Reading Literature through Translation: Antonio D’Alfonso’s Fabrizio’s Passion into Italian

This essay analyzes the representation of the Italian-Canadian narrator’s diasporic identity in Antonio D'Alfonso’s novel Fabrizio’s Passion (1995) and its Italian translation La passione di Fabrizio (2002). Building on Marilyn Gaddis Rose’s assertion that translation is a form of literary criticism (1997), the comparative analysis of selected source- and target-text passages examines the extent to which the translation offers a transnational reading of the novel. More specifically, focusing on the treatment of words originally in Italian, the analysis explores how the translation choices highlight the narrator's resistance to a one-to-one correspondence between country, culture and language, as well as to a binary view of Italian and Canadian national identity.