Margins and challenges of Italian American studies: the role of translation in Joseph Tusiani's poetics

Joseph Tusiani occupies a particular position in the panorama of Italian American studies and his opus has been explored in this context. He is a poet, translator and scholar who writes in four languages (Italian, English, Latin and the Gargano dialect), and the complexity of his literary production evades the interpretive categories of ethnic approaches. His poems and his translations have been analyzed by highlighting those common constitutive elements and expressive modalities underlying his poetic research. Two translations have been selected to exemplify his approach in front of very different poetic genres and epochs: Pulci’s Morgante, the Renaissance mock-heroic epic, for the first time completely translated into English, and Leopardi’s “L’infinito”, the Italian Romantic idyll that has been most translated in the world.