Per una grammatica dello spazio. Montréal, L’Aquila, Venezia: tre città in traduzione

The concept of “cities in translation”, derived from the work of Canadian researcher Sherry Simon (2008; 2013), opens the way to a perception of languages as active forces in the transformation of the cities we inhabit. If Simon focuses on bilingual cities, and in particular on Montréal, analysing the continuous transitions from one language to another, it would be even more interesting to analyse the space between languages, moving in the direction of a study of the heterolinguism inherent in each space, that is, the intrinsic plurality of each space and of its voices. This article will place the case of Montreal alongside that of two Italian cities, L’Aquila and Venice, in an attempt to broaden the concept of the translational or “post-translational” city, thanks to the reading of the different but complementary ways of living in translation that these cities show us, in a physical and metaphorical sense. These pages cannot, of course, fulfil the task of outlining a real method of analysis of the city in translation, but rather aspire to open up a field, that of translation studies, to a true and profound encounter with the reality of contemporary urban spaces. The intention is therefore to contribute to a “linguistique d’intervention” that can act where languages are used and where languages influence our ways of living, that is, on what Gaffuri (2019) calls the “imaginaires de la vi(ll)e”, because space is not alone but is “consubstantial” to the languages that inhabit it and contribute to its formation.