Archetipi esperienziali della cultura classica: la traduzione in ELF per un ‘Turismo del Lusso’

Abstract – This chapter presents a long-term, interdisciplinary and multifaceted analysis of the cognitive archetypes of epic Mediterranean ‘odysseys’ towards ‘Utopian destinations’ proposed to the luxury tourists for an emotional experience of Apulia conceived as Utopia. The character of Ulysses embodies many of the reasons that the tourist-traveller is assumed to aspire to and the aim of this work is to make western tourists rediscover their ‘identity roots’ as seafarers shared with the modern non-western migrants crossing the sea to come to Apulia. The case study reported in this chapter proposes the Homeric place, Scheria, as an evocation of Thomas More’s land of Utopia. The ethnopoetic translation (Hymes 1994, 2003) into English as Lingua Franca (ELF) of some selected verses taken from Homer’s Odyssey (books VI-VIII) is justified by the idea of updating the ancient metrical forms of the hexameter, typical of epic narrative, rendering them cognitively and culturally accessible to various groups of tourists. They will become aware of the cultural values of the different western/non-western and ancient/modern populations that have produced such narratives thanks to a variation of the English language stylistically and structurally adapted to their everyday modes of communication (Lakoff, Johnson 1980, 1999; Guido 2012). More specifically, translation becomes a re-creation of Ancient-Greek and Latin narrative forms of classical ‘lingua francas’ within a contemporary ELF variation in order to allow an emotional involvement of the tourists through a linguistic and cultural perspective