From Scampia to Rione Luzzatti: Marginality and its Language in the Age of Convergence

Abstract

In the age of convergence, bestselling novels have become parts of the phenomenon known as ‘branding’, and cultural production is highly conditioned by the mechanisms that regulate global markets. This article argues that if the contemporary global novel tends to render the plurilingual experience implicitly to ensure translatability, the use of dialect has become crucial for the construction of marginality on screen for products designed to travel internationally. By focusing on a case study grounded in the Italian context, a comparison between Roberto Saviano's Gomorra (2006), with its extensions in theatre, cinema, TV and fandom, and Elena Ferrante's tetralogy L'amica geniale (2011–2014), with its dramatized versions for radio, stage and television, it compares the intersection of language, space and power in recent examples of transmedia storytelling. Drawing on studies of multilingualism and marginality, the author addresses the following questions: how do linguistic strategies influence the portrayal of the urban periphery as a marginal, subaltern space? How does transmedia transposition relate to interlingual translation? Does the relation between fiction and the socio-linguistic reality represented change in the translation process? To what ends is dialect deployed in transnational productions designed for global reach, and what characterizes the reception by Italian and international audiences? A focus on transmedia adaptations, this article suggests, leads us to reconsider the paradigm of multilingualism in translation.