Translating Sicily, Adapting Sicily

What does Sicily represent to writers and cultural producers inside and outside of Sicily? Translating Sicily, Adapting Sicily investigates the ways in which Sicily is constructed in relation to the regional, the national, and the transnational in cultural production.

What does Sicily represent to writers and cultural producers inside and outside of Sicily? How is it constructed in relation to communities within and beyond the island? In what ways do the island’s history and geography render it a privileged site for an exploration of the connections between the regional, the national and the transnational? And what does the ‘translation’ of Sicily tell us about the shaping powers of translation and adaptation? Translating Sicily, Adapting Sicily investigates the ways in which Sicily is constructed in relation to the regional, the national, and the transnational in cultural production. It focuses on the ways in which textual constructions of Sicily are reshaped and reframed for readers and viewers in Italy and the Anglophone world through acts of translation and adaptation. Through an analysis of the transnational, multimodal and transmedial afterlives of three canonical Sicilian writers, from the nineteenth century to the present day - Giovanni Verga, Leonardo Sciascia, and Andrea Camilleri- Translating Sicily, Adapting Sicily interrogates the relationship between translation and the transnational across different media and in different historical moments. Translating Sicily, Adapting Sicily questions our preconceptions of what is a source text, analysing the notion of place as a source text, exploring both its construction as a story and also its multiple, mobile afterlives as we tell and re-tell it.