Translating the Female Self across Cultures

Translating the Female Self across Cultures examines contemporary autobiographical narratives and their Italian and French translations. The comparative analyses of the texts are underpinned by the latest developments in Translation Studies that place emphasis on identity construction in translation and the role of translation in moulding various types of identity. They focus on how the writers’ textual personae make sense of their sexual, artistic and post-colonial identities in relation to the mother and how the mother-daughter dyad survives translation into the Italian and French social, political and cultural contexts. The book shows how each target text activates different cultural literary, linguistic and rhetorical frames of reference which cast light on the facets of the protagonists’ quest for identity: the cult of the Madonna; humour and irony; gender and class; mimesis and storytelling; performativity and geographical sense of self. The book highlights the fruitfulness of studying women’s narratives and their translations, and the polyphonic dialogue between the translations and the literary and theoretical productions of the French and Italian cultures.

Loredana Polezzi, Cardiff University:
Translating the Female Self across Cultures shows us that feminist translations are deeply and firmly located in the place and time that produce them. Through illuminating comparative readings of Winterson, Byatt and Kincaid in Italian and French translation, the book tells a double, parallel story: that of gendered identity as a culture-bound construction, and of translators as powerful cultural agents in its evolution.