Translating Gender and Race Through Music in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

Trumpet is the 1998 debut novel by Scottish writer and Scots Makar Jackie Kay. It narrates, through the “language of music”, the life story of a black transgender jazz musician who, born anatomically female, lives his entire life as a man. Jazz music, encapsulated by the figurative image of the trumpet, contributes not only to shape the novel thematically and structurally, but it is also employed by Kay as a linguistic ‘instrument’ capable of expressing a more fluid conception of gender and racial identities. As a matter of fact, the novel’s discursive pattern is characterised by some basic elements borrowed from jazz music such as variations on a theme, repetitions, improvisation and even, at the level of the linguistic register, by the resemanticisation of its jargon. In other words, even the language itself is altered through a process of linguistic creativity which involves the re-contextualisation and re-signification of specific terms belonging to jazz music in order to express an anti-essentialist notion of both gender and race categories of belonging. Drawing on a theoretical framework influenced by translation and gender studies, critical race theory and the interdisciplinary field of music as discourse, this essay investigates the author’s attempt to de-essentialise the self with regard to gender and race through the use of the language of music (jazz in particular) considered as specialised discourse. The exploration of the translation choices made in the Italian translation of the novel (by Sandro Melani for La Tartaruga, 1999), together with the proposal of alternative solutions on the basis of the aforementioned critical reflection, is then aimed at showing the fruitful insight that the intersection of specialised discourse, translation and gender studies can provide not only to the linguistic interpretation and fruition of literary texts, but also to their translation into other languages.