Abstract
Translators of Shakespearean texts find themselves treading on slippery terrains. While this makes their work more complex, it contributes to the creative challenge of their task, and certainly begins before the translation process itself:
[I]t is obvious that the understanding and evaluation of Shakespeare rests on textual, cultural, and ideological codes which are quite independent from [sic] the linguistic barrier and therefore tend to confront editors, critics, directors, adapters, and other English-speaking rewriters of Shakespeare with much the same dilemmas as the translators abroad.3
The notorious instability of the source text can be the first case in point. Nowadays the possibility of establishing an authentic version of Shakespeare’s plays is widely believed to be a myth. In the words of the 2007 editors of the RSC Complete Works, this is ‘the lesson of late twentieth-century scholarship and editorial theory: that there is no single definitive authorial text, because many different agents at different moments influence the creation and dissemination of a play’.4 Even more drastically, Stephen Orgel approaches the issue of authenticity from the assumption, amongst others, that most texts ascribed to Shakespeare are too long for their (widely accepted) average duration of two and a half hours; the resulting implication is that the author ‘habitually began with more than he needed, that his scripts offered the company a range of possibilities, and that the process of production was a collaborative one of selection as well as of realization and interpretation’.5
It is therefore much easier for directors working in languages other than English to experiment with Shakespeare’s plays, because they are not bound by the canonical status attributed to the texts in English.2
Many thanks to Marco Ponti, who shared with me his translation and all the fun that went with it; Gabriele Vacis and his company, for their generous flesh and blood; Glen Blackhall, for his brilliant e-mails; Sarah Annes Brown, for her stimulating SCAENA Conference (Cambridge, July 2008); Enza Minutella for her kind help; and above all, R. A. Henderson for contaminating me with her passion for Shakespeare — and incurably so.
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Notes
S. Bassnett, ‘Engendering Anew: Shakespeare, Gender and Translation’, in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. T. Hoenselaars (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 57.
D. Delabastita, ‘ShakespeareTranslation’, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. M. Baker (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 223.
J. Bate and H. Sénéchal, ‘Editing Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century’, The European English Messenger 16.1 (Spring 2007): 27.
S. Orgel, ‘The Authentic Shakespeare’, Representations 21 (1998): 7.
G. Melchiori, ‘Romeo and Juliet dal testo alla scena’, in Romeo and Juliet dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera (Bologna: CLUEB, 1986), 9.
J. N. Loehlin, Shakespeare in Production: Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.
S. Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 57–8.
D. Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare without His Language’, in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. D. Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6, 15.
On the ever unclear border between these two terms, see V. Minutella, Reclaiming Romeo and Juliet: Italian Translations for Page, Stage and Screen (University of Warwick, Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies: PhD Dissertation, 2005), 37.
T. Hoenselaars, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. T. Hoenselaars (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 20.
J. L. Levenson, Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 95.
G. Anderman, ‘Drama Translation’, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. M. Baker (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 71.
Minutella, Reclaiming Romeo, 149. Besides, a useful perspective from which to analyse our working procedure is constituted by Descriptive Translation Studies, which focus on the cultural aspects affecting a translation (S. Bassnett, ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. S. Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), and by the widely shared opinion that ‘acculturation is inherent in all translation’ (Minutella, Reclaiming Romeo, 19).
V. Minutella, ‘What’s in a Name? References to Women in Romeo and Juliet and Their Translation into Italian’ in Investigating English with Corpora: Studies in Honour of Maria Teresa Prat, ed. A. Martelli and V. Pulcini (Monza: Polimetrica International Scientific, 2008), 240.
S. Wells, ‘Romeo and Juliet and Sex’, SCAENA Conference (Cambridge: Anglia Ruskin University, 19 July 2008).
F. Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), 59.
Ibid., 53.
M. Ponti and P. Deandrea, ‘William Shakespeare: Romeo Et Juliet. Raccontato da Marco Ponti e Pietro Deandrea’, in Romeo Σt Juliet — R Σt J Links (Torino: Fondazione Teatro Stabile Torino, 2005), 89. The translations back into English from our Italian version are mine and appear in parenthesis.
Quotes from the text of Romeo and Juliet are from William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. J. L. Levenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
P. Holding, Romeo and Juliet: Text and Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 14. Minutella identifies a similar pattern in many important Italian translations of the twentieth century, namely Mario Praz’s (1943–64), Cesare Vico Lodovici’s (1960), and Giorgio Melchiori’s revision (1976) of Salvatore Quasimodo’s version (1949); Minutella, Reclaiming, 139–45.
R. A. Henderson, Shakespeak: Essays on the Language of Shakespeare’s Plays (Torino: Trauben, 2009), 48, 80.
D. Traversi, ‘Shakespeare: The Young Dramatist and the Poet’, in The Age of Shakespeare: Volume 2 of the New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford (London: Penguin, 1982), 285.
G. Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (London and Atlantic Highland, NJ: Athlone, 1997), 34, 145, 157.
I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Penguin, 1957), 24.
A. Knee and D. Magee, Finding Neverland, directed by M. Forster (New York: Miramax, 1994).
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Deandrea, P. (2013). ‘You kiss like in a movie’: A Contemporary Translation/Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. In: Brown, S.A., Lublin, R.I., McCulloch, L. (eds) Reinventing the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319401_9
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