Illness as a Foreign Tongue: Therapeutic Translation in Contemporary Italian Women's Poetry.

Abstract

This article puts translation on the center stage of second-wave medical humanities. It argues that translation is a way to describe medical discourse in its complexities, from the patient-doctor exchange to the patients' account of their illness, and from instances of medical (mis)communication to the lack thereof (untranslatability). After introducing the notion of therapeutic translation in the light of Julia Kristeva's theory of depression, it puts forward three models of therapeutic translation: outer translation, inner translation, and self-translation. This newly forged method is applied to a series of exemplary cases drawn from the repertoire of contemporary Italian women's poetry.