and publishers were aware of the role played by code-switching and italics as a means of attracting attention to specific linguistic material in the source texts and that they were trying to extend italics to other terms to reproduce the same effect. It thus seems, as a consequence, that the effects of the use of code-switching as a device employed to foreground different and, at times, contrasting focalisations, and to create plots that are guided by this contrast, are diminished to a greater extent in La terra del ritorno (Ricci 2004) than in the other two translations of Paci’s (2007) and Melfi’s (2012) works.
In terms of correction of misspellings and syntactical mistakes, although this tendency is in place in the corpus of writing analysed, it seems slightly less visible in the translation of the memoir by Melfi (2012). This tendency can be understood as a habit of the Italian publishing industry—as we have seen in relation to the fact that the Italian language used in the first migrant writing, published in the 1990s in Italy was usually corrected by an Italian editor (Burns 2003). Moreover, as Cavagnoli (2014, 171) states, “the Italian publishing industry finds it hard to comprehend the concept of contamination and hybridism […]; this is because nothing more radical than these concepts can be juxtaposed to the notions of syntactical and lexical cleanliness, order and propriety”. In the case of La terra del ritorno, the tendency to correct Italian can also be explained by the personal taste of the translator Gabriella Iacobucci (2011, 2017) who, on some occasions had stressed the importance of giving the “home and dear language, the language of memory” back to the emigrants, and helping them in communicating in correct Italian during their return trips to Italy.
However, we can also observe that La terra del ritorno (Ricci 2004), published by Fazi Editore, is not part of a book series on migration, as is the case for the other two works analysed and published by Cosmo Iannone Editore, which has instead dedicated four-book collections to the topic of migration, such as “Quaderni della migrazione”, “Reti”, “Kumacreola” and “I memoriali”. As Norberto Lombardi states in an interview (2018, see Appendix G6): “Publishing house Iannone has made the theme of migration the cornerstone of its publishing offer, at national and international level” and that “migration is one of the essential keys to interpret modernity”. Scarpe italiane (Paci 2007) and Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (Melfi 2012), for example, present, respectively, a translation preface and a translator’s note that signal the fact that italics are used to preserve the code-switched terms in the source texts. Moreover, Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (Melfi 2012) also contains the translator’s (Laura Ferri) footnotes explaining Anglophone or Italian dialect terms that might be unknown to an Italian readership. The translator’s intervention and focalisation in this memoir is thus rendered more visible than in the other translations, which do not contain footnotes. The decision not to use footnotes in La terra del ritorno (Ricci 2004) is justified by Iacobucci (2018, see Appendix G4) by the fact that footnotes might be appreciated by scholars but become “boring interferences” in a novel whose audience is more general, and thus they are not welcomed by publishers either. In Venuti’s terms (1995, 1998), we can thus say that Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (Melfi 2012) is the most “foreignised” text of the three works analysed, as it gives a stronger flavour of the foreign, of the source text, also breaking conventions such as correct spelling, while La terra del ritorno (Ricci 2004) is the most domesticated, as it aligns more with the target language and publisher’s rules or expectations.
Given that the preface and the blurbs of Scarpe italiane (Paci 2007) and Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (2012) also refer to the most interesting and important code-switches in these source texts, we can infer that code-switching as a fictional tool might have exercised a stronger impact on these translations, especially in Ritorno in Italia, in which the focalisation of the (implied) translator seems to reflect more closely that of the source text’s (implied) author.
Therefore, despite the fact that the narratives constructed in translation might, in general, tone down the hybridity and simplify the ambivalent use of focalisation and voice (which also impact on plot construction) signalled by code-switching in the source texts, there are differences between them, with Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (Melfi 2012) being the translation that makes the greatest effort to preserve and even, in some parts, accentuate the contrasts of focalisations signalled in the source text. These differences are certainly due to readership considerations (as we have seen when considering italics extended to other items), which must be added to the other factors mentioned that concur in the construction of the translated narratives—that is, publishers’ and translator’s decisions. They might be also due to the different backgrounds of the translators: Laura Ferri, Melfi’s translator (the most foreignised book of the three), has been working within the field of Anglophone Canadian literature, while Iacobucci and Mangione have been working within contexts (associations or institutions) of Italian emigration and might have accentuated the domestic aspect of these works to a greater degree (although with differences between the two, as we have seen).
The narratives found in the translations differ also for what concerns the construction of personal and public narratives of migration, borrowing the definition from Somers and Gibson (1994) (see also Baker 2006, 2014). The translations seem to emphasise the more public aspect of these identity narratives as opposed to the source texts. While Ricci, Paci and Melfi seem to be more concerned with the account of their protagonist’s personal struggles, the translations seem to focus more on the symbolic importance of these narratives as public accounts of emigration.
For example, in the review of Il fratello italiano (Ricci 2000) (the first translation of Where She Has Gone by Iacobucci) found on the Fazi Editore 4 website, we read that this is the “story of return to the motherland” by the protagonist, hinting thus at nationalist and public ideas of nationality. Moreover, according to Gabriella Iacobucci, commenting from the pages of Molise d’Autore, “Ricci’s trilogy can be considered a metaphor of the existence of the emigrant”. 5
The book cover of Scarpe italiane (Paci 2007) has the image of a pair of shoes, a symbol of the made-in-Italy, accompanied by an insistence, in the blurb, on seeing the Italian shoes as a metaphor for Mark not being willing to accept his own Italian values and traditions. The translation’s paratextual material therefore focuses on Italian public narratives, whereas the cover photo and blurb of the source text, Italian Shoes (Paci 2002), point more at the personal search for identity and for artistic inspiration by Mark. In Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (Melfi 2012), finally, we have a cover photo that depicts a group of people (among which are some returnees) in a rural town in the 1950s, therefore a more choral photo referring to a community of migrants, as opposed to the portrait of Melfi’s mother in the source text. Moreover, in the translation we have terms such as “anthropological fresco”, which is absent in the blurb of the source text, and reference to a “conflict between generations in an emigrant context”, which, in the blurb of the source text, is defined more as “tumultuous relationships […] between immigrant mothers and daughters”. There is thus a slight shift in the translation of Melfi’s memoir towards an understanding of it more generally as representative of Italian emigration.
This focus on the more personal aspect of migration by Paci, Ricci and Melfi is in line with what these writers have often said by rejecting the ethnic or Italian-Canadian label to talk about themselves. For example, Ricci (2003, 126) states that ethnicity is not so much the reflection of the true complexity of a community but, rather, of the “symbols of solidarity and homogeneity created as the community evolves as a public persona”. Similarly, Frank Paci states (2018, see Appendix G2): “I’ve never felt myself to be an Italo-Canadian writer, though I’ve been labelled as such in the past”. Paci’s suspicion of the term “ethnic” is confirmed in the following comment: “The very designation Italian-Canadian is a problem because by referring to a body of work as Italian-Canadian we are automatically ascribing marginality to it” (Paci 2003, 136).
Mary Melfi, too (2018, see Appendix G3), says that, in the 1980s, she wanted to be accepted “as a Canadian writer, rather than as an Italian-Canadian ethnic writer”. Only later, in her mid-forties, did she revaluate “what it meant to be an Italian-Canadian”, which for her, means to be critical about migration, and not simply praise it, since her experience of migration has not been pleasant.
When we say that the focus of these writers is more on the personal aspect of migration, and that they all seem to look suspiciously at terms such as “ethnic”, we mean that in their writing they not only want to make sense of themselves, but also to pay homage to their parents. In the case of Melfi, the homage is both to her parents and to the larger community, the people of Casacalenda, her mother’s town in Molise, as testified by her website Italy Revisited. 6 For Nino Ricci, reference to his parents is also a way to tie this story to many more emigrant stories (Ricci 2018, see Appendix G1), not necessarily Italian-Canadian. Given these considerations, we can say that, instead, the translations emphasise the Italian and public aspect of this migration.
Moreover, although the idea of origins is also present in the source texts and discourses around them, as we have seen in Ricci’s trilogy with the myth of origins, and in the blurb of Italian Shoes which states that “Mark Trecroci searches for his family roots” (Paci 2002), the reference to origins and roots seems to be more accentuated in the blurbs of the translations. This is especially so in Ricci’s (2004) La terra del ritorno and Melfi’s (2012) Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (works framed as returns in their titles), where the book blurbs talk respectively of the “impossible return to roots” (Ricci 2004), “eagerness for knowledge and roots” and “reconciliation with her [referring to Mary’s] origins” (Melfi 2012). The cover pictures of these two works—a vintage photo of a little boy on a boat for La terra del ritorno and a photo of Casacalenda in the 1950s for Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre (Melfi 2012)—frame return as return to the past, to the moment of departure, and to a physical location, too, for Melfi’s translation, which is Molise and thus Italy.
I would like, therefore, to delve deeper into two of the elements that seem to have surfaced during the analysis of our corpus of source texts and their translations: the question of origins and the (im)possibility of returning to them, and the question of paying homage (to parents, emigrants, and the like). The notion of origins and the concept of paying homage was very relevant when we discussed, in Chapters 2 and 4, Gabriella Iacobucci’s own understanding of translation as a way of bringing the text back to its original language, and paying homage and giving hospitality to past emigrants. I will thus focus on the analysis of the concept of return as the restoration of origins and return as giving back, as restitution. This analysis will concentrate mainly on how these concepts have been elaborated by Gabriella Iacobucci and Silvana Mangione, the translators of Ricci’s and Paci’s works, and by Cosmo Iannone Editore. As noted in Chapter 2, Laura Ferri, Melfi’s translator, does not talk about the concept of return, as she has mainly been working to promote Canadian literature (of non-Italian origin) in Italy through the Siena-Toronto Centre. However, since her translation of Melfi’s (2009) Italy Revisited. Conversations with My Mother was published by Cosmo Iannone Editore, and thus is the product of a dialogue between translator and publisher, the discussion will be extended to include the framing of this translation (Melfi 2012).
One of the fascinating findings of the analysis is that the same concepts that have just been mentioned—the idea of origins and the idea of restitution—are present in both source texts and their translations, although understood differently according to the authors, translators and publishers who have dealt with them. This points towards another aspect of narrative theory as understood in the social sciences (Somers and Gibson 1994; Somers 1997; Baker 2006, 2014) and in a migrational context. This is the fact that narratives of translations are made of selective appropriation of elements that had previously migrated (and thus are already translational) and that are arranged in plots that make sense for the target culture in which such translations are produced. It also confirms that any narrative, although operating within a specific, local environment, is “inextricably connected to a range of other narratives” (Baker 2014, 160).
The next section will therefore analyse these concepts in greater depth, drawing on philosophers and anthropologists who have engaged with the notion of return framed as the restoration of origins and restitution as giving back, in order to better understand the position of this translated writing within the Italian literary scene, by discussing it within the framework of other diasporic writing and of Italophone writing.
5.2 Returning the Migrant to Italy: Restoration and Restitution
5.2.1 Return to the Origins and Restoration
Iacobucci (2011), in describing her task as a translator in one of her articles, makes reference to philosopher Jacques Derrida (1985) commenting on Benjamin’s work (1923/2000), as noted in Chapter 2. She says that the task of the translator was: “to recover in one own’s language this pure language exiled in the foreign language; to free this language, held captive in the foreign text, by transposing it. This is the task of the translator”. This idea describes the sensation that she felt in front of the first pages of Lives of the Saints. She felt the desire to recover in her language, Italian, those familiar images that were prisoners of another language, and thus to unveil the text, to strip it of what she considered a travesty—that is, Canadian English (Iacobucci 2004, 2011).
According to Benjamin (1923/2000), translation gives the original continued life, assuring the survival of the original work. His idea is that the translation brings together the two different languages and aims to produce a higher and pure language, released by the co-existence and complementation of the translation with the original. For Derrida (1985), commenting on Benjamin’s (1923/2000) article in a famous paper entitled Des Tours de Babel, the languages support each other in the translation, and the translation should try to reproduce this complementarity or harmony. Through translation, one language gives to the other what that language is lacking, and this encounter of languages makes languages grow and regenerate themselves (Derrida 1985). A successful translation is one that tries to reconstitute a symbolic alliance between languages, to reach reconciliation between them (Derrida 1988). Pure language in Benjamin’s terms, says Derrida (1988, 123–124), “is not one which has been purified of anything; rather it is what makes a language a language, what makes for the fact that there is a language”.
In Iacobucci’s terms, however, it seems that the task of the translator is that of pursuing a purified language, more specifically an Italian purified of incorrectness, of “approximations”; as Iacobucci (2011) states, a language that Iacobucci believes the writers that she translated aspire to as a sort of recomposition, in order for the source text to start its journey on the path of return.
On the contrary, in Derrida’s (1985, 1988) terms, the target language needs to allow itself to be affected by the foreign language and thus to be contaminated by it, rather than decontaminated. This could have signified, for example, a translation of code-switching by using techniques such as code-switching (García Vizcaíno 2008)—that is, using a different language in Italian (e.g. English) for the translation of code-switched terms found in the source text (see also Cincotta 1996); or techniques such as mirror-effect translation (Franco Arcia 2012, 78)—that is, using English and Italian as couplets (García Vizcaíno 2005). Mirror-effect translation is something that Mangione uses on a couple of occasions but it is not a strategy widely employed by any of the translators discussed.
For Iacobucci, this pure language represents a way of returning the source text to its supposed origins, which are represented by the language, Italian, in which the work, she claims, should have been written (Canton 2002). The setting of Lives of the Saints (Ricci 1990), its atmosphere, is very familiar to Iacobucci and the ability to recreate that atmosphere, something that Ricci has been praised for by many critics, can certainly make his work resonate with the language of his characters (in this case, the Molisan dialect). What the translator says, however, has more to do with the importance of originals and origins. In her comments about her own translation, Iacobucci (2011), as already noted, focuses on the fact that her translation does not produce work that has undergone a necessary alteration but, rather, takes a further step on the journey of the original work. It is “a life journey in another country, in another language, entrusted to another person” (Iacobucci 2011). The previous reference to the original language of the translation, and this reference to translation as the continuation of a journey, in Italy, of an original work, indicate that translation is not considered by Iacobucci as a bad copy of an original, but as an original itself. These considerations seem to echo a great deal of recent literature in Translation Studies which, since the cultural turn of the 1990s, have put emphasis on the creative aspect of translation (Bassnett and Bush 2006)—the fact that translations are, as are the source texts on which they are based, creative works. They seem also to echo Derrida’s (1985, 1988) ideas about originals and translations—the fact that translations cannot be copies of originals as the originals are copies of other texts and in constant transformation themselves.
According to Derrida (1988, 122), “translations must neither reproduce, represent nor copy the original” as translation, rather, “augments and modifies the original, which, insofar as it is living on, never ceased to be transformed and to grow”. Translations, thus, are never copies of originals because originals grow and transform themselves (Derrida 1985). Originals give themselves up for translation as a necessary way for surviving, for growing. The structure of an original is thus characterised by its need to be translated in order to survive. Without translations, we cannot have originals. As Emmerich, whose recent work has focused on the notion of originals and translation, states: “so called originals are not given but made and translators are often part of that make” (2018, 13).
Echoing but, at the same time, further exploring and delving deeper, from a translator’s and Translation Studies point of view, into Derrida’s opinion regarding originals as entities in transformation, Emmerich (2018, 8) insists on the fact that “we often revert to the rhetoric that suggests that the changes supposedly wrought by translation are inflicted upon an otherwise stable source”, and that “the ‘source’, the presumed object of translation is not a stable ideal […] but a volatile compound that experiences continual textual configurations”. Therefore, she continues, “the textual condition is one of variance, not stability” and translation thus “both grapples with and extends that variance” (2018, 8).
Emmerich (2018, 10) focuses on the fact that translation “does not simply manipulate some preexisting stable source but rather continues a process of textual iteration, already at work in the language of the initial composition”. These considerations are backed up by Guldin (2016, 19), who states that “every original is already a translation of some sort and translations can become new originals that need to be translated again”. These ideas evoke the notion of metatextuality (O’Neill 1994) discussed in Chapter 2, which points to the fact that originals are further contaminated and expanded by translation in other texts, discourses and narratives.
Given these premises, understanding translations as originals should then invest these originals with the same instability as the source texts. However, the reference to linguistic purity attached to translations by Iacobucci seems to go in the direction of wanting to restore a sense of originality in the translation, sense that sounds more akin to stability, a concept that Derrida (1985, 1988) and Emmerich (2018) are, in fact, criticising. It might seem also, from the previous comment on language, that Iacobucci perceives the source text as derivative and in need of restoration. As stated by Emmerich (2018, 13–14): “A particular text becomes an ‘original’ only when another derivative text come along to make it so”. This operation of conceiving the Italian translations as originals, making them, metaphorically, almost precede the source texts (an idea that is also hinted at by some book covers and blurbs analysed earlier), clearly represents the process of narrative “emplotment” (Somers and Gibson 1994; Somers 1997; Baker 2006, 2014), which is pursued by selecting certain elements of a story, isolating them, giving them a special meaning, and linking them causally. In this narrative of translation as return to originals, we can see how the narrative “reframes” (Baker 2006) originality by shifting the spatio-temporal sequence of certain narrative elements.
If the idea of the source text as already being a translation is legitimate in our situation, given our discussions of source texts as translational, as they are the product of diasporic conditions, the risk is transference to the translation of restricted ideas related to originals, instead of going in the direction of challenging both terms as fictional, co-dependent and reflecting dynamics of power, which gives authority to only one of the elements of this relationship.
In the literature of migration there is a need to give a sense of stability to the migratory diaspora, that can be satisfied by recovering an identity of origins in the narratives of the mass migration and rediscovering the links between the participation of migrants to the elaboration of processes of modernization of the western culture.
For Pitto (2013), the myth of origins for diasporic groups is pivotal in order to deal with the effects of the so-called “spaesamento” (disorientation, alienation), a word based on the term “ paese ” (village) (a term analysed in previous chapters) and meaning literally “being out of the paese ”. The thought of returning to the native village by these diasporic groups is coupled with the need to lay the foundations of their belonging to the new reality in Canada. Return, through memory (Pitto 2013), is most of all a means for self-affirmation, for appaesamento, that is for rebuilding in Canada the Italian paese by appealing to imagined origins, in order to face the existential crisis created by emigration. This is exactly the meaning of diaspora as reattachment and reconstruction of home as theorised by Brah (1996), and as discussed in the Introduction to this book. As stated by Pitto (2013, 9), “The return illness [for the emigrants] was expression of the unavoidable need to strengthen their settlement in the new land”, in order to counteract the feeling of ethnic inferiority coming from the prejudices that circulated around Italians, till at least the 1970s, and in order to face the loss of points of reference, the destruction of the “feeling of being in the world” for the emigrants brought about by emigration (Pitto 2013, 57). As confirmed by Taddeo (2010), return is emerging as a theme in situations of crisis, and its function is that of appeasing the sense of precarity and the internal fracture created by migration.
The return, in diasporic Italian-Canadian settings, is thus an imagined return to a village, to certain origins, to the immigrants’ past in Canada after their arrival. Origins here have to do not only with Italy but especially with Canada.
The return/recreation, in Canada, of the paese left is achieved through the reproposition of the food, for example—an element very much present in the work we analysed, 7 especially in Melfi’s (2012) Ritorno in Italia. Conversazioni con mia madre. This process is also well depicted by DeMaria Harney (1998) when he talks about the formation of Toronto’s Little Italies, 8 the recreations of Italian villages in Canada.
We can thus say that the narration of the emigrant’s experience becomes a way to constitute, reclaim and “reveal the cultural autonomy” of the diaspora and to build new origins in Canada (Pitto 2013, 13). Memory is foundational: it connects a mythical past to the present, creating a new more bearable way of being in the present, a new sense of narrative identity for the migrant. Thus, memory of the past is not simply a memory, but a way of living the life in the new reality created by migration. This idea of return coincides with the one encountered in our corpus of texts. Although Pitto (2013) talks also about physical returns, mentioning a vast typology of returns (returns of failure, returns of conservation, returns of innovation, return of retirement), what interests him, and what is relevant for my discussion of diasporic literature, is the vision of return through memory as a journey that gives the migrant an awareness of their own cultural adaptation to the new territory, and that might often be reinforced by cyclical physical returns. The creation of a double village is a defence against the loss of identity, is a return to innocence, as Ricci puts it, to indistinctness, and it is a spiritual personal place which becomes the collective heritage of the Italian diaspora abroad. This confirms that personal and public narratives are connected (see Baker 2006, 2014) in this type of writing.
The return to origins is, first and foremost, for Italian-Canadians, return to Canada, through an imagined Italy, again and again, contrary to the return to origins invoked by Iacobucci which clearly posits origins within Italy. It is “a return to a world of origins renewed, that is not anymore the world of the past but the continuation of the identity of the migrant, […] the awareness of occupying a new reality” (Pitto 2013, 340).
Even though they had no wish to “return home” – none whatsoever – they still thought of themselves as Italian, and being Italian was better than being anything else, including being Canadian. They had a fierce sense of nationalism, in the sense that they perceived their Italian culture – their food, their values, and their way of life as being superior to any other culture, but at the same time, they had no wish to return to Italy, because in Italy they were poor, but in Canada, they were middle class.
The need to make sense of themselves and adapt is also vested in the second-generation migrants, as we have said various times, who experienced the clash between the Italian and the Canadian ways of living, even when, as in the case of Ricci, they had never migrated but were born in Canada (see also Baldassar 2001).
Writing was (and still is) an attempt to make sense out of my nonsensical life. I write to prove to myself I exist. Despite the evidence that I am alive and well, living on the planet Earth, I am not convinced I’m actually here. Writing provides structure, or an identity for this formless mass of thoughts that is called Mary Melfi.
deal with a character’s search for identity beyond his particular background and roots to the deepest roots in human nature. To roots that go back not only to Dante, but to the Greeks and the Hebrew Bible.
Given these premises, it becomes clear that the return to origins is an important matter, which reveals the complexities of this writing, and, most importantly, is a return hoped for, constantly re-enacted and never achieved, especially for Melfi and Ricci, as the analysis of their work has shown.
Yes, being translated into Italian and French is a real boost to the ego, and like any other author in the world, I would love to be translated into every language known to man, but does being translated into Italian make me feel more Italian? Does it make me feel like I am “returning home?” The answer is: no. It doesn’t. Because the country I left when I was a little girl no longer exists. The language I spoke when I was a little girl is no longer spoken. I spoke Molisani dialect to my parents; growing up that’s the language I felt at home in. The Italian that is found in books is not the Italian that was part of my experience of being Italian.[…] My parents, my aunts and uncles and everyone else I knew, spoke a language that doesn’t sound at all like the language spoken by educated Italian urbanites.
The standard Italian of the translation does not give Melfi the feeling of returning home, neither does it for Paci (2018, see Appendix G2). Although Paci admits that translation can be seen as a return, his parents could not speak Italian, so they could read neither the Italian translations of his works nor the English source texts. This view is shared by other Italian-Canadian writers such as Gianna Patriarca, who, commenting on the translation into Italian of a poem within the collection Italian Women and Other Tragedies (Patriarca 1994), states that although she is happy to have her poems translated into Italian, Italian is not her native language and dialect is more representative of her (Madott and Patriarca 2013).
While the return to Italy through the Italian language might seem impossible to an Italian-Canadian writer, this possibility seems to exist for Italian translator Iacobucci. Her vision of returning the emigrant home, as we will discuss in the next section, replies to an important ethical call. The risk behind this idea of returning the migrant home through translation, however, is that of neutralising the conditions, mentioned above, that contributed to forming the hybridity and double consciousness of such a migrant (shown also through the linguistic hybridity of the texts analysed) and to transform that return as though the migrant had never left, in line with narratives of return that, according to Pitto (2013), discard the complex cultural aspects of return and, especially, the reasons for that return. This risk could be considered, according to Loriggio (2004, 24), as a way of re-nativising “the migrants by drawing them back within the perimeters of the sphere of ‘home’”, understood as a nation state. The Italianisation of Italian-Canadian code-switches in translation and the idea, found in the blurb accompanying Paci’s (2002) Italian Shoes—that Mark is not willing to follow the Italian traditions—could also hint at the fact that political acceptance of these Italians outside Italy solely on the basis of their italianità (Italianness), “would annul the encounters, the contacts they have had to navigate, to cope with in the course of their lives” (Loriggio 2004, 27).
is a necessary theme, that completes the bi-directional character of the migratory experience and allows to put forward the research of a specific cultural identity, not in terms of closures and exclusions, but in terms of intercultural confrontation and dialogue. Our publisher, that operates in a small reality in Southern Italy, a place historically characterised by emigration, did not interpret the theme of return as an act of socio-cultural reintegration against the backdrop of a long history of deprivation and loss, but considered it as a passage of a circular cultural process that renovates itself constantly.
For Norberto Lombardi, thus, the process of returning the migrant home by Cosmo Iannone Editore, through publications revolving around the theme of migration, is not seen as definite and in terms of exclusions but, rather, in its circularity, as it happens constantly and involves dialogue and confrontation.
Thus, Lombardi (2018) seems to state, the return depicted by Italian-Canadian writers is both impossible and at the same time possible through writing, through dialogue. As Teti (2013, XIII) affirms, “return is never possible, it is a dream, a desire, an obsession, an illusion”. However, the idea of return “is foundational of new identities, is a creative act, that produces awareness and pushes towards new dialogues, new exchange, new literary, artistic and economic productions which reach also those who experience the impossibility to return” (2013, xiii).
Therefore, rather than returns, we can talk of thoughts of return, to borrow the words of Pitto (2013, 323), who states that the migrant journey is constituted by a constant relationship between “departures and thoughts of return”. Such returns are thus characterised by the fact that they never cease; they are in constant motion and this motion makes them both impossible, as the points of reference are constantly changed, and possible, because this movement and change creates a distance between them that constantly invokes translation.
there is not, for the return journey, an arrival fixed in time as the social and cultural context of the arrival and that of the departure have contaminated and influenced each other during the years. Translation, thus, becomes one of the most important and most complex mediations between the two poles of the migrant relationship.
This statement summarises ideas about translation, which are very much in tune with our discussion of returns in Italian-Canadian writing. As return is both possible and impossible, translation in the terms of Derrida (1985, 1988) is both a possibility and an impossibility. Derrida (1985, 1988, 2001) develops the concept of “différance” (which is not to be conflated with “difference”), as stated in Chapter 3, which points to the fact that there is always deferral between signifier and signified. Différance hints at the concept of presence without providing what is necessary for inferring such presence (Kruger 2004). Translation thus deals with the traces left by the presence, but always in absence and never with a fixed meaning that can be transferred between languages (Kruger 2004, 52).
Translation is thus impossible because of the deferral existing between the sign or trace and the meaning hinted at by it, but it is possible and necessary because “the potential that lives on in the trace,” is “also constituted through translation”, and because traces are always repeatable (Kruger 2004, 67). Translation activates the potential of source text’s traces and generates other traces. Gaps and traces in any texts allow movement and translation, and code-switching represents a good example of traces. Mangione (2018, see Appendix G5) summarises her view of these traces when, commenting on Mark’s return in Scarpe italiane (Paci 2007), she sees traces as “what is rooted in the past within the present” that makes Mark (but I would add also Melfi and Ricci) feel the depth of their diasporic existence.
5.2.2 Return as Restitution, as Giving Back
If the return to origins concurs to build a foundational mythology and a cultural history for Italian-Canadians, what does such a return do for Italians?
As discussed in the previous section, Iacobucci (2018, see Appendix G4) reading Benjamin (1923/2000) talks about the debt of the translator. This debt is a debt of restitution, the restitution of a language of memory, as already said, but also, “a debt of hospitality, of affect, of gratitude” (see also Iacobucci 2011) towards the writers she translated, who originate from the same region as hers (Molise). 9 Iacobucci uses words such as “accudimento” (taking care) to talk about her translation. If this care involves correcting what she defines as “small and inevitable lacks on which the translator intervenes” (Iacobucci 2011), the work of care she talks about is much more substantial than these formalities. In her words, one can find reference to the ethics of translation.
According to Derrida (1985, 1988), mentioned by Iacobucci, original works give themselves up for translation as a way of surviving, and translation is an answer to this call. Translation can therefore also be seen as responding to an ethical call. What lies behind this call?
The research took years – I interviewed dozens and dozens of people. I believe it was worth the effort. The book “Italy Revisited” purports to be a memoir, but in fact, it’s a history book in disguise. […] The information I was looking for wasn’t available in books […] well, not in English anyway. I spent a lot of time interviewing my parents, my relatives and friends of friends.
From this excerpt, it is evident that Mary Melfi invested considerable energy and time in completing the research (which involved interviewing parents, relatives and friends) that formed the basis of her memoir, a memoir that has an historical importance, importance that has been particularly emphasised in translation, as we have seen through the analysis of the translation’s paratexts. Restitution thus means bringing back forgotten histories, places and times, and restituting value to them. It is a work of care in the sense that it cares for those whose voices had never been heard or had been manipulated or misinterpreted. Restitution is thus linked to the act of redressing a power imbalance. It is also an act of self-care, as second-generation writers restitute something not only to their parents but to themselves, as re-enacting or reinventing memories of the past, returning them into the present, gives them a sense of belonging and ignites their creativity, as testified in the pages of the many anthologies published by the AICW.
If we now shift the attention to the translation of Italian-Canadian writing into Italian, can we also hypothesise the existence of a sense of guilt lying underneath the idea of return as restitution?
“Italy Revisited” was translated into Italian, but as the publisher did not send me any reviews of the book, I have no idea how it was received. I suspect it was ignored. Most Italians don’t like to recall the fact that those in the upper and middle classes treated farmers like dirt.
Verdicchio (1997b) has analysed the conditions of Southern Italians very well in his book Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism Through the Italian Diaspora. In this work, using as a reading lens the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who had theorised on the notion of subalternity, he looked at the racialised distinction between Northern and Southern Italians created after the unification of Italy by nationalist discourses, a distinction that has reinforced an anti-Southern prejudice that we find narrated in our corpus of writing.
There is not one family in Molise that has not lived or that is not living divided between Italy and somewhere else, and mainly between Italy and Canada. The families of Nino Ricci, Joe Fiorito, Frank Colantonio, Mary Melfi and Antonio D’Alfonso still live between Italy and Canada. The stories narrated by these writers are always half Molisan, the language is English but it draws on the language spoken by their parents born in Villacanale, as were Ricci’s parents, or Casacalenda, as were Mary Melfi’s parents… the characters featured in these narratives are still recognizable in these villages of origin, or at least everybody claims to have known them.
Translation is, for Iacobucci, an act of taking care and giving hospitality to those emigrants whose origins can be traced back to the Italian regions, especially Molise. At a regional level, the links between Italy and the emigrants in Canada have been maintained by the regions, and thus a regional sense of guilt is not justified in the same way that a national sense of guilt could be. Yet, writers such as Gianna Patriarca, who migrated to Canada from Frosinone, central Italy, in 1960, talk about the fact that, over the years, every time she returned to Italy she felt unwelcome as nobody was interested in the life of emigrants (Madott and Patriarca 2013, 160).
Although Gianna Patriarca and Mary Melfi recognise that the Italian language does not bring them home, they are both happy to be translated into Italian. For Gianna Patriarca, in particular, (Madott and Patriarca 2013) her Italian translation is a way of welcoming her back to Italy, of giving her a passport and some sort of validation, and a way for her of leaving a print, a trace of herself in Italy.
It may not be so much that emigrant writers return home through translation—I’m still very much in Canada, after all, both physically and metaphysically—but that Italians have a way of reintegrating through these translated writers something of what has been lost to them or of getting a perspective on themselves that only the emigrant can provide. […] By virtue of experiencing the literature of the diaspora they have a chance to see that Italians abroad have developed their own cultures, and perhaps might have a perspective on Italy that can inform their own understanding of themselves.
For Ricci, thus, the Italian diaspora in Canada is giving Italians a lost perspective about themselves, a perspective that comes from outside them, from Canada. For Iacobucci (2011), the translation of this diasporic writing is equivalent to narrating the other half of the Italian history, a history that stopped at the moment in which the emigrants left (as also two of the translation book covers analysed seem to indicate)—a history that was only sketched through the letters and photos exchanged between those who have left and those who have stayed. Moreover, for Iacobucci (2004), translating these authors gives her the sensation of participating in the “effort of reconstructing”, as she calls it, this lost history. Translating is thus a foundational act of renarration of a public narrative, in narrative theory terms (the narrative of Italian emigration), but also a personal one. Iacobucci (2011) claims that, in the novels she translated, there is a part of her childhood, of her memories of migration through relatives, even more so as the translation helped her build a personal relationship with the writers she translated. As for the Italian-Canadian writers analysed in this book, translating becomes a way, for Italians, of renarrating, reconstructing and restituting a lost world to themselves and to the others.
In this sense, and following Iacobucci’s words on translation as a form of hospitality, we can recall Ricoeur’s (2004) definition of translation as an act of “linguistic hospitality”, which means “hosting the foreign language in one’s own” (Bottone 2011, 72). In this exercise of hospitality, something is gained, according to Ricoeur (2004), because we understand ourselves better.
Thus, the Italian translations discussed highlight the function of narrative as a tool for self-knowledge, as stated by Cavarero (2000), and by narrative theory in general (Somers and Gibson 1994; Somers 1997; Baker 2006, 2014), a way to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. However, what does this self-knowledge imply? The translator Mangione (2018, see Appendix G5) states that Italian literature, as discussed in Chapter 1, “should be composed of three components: the literature written by Italians in Italy, the literature produced by Italians who live abroad and the literature produced by Italian immigrants”. She also states that “the translation of Italian-Canadian writers can accelerate the process of mutual knowledge” among these groups, and mentions also a further group in another passage of the interview, the group composed by the recent Italian emigration. In her latest book, Pre-occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies, Teresa Fiore (2017, 11) seems to have engaged exactly with this—that is, put into dialogue outbound and inbound migrations as well as the Italian colonial and imperial experience, all phenomena which are pivotal with respect to Italian national formation. She claims that “immigrants should exist in a space of the collective consciousness occupied by memory, as they are the contemporary reincarnation of Italians looking for economic opportunities, political freedom and personal discovery until the 1970s” and even today, given the current exodus of Italians in search for work 12 (Tirabassi and del Pra’ 2014, 2016). Given that emigration has not ceased, it is thus even more important to dispel the sense of historical completion that has characterised the emigration experience and to look at the epiphenomenon and legacies of it (Fiore 2017).
These considerations confirm the necessity of looking at both Italophone migrant writing and translations of writing by Italians who have emigrated abroad as part of Italian migrant writing, as undertaken by the publishing house Cosmo Iannone Editore with its four-book series. Moreover, such considerations emphasise the fact that the translation of Italian-Canadian writing should help Italians deal more effectively with immigration, as stated in the Introduction to this book (through the words of Parati and Tamburry 2011), and increase their awareness of the fact that immigration is also connected to their colonial history (see also the work of Verdicchio 1997b on post-coloniality and Southern Italians).
are in fact called to help old and new Italians to better understand each other. They can help us to understand the importance of acknowledging, respecting and learning from all differences. […] These writers can teach the old ones how to welcome as their own children those who are now forced to leave their motherland in search of a new home; to the new ones, they can teach how to no longer portray themselves as victims, but as would-be protagonists of other exciting stories.
A similar focus on the function of Italian-Canadian writing as a means to better face new immigration into Italy—and perhaps also new emigration out of Italy—is given by journalist Anna Maria Carlone, in the Molise d’Autore blog, 13 in which she recommends the reading of the translation of Ricci’s trilogy because it is the story of “our emigration” and “it would be good to remember this when we use words of contempt toward the new migrants”.
These comments thus point to the ethical importance of remembering Italy’s past emigration, and especially the negative treatment of emigrants in the places of arrival as reflecting the widespread negative perception of immigrants in Italy nowadays. The guilt mentioned previously in relation to the concept of restitution could be attributed to this perception. 14 Most importantly, these comments show that dealing with past (but also current) emigration entails dealing with immigration. The interconnection between Italian emigration and Italian immigration can be shown in the fact that the themes of Italophone migrant writing are very similar to those found in emigrant writing. This is shown by Fiore (2017) in her comparative analysis of written and audiovisual texts about immigration and emigration. The most recurrent themes in Italophone migrant writing, for example, analysed by Burns (2013), such as home, memory, identity, place and space are also the main topics discussed in this book. The types of return analysed by Taddeo (2010) in Italophone migrant writing are also similar to those analysed in this book 15 . Moreover, the concept of hospitality is also mentioned in relation to Italophone writing on a website of a migrant literature competition called Lingua madre. The website mentions the fact that the competition is born out of the desire to “welcome/give hospitality to the other”. 16
What do these examples tell us about hospitality? According to Ricoeur (2007, 120): “When we host the stranger we discover strangeness in ourselves”. The understanding of the foreigner is achieved by redirecting the gaze towards the domestic and vice versa. For Ricoeur, as Foran (2015, 26) states, this movement of appropriation is “taking the foreign home as a guest”, starting from the domestic against what is the other and assuming that “it is this starting point that is to be enriched by the encounter”.
Gabriella Iacobucci, Mary di Michele, Nino Ricci and his father. John Fante festival. Torricella Peligna August 2007
Leaflet of the presentation of the Italian translation of Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci as part of the initiative “Open libraries”. Ripamolisani 2010
The translation of Italian-Canadian writing can thus be conceived as a foundational narrative, a way of reconstructing the foundations of paese , the village at home, given the fact that many villages in Molise have either been abandoned as a consequence of emigration, or at least affected in some way by emigration, past and recent. As Teti (2017, 17), who studied the phenomenon of the desertion of villages in Calabria caused by emigration (old and new) to Canada, states, the deserted village can be an occasion to reimagine the village, to propose new forms of life and images capable of regenerating such a village. The positive nostalgia of those who have remained can “sustain new practices of innovation, inclusion and change”. The discourses surrounding the translations of Italian-Canadian writing that point to the need to welcome the migrant (both emigrants and immigrants) echo Teti’s words (2017, 22): “it is time to welcome those who come to us […] and who have the possibility to make us reclaim, along with them, a sense of the place” (Teti 2017, 22).
The risks of such a rhetoric of hospitality through translation, based on Ricoeur’s integration into the domestic, are, according to Foran (2015), the fact that Ricoeur’s notion of hospitality is “happy and pragmatic rather than uncomfortable and impossible” and “does not sufficiently guard against complacency”, unlike Derrida’s idea of untranslatable as the model of exchange, which infuses discomfort in the encounter. The risks of this domestication have also been amply discussed by Venuti (1995, 1998), who warns against the hierarchies of dominance and marginality created by the target culture.
I believe that the notion of hospitality in Ricoeur as interpreted by Foran (2015) might well be applicable to the discourses circulating around the translation of Italian-Canadian writing into Italian, especially if we consider the idea of linguistic purity. However, if complacency may be one of the elements to have emerged from the discussion, an interesting and important element is also the effort made by translators (such as Iacobucci) and publishers at the regional level to engage passionately with Italian-Canadian writing. Their efforts are aimed at reigniting the memory of emigration through the organisation of activities, such as readings and presentations of this writing, and also by giving hospitably, literally, to these writers during their trips to Italy, helping to make them feel welcome by acting as mediators/translators. In sum, what these translators and publishers are doing is an attempt to restart the project of a personal and public renarration (in narrative theory terms) of places that might have lost a sense of themselves, as they have become relics, in Teti’s words (2011). In a sense, this project is akin to that of Frank Paci, who builds his narrative on the relics of his personal past, which is also the past of his Italian family and relatives.
The new immigrants enter this project of reconstruction as they are seen as subjects that can teach Italians how places and villages (villages that immigrants are now occupying) have not disappeared but, rather, can be reinvented and redefined. The Italians’ nostalgia, if inclusive and projected into the future, can teach Italians to welcome the immigrant’s nostalgia, according to Teti (2011) and build new forms of attachment to the territory. The people who have stayed and who are welcoming the migrant need, according to Teti, answer this call to travel by staying at home. This idea is also confirmed by Lamberti (2013, 18), who states that “the emigrants can teach us that we often go home and leave again without even boarding a train”.
Notes
- 1.
Despite claiming that the dialect used by Ricci on this occasion presents inaccuracies, Iacobucci (2011) also claims that, for the rest, the author is very precise in his use of dialect, and she thinks that this is incredible knowing that he was not born and did not grow up in Molise.
- 2.
Gabriella Iacobucci (2018, see Appendix G4) explains that, for a term such as podestà, it was necessary to add information on why the term did not simply meant mayor and that is why the term was kept in italics, as she recognised its specificity and importance as a code-switch in the source text.
- 3.
Unfortunately, Laura Ferri could not respond to my questionnaire (see Appendix G), and thus this information is inferred from the linguistic analysis of the translation and from her note to the translation.
- 4.
See website at https://fazieditore.it/catalogo-libri/il-fratello-italiano/.
- 5.
The comments are from a post on the Molise d’Autore website dated 29 December 2009 and written by journalist Agnese Genova. See https://molisedautore.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=fossalto (last accessed 25 May 2018).
- 6.
See the website at http://www.italyrevisited.org (last accessed 24 May 2018).
- 7.
Although in this book I have dedicated little attention to code-switched items of food in Ricci, for reasons of space, these are abundant in his trilogy (see Baldo 2008).
- 8.
See Photograph 2.1 at the beginning of Chapter 2 which depicts a popular café in Toronto’s Little Italy in 1975.
- 9.
In addition to Nino Ricci, the other Molisan author translated by Iacobucci, as stated in Chapter 2, is Frank Colantonio. Iacobucci translated his autobiographical work From the Ground Up (Colantonio 2000) for publisher Cosmo Iannone Editore.
- 10.
The context in which Bandia (2008) writes is post-colonial, and thus restitution has strong post-colonial undertones. Although the situation of Southern Italians can be read in the context of colonialism (see Verdicchio 1997b), the concept of restitution I propose is not mainly concerned with post-coloniality and although it involves a restitution of pride to the life of emigrants, it also encompasses discourses of hospitality and the foundation of local mythology as the following pages will make clear.
- 11.
https://molisedautore.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/filo-diretto-con-marco-micone.html (last accessed 23 January 2018).
- 12.
Fiore (2017) states that, at the end of 2013, there were 4,636,647 Italian citizens registered on the list of Italians abroad (AIRE)—that is, Italians who moved to a new country as well as descendants of Italians who recently acquired citizenship. At the same time, according to the ISTAT data of 1 January 2014, there were 4,922,085 immigrants in Italy—thus, more or less the same number as Italian emigrants abroad (numbers that should dispel the idea that Italy is invaded by immigrants).
- 13.
See https://molisedautore.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=ritorno (last accessed 28 May 2018).
- 14.
Journalist Antonio Stella (2003) analysed the discriminatory treatment and perception of Italian emigrants in the USA at the beginning of the last century, and compared that with the current treatment and perceptions by Italians of immigrants in Italy.
- 15.
Within the migrant writing section of his book, Taddeo (2010) analyses the return in writers such as Carmine Abate, Fatima Ahmed, Christian de Caldas Brito, Kossi Komla-Ebri, Miguel Angel Garcia, Gabriella Ghermandi and others, and discusses how returns might be imagined (as for Melfi in this book) and how they not only might help the writers regenerate themselves, but also enhance their sense of alienation, as returns are characterised by impossibilities.
- 16.
See http://concorsolinguamadre.it/?s=accogliere (last accessed 27 May 2018).
- 17.
Lombardi (2018, see Appendix G6) makes reference to writer Carole Fioramore David who, after returning to Casacalenda, published a collection of poetry inspired by the journey.