Loredana Polezzi. Translating Travel. Contemporary Italian Writing in English Translation, Aldershot, Ashgate “European Cultural transmission”, 2001.

Italy has always been an ongoing realm of fantasy, dreams and representations by foreign travelers. Both Italian literary critics and theorists have thus traditionally focused their attention on “foreign representations” of their “domestic culture”. Yet Mrs. Loredana Polezzi, in a both thorough and original analysis, decided to look at the other side of the coin. The author hence studies travel writing in the Italian context from a radically new point of view, focusing on “domestic” - Italian - contemporary narratives about “foreign” cultures and on their English translations. The following two questions raised respectively in the introduction and the conclusion, sum up the problematics of the book: 1) “Why does a genre, which in its international (and predominantly Anglo-Saxon) tradition is as popular in Italy as it is elsewhere in the world, fail to get recognition when it originates from ‘home’ writers?” (p.1); 2) On the other hand, “why should an Italian book on Tibet, or Vietnam, be published in English – a language into which notoriously little is translated – when there are already plenty of volumes on the same subject written by English speaking authors?”(p. 212). The search to these questions engages both writer and reader in revisiting the function of travel writing, its relation to translation as well as the role played by both forms of writing in the dynamics of cultural exchanges. The investigation is undertaken within a strong polysystemic framework. The author postulates the existence of an asymmetry between the Italian and the English polysystem as well as the relative marginality (and hybridity) of travel writing as a genre. In this study, translation is mainly used as “a heuristic tool to enhance our understanding of both texts and their conditions of production, distribution and reception” (p. 2). In line with Todorov’s Genres in Discourse, Polezzi defines travel writing from the perspective of its historicity (its function and ideology) rather than as a set of formal characteristics. The book consists of seven chapters: the first three chapters present a theoretical discussion, the remaining four are case studies. Following the author’s order, I will present the theoretical discussion first followed by the case studies. The first three chapters deal with the first issue raised in the preceding paragraph. By focusing on the source-system, the author’s aim is to explain why - despite the international success of Italo Calvino or Oriana Fallaci - “travel writing” is still currently unrecognized as a genre in Italy. As the three chapters unfold, this question is answered by various and complementary standpoints. The author begins by examining the Italian literary system in relation to its English counterpart and the importance given to travel writing in both systems in order to show how Italian critics have traditionally relied and still rely on a dichotomic system of value opposing literary (“longlasting” and fictional) works to non-literary (factual, “plain” in style and ephemeral) ones. According to the author, such a framework can neither accommodate nor give any recognition to a hybrid genre such as travel writing or English faction. This conclusion leads up to the following hypotheses relating to the condition/effect that the translation of contemporary Italian writing might have on both target (English) and source (Italian) polysystems: Polezzi highlights in the third chapter of her book the differences and similarities between travel writers (portraying a particular culture and setting by narrating their personal experience), journalists (reporting foreign affairs and events) and ethnographers (who head toward a scientific account of a particular culture through participant observation). These different personae, which both interpret and translate “foreign” cultural values for a “home” readership, share an ambivalent position. …