Volume 37, Number 1-2, Spring 2023 The Traces We Leave: Italian-Canadian Writings and the New Millennium Guest-edited by Carmen Concilio

EN:

In this essay, I try to connect Italian migration and life in Canada through the memory of wood, taking as case studies wooden relics made in Italy and relocated to a country known for its immense forests, as well as wooden artifacts made in Canada by the Italian newcomers. After briefly introducing some general observations on the Italian-Canadian community, employing a Cultural Studies approach, I deal with different experiences undergone by Italians, both as new citizens and, as in the case of Giuseppe Penone, as artists working in Canada. Ranging from unfair treatment during the Second World War to the creation of the Galleria Italia in the AGO in Toronto, wood is a relevant keynote in the construction of a hybridized Italian-Canadian culture. Specific wooden objects, such as trunks and Catholic crosses, are taken into account with reference to a thriving Italian-Canadian literary milieu. In conclusion, I demonstrate that Italian popular culture has also left a trace in the Canadian experience.

IT:

Il viaggio come esperienza fondativa dell’identità migrante, nelle letterature che ne sono espressione, assume spesso un ruolo strutturale che va ben al di là del mero valore tematico. Nell’ambito delle letterature francofone, uno degli orientamenti più innovativi della critica come la transpoétique, teorizzata e applicata dallo scrittore e critico franco-ontariano di origine tunisina Hédi Bouraoui, individua nelle implicazioni sottese al viaggio, all’emigrazione, all’erranza delle precise strategie di composizione del testo letterario e, conseguentemente, di analisi testuale. In base a tale prospettiva critica, questa comunicazione si propone di investigare come il viaggio oltrepassi lo spazio geografico per lasciar traccia sull’identità e sulla scrittura nell’opera di autori italo-canadesi di lingua francese, quali Fulvio Caccia, Lisa Carducci, Bianca Zagolin, assegnando così alla definizione di “letteratura migrante” un significato più pregnante, inerente alla pratica stessa della scrittura.

EN:

Montreal playwright Steve Galluccio states, “Italian immigrants, they weren’t gay.” The traditional values of Italians in Canada have often led to the marginalization of members of the LGBTQ+ community. For some, being queer and being of Italian origin is irreconcilable. Traditionally, the queer experience is not acknowledged in Italian immigrant homes. Today, there is still some reticence in the Italian-Canadian community, in both private and public spaces. Galluccio writes about his Italian origins and about being openly gay. Through his writing, he brings together two communities (LGBTQ+ and Italian Canadians) that often seem disconnected. This paper discusses Galluccio’s contribution to Italian-Canadian literature. It introduces his works, from the very popular Mambo Italiano to the most recent At the Beginning of Time, and looks at the connection between his literary contribution, Italian heritage, and queer identity.

EN:

Until the late 1970s, migration research seemed to assume that most migrants were male. It obscured the fact that women, too, were “on the move” and simply relegated female migrants as accessories to men. Today, the global dimensions of female migration are indisputable. Current research on the feminization of migration gives a face and voice to women, largely from developing countries, who have become key economic contributors to both the sending and receiving societies. It also brings into focus the paucity of research about the role and importance of Italian-Canadian immigrant women with respect to the success of many Italian immigrant families who arrived in the post–Second World War Italian diaspora. Within the growing research on female migration, this paper reviews the stereotypic representation of la nonna canadese in popular culture, Italian-Canadian literature, and the social sciences. Through the Nonna Canadese 2.0 Project, which involves one-on-one interviews with women who arrived in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, this paper offers an updated perspective of the Italian-Canadian immigrant woman, one which allows her to take pride of place alongside her male counterpart.

EN:

Finding Rosa (2008) is a quest for the documentation that might prove the true identity, provenance, and date of birth of Caterina’s mother, Rosa. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Rosa is slowly losing her mind and memory; therefore, it becomes even more urgent to know the truth about her early life in Istria. Istria’s international, complex history is unravelled in the novel, while a story of migration from that former Italian territory – first to England and finally to Canada – grows into a historical drama of forced removals, refugee camps, and diaspora for the majority of Italian Istrians, forced to abandon their abodes by the pressure of Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1947, the year of the so-called “Great exodus.” On the one hand, Ageing and Alzheimer’s Studies can help us understand Rosa’s medical condition, as well as the condition of Caterina in the role of caregiver, within the structure and drama of a memoir and a Familienroman; on the other hand, Historical and Border Studies are the methodological frameworks with which to look at Istria in this revealing historical novel.

IT:

Il mio saggio riguarda Pietro Corsi, scrittore molisano di Casacalenda e il testo-documento, da lui scritto, Halifax. The Other Door to America (Halifax. L’altra porta d’America). Il testo, intenso, si colloca tra saggio e storia, racconta il passato del Canada ed è dedicato con amore al mitico molo Pier 21 di Halifax, l’Altra porta d’America. Scrittore italiano, Pietro Corsi ha vissuto sia per la cultura che lo ha, in qualche modo, formato, sia per le lingue (il dialetto molisano, l’italiano, l’inglese e lo spagnolo) tramite le quali ha svolto il proprio lavoro letterario. Pur avendo vissuto in diverse realtà culturali, quali Canada, Stati Uniti e Messico, Pietro Corsi può essere definito scrittore italiano a tutti gli effetti perché la sua identità italiana si dilata, si trasforma, valica i confini tradizionali e diventa capacità di imparare, di sfuggire al proprio passato e alle proprie ossessioni, allargando il proprio orizzonte culturale. L’autore affronta la tematica migratoria, di cui scrisse nel suo primo romanzo, La Giobba, un classico dell’emigrazione del secondo dopoguerra. Per lo scrittore il viaggio “per non morire” dura tutta la vita; la vita stessa altro non è che un viaggio lungo, lontano. Il perché di Halifax lo si trova proprio nella traversata dell’Atlantico, lo sbarco ad Halifax, il viaggio in treno fino a Montréal e l’inizio di una nuova vita, poiché per Pietro Corsi “ognuno parte per un dolore ricevuto, o per una speranza.” Halifax rappresenta proprio questo: la storia di ogni emigrante italo-canadese o italo-americano che in tempi passati è sbarcato al Pier 21, bussando a quella porta che ora chiamiamo Halifax, l’altra porta d’America.

EN:

As scholars and reviewers of Licia Canton’s The Pink House and Other Stories have pointed out, certain characters recur across the cycle of stories and certain events are retold from different perspectives. This is especially evident, I argue, in the series of stories related to a traumatizing accident in which a woman writer is pinned between two car bumpers. These stories, interspersed throughout the collection, are linked not only by continuities in character and detail but also by forms of discontinuity: breaks in the frame of fiction, non-linear narrative practices, and shifts in time and point of view. In the wake of the accident, the woman writer – who is variously a narrator and a character – confronts writer’s block and the holes in her memory, as well as all the interruptions of daily life. The stories are a study in silence, a silence that is audible at the level of the story cycle, the narration of each story, and the enunciation of each character. By foregrounding gaps in understanding and moments in which the senses say more than words, these stories prompt readers to look for – to imagine – what cannot yet be known or spoken. They point toward states of emotion and ways of making sense of the experience that might otherwise remain locked in silence.

EN:

The question of insider/outsider artist has long been a central concern in my work as a social documentary photographer who practises as a member of the Italian diaspora and, in turn, in the way my work has been received and disseminated by the Other in the context of art criticism and the art gallery establishment. This paper will situate bodies of my photography work that concern immigrant and working-class subcultures in the context of the following theoretical frameworks: the concept of insider/outsider, the autoethnographic approach to narrative, the participant observation qualitative research method, and the relationship between words and images. The relevant bodies of my work highlighted in this paper are the Italian-Canadian immigrant series, including the Good Friday collection, the labour movement/migrant farm workers collection, and the queer-Italian-Canadian project (work in progress).

EN:

In this paper, we will examine the connection between the Second World War and Italian-Canadian literature. Many early works from this literature had their roots in the devastation of war in Italy and the resulting mass migration of thousands of Italians to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s. After writing about the initial immigrant experience, most Italian-Canadian authors moved on to other topics and themes. Some wanted to become more Canadian and less Italian in orientation. In later years, some of these authors returned to the topic of the war and its long-term effects on their lives. We will begin our examination by looking at some examples of how war is treated in early works and then we will consider the phenomenon of how the war is revisited in later works.

EN:

This article examines Genni Gunn’s writing in light of her childhood immigration experience and contends that, despite the crypto-ethnic approach she has adopted vis-à-vis her Italian-Canadian heritage, migration figures prominently in both her fictional and personal works, which bear traces of her autobiographical vicissitudes and reflect her own process of coming to terms with trauma. Indeed, her novels, stories, poems, and travel accounts all develop along shared trajectories, which include not only the obsession with travel, movement, and memory, or the search for identity and interpersonal ties, but also the focus on loss, grief, and abandonment, which are typical psychopathologies of migration trauma. Ultimately, Gunn embraces creative writing as a site of healing from the loss and pain endured as an effect of separation, abandonment, and migration, which are investigated beyond identification with a specific ethno-cultural group to encompass universal human experiences of trauma.

EN:

This article examines Genni Gunn’s novel Tracing Iris (2001) and its Italian translation Alla ricerca di Iris (2022) with a focus on the representation of the mother-daughter relationship, a recurring theme in Italian-Canadian women’s writing and a fruitful object of investigation in Translation Studies as it offers new insights into women’s writing and the crucial role played by the maternal figure in the formation of female identity. Unlike most Italian-Canadian daughter-centric first-person narratives, which commonly represent a conflictual relationship with the Italian maternal figure, seen as the embodiment of Italian culture, Tracing Iris is a third-person narrative whose omniscient narrator presents an absent mother and a daughter searching for her. However, what will be shown here is that the narrator’s point of view, in fact, still relies on the fictional daughter’s consciousness. In light of Translation Studies scholars arguing that the narrative point of view inevitably undergoes changes in translation, this analysis will show whether the fictional daughter’s consciousness is still reflected in Alla ricerca di Iris. Five source- and target-text passages will therefore be scrutinized with a focus on the translator’s lexical choices and any changes that these might have implied.

EN:

Despite the vast field represented by translation and self-translation, there is much more to say about these two distinctive practices and their differences within the Canadian landscape. This paper focuses on Licia Canton’s short-story collection The Pink House and Other Stories. It discusses the self-translated stories in the collection, comparing them with other stories which I have attempted to translate into Italian. By referring to the work of scholars such as Popovîc, Grutman, Blanco, Tanqueiro, Serafin, Bassnett, Tagore, and Gumperz, this paper aims to highlight what is inevitably lost in translation whilst underlining the importance of self-translation in the Canadian context.

EN:

This article investigates the practice of self-translation in the context of migration by examining the literary production of Dôre Michelut, a Canadian author of Italian origins. It specifically illustrates how Michelut’s writing and translating are rooted in her migrant experience and operate as instruments through which the author can voice her hybrid identity and bridge Italian and Canadian worlds. Michelut’s experience of living in-between multiple linguistic and cultural spaces is recreated on the written page, which becomes the site where these multiple spaces are connected and interwoven. The act of writing and translating are thus interrelated in a continuous process of creation that leads to the production of a “hybrid text” and to the enactment of a “hybrid process.” In the first case, hybridity emerges through multilingual writing. In the second case, it is articulated around a specific form of self-translation that is in-between writing and translating.