Panel: Cultural Crossings
Copanelists: Nadia Inserra and Leena Kurvet-Kaössar
In Mother Tongue: An American Life in Italy, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s complex memoir tells of the “life in translation” that she has lived since she moved to Parma, Italy, sixteen years ago. While this beautifully written memoir lovingly evokes the city of Parma through its food, architecture, customs, neighbors, and family, it focuses mainly on what is “lost in translation” when one moves into a foreign culture and language.
As the title of her book suggests, her life has been lived in exile from her mother tongue, American English, and her mother culture. The main title, Mother Tongue, has many connotations—Wilde- Menozzi, citing Thoreau, suggests that “mother tongue” implies a primitive, non-educated, maternal language, as well as the fact that our first experiences of language are tied closely to our mothers. Of this original, and as he sees it, more primitive tongue or language, Thoreau, discussing written/ read language as opposed to the oral/aural in Walden, says of the spoken and heard language that it “is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brute, of our mothers. The other [written/read] is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.” The subtitle, An American Life in Italy, suggests both the failure to become Italian and the willed desire not to melt into the culture and disappear like the “egoless invisibility” expected of the ideal translator. She does not live the Italian life in Italy that her daughter, Clare, who came to Italy at six, lives.
We will explore how the loss that translation to another culture incurs is conveyed by many of her metaphors for speaking and being surrounded by a foreign language, which are, if not negative, ambivalent: dubbing in a film, which often simplifies dialogue or leaves whole sentences out, and the myth of Philomela, who, her tongue cut out, can only weave her experiences into a tapestry, which is powerful, but lacks the nuances of words. The myth also suggests that the transplantation/translation of a life into a new language has violent and silencing effects on the voice of the exile, migrant, or traveler.
Rebecca Hogan and Joseph Hogan are Professors of English at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater and founding editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. They have published and delivered papers on crosscultural autobiographies and autobiographies of mental illness, focusing on issues of agency.