Italian Contributions

Italian contributions are copious and rich in quantity, quality, and variety. Many essays confirm the latest trends in inter/multidisciplinarity, intertextuality, cross-culturality, transnationality, translation, and translation studies. Even though most attention is devoted to contemporary prose writing, significant scholarship has also been produced on 19th-century authors, while renewed interest is shown in contemporary poets.

a. Essay Collections

Translating America: The Circulation of Narratives, Commodities, and Ideas Between Italy, Europe, and the United States, ed. Marina Camboni, Andrea Carosso, Sonia Di Loreto, and Marco Mariano (Peter Lang), is the fifth volume in the series Transatlantic Aesthetics and Cultures, concerned with the study of literary and cultural phenomena from multicultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. The book collects some of the most important contributions to the 20th International Conference of the Italian Association for North American Studies (AISNA) held in Torino in 2009. Exploring the exchange of cultural ideas and products between Europe and the United States, the essays discuss the processes of translation and adaptation. The first section deals with the “trading” of linguistic and cultural models to and from America. Among Italian contributors, Mario Corona (“ReTranslating America’s Words: A View from Beyond,” pp. 25–48) considers the necessity to retranslate key terms of America’s self-representation (e.g., freedom and democracy) after the decline of the American model since 9/11. To this purpose, Corona engages in a deep, multidisciplinary study of American national character throughout history, tracing its cultural origins back to the Puritan heritage. Drawing from a large corpus of cultural products (movies, political speeches, criticism in and out of the United States) that enact mainstream ideals and competing alternatives, he eventually extends his claim for revision to traditional perceptions of America and American. Simona Sangiorgi (“Disneyland in Europe; or, How to Translate ‘Cultural Chernobyl’ into Cultural Shock ‘Therapy,’” pp. 65–78) highlights the complex process of cross-fertilization concerning the creation and transfer of cultural commodities. Explaining the change from Euro Disney to Disneyland Paris, she maintains that the French resisted the “invasion” of American cultural models (a “cultural Chernobyl”) through a process of “Europeanization” (“cultural shock therapy”) that helped them preserve their culture. As she interestingly shows, this also added further layers to the already complex structure of the amusement park, which Americans had borrowed from Europe and adapted to their own culture before (re)exporting it abroad. The papers of Gianna Fusco, Alessandro Clericuzio, and Francesca De Lucia also deal with the adaptations of cultural products in television, drama, and film. In “Mainscreening America: Cultural Translation in US TV Series” (pp. 79–94) Fusco shows the process of “Americanization” undergone by Mexican and British TV series in Ugly Betty and The Office under the influence of U.S. social (especially gender and ethnic) conditions and national ideals. These “translations,” she claims, offer self-reassuring narratives that reinforce existing cultural values and, once reexported abroad, provide aspirational models. In “The Foreign Route of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 1949–2009” (pp. 95–112) Clericuzio illustrates the European “appropriations” of Williams’s classic. Discussing a wide range of cases, he comments on the achievement of artists like Ingmar Bergman, Jean Cocteau, and Luchino Visconti. Examining the complex processes of transculturation, he produces a rich review of many translations, adaptations, political interpretations, intersemiotic transpositions, and academic receptions of the play. Finally, in “La linea della palma in Brooklyn: Sicily and Sicilian America in Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso” (pp. 113–25) De Lucia clearly shows how Italian film director Alberto Lattuada has merged the two genres of the American gangster movie and commedia all’italiana to produce in Il Mafioso a new, hybrid, and original cultural product that also explores the ramifications of Mafia mentality outside Sicily, that is, “the line of the palm-tree” in Leonardo Sciascia’s metaphor.

The second section is devoted to translation across media. In “Left in Translations: Mirror Images of Italy and America in the Italian TV Version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun” (pp. 151–70) Valerio Massimo De Angelis offers a lucid analysis of the transposition of The Marble Faun into the Italian sceneggiato Il fauno...