WTIP · Women Translators in Italian Publishing

Women Translators in Italian Publishing

For a long time, women devoted themselves to translation as the only literary practice allowed to them, or as the only way to express their talent or start a career. Despite the so-called feminization of the profession, and the large number of women who have devoted themselves to it since then, women translators have often been victims of a double invisibility, as translators and as women. WTIP intended to address the problem of women invisibility investigating the 20th century Italian publishing from an historical and gender perspective with a set of innovative methodological tools, combining Translations Studies, literary and sociological analysis. The main objective was to reassess the hitherto overlooked yet key role of women, thus rescuing their contributions from historical oblivion. This general problem was addressed by posing a series of crucial questions: what were the books women translated or promoted? And how they did undertake such tasks? What was the family/professional context in which they emerge and what was the extent of their professional relations/network? How did they carry out their intellectual activities and how did they relate to a predominantly male environment? How did they negotiate a space of autonomy against or in compliance with existing paradigms in the publishing industry? To answer these questions four case studies have been chosen as they embodied different positions, ranging from self-effacement to full recognition, while sharing the same geographical and institutional environment, that of the Einaudi publishing house in Turin. The focus was then on two professional translators, Maria Luisa (Nini) Castellani Agosti (1913-2005) and Adriana Motti (1924-2009), and two more visible figures, Lalla Romano (1906-2001) and Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), who would become acclaimed writers during 20th century. While the entrance of women into the literary canon has been, and rightly continues to be, extensively studied and women’s work is beginning to be recognised, the history of women’s translation is still largely unwritten. At the same time, the problem of the invisibility of translators is still relevant in today’s society, since a number of working conditions (salary, copyright, lack of royalties and of the right to negotiate) are just some of the issues that create a gender bias in the publishing industry. In Italy several events have aimed to highlight translation as an equally artistic and literary endeavour, thus overturning the stereotype of translation as a secondary and feminine activity. WTIP provides a historical background to these positions, which advocate the recognition of women professionals and the affirmation of their authorial status. In addition, a strategy for communicating the project beyond academia has been put in place to create opportunities for dialogue, the most effective of which is a series of podcasts based on interviews with translators.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union