“Translating Identity through Women’s Voices: Michèle Roberts’s Fair Exchange and The Looking Glass”

Thanks to her double literary and cultural background – English and French – Michèle Roberts can be defined as a writer in-between cultures. Her mixed cultural heritage becomes a useful tool to shape the richness and particularity of language that characterises her prose and poetry. In all her novels French and English elements intermingle and are combined producing stimulating and sophisticated narratives both at the level of content and form. Her Anglo-French cultural knowledge clearly emerges in her use of the English language enriched by French tones.For Roberts language shaping is a means to recover her own past in-between two cultures; she uses language to open up an infinite series of meanings in a single word in order to outline the multiplicity of possible points of view of any subject.The title of my paper “Translating identity” refers not only to the structure of her texts where literary and cultural traditions are presented through a discussion of translations between cultures, but also to the importance given to the act of translation by the author. In Roberts’s works it is possible to retrace notions of translation: the translation of identity in writing and of cultural translation, or the passage from one language to another typical of bilingual authors, last but not least the practice of translation which Roberts herself carries on. Translation and writing are thus strongly intermingled in Roberts’s art, ‘translation like imitation, can be a means of learning the craft of writing’. Translation as a language transfer act becomes a sign of cultural reference and self-definition.