Reclaiming the Mother(Tongue) through Self-translation

Because self-translation is the existential condition of the migrant, it plays a special role in the context of Italian-Canadian women’s writing, where it is both the production of a written text in another language by the same author and a cultural phenomenon. In the writing of migrant women, translation is also a gendered space of enunciation. This chapter explores the special relation between the mother and the mother tongue in the self-translated works of Dôre Michelut and Gianna Patriarca, two writers who articulate their selves in English, Italian and a non-standard native language, the Friulian language and the Ciociaro dialect respectively. The intent is to determine how the symbolic representation of the mother is reconfigured in the interface between the adoptive language and the mother tongue and how the recovery of the maternal language/figure turns the self-translational space into a site of reinvention and legitimization for women.