Remediating the Mother’s Memories: Mary Melfi’s Italy Revisited and Its Translation Ritorno in Italia

This essay analyzes the representation of memory in Mary Melfi’s memoir Italy Revisited: Conversations with My Mother (2009) and in its Italian translation Ritorno in Italia: Conversazioni con mia madre (2012). The memoir consists of a one-week conversation – in Italian and English – between Italian mother Nina and Italian-Canadian daughter-narrator Mary, who writes up their dialogue in English after tape-recording it and taking notes in her notebook. Their conversation is stimulated by countless questions posed by the daughter-narrator (who had migrated from Molisan village Casacalenda to Montreal with her parents as a child in the late 1950s) about her mother’s pre-migrant past and the Italy of the 1930s. The narrator, however, brings into question and re-interprets her mother’s disillusioned memories in an attempt to find pride in her Italian cultural origins. What results is conflicting images of Italy: Nina’s remembered motherland, and the narrator’s imagined mother’s land, which crucially reflect their ambivalent mother-daughter relationship. Drawing on Bella Brodzki’s association between the transmission of memory and translation (2007) and on Mirella Agorni’s notion of re-mediazione (2014)—which describes the re-elaboration that memories and texts undergo when reported and translated, respectively—this essay examines how the processes of “translation” in the memoir are “re-membered” (von Flotow 2011), or reconstructed, through interlingual translation with a new audience in mind. The ultimate aim is to explore the visibility of the narrator’s “translation” processes in Ritorno in Italia, thus shedding light on the inevitable transformations a literary text undergoes in translation.