Diasporic archives in translation research

This article explores the implications that diasporic archives may have for translation research. It starts with an overview of recent literature that focuses on archival approaches and translation, an area that has only recently managed to attract substantial scholarly attention (Munday 2012, 2013, Cordingley & Montini 2015). It then turns to a case study exploring how split collections can affect the way we understand a translation’s genesis. The study focuses on translation-related material in the Anthony Burgess archives. More specifically, it examines the surviving manuscripts relating to a project carried out by Anthony Burgess in collaboration with Italian actor Mario Maranzana, who worked together to produce an Italian stage adaptation of Burgess’s Blooms of Dublin (Burgess 1986). One of the distinctive aspects of this unpublished translation is its being recoverable only in manuscripts that are dispersed across different collections. As pointed out by previous studies, manuscript evidence reveals that a plurality of agents contributed to the creative construction of the target text (Bollettieri and Zanotti 2014, Zanotti and Bollettieri 2015). Moreover, as will be shown in the present chapter, a non-linear process characterized the genesis of this translation, as reflected in the diasporic nature of the surviving manuscripts. It will be shown that investigation into archives other than those of the writer proved fundamental in reconstructing the complex negotiations that underlie the Italian version of Burgess’s libretto, thus allowing to make sense of the surviving manuscripts and the apparent unrelatedness of one of them. In the concluding section, I will illustrate what these additional archival materials revealed about the genesis of this project. The case of Blooms of Dublin is quite revealing in terms of the writer’s role and degree of intervention in the translation process, the collaborative dimension of the project and the resulting tensions among the various agents involved. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate the use of archives as primary sources of data in translation research and to discuss the implications that their diasporic nature has on our understanding of the process that lies behind the translation of literary texts.