Italian Studies and the Moore Institute are delighted to announce a talk by Italian translator and scholar

Franca Cavagnoli

28 September 2011 @ 6.00pm – The Moore Institute Seminar 6.00pm

Cultural Hybridity and Liminal Space in Post-Colonial Literary Translation

Liminal space and its creative potentialities have been scarcely investigated by Translation Studies in Italy. The in-betweenspace of contact languages is a culturally fertile ground for post-colonial translation, since it is the inter – the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture (Bhabha, 1994). My reflections will draw on my experience as a translator of post-colonial writers and will concentrate on exploring the contact zone of rotten English and creole continuum, as shown by Ken Saro-Wiwa in Sozaboy (1985) and by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) respectively, and on analysing the strange middle ground of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). The final part of my lecture will focus on how liminal space and hybridity have been perceived in their Italian translations. Franca Cavagnoli has published two novels: Una pioggia bruciante (2000) – winner of the CittÌÊ di Cuneo Award for First Novel – and Non si ̬ seri a 17 anni (2007), as well as a volume of essays Il proprio e l’estraneo nella traduzione letteraria di lingua inglese (2010). Her articles and reviews have been published in Corriere della sera, Il manifesto, Diario, Linea d’ombra. She has edited two collections of Australian short stories, Il cielo a rovescio (1950s-1990s) and Cent’anni di racconti australiani (1850s-1990s), in addition to the complete collection of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. She lectures in Translation Studies at ISIT, UniversitÌÊ degli Studi di Milano and UniversitÌÊ degli Studi di Pisa. She is interested in Post-Colonial Studies (her primary areas of interest are Australia, South Africa and the Caribbean) and she has been working as a literary translator for leading Italian publishers (Adelphi, Feltrinelli, Einaudi) since 1987. She has translated, among others, works by Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee and David Malouf. She was awarded the Premio Fedrigoni for literary translation in 2010 and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori for her new translation of The Great Gatsby.