Abstract:

Spices for a Global Cuisine: the international space of local culture

What is the space globalization reserves for local culture? Though the relation between global literature and local traditions is a two-way, sometimes ambiguous exchange, local culture often turns up on the global scenario just for spicing the unsavoury food of globalization. This paper considers the different use of dialect in three contemporary Italian writers, Dario Fo, Andrea Camilleri and Raffaello Baldini, whose presence on the English-language book market is strikingly different. Understanding how and why a text or an author travels well abroad while another doesn’t tells us something not only about the problems English-language translators, publishers and readers are faced with, but also about the dynamics of global culture and the mind-set of globalized readers.

Bio:

Edoardo Zuccato is a poet and translator, and an associate professor of English literature at IULM University, Milan (Italy). His interests are focused on modern poetry and translation, on which he has published two books (Coleridge in Italy, Cork UP 1996; Petrarch in Romantic England, Palgrave Macmillan 2008) and many articles in Italian, British and American periodicals. He has co-edited with Tim Parks a special issue of the journal Testo a fronte, “Towards a Global Literature” (2013). He has edited bilingual editions of works by Romantic and contemporary English poets. He has published four collections of poems and two volumes of translations in a Lombard dialect.