Code-Switching in Caterina Edwards’ The Lion’s Mouth: A Practice-Led Ecological Translation Approach

In this article, I will analyse my translation of Canadian author Caterina Edwards’ novel The Lion’s Mouth (1982/1993), published under the title La bocca di leone (2023), through the lens of Clive Scott’s notion of “ecomorphosis” according to which translation “extends” the source text, thus allowing target-text readers to “re-enter” it and “inhabit” its changing “environment” (2018: 84). This will allow me to discuss how an ecological reading can inform the strategies used to translate a literary work characterised by constant spatial and linguistic movement. The Lion’s Mouth is set in the Venice of the 1970s, suffering the consequences of unsustainable urban planning; in the unwelcoming Alberta of the 1960s that Venetian migrant character Bianca Mazzin struggles to make her home; as well as in a romanticised Venice of the 1950s inhabiting her memories and imagination. Significantly, the movement between Canada and Italy is reflected in the shift from English to Italian, thus resulting in code-switching. Whilst this literary device is widely used in Italian-Canadian literary texts (Pivato 1987; Verdicchio 1997; Canton 2004; Casagranda 2010), it is partly erased in their Italian translations, as pointed out by Michela Baldo (2018), who interprets this translation approach as the publishers’ and translators’ attempt to “return” Italian-Canadian authors to their Italian origins. By contrast, in this article, I will show how in my translation, I drew on Scott’s notion of translation as an “act of diasporic dispersal” (2018: 9), sending the source text on transcultural journeys by renewing the environment presented in the source text.