Oodgeroo Noonuccal, My People. La mia gente. Edited by Margherita Zanoletti
A metal plaque set in the sidewalk at Circular Quay, Sydney, commemorating author and poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal as part of the Sydney Writers Walk series. Wikimedia commons.
Margherita Zanoletti, a graduate of the University of Sydney and currently serving as Modern Languages reference librarian at the
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, has just published a critical edition in Italian of First Nations author Oodgeroo Noonuccal's
My People
(1970): Oodgeroo Noonuccal,
My People.
La mia gente, a cura di Margherita Zanoletti, con un testo di Alexis Wright. Milano: Mimesis. Collana “Eterotopie” diretta da Pierre Dalla Vigna e Salvo Vaccaro, n. 710, 348 pp., ISBN: 9788857576763.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal's
My People is today considered a classic of postcolonial literature, and this volume is the first translation of her writings into Italian. This anthology gives voice to the Australian Indigenous peoples – marginalized, decimated and evicted from their own lands with the arrival of European colonisers. Oodgeroo is the first recorded aboriginal Poetess. Her literary journey, begun in the mid 1960s with the collection We Are Going, published under her anglicised name of Kath Walker, was conflated into
My People. Oodgeroo's poetry recovers and rewrites aboriginal oral and cultural traditions, reclaiming at the same time rights negated by political governors.
The volume features the original text by Oodgeroo with the first Italian translation of the poems. The publication is enriched with an extensive introduction and a glossary. It also includes a text by
Alexis Wright (Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature, University of Melbourne), translated into Italian.
The book (in printed and digital formats) can be ordered by clicking on the book image below, with an excerpt also available.
