Laura Fontanella's 'Perdere il filo' explores translation as feminist and political practice

Laura Fontanella, translator and editor, published the essay 'Perdere il filo' on August 30, 2024, as part of the Culture Radicali series by Gruppo Ippolita. The book examines translation through a political lens, linking it to transfeminist practices, decoloniality, and intersectionality. Fontanella, founder of the Gender in Translation laboratory, argues that translation is never neutral: it involves the translator's identity, biases, and social position. She discusses how translation can be a care work, taking charge of another's authorship with attention to structural oppressions. The laboratory, started eight years ago with Libreria Antigone in Milan, involved collective translation experiments and was later adopted by Libreria delle Donne in Bologna and Università Moro in Bari. Fontanella also addresses challenges such as translating texts with which she disagrees politically, the importation of English terms like 'empowerment', and the difficulty of translating specialized texts (e.g., Stacy Alaimo's 'Allo Scoperto' requiring study of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, or role-playing games needing community knowledge). She cites the example of the first Italian translation of 'The Lord of the Rings' by Vittoria Alliata, later revised by Wu Ming and Ottavio Fatica to reclaim the fantasy genre from fascist appropriation, illustrating resistance within translation communities.