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Tangible translation: Migration and materiality
Edited by Andrea Ciribuco and Anne O’Connor
[Translation and Interpreting Studies 17:1] 2022
► pp. 134–153

Italian items in domestic spaces

Representing Italianness through objects in the fiction of Helen Barolini and Chiara Barzini

ORCID logo | Cardiff University | California State University, Long Beach

In their migration, people carry objects with them, and relocate them through physical spaces and across cultural boundaries. Handed down through generations, these objects become signs of ethnicity beyond their appearance and purpose. Examining the variety of the literary representations of objects and their subsequent translation contributes to the analysis of how material culture migrates within distant cultural systems and from one language to another. This essay focuses on domestic objects depicted by two Italian authors writing about the experience of a migrant coming-of-age in the United States: Helen Barolini and Chiara Barzini. Using diverse multilingual and (self-)translation strategies, they highlight through cultural translation the difficulties of bridging their Italian and American selfhood within an Italian household relocated abroad. In doing so, their relationship with objects underlines how their diasporic experience is entangled with their achievement of self-confidence and independence as women within the context of the Italian diaspora.

Keywords: literary objects, Italian signs, domestic spaces, Italian diaspora, Italian American woman writing, cultural translation
Article outline
  • Introduction: Seeking the Italian diasporic self within the house
  • Objects as vehicles of belonging or not belonging: From American houses to Italian homes
  • Artifacts crossing the bilingual ocean in Umbertina: When “coperta” turns into a bedspread
  • To self-translate or not to self-translate: Uncanny items in Barzini’s American kitchen
  • Conclusion: Being objective through objects?
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 31 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.21018.chi
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