The Trinidadian Calypso as Oral Heritage: Linguistic and Cultural Issues in the Italian Translation of V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street

Abstract

Assuming that the calypso belongs to the many-faceted field of Caribbean orature and represents a significant aspect of a cultural continuum between Africa and the New World, this paper aims at investigating its role in V.S. Naipaul’s third novel, Miguel Street (1959), where the calypso emerges as a musical genre conveying and constantly reshaping the socio-cultural identity of Indo-Caribbean people in Port of Spain. The paper also deals with some linguistic problems resulting from the translation of calypsoes into another language. Particularly, the Italian translation of the novel shows that a twofold difficulty arises. Firstly, the translator needs to decide how to reproduce the colloquial liveliness of the Creole language used for the calypso and, secondly, how to translate into Italian the manifold cultural data that all those popular ditties convey, if it is true that “calypso is a purely local form. [...]. The pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider” (V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage).