The second meeting of the Italian Research Seminar in Spring 2023 will host research presentations by 2nd-year students in the Italian MA program. This year's speakers are Santain Tavella and Toby Hale.
Tavella's presentation is entitled:
“Anybody here speak English? / Non dovete avere paura, non c’è ragione”: Dubbing as Translation and Rewriting in Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna
This lecture analyzes the Italian dubbing of African American director Spike Lee's 2008 film, Miracle at St. Anna. Specifically, Tavella explores the difficulties that the audiovisual translator encounters when approaching a film product that is strongly characterized by the sociolects and idiolects of its protagonists, as in the case in the production of an Italian edition of Lee’s film. The multilingualism of Miracle at St. Anna, which is set partially in Italy, presents increased difficulties to the translator, problematizing standard dubbing procedures. Examining the challenging linguistic and cultural transfer of this film for the Italian market, Tavella's lecture asks whether English-speaking and Italian viewers can even be said to see the same film.
Hale's presentation is entitled:
The Infernal Arno: Mapping the Arno in Dante’s Hell through the Lens of Purg. XIV
This study discusses representations of the river Arno in Dante’s Inferno. In particular, it builds upon recent cartographic readings of the poem by contextualizing Dante’s mapping of the Arno throughout the canticle within the poet’s broader project of ‘re-mapping’ the entire Italian peninsula across the three realms of the afterlife. Far from offering an impersonal or empirical account of the geography and topography of the Italian peninsula, the Italy that Dante maps in the poem, which prominently features the Tuscan river upon which the poet was “nato e cresciuto” [born and raised; Inf. 23, 94], is infused with Dante’s subjective – and more often than not polemical – perspectives on the state of contemporary Italy, which were largely shaped by his experience as a wandering political exile.
In the first part of this study, Hale offers new evidence in support of the argument that Dante establishes a parallel between the infernal river Phlegethon of Inferno 14 and the Arno of Purgatorio 14. He then discusses the essential role that this connection plays in the poet’s re-mapping of the Arno as an infernal river and the implications of this cartographic program for our interpretation of Dante’s critique of the social, moral, and political conditions of the Italian peninsula. Hale concludes by tracing the trajectory that the Arno, superimposed onto the Phlegethon, will traverse across lower Hell, offering a close analysis of passages in which the infernal Arno is charted as it passes through the ditches of the Malebolge reserved for the hypocrites and the falsifiers in Inferno 23 and Inferno 30 respectively, before descending to the ninth and final circle of Hell in which the treacherous are punished and where Dante cartographically aligns the mouth of the Arno with the terminus of the Phlegethon in Inferno 33.