Crossroad in Creole: on translating Sam Selvon's Ways of sunlight

My thesis is focused on the translation of a selection of short stories from Sam Selvon’s Ways of Sunlight, published in 1957. Among his ten novels, the only one which has so far been available to an Italian readership is The Lonely Londoners (1956), translated by Isabella Maria Zoppi (Londinesi Solitari, Mondadori, 1998). Translations of Creole in the past privileged linguistically conservative, “normalizing” solutions, that is, Standard Italian. A well-known example is V.S. Naipaul, whose fiction presenting code-switching Standard English/Creole such as The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959) A House for Mr Biswas (1961), has been translated into Standard Italian, losing thus most of the unmistakable flavour of the original. It is a difficult task, and the range of choices is restricted; an Italian dialect, for example, would result inadequate, representing an undesirable distraction from the original setting. In the course of my research, and after reading all Selvon’s works, I focused my attention on those short stories in Ways of Sunlight where the challenge was particularly stimulating as regards code-switching. The author, in both narrative and dialogues, blends together Standard English, spoken idiomatic English and, above all, different stylizations of Trinidadian Creole; the end result is a unique linguistic amalgam difficult to transpose into another language. I have based my strategy on the principle of dynamic equivalence, namely on the rendering, at least up to a certain point, of the effect produced on the reader by the original text. In the light of the many different translation theories and with reference to Agostino Lombardo’s concept of the “autonomous echo of the original text”, I have devoted my attention to the original setting and to the paralinguistic aspect of the text. To be more precise, when Creole is spoken by uneducated characters in a Trinidadian setting, I have had recourse to an informal register of Standard Italian, with idiomatic expressions typical of colloquial language. On the other hand, as regards the short stories set in London, I have employed, albeit sparingly and prudently, elements of Italian spoken by Nigerian immigrants. My translation strategy was developed through observation of the linguistic patterns of Nigerians resident in Verona (Bini ethnic group), and what brings “Nigerian Italian” and Caribbean Creole into the same focus has to do with the amply documented linguistic affinities between Caribbean Creole and West African languages. Moreover, since the Italian spoken by Nigerian immigrants shares with Nigerian Pidgin (the variety of English spoken in Nigeria) some syntactical structures – mostly derived from calques – or morphological reduplication processes, one can claim that the “Afro-Italian” in my translation and the English spoken by West Indian immigrants in Selvon’s fiction are linked by the common West African heritage. Furthermore, the presence in Italy of a large number of African immigrants is the result of the same phenomenon – globalization – which has completely transformed the human geography of the Caribbean. The different migration waves that brought Selvon’s ancestors to Trinidad, Selvon himself to England and now bring African immigrants to Italy are thus part of the same globalizing drive which is reshaping the world, and this fact, together with the affinities between the phenomenon of Caribbean immigration in England in the 1950s and that of African immigration to Italy nowadays, suggested to me the possibility of taking into consideration the Italian spoken by Nigerian immigrants as an effective linguistic mediation to translate Trinidadian Creole spoken by immigrants in London. Besides, a cautious and sparing adoption of linguistic patterns from “Afro-Italian” has been suggested, whenever possible, to approximate the unmistakable flavour of the Caribbean signifier that is continuously influenced by orality. I have also analyzed, in fact, the connections between oral tradition and Selvon’s fiction, whose linguistic strategies in some ways can be traced back to the calypsonian’s performance. I have also provided an analysis of the variegated socio-linguistic situation in Trinidad, where Creole represents a genuine means of communication with no social connotations. The Caribbean, characterized by multiculturalism but also by a resistance against the denial of specificities in the name of a shadowy cultural unity, was one of the earliest projects of European colonization; the processes of immigration/migration affecting the area and the problematic state of race relations in these countries are paradigmatic of the broader movements of peoples that have played, and will most likely continue to play, a key role in the growth of immigrant communities throughout the modern world. Precisely the increasing level of multiculturalism in Italy, consequence of globalization, has led me to find socio-linguistic parallels between the two different contexts, and thus to suggest an “unbeaten path” for the translation of Creole.