Ruthenberg, Myriam Swennen

In their comparative study of Medieval and Renaissance European women
writers, Pamela Benson and Victoria Kirkham, exploring the relationship between Italian
women writers and their English and French counterparts, assumed a "dynamic
interaction" existed.
Despite the absence of Spanish women writers in that collection when observing
the themes and writing strategies ofModerata Fonte and Maria de Zayas Sotomayor, one
can observe a number of similarities that points toward a dynamic interaction and
moreover, to the transmission of proto-feminist ideas along "memory chains".

Globalization has become an agent of socioeconomic and communicative integration and today it envelops all aspects of human life. The quasi-immediate exchange of information that surpasses the now ancient barriers of time and space has triggered a sociocultural revolution with perceptible effects on the linguistic characteristics that are at the core of collective and individual identities. Among the most noticeable cultural changes are neologisms, which are often at the center of heated linguistic debates. Some claim that the increased use of neologisms in the Italian language is a natural component of the fluctuating nature of a language and that their use enriches it. Linguistic purists take a more conservative stance and view neologisms as a linguistic enemy who blurs the distinctive differences among languages and robs them of their uniqueness. Neologisms are a mirror of contemporary Italian society and their use entails an often subconscious support of certain social currents.

Sandro Penna, an understudied Italian poet whose literary corpus is produced
during the end period and eventual fall of Italian fascism, writes Appunti, the second
volume of his major poetic corpus, from 1938-49. In it, he explicates a poetic of an
unapologetic, open homoeroticism that allows one to examine the obstacles a translator
faces in considering how one can remain faithful to the original poems and the identity
the poet creates. Keeping in mind theoretical influences informing the creation and
translation of poetry and the political choices inherent therein, my translations of these
poems mediate the content and form in the target text to maintain the importance of the
context in which the originals are written. This thesis and these translations aim to reexamine the importance of Penna as a poet, address the importance of translation in the
establishment of foreign poets, and develop a new perspective in Translation Studies that
considers the interdisciplinary applications of Gender and Sexuality Studies.