In The Footsteps of Black British Fiction: Translating “All the Lonely People” by Mike Gayle

The following dissertation will present the translation of a few passages from the British novel All the Lonely People, written by the Birmingham-born novelist with Caribbean origins Mike Gayle. Even though Gayle’s novels have been translated in several languages throughout his career, this book does not have an Italian translation to this day. During the 90s, Mike Gayle worked as a journalist for several English magazines. However, he is generally known in England for being the author of a number of lad-lit novels, including the Sunday’s Best Times’ My Legendary Girlfriend, in which the ‘unheroic masculinity’ of the characters is used to reverse the canonic representation of men. Nevertheless, the lad-lit universe that characterized his publications for most of his career is almost completely abandoned with the release of All the Lonely People. The novel was first published in the UK in 2020, and it was also distributed in the USA for the first time in Gayle’s career. which is a novel that follows in the footsteps of Black-British fiction, while also staying true to Gayle’s tradition of writing popular fiction. With the story of Hubert, Gayle wants to pay tribute to his Caribbean heritage by recounting the story of a Jamaican immigrant and by following his life in the UK. Just like any other story about the Windrush Generation, the main character soon realizes that his life in the country that was supposed to welcome him will not be as idyllic as he thought, and the deeply rooted racism in 1950s Britain will affect both his personal and his working life. The novel also follows Hubert’s life as an elderly, almost 60 years after first docking to London, and explores the way in which loneliness can really condition people’s lives in modern times. Starting with an overview of Black-British fiction, and more specifically focusing on the rise and development of the term as well as its implications, this dissertation explores the main themes of this genre while attempting to create a parallel with Gayle’s novel. The second chapter of this dissertation will focus on the translation of a few selected passages from the novel and will present a proposal for an Italian translation of the novel with a parallel text in English. Finally, by relying on studies conducted by authoritative scholar and translation experts, the third chapter of this dissertation will focus on identifying and analysing some of the most characteristics elements of Gayle’s writing, present some of the most challenging elements in translation, and explain how such features have been translated into Italian, as well as the reason why a specific choice has been made. In particular, the analysis focuses on the rendering of humour, culture-specific references, 1 both to British and Caribbean culture, and of the two different non-standard varieties of English spoken by the characters in the novel.