Abstract:
As reported by the American Community Survey in 2016, Italian Americans were ranked the fourth largest self-reported European ancestry groups in the United States. Nowadays, more than 17.8 million Americans claim Italian ancestry. Even though after the 1950s many great Italian American literary works were produced, this branch of literature remained in the margins of mainstream American Studies/ Italian Studies. Not until the early 1980s did the recognition of Italian American migration literature grow significantly.
In recent years, more and more outstanding literary works written in Italian have drawn the attention of Chinese readers. Nonetheless, many works of contemporary Italian American writers, which are composed largely of memoirs or autobiographies, are still unknown among the Chinese public and there are more studies needed in this regard. For the above reasons, the chapter Viaggi (journeys) of the book la Straniera of Claudia Durastanti was selected as the focus of my thesis, with the intention of introducing more remarkable Italian American migration literature to Chinese readers. Thanks to this publication, Durastanti has become one of the five shortlisted authors of the LXXIII edition of the Strega Prize, the most prestigious Italian literary award for more than seventy years which documents the language, changes, and traditions of Italian culture.
Claudia Durastanti was born in New York and grew up in Basilicata with dual Italian and American citizenship. She is a writer and literary translator based in London. Through her latest work, Claudia Durastanti speaks of her experience of foreignness across time and place, trying to reflect on the theme of identity, emigration, and family. La Straniera is not a memoir in the classical sense, nor a traditional family novel. It is a novel-memoir hybrid of journeys and transfers, without paying too much attention to the literary genre or separation of reality and fiction.
The thesis will consist of three parts: to open up the essay a brief introduction of Italian American emigration literature will be provided, referring to the group of female writers after the 1960s. The presentation of Claudia Durastanti and the type and characteristics of the book will also be examined in the first chapter. The second part is dedicated to the Chinese translation of the selected parts from the chapter Viaggi. The third part will analyze the source text, the difficulties and problems encountered, and the methods and strategies adopted during the undertaken translation process.
