Princesa: The Textual Space Between Translation and Divergence

This article examines Princesa, a testimonial text in which Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque, a Brazilian transvestite who emigrated to Italy in the early 1990s, narrates her life, from her childhood and adolescence in Brazil and through her trip to Europe. In the Roman prison of Rebibbia, Fernanda meets Maurizio Jannelli, a former member of the Italian Red Brigades sentenced to life for crimes related to the fighting of the seventies, and Giovanni Tamponi, a Sardinian shepherd imprisoned for various armed robberies. Fernanda, Maurizio and Giovanni will give life to this peculiar and hybrid text, Princesa, considered one of the first examples of the so called “Italian literature of migration”.