AustLit

A necessary part of an enquiry into the writing of life histories of a linguistic and cultural (or 'ethnic') minority is the examination of the linguistic and discursive transactions of the texts. Who is being addressed? What strategy of identity construction is being sought - assimilation? Integration? Dissociation? In a multicultural situation, any written life history must be to some extent a translation of one culture into another. Most cultures are themselves heterogeneous, so translation may operate between different sectors of what is commonly supposed to be a single culture. This article takes Italian-Australian life writing as its subject and considers as a case of cultural translation Piero Genovesi's biography of an immigrant from Sicily into Australia, Sebastiano Pitruzzello, and Walter Musolino's translation of the work into English. Using the concepts of translation norms and a cultural filter in translation, it finds that a translator who is bicultural and an insider to both the source and the target cultures and languages subtly but quite pervasively subordinates the former to the latter by eliding some of the experiential and discursive values of the source text at all levels of language.