Abstract
As recent Translation Studies show, translatory dynamics are closely connected to global transmigration and social transformation processes (Nergaard 2021). In this talk, I will introduce to Italy’s best known female writer Dacia Maraini (b. 1936) and her life and work in the fields of literature, theater, culture and politics. Born in Tuscany, raised in Japan and Sicily, she has lived and made her career in Rome since the 1950s and is Italy’s most engaged, successful and internationally recognized female author today. Focusing on the opus omnia of Maraini its translations during the last 60 years around the world represent a symbolic glocal contact zone (Haensler et al. 2022; Pratt 1992) that incorporates the original books written by Maraini in Italian while highlighting the transcultural function of translations and translators, too often underestimated (Casanova 2008). Unified in an overview of all translations, Maraini’s original and translated oeuvre proposes a decentralized, diasporic concept of a multilingual world literature in the Third Millennium. Working with an “open” concept of translation by adapting Umberto Eco’s notion of an “open work” (Eco 1962) I illustrate to what an extend translations contribute to a polyglot view of the world, while enhancing differences of literary hospitality in diversified (language-related) cultural spheres. The bridging function of translated texts reawake in the reader a sensitivity for all that could appear other, different, or foreign. At the same time, it unveils that cross-border sociality itself corresponds to a perennial act of translation.
Presenters
Dagmar ReichardtProfessor, Creative Industries and Growth Management, Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga, Latvia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Dacia Maraini, Italian Literature, Translation Studies, Transcultural Studies, Literary Glocalization
