What makes a controversial comparison? Alba de Céspedes, the 1968 Insurrections and Cuban Revolution

This talk focuses on the Italian-Cuban writer Alba de Céspedes (1911- 1997) and her collection of poems about the 1968 Parisian insurrection: Chansons des filles de mai (1968), originally written in French and subsequently self-translated into Italian. The poems feature two comparisons which connect historical events across time and space, establishing a relationship between the 1968 Parisian insurrection, the fight against fascism in Italy and France, and the 1959 Cuban Revolution. These comparisons drove De Céspedes desire for translation, as she identified in Italy and Cuba ideal target readerships. While the self-translation into Italian did not invalidate the comparisons at the core of the poems, the translation into Spanish, which involved the collaboration of a Cuban dissent, challenged the local narrative of history and resulted in censorship. Drawing on unpublished material from the Mondadori archives, I will reflect on the limits of comparisons, on what makes a historical comparison controversial, and on the relationship between censorship, translatability and comparability.
Elisa Segnini (PhD University of Toronto) is Senior Lecturer (research and teaching) in Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on Italian literature in a world literature perspective, with a focus on fin-de-siècle and contemporary fiction. She has written on the relationship between literature, visual arts and thought, on theatre translation, and on translingual and multilingual writing. She is the author of the monograph Fragments, Genius and Madness: Masks and Mask Making in the fin-de-siècle Imagination (Legenda, 2021), and with Michael Subialka, she co-edited Gabriele D’Annunzio and World Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2023). Her current project explores the different meanings that fiction featuring more than one language acquires as it travels across languages and media. She is co-editor for the journal Comparative Critical Studies.

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