Prof. Fiore Gives a Talk at the University of Catania (Italy) about Adoption and Translation

On March 18, Prof. Teresa Fiore (Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies) gave a talk at the University of Catania, Italy. The talk was part of a graduate class on translation taught by Prof. Manuela D’Amore (English Literature) and entailed two parts: a presentation titled “Adoption as a an Act of Translation in the Autobiographical Works of Jeanette Winterson and Nikolai Prestia,” and a short translation workshop using excerpts from the two books.

The talk centered on the notion of translation at large as a philosophy and practice of moving from one dimension to another, whether it’s language, culture… or family as in the case of adoptees. Indeed, both the books Prof. Fiore addressed – Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? (2011) and and Nikolai Prestia’s Dasvidania (2021) – are written by adoptees who resort to the genre of memoir to translate their experiences of loss and abandonment, as well as abuse and trauma, into stories, while translating themselves from the birth family to the adoptive one. Translators of lived experience, Winterson and Prestia, have also been published in translation. Students developed their translation of Winterson’s book and then compared them to the official publication in Italian. Prof. Fiore shared aspects of the translation of Dasvidania, which will come out in English in 2026 with Rutgers University Press in the OVOI series, as the result of a co-translation by Prof. Fiore and Daniela Chaudhary Fiore.

“I am very grateful to Prof. D’Amore for inviting me to talk about a topic that is at the center of my current research agenda (Adoption Studies Project). It was a pleasure to meet the students as part of a workshop in which they have shown refined translation skills and a well-honed awareness about the challenges of this practice. By mere coincidence, the talk was held in the same room where, in 2024, I first introduced the Dasvidania translation project in the course of the AATI (American Association of Italian Teachers) conference. This time, it was exciting to announce that the book is now in the final stages of copyediting!” – Fiore commented. And she added: “The talk was also an opportunity to appreciate once again the breathtaking site of the the University of Catania’s Department of Humanities, a World Heritage building. The baroque Monastery of the Benedictines is a fascinating complex functioning like a palimpsest of several historical periods, from the Roman era in the foundations to the present with contemporary additions designed to enhance the 16th century structure rebuilt after the 1693 earthquake. A veritable work of architectural translation!”

Short link: tinyurl.com/UCTranslation