Translating Africa to Italians: Mediating a presence

ABSTRACT

Collaborations between African immigrants in Italy and Italian writers led to the production of several socio-literary works in the early 1990s. The Italian contributors appear to have acted as linguistic experts who allowed (often Francophone) Africans to place representations of their lives and those of other immigrants in Italy into Italian discourse. The fruits of these collaborations are thus, to some extent, translations of oral stories. The collaboration between Saidou Moussa Ba and Alessandro Micheletti, which led to the novel/educational manual La promessa di Hamadi, is examined in order to tease out the process and consequences of such intercultural collaborative translation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural diversity
• equivalence
• form
• literary translation
• narrative techniques
• target audience

Notes on contributors

Christopher Hogarth is a lecturer in French at the University of South Australia. He works primarily on francophone and italophone literatures.

Notes

1 All translations from Italian are my own.

2 Unlike many of the works written by African authors and Italian collaborators, this is not a testimonial. As a creative work not purporting to depict real persons, living or dead, it must be considered literary. However, it was published by a small company and specifically targeted a younger audience for pedagogical purposes, and therefore represents a relatively peculiar work of literature.

3 http://www.comuni-italiani.it/statistiche/stranieri/africa.html

4 As part of North Africa, the closest part of this continent to Italy, and having been colonized by France and sharing parts of its territory with Spain, Morocco has of course been part of a wider European discourse on Africa for centuries.

5 The lack of empathy of Italians for African victims of racism could be seen as curious, given many Italians have presumably heard stories of how their emigrant countrymen have been treated.

6 These writers are native Italian speakers, which has eradicated the need for collaborations.