Translating Home

Oriana Palusci

HOW MANY WAYS DO WE have to write home? How many homes do we have? How many homes does a Canadian have? John Slama, a Toronto writer, reminds us that, “on Canada Day, hundreds of new Canadians will take the oath, become citizens and sing ‘O Canada! our home and native land!’” (2004). As a secondgeneration immigrant, Slama tells the story of his mother, an ethnic German born in what is now Serbia, who fled home to Germany in 1944, when the Russian army advanced westwards towards the heart of Hitler’s Reich. “But home [...] proved a temporary concept for a decade. Eventually, my mother went on to earn a degree in nursing at Graz, Austria, and emigrated to Windsor, Ont., in 1961.”

As Canada is a crossroad of different destinies and stories, in the sixties it was also ‘home’ to one of the main Canadian writers of Italian origin, Nino Ricci, who re-visited his childhood in Windsor in his very personal autobiographical essays collected in Roots and Frontiers, printed in Italy in a bilingual version edited by Carmen Concilio. According to Slama, who adopted a child in China, and called her Annie, “Some of us were born here, some weren’t. We all call Canada home.” He closes his article asserting that “home is not necessarily where you’re from, but where you belong.” The problem is that Canada itself, although an extraordinary multicultural national entity constitutionally based on the 1988 Multicultural Act, is bound to question itself on the meanings of the hybridity of the very process constituting its identity/identities within a multilingual society even in the twenty-first century.

This is also relevant in the context of the web of relations linking the Italian origins of many of its inhabitants to the so-called Canadian background of the North American country the paesani migrated to from the end of the nineteenth century and especially after the Second World War. Some Canadians have decided to cut the umbilical cord with the land of their ancestors, even if the Italian surname they carry still echoes a feeble, yet recognizable link with their ancient cradle. Other Canadians cling to their land of birth and/or to their ancestors refusing to erase a past rooted elsewhere. Canadian writers of Italian origin experience in their writings a “clash of discourses,” as Barbara Godard would say, signalling in different degrees their “displacement of identity and language” (1990: 154). Thus, notions of national identity are subjected to a continual negotiation with a home still existing (and developing) elsewhere.

The first question concerns the naming of these writers: ethnic, Italic, Italian writers in exile, Italian-Canadian, Canadian of Italian origin or just Canadian writers? What is clear is that cultural traditions and languages collide in their literary texts, producing a continuous effect of estrangement, of foreignness, of translation. I am aware that in the now rich panorama of Anglo-Canadian writers of Italian origin from coast to coast each writer deploys a specific kit of techniques difficult to place in one homogenous frame.

However, by the end of the twentieth century, Antonio D’Alfonso had warned against the spectre of assimilation, yet willing to domesticate the ‘foreign’ side of the hyphen:

[...] [I]t is all right to be an Italian Canadian just as long as Italian eventually melts totally into the Canadian side of the hyphen. The problem is that this Canadian side is just as confused as the other side of the equation. Like any other country in America, there is no such thing as a Canadian. It is too vague a term to encompass all that the term implies. [...] Even if there were such a thing as a Canadian; that is, a Canadian hyphen Canadian, it would be no better or worse than any other hyphenated group. A Canadian Canadian in Canada is just one of the many ethnic groups in the country (2006: 239).

D’Alfonso, a plurilingual and pluricultural writer, is well aware of the intricacies of a concept which in Quebec is called “interculturalism” (obviously this is his translation) and in English Canada “multiculturalism” (Ibid.: 238), because, as a second-generation immigrant, whose parents had moved from a small village in Molise (Ricci’s family did migrate from a similar background), he had to cope with the two hegemonic cultures and languages of his parents’ new home, while exploring other North American linguistic stratifications. Therefore, in the rich linguistic mélange of his poem Babel he writes:

Nativo di Montréal

élevé comme Québécois

forced to learn the tongue of power

vivì en México como alternativa

figlio del sole e della campagna

par les franc-parleurs aimé

finding thousands like me suffering

me casé y divorcié en tierra fria

nipote di Guglionesi

parlant politique magré moi

steeled in the school of Old Aquinas

queriendo luchar con mis amigos latinos

Dio where shall I be demain

(trop vif) qué puedo saber yo

Spero che la terra be mine

(D’Alfonso 1998: 195)

Although D’Alfonso calls his poem Babel, the biblical reference does not necessarily convey a negative overtone, underscoring, instead, that Canada is a cultural, more than a political, formation, a metaphorical house of translation. For D’Alfonso, translation is at the core of the Canadian cultural awareness, in the sense that Homi Bhabha locates within the broader horizon of postcolonial studies: “It is the dream of translation as survival [...] an empowering condition of hybridity” (1994: 324).

In the context of the Italian-Canadian consciousness, the crucial issue is about Italian roots that cannot and should not be totally eradicated, but at the same time they are in danger of becoming imprisoned in the poetics of nostalgia or, on the other hand, of being oversimplified in the cage of naïve, harmless, old-fashioned stereotypes. “It is only when ethnic collectivities overcome the private nostalgia and the rear-view vision of culture of the first-generation immigrants that the serious incorporation of cultures can begin.” (D’Alfonso 2006: 243) Incorporation here means, according to me, translation of a culture within a dominant language, not only on a broadly thematic level, but also through a series of interventions on the matrix language (the language selected in the practices of writing, that is English or French) such as code-switching, borrowing and lexical dissemination of the embedded language (Italian or one of its dialects). Babel is, among other things, a linguistic experiment, on the one hand, on the plurality of four conflicting languages in a plurilingual society and, on the other, paradoxically, on the need to adopt a matrix language in which to operate a cultural translation. The transfer of cultural realities in a new territory (geographical and linguistic) deploys a translation effect – to use Barbara Godard’s words – which relies on an overt process of defamiliarization (1990: 157). The translation effect germinates inside the text, allowing it to highlight the visible and vivid performance of languages and cultures in the plural. The performativity of diasporic subjects is accordingly represented within the texture of the matrix language, so as to stage difference, plurality, fluidity. The estrangement effect emphasizes fragments of selves through codeswitching and code-mixing as if they were otherwise untranslatable.

It is as if what Lawrence Venuti (the most widely discussed and cited translation scholar in the last years) defines as foreignization (against domestication) found a privileged outcome when Canadian hyphenated writers of Italian origin are concerned. Domestication, translation at all costs according to Venuti, entails a reduction of the foreign text to the cultural values of the target language, at the same time minimizing the foreignness; while foreignization implies “to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad.” (1995: 20) Venuti also calls this attitude a strategy of resistance. Canadian multicultural literature (I am referring to the anthology edited by Smaro Kamboureli in 1996) does make a difference in the national consciousness. The degree of foreignness is what is at stake.

The impact of Italian migrants on Canada is marked by a long chain of events based on the defence of an old national identity, denying or obscuring the sturdy regional and provincial roots of each individual. During Fascism, the Italian community in Toronto needed “an articulate and regularly-published Italian-language newspaper,” as Angelo Principe points out (1999: 85). Consequently, on 20 September 1929, the editorial of the first issue of Il Bollettino italo-canadese stated that the new newspaper:

[...] is for the Italians or, better, for the emigrants. We seize every opportunity to assert our “Italianness” in this foreign land; but we intend to cooperate with local authorities in order that our countrymen know the laws governing this country. And that people of other nationalities will firmly understand that Italians have been, are and will always be bearers of civilization, wherever they settle. (Principe 1999: 85-86)

As a matter of fact, from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini would conjure up once again, while announcing the declaration of war to France and Great Britain (and thus also Canada), a mythical “Italia ... forte, fiera e compatta” (Discorso di Mussolini, 10 June, 1940).

In 1957 the popular Italian song “Casetta in Canadà,” interpreted by the popular melodic singer Gino Latilla, created the image of an overtly simplified North American country, even more distant and certainly less dangerous than the Unites States, where the fertility of the land and the abundance of woods enhanced the search for a better life, and promised a thriving domestic environment: “Aveva una casetta piccolina in Canadà,” with its endless refrain on the reconstruction of the burnt down house. Such a perspective, partly questioned by the fact that most migrants (but not all of them) did settle in densely populated urban areas and especially in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, was certainly encouraged by the poignant experience of the “war brides,” themselves Canadian icons, young evergreen – and Italian – girls who had met Canadian soldiers fighting in Italy with the Allied forces and travelled to Canada after the war in order to meet their boyfriends and would-be husbands.

After the Second World War, during the great immigration flows of the 1950s, when the nationalistic vision dwindled and Fascism was substituted by the Italian Republic, the theme of nostalgia of homecoming gained terrain and vigour. Nostalgia was/would be also employed to describe a land which was not even Italian anymore, as in the case of the poem by Gianni Grohovaz, Quando me meto a scriver queste robe in which the dialectical poet cries the loss of Fiume, an ancient Italian city lost to the new boundaries of Yugoslavia.

The search for home and the place to which one feels he/she always belongs is not an easy matter. The themes of diaspora and estrangement are the foundations of the contemporary world and resound in many of the words of its outstanding intellectuals. Hence, in an interview with Maurizio Ferraris, in speaking about his experiences as a boy during the Second World War, the influential philosopher Jacques Derrida stated: “I am a Jew from Algeria, from a certain type of community, in which belonging to Judaism was problematic, belonging to Algeria was problematic, belonging to France was problematic, etc. So all this predisposed me to non-belonging [...]” (Derrida 2001).

For second-generation immigrants like D’Alfonso, the prospective did change also because the images of a stereotypical Italian country became stronger and stronger. The post-Second World War migration from Italy to Canada was made of largely fabled expectations, a rather unsatisfactory comparison between the American and the Canadian ways of life and the confusing mixture of diversified Italian dialects and traditions. It is also true that Canada was generally considered a second choice for many Italian migrants who where unable to settle in the United States. Such an experience is related by Nino Ricci in “Going to the Moon,” published in 1990: the writer’s great uncle Bert had “smuggled into Canada after he’d been turned away at New York” (2006: 40), lived in Windsor, and never set foot in ‘real’

America. In fact, the luckiest and most respected members of Ricci’s family prospered beyond the border, in Ohio, USA, although, during the Vietnam War, Benny, one of his cousins, lost his life in combat, so that, for his relatives, the blessing of the American citizenship collapsed under the heavy burden of mourning and sorrow.

Ricci’s life, as reshaped by the Canadian author in his autobiographical essays collected in Roots and Frontiers, witnesses the growth of a multi-layered identity, partly Italian, partly Canadian. Nino Ricci was born in Canada in 1959, six years after his parents migrated from a remote village in Molise to Leamington, Ontario. Moving later to Windsor, within easy eyeshot of the USA border, the young boy would wistfully observe the dense smoke rising from the car factories in Detroit. The writer encapsulates the desire of an unreachable

American dream in the strong Catholic (even Dantesque) image of Windsor as a temporary Purgatory:

Windsor seemed a kind of purgatory to me, a temporary stop between whatever hell my parents had left behind in Italy and the vague promise of the skyline that opened up beyond the Detroit River. (Ricci 2003: 40)

Ricci narrates how he was raised in an Italian milieu, sent to a Catholic school, where American values were firmly on the foreground (as in the event of a failed expedition to the moon, followed eagerly by all the schoolmates under the guidance of motherly Miss Johnson), consequently making the schoolboy, with Italian parents, an outsider, “moving uncertainly through a world that refused to admit us [he and his brother], that we had to hide ourselves within like animals changing the colour of their fur to fit into a landscape” (2003: 44). His birth in Canada is perceived by the author as a mere accident, something which makes him an awkward, cumbersome, obtrusive lusus naturae, despised also by his older, more integrated brother. Thus, in his autobiographical pieces, Ricci explores the growing consciousness of a youth carefully mapping cartography of feelings, recruiting the language of affect in a land which increasingly reveals dystopian overtones. The Italian subject examines the self in terms of dissonance, of conflict, of social anxiety.

All Ricci’s relatives are Italian, and the domestic arrangements are influenced by the consciousness of a cherished Italian way of life. Ricci’s house in Windsor is itself a sort of replica of a pristine Italian dwelling he had never personally inhabited. The reader is invited to enter the sala da pranzo, which his mother – writes Nino – “guarded as an avenging angel”:

A tall china cabinet stood in one corner, housing small arrangements of silverware and copper pots that emerged from behind their glass doors only for their monthly cleaning; and on the cabinet’s top, underneath a clear glass dome, sat a golden pendulum clock which my mother wound every Sunday after church with a special key, bringing an old chair in from the kitchen to reach it and setting aside its dome with a tenderness that seemed oddly out of keeping with the ruddiness of her hands, with the hard set of her shoulders and chin. (Ricci 2003: 42)

The writer recalls how his parents tried to reproduce an archetypal Italian abode, making it better, larger, more comfortable, but still a self-sustained space, a sort of island in the middle of a foreign country, a dis-located home, de-centred and full of familiar echoes. As we see in the above quotation, the writer employs one of the main strategies in the cultural translation of home, that is the recurrence to the language of affect – tenderness – here applied to his mother.

On the other hand, one of his relatives, Uncle Luigi, according to Ricci’s memoirs in “Passage to Canada,” gives up the idea of a proper place where to live, in order to save money and arrange his journey back to Italy as soon as possible. At the small farming town of Leamington on the north shore of Lake Erie, Uncle Luigi’s Lilliputian cabin suggests the artificial and temporary nature of the Canadian experience, a mere gap to be superseded by the craved restoration of the ‘real’ Italian order:

We used to visit him sometimes Sunday mornings after mass and he always seemed so settled and self-sufficient and in his element in that elfin habitation, with his army-sized cot and his stoop-shouldered Kelvinator fridge and the little shot glasses he’d bring out for a glass of Tia Maria or anisette. It was a kind of shock to me as I grew older to learn that he had this completely other life across the sea that he would be returning to, and that everything here, his blackened espresso pot, his tiny sloped-ceilinged rooms, was merely provisional, a way station. I had not quite understood then this dual-sidedness of imagination, how there was always an absent reference point that the present stood against, and that could make the present’s nutsand-bolts everydayness and permanence suddenly appear the merest shadow. (Ricci 2003: 76, emphasis mine)

Culture bound words in Italian – anisette, espresso – function as objects of desire slightly opening, or not totally closing, the door home. They are loanwords that semantically charge the text with cultural references targeted to a self-conscious Italian readership in Canada.

When, as a young man, Ricci visits the country of his ancestors, he meets a very different kind of civilization and a new village community, and must adapt his perception to the sense of difference that the ancient, narrow buildings project on him. It is very difficult for him to define where his own home is: both the lost world of childhood in Canada, recollected and translated by a true full-blooded Italian young man born in exile, and the re-discovered world of his rural Italian ancestors, seem to deny the fullness of a total identification. Home is a very elusive concept, indeed, because the journey towards home has no clear bearing, and the writer is like Alice in Wonderland, vainly questioning the Cheshire Cat about the right direction.

In the short story “The Fountain,” Ricci tells the story of a wellintegrated Italian community living in the imaginary small town of Mersea. When the community is required to participate in the celebrations of the Centennial of the city, one of its mentors, the young Tony Rossi, plans a beautiful fountain, modelled on the ancient monuments he has dug out in art books found in the city library. The local Roma Club detects the assets and liabilities of the project, splitting into two different factions, led by Tony Rossi and by his opponent Dino Mancini. Although it is clear that Tony had not considered a certain number of topical problems (How would the other citizens react to the naked women sculptured in the original models? What would happen to the streaming water during the harsh Canadian winter?). Eventually the fountain is built. On viewing it for the first time, Tony realizes it is a crude pastiche of several incongruous materials and styles. Moreover, he has to overcome several obstacles to fill the fountain with a stream of water. Finally, an unknown hand throws a box of laundry soap in the water: “[A]nd a night of churning had built up this landscape of foam” (Ricci 1998: 243). There is no way to repeat the glories of the past and the Mersea Italian community does not achieve any glorious unity of intent and perspectives: Dino’s faction, in fact, exploits the Roma Club to achieve a broader social recognition and is not really interested in the celebration of the Italian past. Yet, the bronze goddess on the top of the fountain is still clearly visible over the chaotic mess of bubbles. It reminds Tony of “Venus [...], the goddess of love, rising up from the foam of the sea” (Ibid. 244). Inadvertently, Tony has created a new, ironical version of an old myth, a very ephemeral and casual body of art renewing and translating an obsolete tradition into a sort of postmodern – or maybe a post-national – pastiche.

In this sort of cultural battlefield, new ideas clash with the old ones and stereotypes of the Italian past survive, while next-generation migrants try to break the mould, to adhere to a new identity, to new individual needs and desires. The debate on the translation of one’s name from Italian into English is a common strategy in many texts, juxtaposing the new self and the new culture, with the old one often located in the everyday life routine. For instance, in C.D. Minni’s emblematic short story “Details from the Canadian Mosaic” (1980), Mario, the young protagonist, is displaced from his native village to follow his family to the Canadian Pacific coast. Eager to be accepted, he becomes a hybrid subject once he adapts to the target language by translating his own name, for the new environment, in a sort of awkward familiarization:

He did not know at what point he had become Mike. One day looking for a suitable translation of his name and finding none, he decided that Mike was closest. By the end of summer, he was Mario at home and Mike in the streets. (Minni 1980: 56)

Naming in Italian often highlights the characters’ hybridity as well as their foreignness. Inside the Canadian English text Italian names create an estrangement effect, while functioning as memory tokens which resist forgetfulness, a few precious gems sparkling in an ocean of English words. The use of Italian names for the characters, with the consequent link to Italian place-names and culture-bound words, responds to a specific technique of defamiliarization, through the strategic use of specific names embodying a symbolic meaning recognizable only for the readers of Italian origin. They are names from home transplanted elsewhere. Among the many examples, the first that comes to mind is Rita Latte, the protagonist of Mary di Michele’s novel Under My Skin, published in 1994, or Immacolata, the character in Patriarca’s eponymous poem from My Etruscan Face (2007):

Immacolata came into my

class at age nine

she was all her name implied

immaculate

beautiful

smart

because we shared a mother country

I made an assumption

unwise

“Immacolata,

that is a beautiful name

but would you rather I called you

by a shorter name, something easier

like Maggie?”

her sinuous black eyes gazed

at me without reservation

“my name is Immacolata, call me

Immacolata”

but I should have known that (2007: 58).

In this case, a very young Italian girl defies assimilation (suggested by another Italian individual, the poet herself in her role as school teacher) and proudly declares that the ‘foreign’ name (Immacolata), difficult to pronounce, defines a precise ethnic identity not to be reduced to the friendly and colloquial English nickname Maggie. All the cultural implications of Immacolata – from one of the names of the Virgin to the idea of female purity – are definitely untranslatable.

The very title of a literary work can be in Italian, as in the case of Mambo Italiano (2001), a play by Steve Galluccio – a Montrealer of Italian origin, writing in English – later adapted into film. The main character, Angelo, a writer himself, discusses with his friend and male lover Nino about the different stereotypes stifling the richness of the Italian tradition. Both Angelo and Nino quarrel about the love/hate relationship they have with their very conservative parents:

Nino: Stop shitting on Italians.

Angelo: I don’t shit on Italians.

Nino: You’re the classic self-hating Italian.

Angelo: I’m not!

Nino: Please, the way you portray Italians in your plays...it’s disgraceful.

Angelo: The truth hurts.

Nino: Italians have greatly contributed to civilization. WE have given the world Michelangelo, Fellini, the pizza –

Angelo: – Mussolini, the Mafia, garlic breath (2001: 28-29).

Being a homosexual, Angelo will inevitably upset his old-fashioned and sturdy Italian parents with his outing, while his lover falls back to a safer system of life and marries a former schoolmate, a rich and determined young woman of Italian origin. Yet, once again, although traditional values seem to be utterly useless and even false, the real problem is that also in the past, even in the family past belonging to an archaic society, one can find the traces of subversive feelings and behaviours. From the very background of his Italian family, Angelo conjures up the mythical figure of a strange Venus, his aunt Yolanda, who had committed suicide thirty years before. She used to mambo (an exotic dance reminding the spectators of Silvana Mangano’s seductive performance in the 1954 film Mambo, directed by Robert Rossen), instead of performing the ancient folk dance Tarantella:

But then I thought of my Aunt Yolanda, on my way [to his first gay pride], my sweet Aunt Yolanda, on that day, and remembered that, when everyone was still dancing the Tarantella, she died, trying to teach them how to Mambo. (Ibid.: 126)

As Galluccio points out in his tragicomic play, highly based on humour, stereotypes about food, the perfect family, the protective role of mothers are generated inside the Italian community in Montreal, before being imposed by the Canadian experience at large. They articulate the deeply-felt answer to the drama of origins, of the departure, of the journey across the ocean, of the dramatic settlement in a foreign country. The gay son, Angelo – more of a Caravaggesque angel, than a guardian angel – bitterly rebukes his parents, because the “only worthwhile thing you ever did was leave that spit of a village of yours in Italy to come here” (Ibid.: 86). Then he bitterly adds:

But you never really left. ’Cause when you came here, you brought that little spit of a village along and dropped it on this country, in your houses like a big pile of bricks. And we were forced to live there too. In 1950s Italy. With all the gossip, and the jealousy, and the lies. (Ibid.)

Still, something is slowly moving and changing. As Angelo’s mother Maria comments, near the end of the play: “I guess we’re not all tragedy, guilt and fear, after all” (Ibid.: 121). Thus, while Yolanda, who committed suicide as an act of liberation from the constraints of a dull marriage, and whose grave Maria and her husband visit before the end of the play, now rests in peace, the unhappy Angelo will march in the Gay Pride Parade, at least temporarily reconciled with “all the voices, all the memoirs, all the victories, all the defeats” (Ibid.: 125) of his troublesome life on Jean-Talon, Little Italy, Montreal, Canada.

In any case, we would like to consider Yolanda as a symbolic figure leading us towards the final stage of this paper, the one taking into consideration the strong impact of gender on the Italian-Canadian culture and especially on the poetry of women such as Mary di Michele and Gianna Patriarca, that is a poetry writing home in Canadian English, but also enriching the language with the rhythms and interpolations of an Italian linguistic background. A poetry, I might say, that is Canadian without the need to be pushed back to the old wornout Italian-Canadian ethnic marker and, at the same time, could be defined as fully Italian, or “Italic,” in D’Alfonso’s words (2005: 263).

Such a poetical language overcomes and transforms both entrenched stereotypes and the most personal memories, embodying what we called the poetics of nostalgia and the new meanings of life rising from an everyday experience that is no longer foreign, estranged, belonging to the deepest levels of consciousness. Both Mary di Michele and Gianna Patriarca were born in Italy, both struggle with their background and with the complexities and challenges of their personal stories, with their expectations and disappointments, haunted by the sense of the past.

In Mary di Michele’s “Life is Theatre: Or, O to Be Italian in Toronto Drinking Cappuccino on Bloor Street at Bersani and Carlevale’s,” poetry and experience blend together and the everlasting Italian background is morphed into an ironical discourse on the failure of love filtered through a feminine perspective. In this poem, based on the male/female dichotomy and on ethnic cultural differences, translation is conjured up as a cultural aid for the Italian migrant. The clash of occasional words in Italian typographically intruding in italics in the Canadian English text entails the depth of underground roots still retrieving old habits and culinary traditions. Food imagery exposes the dynamic tension between cultures the newcomer has to reluctantly face. In the first stanzas the you refers to the necessity of a word to word translation:

You needed an illustrated dictionary

to translate your meals, looking to the glossary

of vegetables, melanzane became eggplant,

African with the dark sensuality of liver.

But for them even eggplants were exotic

or alien, their purple skins from outer space.

Through the glass oven door

you would watch it bubbling in pyrex,

layered with tomato sauce and cheese,

melanzane alla parmigiana ;(1986: 45)

In the poetic closure, you shifts to he, to a Canadian who appropriates the Other by shouting: “For you Italians! [...] life is theatre!”

New literary styles and paradigms emerge, and they seem to bury a past which relentlessly keeps on re-surfacing. A new sense of irony and displacement redefines the concept of home located neither in the Italian land of the ancestors nor in the streets of Toronto’s Little Italy, where Gianna Patriarca has been living for fifty years. Patriarca, a poet who has tried to write verses not only in Canadian English, but also in Italian and in her native Ciociaro, has self-translated a collection of poems into Italian (Donne italiane e altre tragedie). In Italian Women and other Tragedies, Patriarca draws a rich gallery of female characters far from their homeland. The common denominator for all diasporic peoples is not only, as Naipaul would say, the enigma of arrival, but the trauma of departure, the leaving of one’s home behind, the travel by water. In “Returning” Patriarca centre-stages the traumatic detachment of the poetic voice from the concept of motherland, as motherland cannot be connected anymore to an idea of nation/ nationality:

We don’t discuss the distance anymore

Returning is now

The other dream

Not American at all

Not Canadian or Italian

It has lost its nationality. (1996: 21)

This is what is left to the migrant diasporic subjects, the Italians turning into Canadians: the sometimes nostalgic search for an unreachable, yet still vibrating living past, and the awareness that they belong to a new world in which they fit, but will never totally fit properly, marginalized figures of resistance questioning their identity through narratives and structures made of words, reinventing the language of affect. The issues of power, of gender, of ethnicity come to the fore together, reshaped through a language, Canadian English, giving voice to an identity, which is culturally marked, loaded with the memory of shreds of a permanent unforgettable ancestral past.

Could we suggest that for both Mary di Michele and Gianna Patriarca, as well as for other female and male authors, who are firstgeneration or second-generation migrants with roots in Italy, translating home is the re-discovery of the creative power of writing?

Writing the way home does not mean simply to include ethnographic and linguistic items or themes into the Canadian culture (which is by its own nature, already highly layered), but to traghettare (one of the meanings of tradurre) a series of experiences, narratives and linguistic devices enriching and re-defining a multicultural and multiethnic ‘national’ tradition. Hence, the house of the ancestors does not completely disappear, once it finds a new home in Canadian literature.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge, 1994. D’Alfonso, Antonio. “Babel” in Joseph Pivato, ed.,

The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing, Toronto, Guernica, 1998, p. 195. 

_____. Gambling with Failure, Toronto, Exile Editions, 2006.

Derrida, Jacques. “I Have a Taste for the Secret,” Interview with Maurizio Ferraris, in Jacques Derrida, Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. by Donis and David Webb, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001.

Di Michele, Mary. “Life is Theatre” in Immune to Gravity, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1986, pp. 45-47.

Galluccio, Steve. Mambo Italiano, Vancouver, Talonbooks, 2001.

Godard, Barbara. “The Discourse of the Other: Canadian Literature and the Question of Ethnicity,” The Massachusetts Review, XXI, 1990: 1-2, pp. 153-184.

Kamboureli, Smaro. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Minni, C.D. “Details from the Canadian Mosaic” in Other Selves, Toronto, Guernica, 1985, pp. 49-57.

Patriarca, Gianna. “Returning” in Italian Women and Other Tragedies, Toronto, Guernica, 1996, pp. 21-22.

Patriarca, Gianna. “Immacolata” in My Etruscan Face, Thornhill (Ont.), Quattro Books, p. 58.

Principe, Angelo. The Darkest Side of the Fascist Years. The Italian-Canadian Press: 1920-1942, Toronto, Guernica, 1999.

Ricci, Nino. “The Fountain” in Joseph Pivato, ed., The Anthology of ItalianCanadian Writing, Toronto, Guernica, 1998, pp. 215-244.

Ricci, Nino. “Going to the Moon” and “Passage to Canada” in Roots and Frontiers: Radici e frontiere, edited by Carmen Concilio, Torino, Tirrenia Stampatori, 2003, pp. 40-55 and pp. 74-91.

Slama, John. “My All-Canadian Family,” MacLean’s, July 1, 2004, p. 94.

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London, Routledge, 1995.