“Writing the blues: Jackie Kay’s intersemiotic translations of words and music”

In this paper I focus on the poetry and fiction of Jackie Kay, and in particular I analyse her ‘multimodal’ texts, that is, texts (a sequence of poems and the novel 'Trumpet') that combine multiple semiotic channels, by employing the expressive strategies of music (the blues and jazz), translated into the verbal code. In these texts, we can find the most prominent themes in Kay’s production: origin, legitimacy, and authenticity; identity and the construction of subjectivity. Moreover, the blues jazz music do not merely provide the main motifs of Kay’s stories, but they also provide the code, structure, and expressive devices through which stories are told.