1st Edition
Translating Travel Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation
By Loredana Polezzi
Copyright 2001
256 Pages
by
Routledge
256 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Translating Travel examines the relationship between travel writing and translation, asking what happens when books travel beyond the narrow confines of one genre, one literary system and one culture. The volume takes as its starting point the marginal position of contemporary Italian travel writing in the Italian literary system, and proposes a comparative reading of originals and translations... Read more
Contents: Introduction: the paradox of absence; The case for Italian travel writing; Travel writing in translation; Travel and/as translation; Rewriting Tibet: Italian travellers in English translation; Crossing borders and exploiting hybridity: language, gender and genre in the works of Oriana Fallaci; Jumping genres: Italo Calvino and the question of ’Literariness’; Different journeys along the river: Claudio Magris’s Danubio and its translation; Conclusions; a question of distance; Bibliography, Index.
Biography
Loredana Polezzi is Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her main research interests include travel writing, translation studies and comparative literature. She has written on British travellers in Italy, contemporary Italian travel writing and the influence of translation on the formation of images of Italy.
'The book is excellently documented, coherently marshalling a wide range of sources, and it offers perceptive comments on many points of detail. Balanced between several fields of interest, it can at times be tantalizing... an important contribution to an inherently complex field of enquiry.' Italian Studies '... highly recommended for its theoretical intelligence and acumen, and in particular for its innovative development of the Deleuzean concept of 'minor literature' in an Italian context. Moreover, the book proposes an original and extremely fertile methodological approach to Italian travel literature that might well be extended to the Italian tradition at large, going back to Marco Polo and early modern Italian travel literature, thus providing a powerful and timely antidote, particularly in an age of 'globalizing literary studies', to the Italian critical tradition's aversion to travel.' Modern Language Review '[Loredana Polezzi's] work is a fine example of a perfect bilingual sensibility at work on a suitably bicultural subject, in the older 'golden' tradition of Comparative Literature... Few books in translation studies can match this kind of fully bilingual resourcefulness...' The Translator
