Translating the ‘city of the eye’: Mapping contemporary Venice between travel writing and residents’ accounts

Marinetti, Cristina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5877-280X 2025. Translating the ‘city of the eye’: Mapping contemporary Venice between travel writing and residents’ accounts. Text Matters Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This article explores the ‘translational city’ through the unique lens of contemporary Venice. The multiple cities that have been the subject of work on the ‘translational city’ display different linguistic and cultural relations: from the dual city, to colonial/post-colonial cities, to cosmopolitan cities. While Venice historically shares some of the characteristics of these models there is a uniqueness in the social, cultural and linguistic make-up of contemporary Venice which is exceptional in terms of both nature and scale. The progressive hyper-touristification of Venice in the last 30 years has caused “dramatic changes to Venice’s urban structure” and social fabric (Bertocchi & Visentin, 1) and has made travel writing central to how Venice’s urban spaces are imagined and experienced. This perspective prompts a reconsideration of the role of travel writing in shaping our perception and our experience of the city. The article offers a comparative analysis of how the city is imagined today, by placing Joseph Brodsky’s influential English travel account of Venice, Watermark, in conversation with two collections of residents’ narratives and maps how translation mediates between the city’s global perceptions and its local realities. The analysis uncovers an important disjuncture between how Venice is imagined by Brodsky as a global citizen and how it is remembered, memorialized, and constructed by Venetian residents as “denizen” (Cronin, 6) seeking to reconstitute a local/minoritized language. The article explores Venice as a specific example of translational city while reflecting on a broader set of questions on the politics of language, travel, translation and community.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Modern Languages
ISSN:	2083-2931
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	2 April 2025
Date of Acceptance:	1 April 2025
Last Modified:	15 May 2025 14:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177346

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