La chiave della lingua d’America: Remediation of Roger Williams'. A Key into the Language of America

In 163, Roger Williams wrote a remarkable book entitled The Key into the Language of America or an Help to the Language of the Natives in that Part of America Called New England, which we have translated into La chiave della lingua d’Ameri- ca. This article proposes insights that evolved in this experience of translation/(re) mediation from both the linguistic and literary-cultural points of view. We illustrate the different levels on which Williams mediates Narragansett into a written version. He suggests a possible reconfiguration of two cultural perspectives: that of the Nar- ragansetts and that of the colonists. Williams then translates the native language into English in the implicit dialogue he constructs by arranging thirty-two different the- matic chapters. The Key is not a formal grammar, but a phrase book through which he discloses a novel approach to the wilderness and its inhabitants, thereby giving, as he suggests in the section To the reader, “a little key [that] may open a box where lies a bunch of keys” (p. 6).