L’Italie au miroir : bilinguisme et auto-traduction dans la poésie de Christina Rossetti

• Main Author: Mélody Enjoubault
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2013-03-01
• Series: Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
• Subjects: Rossetti (Christina); bilingualism; Italy; self-translation; mirror; identity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cve/311

Christina Rossetti, known as one of the greatest British poets of the 19th century, also wrote poems in Italian, the language of her origins. These poems, albeit a minor part of her work and mostly excluded from publication during her lifetime, play an interesting role insofar as they create diffractions which reflect a fragmented identity and are present in these hidden texts as well as in their confrontation with the published English poems. This article, through the detailed analysis of the series Il Rosseggiar dell' Oriente and of Rossetti’s translations of her own nursery rhymes gathered under the title Ninna-Nanna, aims at studying the complex relationships between ‘the same’ and ‘the other’ caused by these poems written in a language at once foreign and familiar, as well as focusing on the way the presence of otherness is eventually reintegrated by the poetical text.