Annali D'Italianistica

Reflecting on the rise of modern national communities, Naoki Sakai, in "The Modern Regime of Translation and the Emergence of the Nation," argues that the question of language is not only central to the constitution of state sovereignty and identity but implies the creation of a "modern regime of translation" (106). This regime is founded upon "bordering" (108): a process of separation and differentiation between the inside and the outside, the same and the other "so as to postulate...
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Reflecting on the rise of modern national communities, Naoki Sakai, in "The Modern Regime of Translation and the Emergence of the Nation," argues that the question of language is not only central to the constitution of state sovereignty and identity but implies the creation of a "modern regime of translation" (106). This regime is founded upon "bordering" (108): a process of separation and differentiation between the inside and the outside, the same and the other "so as to postulate the internal systematic unity of a national or ethnic language" (106) that did not exist in the multi-lingual societies of pre-modern times. Like Sakai, Lawrence Venuti also reflects on the relationship between nation and translation, pointing to the benefits that nation-building projects derive from the organization of diverse cultural spaces into the sameness and uniformity enabled by translation: "[N]ations do 'indeed' profit from translation. Nationalist movements have frequently enlisted translation in the development of national languages and cultures, especially national literatures" ("Local Contingencies," 177-78). At the same time, however, Venuti also highlights the threats that such "bordering" implies for the nation. Since translation, he writes, "works on the linguistic and cultural differences of a foreign text, it can communicate those differences and thereby threaten the assumed integrity of the national language and culture; the essentialist homogeneity of the national identity [...]" (178). In doing so, Venuti aligns himself with the pioneering work of Itamar Even-Zohar and the School of Tel Aviv for whom, in the polysystem of the target language/nation, translation can play an active role not only in upholding unifying concepts of national language, but also in creating linguistic and cultural variations that are thus beholden to the source language (Even-Zohar). Translation, therefore, far from being a neutral and fairly innocent practice of moving structures and contents from one language to the other, can be used to validate or undermine paradigms according to the translator's ideology and positioning vis-à-vis the idea of Nation. Both the centrality of the "regime of translation" and translation's role in sustaining as well as threatening nationalist projects find in Italian literary and cultural history a paradigmatic example. While a comprehensive revisiting of this history exceeds the scope of our introduction, we briefly recall some of the most significant developments in the complex nexus between nation and translation in the Italian context, before proceeding to a presentation of the fifteen essays that comprise this issue of Annali d'Italianistica.