Incontro con Marina Colasanti. L’Italia di una passeggera in transito[1] La conversazione informale con Marina Colasanti, in occasione della mia traduzione – con la sua collaborazione – della raccolta poetica Passageira in transito, è avvenuta il 21

Marina Colasanti has been one of Brazil’s best known and most decorated writers. However, her poetry, even in Brazil itself, is not as well known. Within it, more than in her fiction or her rich body of work for children, the author’s biographical connection to Italy is most evident. Born in 1937 in Asmara, at that time an Italian colony in Africa, and later moving with her family to Libya and then Italy, Colasanti emigrated to Brazil as a 12-year-old in 1948. A journey that, because of her cultural and linguistic ties to her motherland (that emerge from her poetic declarations and from the underlying musical structure of her Lusophone verse) identifies her for all intents and purposes as a transnational author. Starting with a conversation with Marina Colasanti held in January 2024 at her home in Rio de Janeiro, the analysis delves into her poetic journey, dwelling in particular on the collection Passageira em trânsito, to highlight precisely how this biographical and cultural “transiting” functions towards the construction of a translingual imaginary and its “sonorous rendering”. Marina Colasanti’s illuminating definition of Italian as the language «in which I stand in silence», summarizes the deep attachment to mother-tongue and native culture of poets existing in transit between literatures. From the fabric of this “silence” – the emptiness left elsewhere by the migrating body and its voice – a poetry is woven, rooted in a borderless land, always promised, characterized by the literary richness of its interpreters.