Translating Italy for the Nineteenth Century

In order to produce a complex – but by no means exhaustive – view of the translation phenomena in the period 1816–1830 in the Italian peninsula, I will supplement system theory with a methodological approach fruitful for historical research on translation, namely localism (cf. Tymoczko 1995, 1999; Agorni 2002, 2007). Localism stands for a descriptive research model focused on specific translation activities and designed to map the details of the linguistic, social and historical context surrounding translations. It consists of a fine-grained contextual weaving, committed to following the seemingly loose threads leading to those intercultural spaces that host translations (Agorni 2018: 323–324).

Rundle has drawn a methodological distinction between two different models of research in translation history, one focusing on translation as “a historical object in its own right”, as distinct from another that looks instead at “what translation can tell us about history” (Rundle 2012: 49). In a later article, however, he brought these two perspectives together in a fruitful combination that emphasised the importance of adopting a multidisciplinary approach (2014: 7). This latter development seems to go in a similar direction to the localism model, since it deals with the actual texts of translations as well as with the function that translation plays within the specificity of a given historical context.

The metonymic nature of translation as a form of “partial” or “relational” representation has rarely been highlighted in Translation Studies, which have traditionally preferred metaphorical or substitutive models, as the endless debates on equivalence demonstrate. However, other disciplines, such as ethnography, have long experimented with similar interpretive turns. Geertz’s (1973) “thick description” methodology goes beyond a simple descriptive framework: it establishes a firm connection between local and specific experiences and their broader sociocultural context.

Dichotomies derived from a metaphorical logic have come under close scrutiny recently: their either/or perspective makes it difficult for researchers to investigate the nuanced patterns that characterise translation activities. A different, metonymic logic, working by association and connection between texts and their contexts, stories and history, cultural agents (translators, publishers, critics, reviewers, etc.) and their sociocultural environments, could avoid the risk of producing images frozen in a set of static frames, whether in terms of places, languages, cultures, nations or sharp disciplinary boundaries. It is necessary to represent the complexity of translation activities, which move across and beyond territorial, cultural and disciplinary frames. This seems to be all the more important when the context under examination was trying to define itself as a single national and cultural unit, as was the case with “Italy” at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The quantitative dimension of translation phenomena in the period under examination has been brought to the fore in recent research, especially by book historians. Qualitative studies, on the other hand, are still scarce. When conducting qualitative studies on translation, especially with reference to distant historical periods, it may not be useful to assess the quality of translation according to criteria that are necessarily time-dependent and closely linked to the positionality of the researcher. Rather, it seems more productive to identify the characteristic elements of translation activities and try to discern their underlying strategies. This is an ambitious task, made even more difficult by the scarcity of information on most translation-related phenomena. Moreover, the main difficulty of translation research is due to its fundamentally hybrid nature, which requires research models spanning different methodological and disciplinary areas.

The profound transformation that a cultural system aiming to be recognised as “Italian’” underwent with the advent of the Romantic Movement serves as a pretext, rather than a “text”, for this volume. By this I mean that this study is not intended to be part of Italian Studies on the one hand or Cultural Studies on the other, focusing on the influence of British literature on Italian culture. Rather, the “Italian” culture of the first decades of the nineteenth century provides the context for a study of translation as a fundamental practice for the renovation of a given cultural system during an important phase of its evolution. Adopting some of the insights developed in Coldiron’s seminal text Printers Without Borders (2015), I would like to present an account of how translation became a means of introducing the “foreign” (an English and contemporary foreign) to produce a renewal of the Italian literary system in the early nineteenth century. A Translation Studies perspective will therefore allow me to concentrate on the foreign, rather than the indigenous, traits of Italian literature and culture and see how, by means of translation difference, it became one of the constitutive elements of new definitions of Italian literary identity.