Journal of Italian Translation

Lost and Found in Translation:
A Personal Perspective
by Rina Ferrarelli
Italians divide their country into three parts, northern, central and
southern. Some of the northern and southern so-called dialects
are as different from standard Italian as Portuguese or Spanish,
and are, like them, separate languages, Italian being a language the immigrants
had to learn in school. That I had to learn in school. Those of us from
the North and the South--I’m excluding central Italy because all those regions
are close to Tuscany which was the source of the language from which
Italian evolved and their languages may in fact be true dialects--those of us
from the North and the South had to abandon our mother tongue and learn
another language, the Italian language, at a very young age.
At the age of five or six, before we left our countries of birth for a
foreign country, we were translating from the mother tongue into Italian,
what I call our father tongue. And with it we translated ourselves from the
motherland, the folk culture which was either matriarchal or a state between
the two, into the fatherland, la patria, a national concept and a national
project. Today, because of the history we have lived through, we do
not like the connotations of the word fatherland, but that is what patria translates
into, the root being from pater in Latin. Pater became patre in my vernacular,
padre in Italian, father in English. Also, the nation is patriarchal in
its ways. Ethno-linguists might tell us that the countries that use fatherland,
different as they are among themselves, are probably even more culturally
different, or were at one time, from countries whose language has them
say motherland or homeland.
The Italian language and the culture that was imparted with it were
used to unify the peninsula and the islands in the twentieth century, and to
give all the various tribes a common tongue and a common identification.
It was in fact a kind of naturalization, for in the translation, we lost
some aspects of our identities and acquired others. The mother tongue had
an intonation, diction and syntax that set us apart from other Italians, even
people from the same general area. It not only pinpointed us to a region,
but to a particular town. We recognized each other through our speech as
through a habit or dress, a costume.
I grew up in San Giovanni in Fiore (Province of Cosenza in the region
of Calabria), and I remember coming home from school every day with
news of the new tongue I was learning. Guess how we say marmitta (pot) in
Italian? I would ask my mother, and then quickly answer myself: Péntola!
Frissura (frying pan)was padella, forgiaru (blacksmith) fabbro ferraio! Tappini
(slippers) were called pantófole, and table cloth which we called misale was