Carnevaliâs Cultural Translation: Modernism

This article investigates the activity of Italian poet Emanuel Carnevali in America as an act of cultural translation. It focuses on his adoption of English as a language and on the way in which he presented Italian culture to an American audience Recent trends in translation studies indicate that migrant writing can be assimilated to translation. As authors move from a source culture and language to a target culture and language, they have to adapt their stories and backgrounds so that they can be communicated to new audiences in the new language. The first part of the article concentrates on Carnevaliâs adoption of English, which enabled him to distance himself from his traumatic Italian childhood. He approached the language from a foreign perspective, and a newcomerâs enthusiasm. He published poetry, short stories and essays in his newly acquired language, in modernist reviews of New York and Chicago. The second part of the article focuses on the treatment that, in those reviews, he gave of two contrasting symbols of Italianità: Dante and the Italian immigrants in America. Dante was experiencing a time or renewed popularity as a model for the Anglophone modernists, and Carnevali contrasted or mocked this appropriation. On the other hand, when he discussed the other Italian immigrants in America, he had a patronizing look toward them â but also defended them from racist attacks. Carnevaliâs treatment of Dante and of Italian migrants offers us a chance for analysis of how a migrant writer can communicate home culture in a new language, negotiating between different cultural constraints.