Respecting Complex Personhoods: Translation Studies and British New Slaveries

This article has a double thematic concern, namely, contemporary forms of slavery in Britain and literary translation. On these premises, it reflects on which translation strategies can be most effective in conveying the narratives related to the phenomenon of new slaveries, by analysing almost all the fictional works in English which have been translated into Italian. Part 1 concentrates on Translation Studies with regard to both postcolonial literatures and narratives around British new slaveries. It brings to the fore Avery Gordon’s concept of ‘complex personhood’, emphasising the need to consider the enslaved subjects’ complex personhood in translating practices. Moving from Lawrence Venuti’s and Antoine Berman’s theories of translation to Douglas Robinson’s and Viktoria Tchernichova’s reflections on postcolonial translation, it is argued that this priority can be satisfied through techniques based on foreignisation. This point is tested on the Italian translations of Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand and Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans, which end up reducing two specific non-standard usages of English to caricatural representations. The second section of the article points to further unexplored aspects of the published Italian translations of these texts. Its focus is narrowed to four of their facets: titles, interlingualism, linguistic creativity, and the contexts of new slaveries. In the Italian versions of Ruth Rendell’s Simisola and Ian Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close, banalised titles operate to conceal fundamental aspects of the phenomenon of British new slaveries. Interlingualism is another common feature of these texts: reflecting on the case study of Abi Morgan’s play Fugee, this article connects its Italian version (which emphasises the polyglossia of the original text, considering it as another case of foreignisation strategies) with the stress on interculturalism and the polylinguistic nature of texts posited by translation theorists such as Berman, Robinson, Michael Cronin and Michaela Wolf. There follows a reflection on a crucial aspect of fictional literature, linguistic creativity, taking as its first example Ali Smith’s short story The Detainee’s Tale; starting from an analysis of the ways in which the Italian translation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go risks flattening the polysemic suggestiveness of the author’s pared-back language, it then focuses on the problems posed by neologisms through Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close and using the criterion of appropriateness, as suggested by Lance Hewson’s discussion of the role of creativity in translation. The final section of part 2 goes back to Lewycka’s Two Caravans, and its implicit references to historical facts around British new slaveries, to argue the importance for a translator to have a knowledge of the context of this historical phenomenon, alongside the required linguistic skills. By way of conclusion, Part 3 studies how Morgan’s Fugee and Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close fictionalise non-literary translation and interpreting, thus bringing to the fore the ethical and political dimension they entail, as theorised by Moira Inghilleri and Carol Meier. It is here argued that in literary translation, too, such an ethical approach is a necessary step to avoid dehumanising enslaved migrants and their complex personhood, by making reference to theoretical concepts such as Berman’s ‘ethical translation’, Robinson’s ‘subversive translation’ and Venuti’s ‘resistancy’, closely connected to the favouring of foreignising strategies.