Contemporary Italy in the UK and the US

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My project aims at analysing the role of works translated into English as English literature. This corpus shapes the perception English readers have of foreign literatures and countries, and influences the literary and cultural debate. Translations form a continuity with other forms of writing: famous translators and writers are referred to as experts on a specific country, and have a public role. There are strong connections between what is translated from a country and its image, and it is this connection that my research intends to explore.I will focus on the interrelations of English and Italian literatures, as these languages have been entangled since their very beginnings, and they continue to influence one another to this day. As Reynolds argues, the translations between these two cultures cannot simply be described using Venuti's labels of 'foreign' or 'domestic', as it is hard to draw a line to say where the English ends and Italian begins (2008). The study of the 'Italy in English' case is intended to provide a model of permeable space between languages and cultures, and aims at contributing to the development of a new literary research methodology focused on exchange and interactions. Rather than studying language mediations as a binary opposition from one language or country to another, it is necessary to re-conceptualise it as a fluid dynamic, considering the hybridity of language interaction (Apter 2013, Walkowitz 2015, but also Wellek 1959).Delogu and Lagioia highlight that since the start of the twenty-first century, beginning with the explosion of the "Ferrante fever", and thanks to the 'greater openness of the British publishing market towards European and international authors', the number of translations of Italian literature into the English-speaking world 'has more than doubled' (2018). However, as Comiati, Piperno and Willman pointed out, 'whilst a large amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to the image of Italy through the centuries, little has been written so far on how the British world perceives Italy today' (2018). Moving on from first contributions to the field (La Penna 2008), my research will first address this gap by providing an overview of the current literary image of Italy in the UK and the US.My research will first provide a description of the current state of translated literature in the British and American market (Heilbron 1999), with a focus on the image of Italy and the role of Italian translation in these dynamics, taking into account elements such as bestsellers set in Italy (as Aciman's), debates on newspapers (as Parks'), bestselling books translated from Italian (as Ferrante's) and retranslations (for instance, Dante's case). By discussing these examples, I intend to analyse the continuities between the images of Italy in English writing and in relation to writing that has come into English from Italy. Building on this, I will analyse the personal production of two relevant mediators of Italian literature into the English-speaking world: Jhumpa Lahiri (US) and Jamie McKendrick (UK). Their examples are relevant and representative as they both are renowned writers and translators, as well as individuals who have the power to influence critical discourse ("les consacrants consacrés", Casanova 2002). The analysis of their production will allow me to discuss the reception of Italy in different nations and genres, and will let me address questions related to their translation practice in a more sustained and detailed way. My focus in studying Lahiri and McKendrick will be: what happens to Italy in their writings and to Italian in their translations? I will analyse them in a literary and textual perspective, considering their impact and reading them closely, in the belief that this double approach, combining the sociological framework to qualitative reading, will allow me to draw on the strengths of both methods. Finally, I aim to interview both writers.