The Trinidadian Calypso as Oral Heritage
Linguistic and Cultural Issues in the Italian Translation of V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14770471 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mariacristina Petillo (0000-0002-0440-055X, University of Bari Aldo Moro, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 80-1/2 |
| Pages | 205-215 |
| Publication date | 2010-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal des africanistes (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0399-0346 • E-ISSN: 1957-7850 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/africanistes.2508 |
| OpenAlex | W319733791 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 15 |
Assuming that the calypso belongs to the many-faceted field of Caribbean orature and represents a significant aspect of a cultural continuum between Africa and the New World, this paper aims at investigating its role in V.S. Naipaul’s third novel, Miguel Street (1959), where the calypso emerges as a musical genre conveying and constantly reshaping the socio-cultural identity of Indo-Caribbean people in Port of Spain. The paper also deals with some linguistic problems resulting from the translation of calypsoes into another language. Particularly, the Italian translation of the novel shows that a twofold difficulty arises. Firstly, the translator needs to decide how to reproduce the colloquial liveliness of the Creole language used for the calypso and, secondly, how to translate into Italian the manifold cultural data that all those popular ditties convey, if it is true that “calypso is a purely local form. [...]. The pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider” (V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage)
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Creole language · Cultural heritage · Cultural translation · Field (mathematics · Identity (music · Linguistics · Literature · Port (circuit theory · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Engineering · History · Mathematics · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature
An Anthropology of Indirect Communication
Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage
Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities
(Not) Knowing the Difference
With a Tassa Blending
Globalization and Trinidad Carnival
The influence of the west African songs of Derision in the new world
Toward a Definition of Calypso (Part II)
Toward a Definition of Calypso (Part I)
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |