In this essay I consider “posing” and “passing” as narrative, cultural, and linguistic mechanisms that help us understand how exophonic1 Exophony refers to the practice of writing in a non-native literary language. and migrant identities are negotiated in contemporary Italian literature.2 This essay on translation draws on a talk I gave at the American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS) conference in Sorrento in June 2024. More specifically, I examine practices of translation in relation to practices of posing and passing as Italian. I discuss three case studies of texts written in Italian within the same decade (2006-2015) that narrate identities shaped by the mastering of a new language or a new idiolect: Amara Lakhous’s novel Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore in Piazza Vittorio, 2006); Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014); and Jhumpa Lahiri’s essays-cum-language- memoir In Other Words (In altre parole, 2015). These works also reflect on the traumatic experiences of immigrants, external or internal, and the ensuing processes of translating the self to explore the identitarian force of language. Translation provides the linguistic, cultural, and discursive site where posing and passing take place. And notably, these works share in English the voice of Ann Goldstein, their translator—a point I will revisit at the end of this essay.
Before I turn to my three case studies, a note about my terminology. I owe the pair of terms “posing” and “passing” to Barbara Spackman (2011) who in turn borrows them from Linda Williams’ work (2001) on the performance of racial identity. As Spackman summarizes: “Those who pose simulate something that they are not, whereas those who pass dissimulate something that they are” (2011). Importantly for my argument, Spackman analyzes Amara Lakhous’s novel Divorce Islamic Style (Divorzio all’islamica, 2010; translated by Ann Goldstein in 2012) which foregrounds the performance of linguistic and ethnic identity in a multicultural, immigrant community in Rome. Spackman argues that “Lakhous the immigrant writer posing as a Sicilian (himself posing as a new immigrant) ‘passes’ as an Italian writer” (2011). Or to paraphrase, an immigrant writer posing as a character himself posing as an immigrant passes as an Italian writer.
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Amara Lakhous, an Algerian journalist who immigrated to Italy in 1995, is the exophonic author in Italian of five novels. Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio was his first novel, published in Italy in 2006, where it received several awards. In 2015 Lakhous moved to New York and after teaching at New York University for a few years, he now teaches at Yale University. Set in a multiethnic Rome, a city figured as a translation zone in the context of globalization, Clash of Civilizations itself poses as a noir novel, a whodunit of sorts, while in fact exploring migrant identities and language as indices of Italian-ness. The book is also a brilliant satire of Italian attitudes towards immigrants, including internal ones such as Neapolitans and Sicilians. Ultimately, the novel exposes the flawed, porous, and unstable alignment of Italian language and national identity.
Clash of Civilizations captures the subjectivities of immigrants and Italians alike, narrating in the first-person different forms of migrant suffering and language struggles. Structured as a series of testimonies by the immigrants and Italians who live or visit an apartment building in Piazza Vittorio, the book ostensibly seeks to solve the murder of a serial rapist (and a racist), the Gladiator, who lived in the building. At the center of each speaker’s narration is the question of who is Amedeo, a man who speaks perfect Italian and feels at home in Rome, and who helps the immigrants by advocating or translating for them. Amedeo has disappeared and so the police consider him a prime suspect in the murder of the Gladiator. Each speaker’s testimony comprises a chapter which proposes the speaker’s own version of Amedeo’s identity. All those interrogated agree that Amedeo is Italian and are amazed to learn that he is, in fact, an immigrant, like them. Because of his fluent Italian and his Italian habits, they have all assumed that he is Italian. Each testimony is followed by a chapter called a “wailing” in which we hear Amedeo’s recorded voice. These “wailings” gradually reveal Amedeo’s own version of himself, hinting at a tragedy that led him to flee his country. Amedeo also explains how his real name, Ahmed, was misheard by a Roman bar owner as Amedeo, a mistake which consequently defined him as both Italian and Roman. Amedeo willingly accepts this new identity.
His posing and passing as Italian is not only cultural-linguistic, but also kinetic and topographic, as he aspires to assimilate fully and forget his past. All the residents at Piazza Vittorio compare Amedeo to Rome itself, its heart and soul. As the Iranian immigrant Parviz states to the police, “Rome, without Amedeo, is worthless” (Clash, 26). An ardent walker and explorer of Roman urban space, Amedeo knows more about the history and streets of Rome than its long-time residents. He easily beats a Roman taxi driver in a competition over who knows better the streets of Rome. This adoption of Rome as his new home and Italian as his new mother tongue allows him to conceal the painful memories of his traumatic past and live in the present. Importantly, Amedeo works as a translator and at the end of the novel we learn that he used to be a court translator in Algeria before his fiancée was killed by terrorists. Thus his new, Italian, identity can metaphorically be described as an act of self-translation as well.
Amedeo’s translingual performance is curtailed not by the police who unmask him as an immigrant, but by an accident in the streets of his beloved Rome. Crossing the street in front of the Coliseum, he is hit by a car and ends up in the hospital, suffering from “severe brain trauma, as a result of which he may lose his memory” (Clash, 127). It is precisely the erasure of his memories of lived violence that he has sought throughout the narrative by constructing an Italian self. The novel concludes with this scenario in which the Algerian refugee Ahmed may permanently become the Italian Amedeo, blurring the difference between the two.
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If Amara Lakhous depicts an immigrant’s posing and passing as a way of bypassing traumatic memory, Elena Ferrante portrays an Italian subject who negotiates between idiolects and identities. “Elena Ferrante” is the pen name, gendered female, of a contemporary Italian writer whose biographical identity remains unknown despite her resounding success as “world literature” (Milkova Rousseva 2021). Her textual production consists of four stand-alone novels; a series of four novels known as the Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014); a children’s book; and three volumes of collected non-fiction. Like Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations, Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels posit language, language acquisition, and self-translation as sites for identity construction and negotiation (Milkova Rousseva 2023). The first-person narrator Elena Greco renounces her mother tongue, the Neapolitan dialect, in favor of standard Italian which provides her with a means of emancipation and social mobility but also severs her ties to her local community and to her childhood friend, Lila. Elena translates herself into a new idiolect, a new cultural context, and a new social class.
If in Lakhous, posing and passing work to counteract traumatic memories, as well as a monolingual conception of Italian identity, in Ferrante, posing and passing intend to conceal Elena’s lower-class origins and dialectal speech (Milkova Rousseva 2023). She consciously erases her Neapolitan dialect to acquire standard Italian, molding her speech to fit the idiolect of the educated circles she enters as a high school and university student and later, as a writer. But hers is a painful and traumatic process of gradually shaping her identity through language, oscillating between the traces of Neapolitan dialect and the polished speech of her new social-professional environment. Elena’s narrative bears witness to the trauma of learning a language to escape an oppressed, marginalized position and find a voice in the adoptive tongue. The traumatic nature of dialect emerges most powerfully in the context of Elena’s education and identity formation as a speaker of standard Italian. Throughout her school years, she makes enormous efforts and sacrifices to acquire fluency in standard Italian, to give herself “an educated identity” (The Story of the New Name, 201) and escape her lower-class origins. Her fellow university students mock her for her Neapolitan cadences and lexical choices until she sterilizes her language to remove all dialectal inflections.
Although she eliminates the dialectal traces from her language, she cannot conceal its powerful legacy—she cannot fully pass. Structurally, dialect permeates the narrative she is writing, occupying a palpable verbal and textual space in the tetralogy. Elena resorts to numerous metalinguistic glosses “he/she said in dialect” to signal the characters’ use of dialect but without reproducing it textually (Cavanaugh 2016). Dialect haunts her writing as a repetitive absence that cannot be overlooked but rather constantly points to its own omission, to Elena’s ongoing traumatic translation and self-translation from dialect into standard Italian (Milkova Rousseva 2023).
Elena’s geographic, social, and linguistic mobility recall that of internal immigrants who seek better opportunities for themselves and their families. (Like the Neapolitan and Sicilian characters in Lakhous’ Clash of Civilizations.) And like immigrants, Elena suffers from a “double absence” (Hron 2018), a sense of disorientation and alienation from both her original and her adoptive cultures. In the fourth book, Elena attempts to communicate in dialect with her friend Lila, seeking to recover a state of lost intimacy. Notably, Lila and Elena’s verbal interactions occur through acts of translation:
It occurred to me that now it was a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier. I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language. (The Story of the Lost Child, 362)
Each friend translates her own speech into the language of the other, but in the process, each betrays the language that has come to constitute her identity. Elena has assimilated to such an extent that her mother tongue, the Neapolitan of her childhood, has become a foreign language. The hierarchical relationship between dialect and standard Italian is reversed: now dialect signifies for Elena an inaccessible, desirable reality – that of Lila’s inner life and words, of their former attachment. The narrator of the Neapolitan Noels now aspires to pose but fails to pass as a dialect-speaking subject.
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Like Elena Greco, Jhumpa Lahiri’s autobiographical self narrates from the position of a subject navigating between languages. Unlike Elena Ferrante’s elusive identity, Jhumpa Lahiri’s biography is easily accessed. She is a renowned American writer of Bengali origins who grew up in Rhode Island, speaking Bengali with her immigrant parents and reading and writing in English at school—a bilingual scenario typical of second-generation immigrants. Her debut collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 and was followed by more award-winning works: two novels and another collection of short stories. Although not a migrant herself, she embarked on a journey of elective exile, linguistic self-reinvention, and self-translation. In 2012 she moved to Rome, renouncing English and Bengali, and adopted Italian for her creative expression. Collaborating with the weekly publication Internazionale, Lahiri published essays tracing her language immersion and the emergence of her authorial self in Italian. Collected in the volume In Other Words (In altre parole), these essays narrate not only Lahiri’s struggles with Italian, but also her self-reinvention enacted in the process of translating the self.
Her elective exile from the English language has generated more works in Italian – a novel (which she self-translated in English), a book of poetry, and a collection of short stories. She has turned to literary translation as well producing a massive textual corpus in both English and Italian. But my focus here is on Lahiri’s In Other Words which shares with Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels a concern with translation and self-translation as the shaping forces of professional identity. Lahiri’s linguistic journey which originates in a position of privilege and cultural capital could not be more different from the traumas suffered by Amedeo/Ahmed and the other immigrants in Lakhous’s novel, or from Elena Greco’s adoption of standard Italian as her only means of emancipation from a life of violence and poverty. Lahiri’s is nonetheless a traumatic experience since she must negotiate her fraught relationship with her “mother tongue,” Bengali, and her “stepmother tongue,” English. And the more she tries to pass as Italian, the more she must come to terms with the trauma of her own linguistic imperfection.
Despite their significant differences, as language learners, Amedeo/Ahmed, Elena Greco, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s narrated persona share a performance of posing as native speakers. Paradoxically, Lahiri’s performance is centered on linguistic imperfection, manifested as the compulsive insistence on her linguistic incompetence in Italian, the recurring discussions of her linguistic insecurity, her deliberate embracing of ignorance, and finally, her frustration at not blending in— that is, not sounding and looking Italian. In adopting a new language, Lahiri has given up the expert knowledge and skills of an American, Anglophone author, and found herself in the seat of a novice learner and writer in Italian. And hence, she has to both find and prove her new professional identity.
In her essays, she resorts to more than 50 metaphors that capture her language learning process and revolve around her linguistic imperfection. The most evocative metaphor for entering the new language is the “trauma” (In Other Words, 55) she experiences when she cannot unlock the door to her apartment in Via Giulia, the day after she settles in Rome. The eventual unlocking of the door signals Lahiri’s symbolic crossing of the threshold of Italian, the “synthesis of her translingual existence” (de Rogatis 2023, 175). The metaphorics of denied entry (the locked door), however, betray an anxiety—a traumatic insecurity—about entry and appropriation (Milkova Rousseva 2023). Lahiri’s lexical choices reveal a subject traumatized by the idea of inhabiting a space illegally, of being unmasked as merely posing (Milkova Rousseva 2023). When writing in Italian, she says she becomes an intruder and an impostor (In Other Words, 83), or an illegal immigrant of sorts. And yet, she protests vehemently when in her Italian encounters she is taken for a foreigner or immigrant.
Lahiri recounts a series of incidents when despite her fluent and grammatically correct Italian delivered with confidence, she is repeatedly addressed in English and asked where she is from. Unlike the unlocked door, Lahiri cannot cross the boundary of racial otherness, a boundary which defines and enforces the national, linguistic, and racial markers of Italian identity. This barred entry elicits strong feelings of resentment and discontent. Her efforts to learn Italian are invisible and unappreciated, underscoring her non-belonging (In Other Words, 139). The dynamics of Lahiri’s linguistic performance—her meticulously acquired and exhibited fluency—can be understood as posing but not passing. She simulates something she is not (a native speaker, a white Italian, an Italian writer) but is unmasked for something she is or looks like—a foreigner, an immigrant, a person of color. And yet, thanks to her extensive autobiographical writing documenting her language learning and insisting on her linguistic imperfection, Lahiri succeeds in impersonating an Italian writer, producing the very text we are reading. Thus, I suggest, echoing Spackman on Lakhous, that it is precisely in posing as an imperfect Italian language speaker/writer, in performing her linguistic otherness, that Lahiri passes as one.
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It’s important to note that these texts by Lakhous, Ferrante, and Lahiri have all been translated in English by Ann Goldstein and thus share more than the thematic and diegetic concerns outlined above. Their English arrives by way of Goldstein’s language which intrepidly navigates the challenges of exophonic writing (Lakhous, Lahiri), polyphonic narration (Lakhous), implied dialect (Ferrante), and language-learner discourse (Lahiri). The different scenarios of posing and passing as Italian unfold by way of translation and self-translation in the context of migrant suffering, upward mobility, and elective exile. Lakhous portrays an immigrant who passes as Italian to dissimulate his identity as a traumatized refugee. Ferrante’s marginalized dialect speaker translates her identity upward but, in the end, her passing leads to the loss of her mother tongue. Lahiri’s autobiographical language learner fails to perform an Italian identity but leverages her failure in order to pass as an Italian writer. These three case studies provide a productive position from which we can explore Italian post-monolingual practices and translingual identities, disrupting the perception of a monolingual Italian nation or literature.
Stiliana Milkova Rousseva is the pen name of Stiliana Milkova, a Bulgarian exophonic writer, translator, and scholar.
Works Cited
de Rogatis, Tiziana. 2023. “In altre parole di Jhumpa Lahiri. La traduttrice, la metamorfosi e l’esposizione narrativa al trauma” in Tiziana de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi. Traumi e tranlinguismi in Morante, Hoffman, Kristof, Scego e Lahiri. Siena: Edizione Università per Stranieri di Siena, 169-190.
Ferrante, Elena. 2013. The Story of the New Name. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions.
Ferrante, Elena. 2015. The Story of the Lost Child. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions.
Hron, Madelaine. 2018. “The Trauma of Displacement.” In Trauma and Literature, edited by J. Roger Kurtz, 284–298. Cambridge University Press.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2016. In Other Words. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Vintage Books.
Lakhous, Amara. 2008. Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions.
Milkova Rousseva, Stiliana. 2023. “The Trauma of Language Learning and Self-Translation in Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri” in Romance Studies 41(4): 283-302.
Spackman, Barbara. 2011. “Italiani DOC? Passing and Posing from Giovanni Finati to Amara Lakhous” in California Italian Studies. 2(1).
Williams, Linda. 2001. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton University Press