‘What is an Afro-Scot anyway?’: Reframing Jackie Kay’s Fluid Identities in Translation

In the panorama of the Italian translations of African or Afro-diasporic literature, the work of the Scottish writer of mixed Scottish and Nigerian parentage Jackie Kay figures as an interesting case in point. Not only is her work strongly influenced by her Scottish roots and a deep interest in the Nigerian cultural heritage of her birth father, but as a lesbian, a mother, and the daughter of adoptive parents, Kay returns multiple times in her oeuvre on the impossibility to fix identity into compartmentalized categories of belonging therefore rendering the translation of her work into other languages a challenging endeavour.
Drawing on a methodological approach which combines translation studies, gender studies and black diaspora studies, the aim of this chapter is to explore how Kay’s “first-level translation” of her experience onto the page is rendered into another language and socio-cultural context through its reframing into Italian.
Considering that the creation of paratextual elements is linked to a culturally-specific time and place and as such proves particularly suitable as an instrument of cultural translation, the chapter will focus more specifically on the reframing in Italian of Kay’s collections of poetry The Adoption Papers (1991) and Fiere (2011) through a contrastive analysis of the paratextual elements of both source and target texts.