Narrative Networks: Reading, Translating, and Teaching Audre Lorde’s Poems in Italy
Résumé
In 2018 a collection of Audre Lorde’s poems was published (Le Lettere, Firenze) with the Italian version by the collective WiT – Women in Translation, a group of women and translators that, together with Grazia Dicanio, Margherita Giacobino and myself, includes Loredana Magazzeni, Mariagrazia ‘Migi Sean’ Pecoraro, Maria Luisa Vezzali, and Anna Zani. In this contribution I will tackle the networks weaved together by and thanks to the circulation of Lorde’s poems in Italy, and the challenges of WiT’s collaborative translation strategies. I will also trace my personal network with Lorde’s poetry: from our first encounter when I was an undergraduate student to the university classrooms where we meet today, Lorde’s poems have played a key role in triggering self-empowering and community-empowering narrative processes. In the classrooms and beyond, they have shaped my awareness of the personal and political role of narratives for the transformation of silence into language and action.