r
R. Hudson, Word Grammar, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1984 (1986)
Ed. D. H. Laurence, Platform and Pulpit. Bernard Shaw, Rupest Hast-Davis 1962
Eds. S.D. Lima, R.L. Corrigan, G.K. Iverson, The REality o/'Linguistic Rules, John
Benjamins company, Amsterdam 1994
P. Newmark, A Textbook 0/' Translation, Prentice Hall International, Hemel
~
Hempsted 1988
L. Pirandello, Questa sera si reciia a soggetto, (first performed in German, in
Vienna, in 1929) in I romani/, Ie novelle, il teatro, 2009, 1'\ ewton Compton,
Roma
H. Pinter, Betrqyal, Eyre Methuen, London 1978
E. Sapir, Language, Harcourt, Brace, 0Jew York 1921
C. Segre, Teatro e romanzo, Einaudi, Torino, 1984
A. Serpieri, "Translating Shakespeare. A Brief Survey on Some Problematic
Areas", in Eds. R. Carvalho Homem and T. Hoenselaars, Translating
Shakespeare for the Twenty-first Century, Rodopi, Amsterdam 2004
L. Tesniere, Etements de syntaxe structurale, Editions Klincksieck, Paris 1959
W. Shakespeare, Richard III, Riccardo III (a cura di Paolo Bertinetti, note al testo
di Mariangela Mosca Bonsignore, traduzione di Patrizia Valduga), Einaudi,
Torino 2002
G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion (first performed, in German, in Vienna, 1913), in The
Complete Works o/'Bernard Shaw, Oldhams Press Limited, London 1934
L. Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary Criticism: Studes in Stylistics, Princeton UP,
Princeton 1948
T. Stoppard, L. Pirandello, Henry IV, Faber, London 2004
80
Chapter II
VERSIONS, PERVERSIONS, ANIMADVERSIONS:
DILEMMAS OF THEATRICAL TRANSLATION
R A Henderson
o Bottom, thou art translated ~
William Shakespeare
The only way to see the value of a play
is to see it acted.
Franfois Alarie Arollet de Voltaire
I start from the assumption that there can be no fixed, invariable set of
"rules" (or guidelines) for literary translation in general and for
theatrical translation in particular. It is not my intention, in the pages
that follow, to propose a universally applicable template beyond St
Jerome's "sometimes word for word, sometimes sense for sense",
which remains the theoretical basis of all good translation. My aim is,
rather, to explore the specific difficulties of theatrical translation in the
light of an analytical study of passages from a number of plays in their
original language (English, Italian or French) and in translation (into
one of these same three languages), as well as conversations with two
Italian translators of theatrical texts and reflections based on my own
experience as a translator, actor and occasional director.
To work in the theatre (as opposed to studying dramatic texts on
the page) is to be made aware of the essentially practical demands
which weigh upon the dramatist. Translations of plays made for the
express purpose of making the text available to readers seem to me to
be fundamentally flawed in their very conception: the analogy which
occurs to me is of a book explaining how to swim, or play tennis, or
train a domestic animal - such texts have validity only if they are used
concomitantly with water, or tennis racquets and balls, or dogs and cats;
and the test of their effectiveness is their application in practice. By
much the same token, I fail to understand how a play can be
81
 T
appreciated at atry level (including, of course, the linguistic and
interlinguistic) unless it is "applied in practice" - that is, performed in a
theatre (or other suitable space) before an audience.
That said, there are factors which must be taken into account in any
literary translation: writers do not use rhythm, or alliteration, or metaphor
casually; but the difficulty that is bound to remain has been with us since
the Tower of Babel - no two languages function in exactly the same way;
what is alliterative in one language will not necessarily be so in another; the
image that strikes one language community may not have the same power
in another. In terms of prosody, English favours stress (it is rare, in this
language, to find a cluster of more than two unaccented syllables, and
where such a cluster occurs it is almost invariably broken up by the -
instinctive - addition of a secondary stress), French invariably puts the
accent on the final syllable and Italian is in prosodic terms a syllabic tongue,
in which long strings of unstressed syllables are not unusual. Up to a point,
such discrepancies may be resolved by a skilled translator, especially one
with a high degree of literary sensibility; nevertheless, a translation (in the
strict sense - not a rewriting of the original) will always be second best.
Awareness of the inevitable limitations should not, however, deter us from
attempting to make major - or even minor - works of literary art available
to those who are unable to read or otherwise experience them in the
original language. Few of us can aspire to read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky
and Homer and Dante and Baudelaire and Ibsen in their respective native
tongues; it would be a sad state of affairs indeed if this were to debar us
from all knowledge of their works. The translator, then, is at the service of
the author of the original text, whose artistic choices slhe must at least
attempt to appreciate and reflect, and at the same time of the target
readership or audience, who may not unreasonably demand that the new
text be accessible in as many respects as feasible.
The essential difference between dialogue in a novel and dialogue in
a play is that in the former case, it is the reader who has immediate
responsibility (after the author) for interpretation, whereas in the
theatre all interpretation is mediated to the audience by at least one
other individual - the actor - and arguably by the director and the
designer too; members of the audience are not, in this sense, free to
make their own interpretation.
82
In the case of a translated theatrical text, in addition to the mediation
of the director and the actors, yet another mediator may be said to
intervene: the translator, whose choice of lexis, syntax and register is not
necessarily the fruit of an attempt to replicate, but rather to approximate,
the lexis, syntax and register of the original. To some degree, all - but
especially literary - translation is culture-bound: to take an obvious
example, the absence in English of a distinction between formal and
informal second-person singular pronouns constrains the translator to
find alternative strategies for the communication of varying degrees of
formality - which is not, of course, to say that these perceived degrees of
formality cannot be transferred to a remarkable degree, albeit by the
adoption of different means. Similarly, an oath that is considered mild 1 in
one language may be offensive in another; an endearment that rings true
in one language ("mon petit lapin"; "ducky'') is merely comical if
translated literally ("my little rabbit"; "paperina"). And if a degree of
conscious "foreignness" may have a certain effectiveness in the context
of narrative prose, it is likely to sound artificial, not to say absurd, in the
theatre, and to cause the audience to withdraw that "willing suspension
of disbelief" that is an essential element in the logic of theatre.
That plays were not written to be read in the privacy of one's home
- much less in the classroom - does not quite go without saying: the
tendency in recent years has been to examine play scripts, not least in
the context of translation studies, from two points of view, as the raw
material of theatrical performance but also, and perhaps more
intensively, as reader-oriented texts. In part, this is the consequence of
the rise of semiotics as an academic discipline. Keir Elam observes:
Literary critics have usually implicitly or explicitly assumed the priority
of the written play over the performance, the latter being more often
than not described as a 'realization' (actual or potential) of the former.
[... J Since, chronologically, the writing of the play precedes any given
1 Valerio Fissore maintains that mildness is "not a linguistic issue: it rests on habit,
'culture'." 'X'hile it is certainly true that culture, in the sense of societal custom, is at the
basis of the concept of acceptable/unacceptable oaths, my point is that it is precisely
through language that this societal custom is expressed. 'X'hat is clear is that the
translator must respect the degree of (in)offensiveness implied by certain expressions in
the language with which s/he is concerned.
83
 T
performance, it might appear quite legitimate to suppose the simple
priority of the one over the other. [... Nonetheless,] the dramatic text is
radically conditioned by its performability, [... ] is determined by its
very need for stage contextualization [... ] What this suggests is that the
written text/performance text relationship is not one of simple priority
but a complex of reciprocal constraints constituting a powerful
intertextuality. (Elam 1980:208-209)
These are considerations that ought to be borne in mind by the
translator as much as by the literary critic; the translated text is no less
"radically conditioned by its performability" than the original, and it is on
this assumption that I base my reflections on theatrical translation. That
said, I have reservations about the use of the term 'performability' in this
context. The term was frequently used by Susan Bassnett to identify a
concept which she espoused in the early 1980s but has subsequently
refuted. Her original position was that a dramatic text is fully realised
only when it is performed, and that for the translator both components -
text and performance - must be kept constantly in mind.. By 1985, she
had undergone a change of heart, and was able to write:
It seems to me that the time has come to set aside "perform ability" as a
criterion for translating too, and to focus more closely on the linguistic
structures of the text itself. For, after all, it is only within the written
that the performable can be encoded and there are inftnite performance
decodings possible in any playtext. The written text, troue though it may
be, is the raw material on which the translator has to work and it is with
the written text, rather than with a hypothetical performance, that the
translator must begin. (Bassnett 1985:10?,
What Bassnett means (or meant) by "performability" appears to be
a question of the practical possibility of staging a dramatic text in
accordance with the playwright'S stated intentions (as indicated by stage
directions, set descriptions etc.). For present-day theatregoers,
accustomed to a degree of realistic representation in the cinema and in
(for example) video games, that collaboration of the imagination
necessary for many, perhaps most, theatrical productions is hard to
seek. In this sense, Shakespeare provides numerous examples of plays
that are barely "performable": think, for instance, of Henry V before
the gates of Harfleur, addressing his army - not even the most
84
generously subsidised company can put a whole battalion of soldiers on
stage, with the result that ten or twenty men must be accepted by the
audience as representing a much larger number. Or think of the storm
scene in King Lear: thunder and lightning can be quite convincingly
represented, but torrential rain is another matter - there will be no
drenching of steeples or drowning of cocks, even at the Royal
Shakespeare Theatre or the National. Even more difficult to "perform"
(and we have no idea how they were done in Shakespeare's own time)
are the notorious exit of Antigonus in Act III scene iii of The Winter's
Tale, "pursued by a bear" (a man in bear costume is merely ridiculous)
and the disappearing banquet in IILiii of The Tempest, signalled by the
unhelpful stage direction "with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes".
Neither of these is 'performable' in any ordinary sense; yet they are
eminently actable, and of course translatable.
While it is certainly true that the translator must begin with the
written text - and while it is greatly to Bassnett's credit that she has not
hesitated to acknowledge a major change in her own thinking - I am by
no means convinced that the influence of semiotics has, in her case,
been entirely positive. I stand by my assertion that the play text is
incomplete without performance, and that the actor and the director
have the right to make even widely differing interpretations, within the
limitations of that text, in performance; indeed, if they are not to do so,
there will be little point in performing at all. To clarify my own
position, let me say at once that we are all more or less at the mercy of
a problem of terminology. Translation of a play - of a text, that is,
written with at least the possibility of performance in mind - may be
regarded from two not altogether incompatible standpoints: as
translation of what Keir Elam calls "a dramatic text" (words on the
page, prior to and possibly even exclusive of performance), or as
translation jor the theatre. In the latter case, the translator will be at all
times aware of the interpretative flexibility of the text, and will attempt
to give that flexibility due attention in the target language; and it is this
kind of translation which interests me and which I regard as by far the
more soundly based.
Listening to a playwright's words as part of a theatrical production is
quite different from reading that same text on a page. The reader is free
to halt and consider the material, even to go back and read it over
85
 again, whereas the audience, caught in the forward rush of time, is only
given one chance for understanding. With a translated text, this
dynamic is especially acute: a translation must catch listeners' ears with
the same freshness and immediacy as it does in its original language and
culture or else theatregoers will soon weary from having to grope for
meaning. [... I]n order to become a translator for the theatre, one has
to have an ear for the theatre and for what will work in the mouths of
actors. (Langwortl!J 2007: 379)
These (and many more) considerations must be borne in mind in
any reflection on translation for the theatre. The text of a play is in
some respects analogous to an architect's blueprint, in that it represents
a plan, a design which has subsequently to be realised; and in much the
same way, the bricks and mortar, glass and tiles of the completed
building are - up to a point - analogous to those elements of
performance that are not visible in the text: the actors' physical
appearance, the quality of their voices, their movements, gestures and
facial expressions. A translated theatre text should not - cannot -
encroach upon these areas of interpretation, except inasmuch as the
writer of the original may have made (hopeful) specifications of this
kind in the stage directions. W'hat the dramatist offers is, above all,
words to be spoken (and silences to be maintained); a certain degree of
flexibility is bound to remain for the director and the performers. If it
were not so, the dynamism of theatre would be lost - that ephemerality
which is so frustrating to the fortunate spectator of a classic
performance2 is at the same time the strength df the stage, allowing as it
does an infinite range of shades of interpretation, even by the same
actor in the same production of the same play, on different nights
before different audiences. A responsive audience can raise the level of
intensity of a performance to an extraordinary degree - as, indeed, can
fortuitous parallels between a given drama and the political or social
climate at the time of performance. Such imponderables are, I believe,
liberating for the translator, who is not required to render more than
the words themselves in their stylistic and syntactic context. Thus,
Shakespeare's Merchant oj Venice is moving in a different way for post-
2Even more so to those who, for whatever reason, have been unable to witness such a
performance.
86
Holocaust audiences as compared with those of Shakespeare's own
time, and directors and actors are constantly seeking ways to adjust to
the contemporary situation: I have seen a production in which Shylock
was a modern businessman (complete with computer and mobile
phone) beset with family problems - a rebellious adolescent daughter _
and subjected to displays of anti-Semitism by various individuals; but I
have also seen productions in which he was little short of monstrous, a
tyrannical father and a grasping usurer who positively invited the
hostility of the Gentile society he sought to exploit. Neither version
departed by a single syllable from Shakespeare's text. Precisely this
degree of flexibility should be maintained in the translated text.
W'hat this implies is that the translator, though bound - as George
Steiner insists - to engage in a degree of interpretation, must beware of
the temptation to spike the actors' guns by imposing on the target
language text any interpretative limitation not unmistakeably present in
the original. Such (in my view) illicit intervention on the part of the
translator may take a variety of forms, from omission or addition of
speeches in whole or in part, through modification of register, to
rephrasing of a kind, and to a degree, not made necessary by the
differing structural, lexical and cultural characteristics of the two
languages involved. Tom Stoppard's "version" of Luigi Pirandello's
Enrico IVoffers examples of all these failings, as we shall see.
In addition, the variety of kinds of theatrical texts makes it difficult,
if not impossible, to postulate an all-purpose theory of theatrical - or, I
believe, of any other kind of literary - translation. W'hat kind of theory
can adequately guide the translator of both hide and Pn!judice and
Ujysses? Or of Wordsworth's Lucy poems and Eliot's Waste Land? This
is not a question of the quality of the texts being considered, but simply
recognition of their fundamentally diverse approaches to literary
composition. The responsible translation theorist will thus inevitably
conclude that her/his work must consist not so much in the formulation
of universally applicable 'rules', but rather in the examination of the
specific problems represented by individual texts. It seems to me that
Umberto Eco has acknowledged this more explicitly than most
theorists in such books as Dire quasi la stessa cosa, Experiences in Translation
and Mouse or Rat? Again and again, Eco quotes from his own or others'
work in order to illustrate the strategies adopted; but these strategies
87
remain occasional rather than all-encompassing. Thus, for example, he
writes of his own translation of Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie:
[... ] Nerval inserts metrical lines, sometimes complete Alexandrines,
sometimes hemistichs, and sometimes hendecasyllables. [... ] Faced with
'NOS TAlliES ETAlENT PAREILLES' [...J I could not manage to
find a seven-syllable line that was as smooth, and I ran aground on the
shoals of a decasyllable that, if isolated, would sound rather martial
('ERAVfu\10 DI PARE STATURA'). But even in this case, in the flow
of the discourse, I think that this scansion emphasises the symmetry
between the couple standing face to face. (EC!) 2001:4142)
The reader mayor may not agree that Eco has contrived a solution
that at least partially maintains the intended effect of the original, but is
in any case bound to recognise that the translator has not dismissed the
source text's rhythm as irrelevant.
That there are language universals - characteristics and strategies
common to all languages (though realised in different ways) and in all
probability inherent in that part of the human brain dedicated to
linguistic communication - is almost certainly the case: the apparently
spontaneous development, within a single generation, of complex
grammatical "rules" in both Creoles and sign languages seems to bear
this out. It nevertheless remains true that certain factors tend to mask,
or to override, such universals. On the one hand, consider develop-
ments such as the loss of most inflectional syllables in English: this has
led to the establishment of word-order conventions of great rigidity,
shared by all native speakers of the language, which must be respected
by the adoption of different strategies in the event of translation into
another language. The second factor is cultural difference: what is
significant in one culture will not necessarily be so in another. A joke
which circulated on the Internet some months ago suggested that
Scottish English was the only language in which two affirmatives make
a negative: the instance given by way of illustration was the response
"Aye, right", which in most contexts has the force - at least in South-
West Scotland - of "What you are saying is either a lie or totally
mistaken". This is a small but telling example of the way geographically
circumscribed language communities may develop codes that are far
from transparent even to their near neighbours. What is significant here
88
is that codes of this kind are active in the spoken but not (or at most
rarely) in the written language; they may be used in drama, but in the
context of dialogue in a novel would very probably be accompanied by
an authorial comment to assist the reader's comprehension. Comment
in the theatre is supplied by the actors' delivery and not by the
dramatist's intervention.
This brings me, as it were naturally, to the question of prosody, on
the importance of which Valerio Fissore insists. Up to a point I willingly
concede that the translator should be aware of the rhythm of the source
language text and should, in one way or another, respect it in the target
text. Certainly in verse drama this is of the utmost importance; I have
written elsewhere at some length on the importance of Shakespeare's
blank verse to the actor, and continue to maintain that the major verse
dramatists'in effect direct the actor through the canny distribution of
stress. Modern writers who have attempted this form have not, in my
opinion, shown the same acute awareness of metre-as-meaning: the field
is sparsely populated, but T S Eliot and Christopher Fry had some
success in what, not least because of the all too evident artificiality of the
form, is no longer regarded as a standard approach to the writing of
dramatic dialogue. In these cases, as for the Elizabethan and Jacobean
playwrights, the translator does well to make a scrupulous analysis of the
prosody of the text and to respect its implications (l am not in the least
persuaded that slhe should respect its form) in the target text.
Although I appreciate Fissore's point, and believe that it is of
fundamental importance to the actor, above all in dramatic verse, I
cannot agree that the translator should feel bound by it, except within
certain limitations. It goes without saying that no two languages have
the same prosodic characteristics; it is simply impossible to maintain
the rhythmic pattern of English in Italian, or vice versa. Where, for
example, emphasis is required, in spoken English this is achieved by a
(modest) increase in volume on the word(s) to be stressed, generally
accompanied by raised pitch; in Italian, there is frequently a structural
modification which in English is neither necessary nor, frankly,
desirable. Thus, for example:
Jack did it (where the italics indicate increased volume and raised pitch).
89
 L'ha fatto Jack (where the slight increase in volume and rise in pitch are
essentially reinforced by the displacement of the subject to what, in
Italian, is emphatic end position.
Nor will emphasis be used in the same way across languages:
You did not choose me, no, I chose you (fohn 15:16)
is read in English with almost equal stress on all four pronouns, but
especially the fourth, to bring out the contrast; the Italian version:
Non voi avete scelto me, rna io ho scelto voi3
has the main stress on the third pronoun (io), not (to the ears of
English speakers, oddly) on the fourth. The actor, like the translator, is
bound to respect the code norms of the language in which s/he is
performing.
That the translator is (or at least should be) bound by certain
specifics of the original is illustrated by Pissore, at one point, with a
brief exchange from Shakepeare's Richard III. The exchange which he
quotes between Richard Gloucester and Anne is deliberately artificial;
indisputably the artificiality of the syntactic and rhythmic parallelism
should be maintained as far as possible in translation. Valduga's Italian
rendering is certainly unsatisfactory: as Pissore notes, she has failed to
respect the collocation of "let me have" and "thou canst make" at the
end of the respective lines; she has also changed the force of Richard's
plea ("let" softens the imperative and has the force of an appeal) to a
barefaced demand ("dammi"), and has removed Anne's vehement
"thou canst make/ No excuse" by both suppressing the auxiliary can
and eliminating the (always stressed) negative particle no. Shakespeare's
Anne does not tell Richard that the best thing he can do is hang himself;
she says it is the onlY thing he can do. Valduga's translation not only
obscures this point, but depersonalises Anne's response, which is
thereby weakened in terms of dramatic effect. This is precisely the kind
of translational inattentiveness that Pissore rightly deplores.
Very prominent repetition of a given pattern, of the kind found in this
3 These are the Jerusalem Bible/Bibbia eli Gerusalemme versions; the same point is
valid for other translations of this verse.
90
brief exchange, is fairly common in early Shakespeare, and is, as such, a
mark of artistic immaturity; but it is not the translator's job to "improve"
on the original, however leaden-footed it may appear. I am thinking, for
example, of the choral lament of Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York
and Clarence's children in Act II scene ii of the same play:
Queen Elizabeth Oh for my husband, for my dear lord Edward!
Children Oh for our father, for our dear lord Clarence!
Duchess of York Alas for both, both mine, Edward and Clarence!
Queen What stay had I but Edward? and he's gone.
Children What stay had we but Clarence? and he's gone.
Duchess What stays had I but they? and they are gone.
Queen Was never widow had so dear a loss!
Children Were never orphans had 50 dear a loss!
Duch~ss ~ra5 never mother had so dear a loss!
This is not good theatre, but it is what the (apprentice) playwright wrote,
and should be rendered in translation as faithfully as the target language
allows, with due regard to the lexical, syntactic and rhythmic parallels.
Here and there, Pissore contradicts his own (interesting but
debatable) practice in his commentary. I am thinking, for example, of
the following short quotation from Much Ado About Nothing:
Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? 0
that he were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember
that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am
an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be prov'd upon
thee by good witness
of which Pissore remarks that "Dogberry's simple mind is unlikely to
be capable of more complexity shan that.of using full short sentences
and playing on ther!!_.C#:::c:ldi("''' of ass/ witnesl'. Setting aside
~e 1n~ccura:y .<?L. ~e_):~f~rence to -"th!lE;;;{.g1J.~~~~ of ass/
wltnesl (a r.~:~iI, the assertlon that
Dogberry uses "full short sentences" flies in the face of the observable
fact that in this extract alone Dogberry uses a non-finite clause as
adverbial ("to write me down an ass"), a finite clause as direct object
("that I am an ass" - twice), a concessive clause ("though it be not
written down")and what Quirk and Greenbaum (1973: 335) call a
91
comment clause ("as shall be prov'd upon thee by good witness"). I would not be averse to a translation approach which respected the
Simple his mind indisputably is, and his lexis is eccentric; but Dogberry fractured rhythm here (though I am by no means convinced that it would
is capable of more syntactic sophistication than Fissore seems to allow. be possible to maintain the same rhythmic pattern, if so irregular a
distribution of accents can be thought of as a pattern at all). What is clear,
Fissore offers his personal analysis of the possible segmentation of a even before any attempt at such a translation is made, is that there will be
passage from Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular, I should like to many more unaccented syllables in Italian, because of the very nature of
offer my own analysis of the same passage, for purposes of comparison the language: for example, the word dog(s) occurs four times in this extract;
(though neither version should be regarded as definitive). For the monosyllable inevitably becomes a disyllable in Italian. Below I offer a
convenience of reference I have added a count of the stresses and of tentative translation into Italian of this passage, accompanied by the same
the monosyllables and polysyllables (by which I mean any word of numerical analysis. I should make it clear that I am well aware of the
more than one syllable) in each segment of text.
deficiencies of my translation, but it serves, I believe, to make a crucial point.
Segments I
Primary + Mono- Poly-
Segment Primary+ Mono- Poly-
secondary syllables syllables secondary stresses syllables svllables
Ascolta il tuo cane. 2+1 1 3
Enonne, vera? 2 0 2
Come un asino - enorme. 2+1 1 3
Sai cosajQi ha camprato Dick? 3+1 4 2
Dick Potter? 2 1 1
Ha comprato un regalo eli Natale per 4 5 3
George.
U no eli quegli anelli ill gomma. 3+1 2 4
Sai quelli che butti in aria. Uno eli 6 4 5
quelli.
La adora. 1 1 1
Stava carrendo su e giu per il vostro 6+1 6 4
carridoio lil -
Dick che 10 lanciava, lui che cercava 5 6 3
eliJ?renderlo.
Ma e veramente meraviglioso con i 4 5 3
cani, Dick
Li capisce davvera. 2 1 2
Sai che stava quasi per eliventare 5+1 4 5
addestratore eli cani,
solo che non aveva la vista giusta. 4+1 3 4
Ma sa come trattarli. 3 2 2
Non importa che tipo ill cane sia. " 4 3 4
Conosce tutti i lora modi/umori. 3+1 1 4
Total: 48 Total: 56

92 93
 It is noteworthy that even when a determined effort is made to Sidney \XThat do you mean, no shoes?
maintain the simplicity of lexis and syntax characteristic of the original, Jane They're in there.
the distribution of monosyllables and polysyllables remains significantly Sidney \XThere?
different, with the Italian version having almost exactly half as many Jane By the fireplace. I left them so I could slip them on.
Sidney Well, then, why didn't you?
monosyllables as the English and more than twice the number of
Jane I didn't have time. I forgot.
polysyllables. This is bound to have an effect on the prosodic nature of
Sidney Well, come and get them.
the two texts; nevertheless, the number of stresses in the Italian JaneNo ...
translation has been maintained almost exactly as in the English version. Sidney It's only Dick and Lottie Potter.
Similarly, I would suggest some small modifications of Fissore's Jane You fetch them.
segmentation of both the passages he quotes from Harold Pinter's Sidney I can't fetch them.
Betrqyal. If, as he seems to suggest, the end of a segment corresponds to Jane Yes, you can. Pick them up and bring them in here.
a pause (of variable length, but a pause nonetheless), the separation of Sidney But 1. ..
the second "~'hy did you ask" from its direct object, "when I last saw Jane Sidney, please.
him" is, in actors' terms, so artificial as to be alienating for the audience. Sidney Dear oh dear. What a start. I say, what a start. They've stopped
This is, I believe, a single segment. Again, in the case of "I wasn't talking.
Jane Have they?
inspired to do it/ from any kind of moral standpoint", the separation of Sidney Wondering where we are, no doubt.
the prepositional phrase from the main clause of which it is an integral Jane Well, go in. Here.
part is unnatural - and if ever a dramatist demanded naturalistic acting, Sidney What?
it is Pinter in speeches of this kind. Jane Take these.
Fissore's approach is even more acutely problematic when applied Sidney \XThat do I do with these?
to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who used both verse and Jane The hall cupboard.
prose, to a variety of ends, as I have suggested elsewhere (Henderson Sidney You're really expecting rather a lot tonight, aren't you?
2009:45-81). If Shakespeare's prose is treated as though it were verse, the Jane I'm sorry.
Sidney Yes, well it's got to stop. It's got to stop. I have to entertain out
subtlety of his alternation of the two media in cases such as the
there, you know.
character of Hamlet, or the varying tone of Much Ado About Nothing or
Twelfth Night, goes by the board. This seems to me to be too great a loss
Here the proportion of monosyllables is exceptionally high (87%),
to be compensated by the convenience, for the translator, of a
and this, combined with a preponderance of short vowels in the
segmented text.
stressed syllables (some 73%) and the brevity of the individual
speeches, many of which are composed of six or fewer words, creates
Something of the same kind as with the Pinter passage applies to
an effect which would be extraordinarily difficult to reproduce in
Ayckbourn's dialogue, which is often a very rapid exchange of short,
translation.
predominantly monosyllabic speeches. Take this passage from Act I of
An at least equally urgent consideration, from the point of view of
Absurd Person Singular.
the actor, is the characteristic lexis and phraseology of certain
Sidney Come on. What are you doing? characters; and this is certainly a constant in theatrical texts from at
Jane I can't. least the time of Shakespeare - indeed, as early as the 14th century there
Szdney What? is evidence of authorial attention to the individual's mode of expression
Jane I've got no shoes. as a characterising feature. Thus, in the mystery plays of the anonymous

94 95
 dramatist variously known as the Wakefield Master or the Towneley
Master, speech idiosyncrasies are attributed to certain - especially comic
- characters. The contumacious exchanges between Noah and his wife,
for example, are splendidly scurrilous (he calls her "ram-skyt", decorously
glossed by J.R.R. Tolkien in the "Middle English Vocabulary" appended
to Kenneth Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose as "a term of
abuse" (Sisam 1959 4); she calls him "Wat Wynk", a deliberately silly
nickname that undermines his authority; they both make constant,
casual use of mild blasphemy: "Mary", "Lord", "bi Godis pyne",
"Peter''); and in the Second Shepherds' Play the sheep stealer ~ak
attempts a southern English accent to assert his "superiority" over the
victims of his thieving. In translating this, and any other play from any
period, such distinctions must be respected.
This is why I am convinced of the rightness of Fissore's point about
the words spoken by Liza Doolittle's father: "I'm willing to tell you: I'm
wanting to tell you: I'm waiting to tell you", where structural parallelism
is reinforced by repetition and alliteration, as well as by the marked
prosodic regularity in the three pairs of amphibrachs: I'm wil!mgl to tell
youllI'm wantingl to tell youl Irm waitingl to tel! you. Something of the
same effect should at least be attempted in translation. The line in
question has been variously translated into Italian as:
1. Son qua per dircelo, non vedo l'ora di dircelo, sento il bisogno
di dircelo. (Agresti 1951)
2. desidero di dirvelo, voglio dirvelo, aspetto soltanto di dirvelo.
(Sardi 1980)
~ 3. ve 10 dico, ho tutta l'intenzione di dirvelo, non aspetto altro.
t"ragaglia e Chiavarelli 1995)5
The rhythm here is so marked in the original as to be self-evidently
a rhetorical device. There is a nod at repetition in the first two
translations, but in none of these cases has the prosodic regularity of
the original been respected. There is, admittedly, a fundamental
difficulty in that the three verbs Doolittle uses, wzlling, wanting and
waiting, when translated literally no longer alliterate; nor, for that matter,
do they have the same syllabic structure. The challenge to the translator
4 The pages ofTolkien's glossary are not numbered.
5 I am grateful to Silvia Boano for drawing my attention to these translations.
96
is, first, to choose between a word-for-word rendering, losing the
rhetorical characteristics of the original, and a translation which
recreates the repetitive rhythm (and the alliteration), but employs verbs of
different semantic import. Something must be lost, either prosodically or
in terms of meaning; the problem is to decide which of these losses is the
greater. In this case, my own instinct would be to favour the rhetorical
effect, not least because of Higgins's comment, which obliquely
compares the dustman to Shakespeare: "Observe the rhythm of his
native woodnotes wild". Higgins is quoting Milton's L'Allegro:
[... J sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warbling his native woodnotes wild.
(The absurdity of Higgins's comparison is on a par with that of Milton's
improbable picture of Shakespeare as a purely instinctive artist.) A
possible solution might be the following: "Sono pronto a direvelo; mi
presto al dirvelo; mi preme il dirvelo", where the alliterating verbs, the
substantial repetition and the prosodic pattern are all respected; and if
the result seems somewhat strained and unnatural, it is no more so than
the original, in which Doolittle uses a progressive form of the verb want
(which student grammars outlaw) for purely rhythmic purposes.
Let me analyse this case in greater detail. The verbs are, as Fissore
says, alliterative (not assonant, since the tonic syllables feature three
different vowels: /II, 101 and I eI I); the structure is perfectly parallel:
these are aspects that prompt Higgins's observation about the "natural
gift of rhetoric", "the rhythm of his native woodnotes wild" (which is
not quite the same as "musicality"). There is nothing especially Welsh
about this - indeed, Cockneys are renowned for their inventive use of
language, as are many working-class urban communities: Naples and
Rome come to mind, as do Glasgow and New York. The point of
Higgins'S mention of a putative W'elsh mother for Doolittle is precisely
that onlY Higgins (in a sense, not even Shaw himself) can detect
anything Welsh in the dustman's speech. Higgins is a phonetic Sherlock
Holmes, capable of observing what escapes everyone else; the character
was based either (though Shaw denied this) on Henry Sweet, or -
perhaps more probably - on Daniel Jones, a prodigiously gifted
linguist, who is said to have had just such an acute ear as Shaw
attributes to his Professor Higgins. What, in any case, is a translator to
97
 -
do with this short passage? I have already proposed an Italian version
which, whatever its deficiencies, at least maintains the alliterative and
rhythmic parallels of the original in order to offer a rendering of
Doolittle's display of rhetorical virtuosity; but I confess that the
reference to a Welsh mother defeats me, for it is unlikely to be
decipherable in any language context but that of English. Indeed, it
poses in little the problem of the premise on which this play is
predicated, namely the manner of speech of Eliza Doolittle. Her
transition from gutter Cockney to acrolectic Standard English is clear
enough in the original (and eminently actable); but for the Italian
translator she represents a hurdle of alarming proportions. If she is to
have a regional (inner-city) accent, it can hardly be Neapolitan or
Roman or Milanese; and regionally neutral Italian carries nothing like
the same clout, socially speaking, as Received Pronunciation. It is on
the basis of cases like this that I continue to maintain that not
everything is translatable.
The problem of prosody is nowhere more apparent than in the
translation of Shakespeare's blank verse dialogue: since the metre of
Italian (or French, or German, etc.) is significantly different from that
of English, any attempt to reproduce specific metrical effects in
translation is doomed to failure - or, at the very least, to diminished
effect. A clear illustration of this point can be found in Hamlet's "To be
or not to be" soliloquy, as I have written elsewhere:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
%en we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life ...
11.11-14
[tJhe thirteenth line is of only four iambic feet (Must give I us pause I
.... I There's the Irespect): clearly the actor is invited to pause
precisely at the word 'pause', for the space of at least one foot.
(Henderson 2009:155)
Though line 13 - always supposing that the translator is rash
enough to maintain the lineation of the original - can of course be
98
made shorter than the other lines by the omission of one or more
syllables, the effect Shakespeare creates can be only approximately
reproduced, for the pentameter line allows the dramatist not only to
place the pause (in this case it is the third - the central - foot that is
"silenced',), but to indicate its length to the actor (namely, the length
equivalent to one iambic foot). This, in languages which do not share
the accent-based rhythm of English, cannot be done 6 - or rather, can
be done only by recourse to some other strategy, and one which may
well be less effective.
Of course, similar constraints apply in translation into English. A
famous line from Racine's PhMre will serve to illustrate the difficulty:
C'est Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee.
Here the mid-line caesura is at exactly the halfway point: the
dodecasyllabic verse is divided into two perfectly balanced "halves" of
six syllables each. It would, of course, be possible to attempt an English
translation of the play into hexameters and thus to aim at an analogous
division of the translated line; but, quite apart from the difficulty of
rendering this (or any other) line as an accurate, credible English
hexameter - the ghastly best I can do is
'Tis Venus as a whole attached to her prey
- the metrical effect is radically different, simply because of the
nature of the two languages in question.
Commenting on a brief exchange from T S Eliot's The Cocktail Parry,
Fissore observes: "If this text were not written in verse form, it would
not be easy to realise its being in verse at all. All the units are so much
the same as so many we speak ourselves or hear spoken in daily life that
anybody would be likely to take them as units of ordinary everyday
speech." Faced with the incontrovertible truth of this affirmation, one
can only ask: is it verse, if it is to all intents indistinguishable from
prose? The famous (or notorious) case of the note left on his kitchen
table by William Carlos Williams is an illuminating illustration:
6 Which is not to say that it is impossible to indicate a pause. My point is simply that it
will not be a pause of precisely the same value.
99
 I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Debate has - "raged" is too strong a word - continued for many
years over this text: is it or is it not to be regarded as a poem? Can we
all become poets by the simple expedient of dividing our prose texts
into segments, as Williams appears to have done here? What is the
relationship of this question to Fissore's suggestion that translations of
dramatic texts should segment speeches such as Robert's in Pinter's
Betrqyalee p. 65) or Pickering's in Shaw's Iygmah'on (see p. 69-70)?
Unless I am much mistaken, the jury is still out on cases of this kind;
and a verdict is unlikely to be reached unanimously in the foreseeable
future.
In modern prose drama, pauses are generally marked in stage
directions, most liberally - and famously - in the works of Harold
Pinter and Samuel Beckett. Pace within a given speech can, however, be
indicated by an apposite use of punctuation: thus, in Pinter's Old Times,
the slow dialogue between Deeley and Kate which opens the play is
~d ppt 901& by the stage direction "Pause" 23 times, seven of
which within single speeches, but is also rather heavily punctuated:
1. Kate: Fuller than me. I think.
2. Dee0': But you remember her. She remembers you. Or why would
she be coming here tonight?
3. Kate: I had none. None at all. Except her.
4. Kate: She was a thief. She used to steal things.
S. Kate: Bits and pieces. Underwear.
6. Deeley. In you. I'll be watching you.
100
7. Kate: I hardly remember her. I've almost totally forgotten her.
S. Deelq It's too late. You've cooked your casserole.
9. Deelry: 1\;'0. Not at all.
(I have numbered the lines quoted for convenience of reference;
this is not a continuous extract.) In every one of these cases, a comma
or a dash could not unreasonably be substituted for the full stop; but
this would alter the rhythm of the line for the actor, for example:
1. Fuller than me, I think.
3. I had none - none at all, except her.
9. No, not at all.
These apparendy insignificant changes impose a markedly different
reading on the actors. Nor can the liberal use of full stops in these
speeches be attributed to some sort of Pinterian tic: when the third
character, Anna, speaks, she evidendy does so in a rush, under the
impetus of a powerful- at this point, unspecified - emotion:
Queuing all night, the rain, do you remember? my goodness, the Albert
Hall, Covent Garden, what did we eat? to look back, to do things we loved,
we were young then of course, but what stamina, and to work in the
morning, and to a concert, or the opera, or the ballet, that night, you
haven't forgotten? and then riding on top of the bus down Kensington
High Street, and the bus conductors, and then dashing for the matches for
the gasfire and then I suppose scrambled eggs, or did we? who cooked?
both giggling and chattering, both huddling to the heat, then bed and
sleeping, and all the hustle and bustle in the morning, rushing for the bus
again for work, lunchtimes in Green Park, exchanging all our news, with
our very own sandwiches, innocent girls, innocent secretaries, and then the
night to come, and goodness knows what excitement in store, I mean the
sheer expectation of it all, and so poor, but to be poor and young, and a
girl, in London then ... and the cafes we found, almost private ones, weren't
they? where artists and writers and sometimes actors collected, and others
with dancers, we sat hardly breathing with our coffee, heads bent, so as not
to be seen, so as not to disturb, so as not to distract, and listened and
listened to all those words, all those cafes and all those people, creative
undoubtedly, and does it still exist I wonder? do you know? can you tell me?
(pinter 1971: 11-18)
101
 ~
Significantly, even after interrogation points Pinter here uses only
lower-case letters; in effect, this long monologue is a single sentence 7,
contrasting strikingly with the exchange that precedes it. (the reader is
invited to insert the expected upper-case letters after each interrogation
point and to notice the effect this has on the rhythm of these lines.)
This must be respected in translation, and it is greatly to the credit of
the translator for the Einaudi edition, Romeo de Baggis, that he
reproduces Pinter's punctuation in all but one of the cases quoted
above. The exception is Deeley's "No. Not at all", which in Italian
becomes "No, s'intende". It is hard to understand why; "No. Affatto"
(or, as Fissore suggested to me, "No. Niente affatto", which is closer to
the rhythm of the original) seems a perfectly acceptable solution.
Pinter has also used a number of rhetorical devices in Anna's
monologue: most notably, strings of noun or verb phrases (the Albert
Hall, Covent Garden; a concert... the opera... the ballet; artists ...
writers ... actors ... dancers; to look back, to do things we loved;
dashing... giggling... chattering... huddling... sleeping... rushing),
assonance (hustle/bustle/rushing/bus) and repetition (so poor, but to
be poor and young; so as not to be seen, so as not to disturb, so as not
to distracts; listened and listened; all those words, all those cafes and all
those people). In translation, these devices should be, as far as possible,
reproduced; only in the case of assonance is this likely to represent an
insuperable challenge, but even here, as in Eco's translation of Nerval,
it is not impossible to offer a valid alternative strategy.
That the playwright is not necessarily wedded to the exact wording
of his original text is intriguingly illustrated by that rarest of cases, a
dramatist who is his own translator. Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godo!
was originally staged in 1953 ; it was not until 1955 that the English
version, Waitingfor Godo!, appeared, in Beckett's own translation, which
is by no means slavishly literal, although, line for line, with very rare
exceptions, it corresponds to the original. Beckett's mother tongue was
English, and for all the fluency and idiomaticity of his French, the use
of English evidently permitted him a certain freedom of expression not
7 At the University of Wales many years ago, in a production of Old Times in which I
played Anna, the director, the late Graham Laker, asked me to deliver this speech on a
single breath.
8 Note, in this last example, tbat tbe prosodic pattern is identical in each case.
102
fully present in the French original. Thus, for example, in Vladimir's
first speech, "Je commence a Ie croire" becomes "I'm beginning to
come round to that opinion", not only a notable expansion in terms of
rhythm - of prosody - but also a modification of meaning; a little later,
"Leve-toi que je t'embrasse" achieves an Irish turn of phrase as "Get
up till I embrace you", where "till" is not temporal, but has the
Hibernian sense of "so that"; again, "monsieur" used ironically by
Vladimir to refer to Estragon becomes the even more ironic "His
Highness"; "Ce n'est pas la raison pour ne pas Ie boutonner" becomes
''You might button it all the same" (shifting in tone as well as meaning,
from impersonal to personal); and so on. In these, as in many other
cases, the principles observed by most literary translators - respect for
syntactic structure, for tone, for rhythm, for the individual word - are
largely set aside; but it can hardly be supposed that Beckett disapproved
of his own practice. It would appear that he privileged naturalness, and
what I will call "actability", over the kind of accuracy many translators
habitually practise; and as he was his own translator, it must be
supposed that he did not deplore the result. Beckett was, of course,
virtually bilingual in English and French; that his manner of expression
in his second language should be, as it were, statelier, less slangy, with
less varied register, is, I think, attributable not only to a certain apparent
formality which seems - at least to the ear of a native English speaker -
to be inherent in the Romance languages, but to the instinctive
discretion, etiquette even, natural even to the most gifted speaker of a
second language. The present writer feels free to take liberties in her
native tongue which she would hesitate to permit herself in Italian. This
is not to say that Beckett confines himself to "aulic" French: the
exchange "tu veux?" - ''Je veux bien" is neatly colloquial, as is the use
of "Hein?" or "Tiens". At the same time, Beckett is able to produce
interesting effects of register variation in English that seem to me to be
lacking in the French original, and to indulge in literary in-jokes ("Hope
deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?"9
Most intriguing of all is Lucky'S long monologue, which in the
English version assumes an almost hypnotic prosodic effect based
largely on four-stress units; I quote the first few lines by way of
9 It was tbe author of the Book of Proverbs; the missing word is "heart".
103
 illustration, marking stresses in bold and providing lineation to make
clear the relative regularity of the prosodic structure:
Given the existence as uttered forth
in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann
of a personal God quaquaquaqua
with white beard quaquaquaqua
outside time without extension
who from the heights of divine apatrua
divine athambia divine aphasia
loves us dearly with some exceptions
for reasons unknown but time will tell
and suffers like the divine Miranda
with those who
for reasons unknown but time will tell
are plunged in tonnent plunged in fire
whose fire flames if that continues
and who can doubt it will fire the firmament
; I
that is to say blast hell to heaven [... J (Beckett 1956:42-43)
I appropriate, with elevated vocabulary and perhaps a degree of
This marked rhythm substitutes for the sporadic use of rhyme in the
II I French text:
Btant donne l'existence telie qu'elle jaillit des recents travaux publics de
Poin<;on et Wattmann d'un Dieu personnel quaquaquaqua a barbe
blanche quaqua hors du temps de l'etendue qui du haut de sa divine
apathie sa divine athambie sa divine aphasie nous aime bien a quelques
II'I exceptions pres on ne sait pourquoi mais <;a viendra et souffre a l'instar
de la divine Miranda avec ceux qui sont on ne sait pourquoi mais on a
Ie temps dans Ie tounnent dans les feux les flammes pour peu que <;a
I dure encore un peu a la fin Ie feu aux poutres assavoir porteront l'enfer
aux nues si bleues [...J (Beckett 1971 :62)
(note pourquoi/viendra/Miranda/pourquoi; feu(x)/peu/bleues; temps/
tourment; and later bienvenu/attendu; inachevees/couronnees; etabli/
tabli/suit, etc.). The result is a tour de force in both languages; but it is
not the same tour de force. Beckett's strategy here is reminiscent of
Umberto Eco's in his translation of Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie, of which
Eco himself writes:
104
[IJt was only on translating it that I became aware of a stylistic device
that Nerval often uses. Without the reader's becoming aware of it[ ... J,
in certain scenes with a powerful dream-like quality Nerval inserts
metrical lines, sometimes complete Alexandrines, sometimes
hemistichs, and sometimes hendecasyllables. [... J Hence the decision to
adhere to these rhymes lO as far as possible, even at the cost of forgoing
a literal translation. (Eco 2001:41).
He goes on to say that "In certain cases, we are faced with a dilemma: if
we wish to save something, we lose something else" (Eco 2001 :42),
which is of course the classic dilemma of all literary translators; but
fortunately "On other occasions, as usual, something has been
recovered" (43).
In the case of 16 th -17 th century drama, above all in Shakespeare,
distinctions of character and tone are indicated in part by the use of
blank verse, rhymed verse and prose. In such cases, for example, in
Macbeth, with the possible exception of the witches' doggerel, the
translator has little alternative to embellishing a prose translation, where
deliberate artificiality in word order and syntax; but this certainly
represents a loss. In the Scottish play (as actors superstitiously call it),
where blank verse is the norm for all upper-class characters, exceptions
are significantly made for Lady Macduff in conversation with her small
son, and for Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene. The reasons are
not far to seek: in the first case, the intimacy of the relationship and the
tender age of one of the interlocutors are unique to this scene and are
underlined by the use of prose; in the second, it is Lady Macbeth's loss
of self-control that is signalled linguistically by her departure from her
customary mode of speech 11 That such features should be reflected in
translation is clearly desirable; but any attempt to reproduce the
prose/verse variation is doomed, if not to failure, at least to a
diminution of the original effect, not only because of the difference,
10 Presumably a misprint for 'rhythms', or perhaps a somewhat oblique way of referring
to a 'poetic' effect.
11 The other two characters onstage at this point, the Doctor and the gentlewoman, as
members of the servant class (albeit educated and not inelegant), are prose speakers for
social reasons.
105
 ::"

III!

i
already mentioned, between English prosody and the metre of French, maintained as such, prose is rendered as prose. The results, however
i Italian or any other language, but also because of the very nature of commendable their formal fidelity, are not always happy, and Celenta
;111
iambic pentameter, which is close to the natural speech rhythms of has too often been constrained to deviate from the strict meaning of
English - something which cannot, I think, be argued for the French the original.
dodecasyllabic or Italian hendecasyllabic line:
SHAKESPEARE (Alexander edition) CELENTA (1964 translation)
III [T]he iambic is a rhythm that derives from the Ge=anic roots of the On the ground Sui tenace
English language, roots which have given English its familiar, largely Sleep sound; suolo, in pace,
monosyllabic vocabulary and whose influence on borrowings from I'll apply dormi: e i1 fiore,
I Latin, Greek and the Romance languages is apparent in the tendency to To your eye, o amadore,
Illi distribute secondary stresses among what in the original language are Gentle lover, remedy. l'occhio tuo sgombri d'errore.
unstressed syllables. [... J Because of the customary subject-verb-object 'When thou wak'st Nel destarti,
word order, many - perhaps most - sentences in spoken English begin Thou tak'st possa darti
with an article (a, an, the) or a personal pronoun (1, you, he, she, it, we, True delight gran piacere
they), and these elements, in English, are no=ally unstressed. In the sight rivedere
(Henderson 2009: 84-85) Of thy fo=er lady's eye; gli occhi del tuo primo amore:
And the country proverb known, SI che i1 detto popolare
Valerio Fissore quotes the opening lines of Dante's Divina Commedia That every man should take his own, - a ciascun de' il suo toccare -
and remarks that he can hear the Tuscan voice behind the words; I am In your waking shall be shown. per te s'abbia ad avverare.
Jack shall have Jill; Gilia e per Gianni:
in no position to dispute this, as a non-native speaker of Italian (and
Nought shall go ill; bastan gl'inganni;
one who has learned all her Italian in Piedmont), but continue to
The man shall have his mare again, l'uom de' aver la sua cavalla, e finir
maintain that ordinary spoken Italian does not fall naturally into and all shall be well. coi danni
hendecasyllables in quite the way that English spontaneously lends itself
- - - -

to iambic pentameters. 12
An analogous problem arises, in this case in a comedy, for A
Midsummer Night's Dream, where at least three distinct modes of speech
are employed: what might be called 'standard' blank verse for the
Athenian and fairy courts; lively tetrameters (and even, briefly,
dimeters) for Puck on certain occasions; and clumsy, uncultivated prose
for the mechanicals. A bold translator will aim for rhyme in Puck's
"magic spell" speeches; for the mechanicals, especially Bottom,
grammatical irregularity and malapropisms are not hard to devise. In
the edition of Shakespeare's complete works under the general
editorship of Mario Praz (1964), Giulia Celenta goes the whole way:
blank verse is translated into hendecasyllables, rhymed verse is
12 "I think I'll have another cup of tea"; "A pint of bitter and a gin and it"; "That
stupid man has burnt the steak again" are three entirely natural examples, the first
two of which I recorded, as it were, live during a visit to Stratford upon Avon ..
Celenta's 'translation' is ingenious; she has preselyed the basic
rhythmic and rhyming form of the original without deviating far from
its sense, but this has been achieved at a cost: she has lost the medicinal
metaphor of 'remedy', and the reference to 'waking' (which is surely of
fundamental importance here) in her "per te s'abbia ad avverare". Nor,
I suspect, do Gilia and Gianni have quite the same charming echo of a
childhood verse as Jack and Jill (who, it will be recalled, were involved
in an unfortunate accident when they "went up the hill/To fetch a pail
of water"). However, I believe the infantile rhythm of Puck's
incantation to be crucial to the effect of this moment in the theatre, and
Celenta has taken what is probably the only route to the maintenance
of fidelity of atmosphere.

106 107
Ilil
I am less impressed by Oberon's words in the following scene,
when he is gloating over the situation of Titania, now hopelessly in love
with Bottom.
SHAKESPEARE PRAZ
Welcome, good Robin. See'st thou this Benvenuto, Bertino. Ve' che scena?
sweet sight? Impietosisco orrnai pel suo delirio.
Her dotage now I do begin to pity; Del bosco allirnitare or or la vidi
For, meeting her of late behind the andar fra l'erbe, in cerca di soavi
wood, pegni d'amor per questo sciocco
Seeking sweet favours for this hateful esoso,
fool, e mosso a sdegno la garrii.
I did upbraid her and fall out with her.
Setting aside the choice of name for Puck ('Robin' is, I feel, lighter
and more pleasing than 'Bertino,), Celenta has here strained to produce
'old' Italian, to questionable effect. Is it only because she is in effect
writing in a 'foreign' form of Italian that her translation seems far less
accessible than Shakespeare's original? Here I am in complete
agreement with Peter Newmark:
A translator of drama in particular must translate into the modem target
language if he wants his characters to 'live', bearing in mind that the
modem language covers a span of, say, 70 years, and that if one
character speaks in a bookish or old-fashioned way in the original,
written 500 years ago, he must speak in an equally bookish and old-
fashioned way in the translation, but as he would today, therefore with
a corresponding time-gap [... J (Newmark 1987:173)
Nor, for that matter, is Celenta's approach consistently applied
elsewhere in the Praz edition: in Macbeth, blank verse is translated by
Cino Chiarini as prose, with the result, for instance, that no distinction
is made between the letter from her husband which Lady Macbeth
reads at the beginning of Act I scene v, and her immediately following
soliloquy; nor, in this case, has the translator made any attempt to
reproduce the prosodic effect of "Glamis thou art, and Cawdor", where
the fronting of the subject attribute lends it an emphasis altogether
absent from Chiarini's "Tu sei Glamis e Cawdor". It would be
interesting to know the motivation behind this choice, and especially
108
why Mario Praz, as editor, did not demand uniformity of approach
from one play to another throughout the edition.
Respect for the text 13 does not (nor should it) impose uniformity on
the manner in which actors choose to deliver it; the point is precisely
this, that there is a degree of choice and not an absolute obligation.
Illustrations of interpretative flexibility abound. Take, for example,
Peter Brook's 1970 flim of King Lear, which opens with a long tracking
shot, in complete silence, showing some dozens of unremarkable
figures; the silence is then broken by a slammed door and then by a
pause lasting ten seconds (this could hardly be sustained in the theatre),
followed by the voice of Paul Scofield, who is seen in close-up,
pronouncing the word "Know ... ". Scofield's face remains almost
expressionless throughout the scene in which Lear divides his kingdom;
he is motionless on a strikingly primitive throne; he wears no crown,
carries no insignia of his rank. The same scene, with identical words
(both versions are faithful to Shakespeare's text14) is played in the 1983
television production by Laurence Olivier with the addition of music, a
rather more elaborate set, colour!) and a far wider range of inflection,
intonation, pace, gesture and (especially) facial expression. Individual
taste will dictate which of the two makes greater impact on any given
spectator; my own preference is for Scofield, but Olivier's Lear is no
less acceptable in terms of textual authority - Shakespeare has given no
indication that the king is or is not a superficially lovable old man in
these first moments. It is no part of the translator's responsibility to
take sides in such a conflict of interpretations. It might seem, then, that
translating a play is a matter of providing a readable target-language text.
This, however, is not my contention. However Lear (or any other
character) is played, he is seen in the theatre - or, though under
somewhat different conditions, in the cinema or on television - in a
physical context, among other characters, whose presence is not
necessarily apparent on the page. Time and again, in Shakespeare as in
13 By 'text', in this case, I mean the lines to be spoken by the actors. The degree of
authority to be accorded to stage directions is a different matter: cf. p.119-120 below.
14 That is to say, such words as are used are Shakespeare's; the two directors make
different cuts at various points.
15 Brook's fIlm is in black and white.
109
 ~}-i
other playwrights, the presence onstage of a silent character makes its
own impact; and the almost complete absence of stage directions in
early drama makes it difficult for the reader to be aware of such a
presence, which is in linguistic terms untranslatable.
More than once in the course of his essay, Fissore suggests that
actors and directors are (or should be) bound to respect a single
interpretation of the rhythmic intentions of the playwright. If this is the
case, what is the value of the acting profession? Memorable cases of
actors alternating the leading roles in certain (especially Shakespearean)
plays illustrate the absurdity of a strai~acket approach. For example, in
1935-36 John Gielgud played Mercutio to Laurence Olivier's Romeo
for six weeks, after which the two actors exchanged roles; they had
already established themselves as representatives of contrasting styles -
Gielgud lyrical, Olivier passionate; Gielgud poetic, Olivier naturalistic.
Audiences and professional critics were divided as to the effectiveness
of each casting, but no one suggested that the experiment should not
have been attempted. Analogous cases have seen actors alternating the
roles of Shakespeare's Richard II and Bolingbroke16 , or of Othello and
!ago, with illuminating results; it goes without saying that one or the
other will be preferred by the individual spectator, but the consensus of
opinion is invariably to the effect that this kind of casting highlights the
complexity of Shakespeare's characterisation, inviting a more nuanced
response than could be expected from a uniform, one-size-fits-all
interpretation. There would be little point in such exercises if all actors
observed precisely the same rhythms; indeed, it would scarcely be
worth putting on new productions at all, especially now that the
possibility exists of recording performances on film, and in
consequence new plays would presumably be set in stone at the outset.
In recent years a new practice has been adopted by some
companies for English-language productions of classic plays written in
other languages: an established writer, not neJessarily familiar with the
16 At Stratford's Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in 1973, I myself saw Richard Pasco and
Ian Richardson in just such a production of this play, with Pasco as Richard at the
matinee and as Bolingbroke in the evening. Pasco's Richard was a poet and a dreamer;
Richardson's was more self-pitying; as Bolingbroke, the former actor was more
sensitive, the latter more militant. The net result was to suggest depths in the play
which had rarely been perceived in previous productions.
110
original language of the play, makes a "version" of the text, fairly close
to an existing translation (from which the adaptor works), but
displaying a certain freedom of a kind which a ttanslator would not
normally regard as permissible. Peter Newmark is particularly severe in
this regard:
The deplorable practice of having a play or poem literally translated and
then rewritten by an established dramatist or poet has produced many
poor adaptations (f--;Tewmark 1987: 46)
Nonetheless, that the result is, at least in some cases, more "actable"
than many existing translations cannot be denied: playwrights such as
Chekhov, Ibsen or Pirandel10 have not always been rendered in such a
way as to facilitate onstage interpretation. It nevertheless remains true
that a writer, however distinguished, who is not fluent in the original
language of the text may take liberties that can hardly be justified in the
sale terms of "actability"17, by which I mean that appearance (it is no
more than appearance) of naturalness in dialogue that enables the actor
to deliver the lines in such a way as to avoid distracting the audience
with abnormal, unconvincing turns of phrase.
By way of illustration of this currently fashionable approach to
theatre translation, I will consider some aspects of the "version"18 by
the playwright Tom Stoppard of Luigi Pirandello's Enrico IV. It is
worth noting, initially, that Pirandello and Stoppard have a good deal in
common: a preoccupation, in particular, with the paradoxical nature of
truth. Pirandello's concept of "il costruirsi", the stratagem whereby
individuals construct "a fixed attitude and consistent personality"
(pirandello 1969: xxiv), the demolition of which is in every sense
dramatic, is recognisably a concern of Stoppard's in, for example, The
Real Thing (1982); and both writers exploit the manifold senses of 'play'
- games, acting, multiple meanings - in their work. From this point of
view, Stoppard is ideally suited to interpret Pirandello for Anglophone
audiences. It is my belief, however, that he goes too far, imposing his
17 This is not quite the same concept as what Susan Bassnett called "perform ability"
(see above, p. 84).
18 This is the term used on the title page of the published text of Stoppard's adaptation.
111
 ~.
own (21 st-century, fundamentally English) creative personality to a
degree that goes well beyond what is usually meant by 'translation'.
Stoppard makes fairly extensive cuts in his version of Enrico IV,
above all in the background information Pirandello supplies through
dialogue on the historical figure of Henry IV (1050-1106), the Holy
Roman Emperor, and his conflict with Popes Gregory VII, Urban II
and Paschal II. It seems to me that, while the text remains eminently
playable, and the generalities of Henry and his various associates are
competently outlined, the omission of historical facts relevant to the
protagonist's behaviour seriously weakens the drama, obscuring as it
does the factual basis for Henry's construction of a false, but credible,
persona. My suspicion is that Stoppard is engaging in the process of
"dumbing down" which is proving so detrimental to many forms of
contemporary entertainment.
What is at issue here is the duty (an unfashionable but essential
concept) of the translator to respect the source text as a whole.
Stoppard not only makes heavy cuts in the historical references, but
omits lines or parts of speeches for no discernible reason, and
elsewhere makes gratuitous additions. Consider, for example, the
opening exchange (reminiscent, in style, of the beginning of Stoppard's
own Rosencrantz and Cui/denstern are Dead):
LandolfNext - the throne room!
Harold The throne room of the Emperor's Palace at Goslar!
OrdulfOr could be Hartzburg ...
Harold .. . or Worms, depending.
LandolfDepending on where we are in the story - he keeps us on the hop.
OrdulfSaxony ...
Harold Lombardy .. .
LandolfThe Rhine .. .
In the original text, the dialogue is as follows:
Landolfo E questa e la sala del trona!
Arialdo A Goslar!
Ordulfo 0 anche, se vuoi, nel Castello dell'Hartz!
Arialdo 0 a Worms.
Landolfo Secondo la vicenda che rappresentiamo, baIza can noi, ora qua,
ora Ii.
112
Ordulfo In Sassorua!
Arialdo In Lombardia!
Landolfo Sui Reno!
At this point, there is an interruption by the "valletti", which has
vanished from the English version. This may be in the interest of
economy, keeping the number of dramatis personae to eleven rather
than thirteen 19 ; but Stoppard sacrifices an effective bit of 'business' with
the anachronistic (for Henry IV) cigarettes and matches.
Primo valletto Per favore, ci avrebbe un fiammifero?
Landolfo Obi! A pipa no, qua dentro!
Primo valletto };la, fumo una sigaretta.
This seems to be a genuine, if small, loss.
Elsewhere, a substantial cut is made in the description by Belcredi
of the origin of the pageant at which "Henry IV" assumed his new
identity.
Belcredi Ma se venne a me! [the idea of the pageant] Oh questa e bella!
Non avrei mica da gloriarmene, data l'effetto che poi ebbe, scusate! Fu,
guardi, dottore - me ne ricordo berussimo - una sera sui primi di
novembre, al Circolo. Sfogliavo una rivista illustrata tedesca (guardavo
soltanto Ie figure, s'intende, perche i1 tedesco io non 10 so). In una c'era
l'Imperatore, in non so quale citcl uruversitaria dov'era stato studente.
Dottore Bonn, Bonn.
Belcredi Bonn, va bene. Parato, a cavallo, in uno degli strani costumi
tradizionali delle anrichissime societa studentesche della Germania;
seguito da un corteo d'altri studenti nobill, anch'essi a cavallo e in
costume. L'idea mi nacque da quella vignetta. Perche deve sapere che al
Circolo si pensava di fare qualche grande mascherata per il pros sima
carnevale. Proposi questa cavalcata storica: storica, per modo di dire:
babelica. [... ]
Stoppard has reworked this as follows:
19 Oddly, from the list of 'personaggi' the name of the 'vecchio cameriere' Giovanni is
missing, at least in the Italian edition I use. Stoppard omits the 'valletti', who appear
only in this opening scene.
113
 -~f

I'
I, Be/mdi It was mine! This is too much! Do you think I'd brag about it esempio quella Ii? instance? do you know?
!i
after what happened? You see, at the Club we'd been thinking of Giovanni Finitela, vi dico! John Oh, have done! Giovanni Stop taking
putting on a show for the next carnival. So I suggested this historical the~iss.
pageant - I say historical, it was more of a hodge-podge [... J Ordu!fo Se lui la vede, guai! OrduJph If he catches Ordu!flf Himself sees
sight of her! Whee! her, he'll blow his lid.
Thus Belcredi's low level of cultural preparation (he knows no there'll be trouble! I
German; he is ignorant of where Henry IV was a student) is Giovanni Perdio ... John Oh, good Lord! Giovanni Bloody hell ...
suppressed, and he emerges as a rather more worthy consort for MatiJde Ah 10 so bene! Donna Matilda Yes, I Matilda Don't we
Matilda than the original text suggests. Stoppard has also sacrificed the know that only too know it.
character's logorrhoea, yet another instance of impoverishment. well! I

In terms of fidelity to tone, Stoppard appears to have yielded to the Lando(fo Lo porterai di la. Lando!fo Don't forget to Lando(fo Lose the hat.
temptation - understandable, perhaps, but nonetheless unjustifiable _ take that out with you
to recast Pirandello's phraseology in the cheap vulgarity of much when you go.
modern parlance. Examples abound: thus, in the first pages of the text, Enn'co IV Se non e Henry IVWas it not Henry I take it it's not
'fucked' occurs twice in Stoppard's version. Aside from the gratuitous partite da voi l'oscena you who started that you who's been putting
voce che la mia santa obscene rumour that it about that my saintly I
crudity of this by now ubiquitous word, it is used to render two
madre, Agnese, abbia my holy mother Agnes mother spread her legs
markedly different terms. The middle column of Table 1 gives
illeciti rapporti col had had illicit relations for the Bishop of
Frederick May's 1953 translation of the same lines.
vescovo Enrico with Bishop Henry of Augsburg.
Table 1 d'Augusta! Augusta? I

PlRANDELLO MAY STOPPARD

Berloldo Oh Dio mio! Berlho/d Oh, my God! BerloJd I'm fucked.
It might be argued that in the case of the servants, informal register
is appropriately used to mark their low social status; but that Matilda or
Ordu(fo Eh, stai fresco, OrduJph Then you've Ordu!fYou're fucked Henry himself should adopt a similar tone not only represents a
allora, caro mio! had it, dear boy! deviation from Pirandello's text, but rather defeats the presumed
purpose of distinguishing between the speech patterns of the lower and
Further cases of excessive colloquialism are listed in Table 2 below: the upper class. May's translation is much closer to the original, but here
too there are flaws such as the over-translation of 'Scusa' as 'That's not
Table 2
PlRANDELLO quite true' (though the tone is infinitely preferable to Stoppard's slangy
.MAY STOPPARD
Adaldo Noi ci 'Fair do's'), and of'Lo porterai di la' as 'Don't forget to take that out with
Harold And there we HaroldWe eyeballed
guardammo rutti e tre you when you go'; the absurd "Whee!' for 'guai'; nevertheless, May shows
stood, all three of us, each other - who dat?
negli occhi: Chi sad. looking at one far greater respect for the original than Stoppard, and his translation, if a
questo Bertoldo? another ... Wondering trifle mechanical at times, remains grist for the actors' mills.
who this Berthold
mi~ht be. How far maya translator go in adapting a text before s/he loses the
Arialdo Eh no, caro mio! Harold Oh no, dear HaroJdNo, fair do's ... name of translator? A fascinating example of reworking of a classic text
Scusa! boy! That's not quite while remaining close to the original is represented by the version of
true! Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by Marco Ponti and Pietro Deandrea,
Aria/do Chi e.E.er Haro/d,\x/ho's that, for HaroldWho's the skirt, performed at the Teatro Romano, Verona and the Cavallerizza Reale,

114
115
 "1II!I!!If

Turin in 2005. This was a much more radical reshaping of the original Ponti and Deandrea reduce this to its bare bones:
text than Stoppard's version of Pirandello: significantly, in the text
printed for the Teatro Stabile di Torino, the subheading is "Raccontato Verona.
da Marco Ponti e Pietro Deandrea" the two making clear at the outset Due famiglie.
their approach to Shakespeare's text. It might be argued that theirs is Un odio, antico.
Le mani dei cittadini sono ancora una volta rosse di sangue.
not, strictly speaking, a translation; indeed, they themselves write:
Due sfortunati amanti.
In ogni caso, il risultato di questa traduzione non vuole essere un Romeo
Un amore, nato sotto la stella nera della morte.
e Giu/ietta modernizzato, non vuole essere una traduzione alternativa a
E illoro sangue porri fine a quell'odio antico.
quelle, innumerevoli, pubblicate, rna un testo pensato totalmente per la
rappresentazione scenica dove, con parole dicibili e ascoltabili da attori
Uno spaventoso passaggio di amore e marte, ecco che cosa sari questo
e pubblico contemporanei, il senso originario sia restituito in tutta la
sua terribile attualita. 20 palcoscenico.

Ora.-
Certainly the integrity (in the moral sense) of such total rethinking is
not to the taste of all; but it seems to me more readily justifiable than In terms of informational content, little or nothing is lost; and the
Stoppard's inconsistent fiddling with the text of Enrico IV. Take, for deliberately artificial structure (the Prologue here begins and ends with
example, Shakespeare's Prologue:
a single word ("Verona", "Ora"); the text is arranged in ever-
diminishing "paragraphs", successively of four, three, two and one line;
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, six of these ten lines are syntactically abbreviated) recalls the deliberate
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, artificiality of Shakespeare's use of the sonnet form.
\X'here civil blood makes civil hands unclean. Like Shakespeare, Ponti and Deandrea introduce elements of
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes linguistic vulgarity that place their text firmly in its own time - in their
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; case, the 21 st century; thus Juliet's repeated "I come" to the (offstage)
\X'hose misadventur'd piteous overthrows Nurse in the balcony scene is, aptly enough, punctuated at intervals
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife. with "Dio che palle, 'sta qua" (God, what a drag, this woman), which
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, Shakespeare did not make explicit but which clearly reflects Juliet's
And the continuance of their parents' rage, sentiment at that moment. In other cases, a 16 th -century vulgarism is
\X'hich, but their children's end, nought could remove,
reshaped in contemporary language:
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
As for Mercutio, we obviously played on his numerous sexual puns,
\X'hat here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
such as his description of Romeo-in-love in II.i.35-39:

~ow will he sit under a medlar tree

And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
20In any case, the result of this translation is not intended to be a modernised Romeo and
Juiiet, nor an alternativeto the innumerable published translations, but a text designed
As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.
wholly for the performance in which, with words that can be spoken and listened to by o Romeo, that she were, 0 that she were
the actors and audiences of our time, the original sense is restored in all its terrible An open-arse, or thou a popp'rin' pear.
contemporary relevance.

116 117
 -,.
'1"'
Gii me 10 veda, sdraiato satta un albero di fico, a pensare a guella parte
di Rosaline che starebbe benissimo in mezzo a quei frutti. Oh Romeo!
Se solo lei si decide sse a dartela, la sua vlrtli. 21
This may be regarded as carrying Valerio Fissore's very proper
insistence on linguistic modernisation to extremes, but it makes perfect
sense in the live theatre: a contemporary audience will appreciate the
reference to the fico as the public at the Globe must have enjoyed the
poppering pear.
It seems especially worth noting that this translation/retelling of
Romeo and Juliet was commissioned by Gabriele Vacis and Roberto
Tarasco for the Teatro Stabile di Torino with the specification that the
performance should last no longer than 90 minutes. This was one of
the elements that led Ponti and Deandrea to feel not only free but
effectively constrained to operate what Deandrea defines as "una certa
licenza", a certain freedom; and Vacis, who directed the play,
collaborated closely with the translators, influencing certain of their
choices on the basis of theatrical efficacy. His decision to dress the
actors in a style that was, in temporal terms, neutral permitted Ponri
and Deandrea to use highly colloquial contemporary Italian; where
possible, they chose to maintain Shakespeare's figures of speech,
respecting the polysemic wealth of his language. It is fair to say that
they felt their first loyalty was to the director (rather than to the
playwright); and the director's first loyalty was, of course, to his
audience. Deandrea writes that "[... ] often we resorted to
compensatory tactics in order to maintain the overall bawdiness and
vulgar allusions of the original language"; this will not be to the taste of
all spectators, but Shakespeare himself was much given to bawdy puns
(though not, perhaps, as much as some modern commentators would
have us believe; Stanley Wells offers a useful - and entertaining
corrective to such exaggerations in Lookingfor Sex in Shakespeare).
The quality I have called 'actability' is most readily achieved by
writers who are themselves actors (or vice versa): Shakespeare and
Pinter both fall into this category. Playwrights with acting experience
have, I contend, an ear for performable dialogue, in part because they
21 Pietro Deandrea, unpublished essay.
118
have been trained in the onstage delivery of lines, in part because any
competent actor has an intuitive grasp of what is and is not effective, to
the point that it is not unusual for experienced performers to propose
slight modifications of the dialogue in the direction of that illusion of
naturalness of which I have already spoken. Character in a play is
transmitted in the first place in what is said and in how it is expressed: few
dramatists indulge in the lengthy prefaces and minutely detailed stage
directions dear to George Bernard Shaw (and largely ignored by actors
and directors). Interestingly, John Osborne's ground-breaking Look
Back in Anger, a clumsily written play which owed much of its success to
the shock effect of seeing not a drawing-room, but a shabby bedsitter,
on the stage, and hearing dialogue of a very different kind from what
audiences had been accustomed to in the theatre, adopted a similarly
wordy approach to stage directions. Elisa Armellino, elsewhere in this
volume, makes a perceptive. : 6 ,..
the Italian translation of
Osborne's description of the set, with its minute details:
[... ] The ceiling slopes down quite sharply from L. to R Down R. are
two small low windows. [... ] Most of the wall L. is taken up with a
high, oblong window. This looks out on to the landing, but light comes
through it from a skylight beyond. [.:.] Standing L., below the food
cupboard, is ALISON. [... ] Hanging over the grubby, but expensive,
skirt she is wearing is a cherry red shirt of JIMMY's [... ]
It is hard to imagine what possible importance lies in the direction
of the slope of the ceiling, the precise location of the windows, or the
position of Alison and her ironing board; few directors (unless rank
amateurs with neither experience nor initiative) would be bound by
such specifications. Nor, for that matter, is it easy to imagine how a
skirt can be made evidendy "grubby, but expensive". These are
novelist's details, and have lime relevance to the theatre: Actors and
directors whom I consulted22 on this aspect of the dramatic text were
unanimous in insisting that, while they respect the playwright'S
indications insofar as they serve to guide interpretation, it is sometimes
22 In particular, in addition to Giorgio Perona (see p.l23 ff.), I should like to thank Vito
Jr Battisti, Lorenzo Denicolai, Cristina Palermo and Marco Stracquadaneo for their
helpful contributions.
119
 ~
- perhaps often - necessary, or at least desirable, to deviate from
certain detailed instructions, especially where these have no particular
relevance to characterisation. (This is the case of the sloping ceiling of
the Porters' bedsitter.) There are cases - and this is particularly true of
dramatists like Pirandello, or Ayckbourn, or indeed Shakespeare, who
work(ed) closely with the actors prior to the first public performance of
their works 23 - in which details of the stage set, or of acoustic or visual
effects, are essential to the reinforcement of characterisation and the
devdopment of the plot: thus, for example, Chekhov's Cherry Orchard
ends with the sound of the axe falling on the trunk of one of the cherry
trees, and it would be an imprudent director indeed who omitted this
detail. At the same time, as more than one actor pointed out, a
production may be staged in successive weeks or months in very
different theatres, where the varying dimensions of the stages, the
availability (or lack) of space in the wings and other purely physical
elements not infrequently impose modifications of the disposition of
objects and human figures, the relative positions of the actors, their
entrances and exits. From this point of view it is clear that the authority
of the stage directions can be only partial: the exigencies of per-
formance must take precedence. In the case of the description of the
Look Back in Anger set, quoted above, the vivid colour of the shirt
Alison is wearing is the one bright spot Osborne proposes; if a cherry
red shirt is not readily available, I see no reason to object to the
substitution of a sky blue, yellow or emerald green one. The translator
will, as a matter of course, maintain the colour chosen by Osborne; but
some inaccuracy - say, the use in the target text of a different shade of
red, such as scarlet or crimson - is of very minor import here. It is a
very different matter, of course, when it comes to translating dialogue,
in which the greatest care must be taken to maintain the shades of
meaning suggested by the lexis, syntax and rhythm of the lines.
A more convincing case can be made for the significance of those
adverbials often preceding or immediately following a given line or
speech, indicating the tone of voice or the underlying mood of the
speaker. Here, although as an actor and director I do not personally feel
immutably bound by the playwright's indications, I can recognise the
23 I am grateful to Cristina Palermo for making this point.
120
Ii I
helpfulness of a degree of authorial guidance in interpreting the text.
For example, I was recently in rehearsal with an English-language
company, in preparation for public performances of an enormously
successful American play, Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House. Ruhl is a non-
interventionist author; she provides a minimum of stage directions,
mainly of a purely physical kind; and this led to lively (and, it must be
said, invaluable) discussion of the characters' unexpressed motives,
which in its turn permitted us to experiment with many differing
interpretations of specific scenes, according to the subtext each of us
had drawn from the words on the page. In my own case, the result was
the exhilarating opportunity to experiment with playing my character in
contrasting ways, as a self-centred but well-meaning woman who is
convinced that everybody loves her, or as a slyly calculating man-eater.
The dialogue remained unchanged but is open to either interpretation;
the director opted for one rather than the other, but without denying
that the version she had rejected is viable in terms of the text, for
example "It's so nice to meet you. I've heard wonderful things about
you. I've heard you're a wonderful doctor". This can be read as a
perfectly sincere greeting or as acidly ironic (and in performance,
delivered straight, elicited one of the biggest laughs of the evening, to
the surprise of the company). I am not convinced that it is the
translator's task to take sides in this kind of debate, but rather to allow
for a certain flexibility of reading.
It goes almost without saying that the director and the set and
costume designer(s) make their own contribution to the communicative
act of performance: in the 1960s, David ~!arner's Hamlet was dressed
as a vaguely hippy student, all lanky hair and long college scarf,
imposing on the actor a concomitant reading of the lines; but that he
was a tortured late adolescent and an academically gifted young man
was clear in the first place from Shakespeare's dialogue. By the same
token, textual justification can be found for the very different
interpretations of Laurence Olivier (who was actually older than the
actress, Eileen Herlihy, who played his mother in the 1948 film),
Kenneth Branagh, or Mel Gibson. Olivier's romantically handsome
blond was crippled by indecisiveness, an interpretation supported by
the speech quoted (in condensed form) from Liii.23-36 by a
disembodied voice at the start of the film:
121
 ~".,
So oft it chances in particular men
That, for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin;
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason
Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens
The form of plausive manners - that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature's livery or fortune's star,
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infInite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault,
immediately followed by Olivier's interpolation: "This is the story of a
man who could not make up his mind". Branagh drew heavily on the
frequent references to Hamlet's real or assumed madness in the first
three acts of the play and made the prince clearly, if not invariably,
insane. Franco Zeffirelli's casting of Gibson, whose reputation as a
glamorous star of action flims was already well established, resulted in a
less complex, more consistently heroic Hamlet. As is usual in
Shakespeare films, the text was cut by Olivier and Zeffirelli (Branagh
offered the entire four-hour version, with not altogether satisfactory
consequences), but all three based their very different interpretations on
Shakespeare's words. The translator should never, of course, feel free
to distort the source language version in favour of one or other of these
(or alternative) renderings of Hamlet.
Importantly, too, characters may be differentiated (socially,
I educationally, intellectually etc.) by the kind of language they use: thus,
for example, in Noel Coward's Hqy Fever the vapid personalities of
Sandy Tyrrell and Jackie Coryton, the two younger guests at the Blisses'
I
home, are conveyed by certain verbal mannerisms, perfectly respected
in the working translation by the Italian actor Giorgio Perona. Jackie'S
I' I conversation consists largely of banalities expressed within the limits of
her personallexis:
II
122
Yes, I've always heard Spain was awfully nice 24 .
Italy's awfully nice, isn't it?
Yes, I've always heard Rome was lovely.
Si, ho sempre sentito dire che !a Spagna e moho bella.
L'Italia e molto bella, vero?
Si, l'ho sempre sentito dire.
Although Perona has abbreviated the third of the quoted lines, he
has, I think, perfectly caught the tone Coward conveys in the original.
(Sandy is not notably superior as a conversationalist: in response to
Judith's account of "why we came to Cookham" he responds: "Awfully
nice place, Cookham", which Perona translates "Gran bel posticino,
Cookham", using the diminutive to suggest Sandy'S communicative
limitations.) Similarly, his version of the dreadful "poem" that Sorel
reads to her brother at the beginning of Act I is rendered in such a way
as to make clear its awfulness: the original reads as follows:
Love's a Trollop stained with wine,
Clawing at the breasts of Adolescence,
Nuzzling, tearing, shrieking, beating-
God, why were we fashioned so!
Perona translates thus:
Amore, quel farabutto dal vino macchiato
al seno dell'adolescenza avvinghiato
grufo!a, lacera, latra,
e questo il disegno di Dio!
This, though not a literal rendering, is splendidly vacuous and fully
justifies Simon's reaction: "The poor girl's potty" /"Quella povera ragazza
dev'essere impazzita!"25
24 Perhaps no single lemma better expresses poverty of lexis than the harmless but
insipid adjective 'nice'.
25 Perona's Simon is a little less brutal than Coward's; the original suggests that the
author of the "poem" is and always has been mentally unbalanced, whereas in Italian
she has gone mad (arguably in response to her own lack of artistic skill).
123
 ~,,>
Perona's approach to translating for the theatre is pragmatic: having
made a draft version, he then "performs" it, reading it aloud with the
employment of his actorial skills to establish the degree to which it is -
or is not - acceptable, actable. I should perhaps reassert at this point
that I am using "actable" throughout this essay with reference to the
spoken word, without considering the semiotics of the stage - gesture,
movement, costume etc. - which I take to be elements in the realm of
performability, a concept not limited to language. The translator's
concern is necessarily and immediately with words, and only marginally
with the accompanying ingredients of the performance.
In the case of Coward, the translator's task is made still more
I
arduous by two further considerations which apply to many other
'I writers: his humour is powerfully culture-bound, and his social
assumptions are such that they may no longer be taken for granted.
III
This latter factor is the less inconvenient, in that we are sufficiently
accustomed to books, plays and films set in the past to be able to adapt
our expectations fairly readily, though in the case of Coward it might be
argued that he is too recent to be accorded the leniency which we so
willingly grant to writers from a more distant period. Coward's humour
Iii is another matter altogether. Not only does it at least partly depend on
situations that are socially specific to the English upper middle class; it
II rarely has much to do with witticisms. The playwright himself, in his
Preface to the play, observes:
III
Some of the biggest laughs in Hqy Fever occur on such lines as 'Go on',
'No, there isn't is there?', Thanks most awfully, Mrs Bliss', This haddock's
III disgusting' and 'How very rudel' There are many other glittering examples
of my sophistication in the same vein [... ] (Coward 1965: ix)
II In such cases, more than the words themselves, it is the context and
the situation that provokes hilarity. Here it seems peculiarly worth
commenting on the case of "This haddock's disgusting" - the very idea
II of eating haddock for breakfast is so un-Italian that it represents a
! ,
particular challenge for the translator. The breakfast menu in the play
offers the aforesaid haddock, or bacon and eggs - the latter a dish well
known outside Great Britain as a classic example of what hotels call an
"English breakfast"; its very familiarity as such is enough to make it
acceptable to an Italian audience. Fish at 8 a.m. is another matter
I
III 124
altogether; and the Italian translator is faced with a further problem in
that the fish in question is unfamiliar to Continental Europeans. It is
translated by reputable bilingual dictionaries as eglejino; not, I think, a
species commonly found at fishmongers' shops outside Britain. Perona,
in this case, calls it simply pesce at the first mention, whereas the line
quoted above becomes "Questo merluzzo e disgustoso", substituting
for the mysterious egleftno a kind of fish every Italian knows. (Whether
the line would be greeted with unrestrained hilarity in the Italian theatre
is an open question.)
Apropos this kind of problem, Perona remarks on "la tendenza di
molti di trasferire in ambito italiano vicende che in origine sono
ambientate in Inghilterra [... ] il pili delle volte il trasferimento in
territorio italiano si limita all'italianizzazione dei personaggi e dei luoghi,
lasciando lnvariato il resto"26 - which mayor may not result in a
credible performance. Thus, in Noel Coward's Relative Values, Frederick
Crestwell becomes Carlo (why not Federico, if the name is to be
translated at all?), and Alan Ayckbourn's Confusions has been rendered in
Italian to questionable effect: especially in the fourth scene, set at a
village fete, much of the humour is lost when the culturally distinct
sagra del paese is invoked. A recent production in Turin restored the
original setting and thus recovered the comic clout of the original.
Perona also quotes a number of mistranslations from Relative Values,
some of which may be partially justified: thus ":May being in bed with
shingles" becomes "si e dovuta mettere a letto con un eczema",
presumably because "fuoea di sant'Antonio" is prosodically much too
long - but at the same time, there is a loss of credibility in the
translation, in that eczema is not a complaint with which one takes to
one's bed. Much more seriously, the following brief exchange between
the butler Crestwell and Alice, the maid, is translated in such a way as
to lose almost all of its comic effect:
26 "many [translators 1 tendency to transfer into an Italian setting incidents originally set
in England [... J in most cases the transfer to Italian territory is limited to the
Italianisation of the characters and the places, leaving the rest unchanged." I am
grateful to Giorgio Perona for discussing this question with me at length and for the
long personal communication from which this quotation is extracted.
125
 ~.
i
I
Crestwelf. The fact that it doesn't work out like that and never will in no
"I way deters the idealists from pressing valiantly towards Utopia.
Alice: What's Utopia?
Crestwelf. A spiritually hygienic abstraction, Alice, where everyone is
il hail-fellow-well-met and there is no waiting at table.
Alice: Oh, I see. Fork lunches?
I
Carlo: II fatto che questa non risulti, come non risultera mai, non
III distoglie in alcun modo gli idealisti dalla loro marcia verso I'utopia.
Alice: Che cos'e?
Carlo: Una astrazione spirituale igienica secondo la quale nessuno serve
a tavola!
il Alice: Nemmeno per la seconda colazione?
I Setting aside for the moment the weakening of Crestwell's first line,
I
and the total loss of the concept of "hail fellow well met" (which could
Ii III have been rendered, as Perona suggests, with "tutti si vogliono bene",
or alternatively with "tutti sono cordiali"), Alice's "fork lunches" is a
delightful (mis)interpretation of "Utopia", the comedy of which is
entirely lost in the feeble Italian translation.
Perona goes on to make a general point with which I find myself in
complete agreement:
III
Nella traduzione in generale rna soprattutto in quella teatrale, che ha a
che fare can l'arte piu difficile del mondo, oltre alla fedelti al sensa del
testo (e in questa caso dobbiamo davvero molte volte restare legati solo
ed esclusivamente al sensa) non possiamo mai perdere di vista la
"recitabiliti"27 delle battute, della lora musicaliti ed efficacia in scena.
Dopa di che, il testa sara nelle mani del regista, che trovera aneora altre
suggestioni e forse aggiungera a tagliera a secondo dell'interpretazione:
quella teatrale e materia in continuo mutamento e la traduzione per
prima non puo non tenerne canto. Pretend ere di fissarla sulla carta una
volta per tutte significherebbe snaturarla,zs
27 This translates into English as "actability". Perona and I have arrived independently
at exactly the same concept.
28 In translation in general, but especially in theatrical translation, which is concerned
with the most difficult art in the world, in addition to fidelity to the meaning of the text
(and in this case we really must very often remain bound exclusively by the meaning),
we can never lose sight of the "actability", the musicality and the on stage effectiveness
of the lines. Thereafter, the text will be in the hands of the director, who will find yet
126
This is, broadly speaking, my own view. For the scholar who regards
the theatrical text as simply that - a text - and not as the basis for a
performance, Perona's final point must seem outrageous: it is the
definitive form of the words on the page that interests most academics
(and its immutability is reassuring). But Perona is writing for the theatre
practitioner, to whom the validity of the text is inseparable from its
_e
actability.
Fissore overstates the case when he writes that "most directors and
actors constraints their authors try to fetter
them ~Irssee, cases on record of actors blatantly
dis regrading the playwrigh wishes; one such is recorded by Alan
Bennett, during rehearsals of his play Getting On, in which the leading
role was taken by Kenneth More, an actor familiar to the public as the
star of hugely successful comedy films, and in addition of &ach for the
S~, in which he played the legless W'orld War II air ace Douglas Bader:
Until he was actually faced with an audience Kenneth More was
scrupulous ab~ut playing the part as written (and sometimes
overwtitten). Itf, true he flatly refused to say 'fuck' since it would ruin
the matinees, but this didn't seem to me to be important, so long as he
continued to play [the partJ as the kind of man who did say lucll [...J
We made some cuts, but found it hard because it was now plain that
Kenneth More saw the piece as a comedy while I was trying to keep it a
serious play. [... W'Jithout there having been any warning or disagree-
ment, he called a rehearsal to cut the play to his own taste, while
instructing the management not to allow me into the theatre until this
had been done. (Bennett 1994:203)
Two points must be made here. First, More was clearly in the
wrong, both in barring the dramatist (himself, as it happens, an
experienced actor) and in tampering with the text for reasons of personal
vanity (he was evidendy loth to appear in an unsympathetic role): this is
irresponsible behaviour, quite inexcusable when the writer is alive, fully
compos mentis and willing to collaborate with the company in preparing for
more suggestions and may cut or add according to [his] interpretation; the matter of
theatre is in continual mutation and translation cannot fail to take this into immediate
account. To pretend to fix it on paper once and for all would be to distort it.
127
 performance. Secondly, the very fact that Bennett considered the incident
worth recording testifies to the relative rarity of such interference. Of
course some actors and some directors "11
autho' intentions - even some very distingw.s e
"!II 71" .....,. the
rectors allow
:111
themselves to be betrayed by their eg02 9 That said, I have found no one
i among the numerous actors and directors of my acquaintance who is
indifferent to the authority of the playwright, alive or dead.
It should be clear at this point that my position on theatrical
translation is different from both Fissore's and Armellino's, and this is
undoubtedly in part the fruit of my years of reflection not only as an
!III academic specialising in the history of the English language and in
(mainly English to Italian30) translation, but as an actor and director
with extensive semi-professional experience. That said, I am very far
from asserting that mine is the 'right', the definitive approach; I would
il l only insist that to translate a theatre text without reference to the
exigencies of performance is to risk producing a version which,
whatever its virtues in terms of accuracy, syntactical, lexical or prosodic,
will be beyond the capabilities of even the most accomplished actors to
make palatable for an audience. I use 'palatable' here in the sense of
readily comprehensible, moving where appropriate, comical, satirical -
for, whatever the tone of the original, and always supposing that the
original is effective on the source-language stage, it should be as far as
possible reproduced in the target-language version. If this view is
mistaken, I take full responsibility for my own eccentricity in regarding a
playas primarily a theatrical event and not simply as words-on-the-page.
29 At the time of writing, Sir Peter Hall's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream is
playing at the Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames. Sir Peter, aged almost 80, has cast
Dame Judi Dench, aged 75, as Titania. Dench has no more fervent admirer than the
present writer, who also greatly respects Hall; but this casting is either a piece of
outrageous self-indulgence by both or simply a bit of commercial strategy - Dench's
popularity is such that audiences would pay to see her in any role, however unsuited to
her present age. In either case, these two magnificent artists are flying in the face of
Shakespeare's intentions.
30 But also Italian to English, French to English and French to Italian.
128
References
1. Plays
Alan Ayckbourn, Absurd Person Singular, Longman, Harlow 1991
Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot, in Theatre " Les Editions de l\finuit, Paris 1971
_ WaitingjorGodot, Faber and Faber, London 1956
Noel Coward, Hqy Fever, Heinemann, London 1965
_ Febbre da fieno, tr. Giorgio Perona, unpublished
John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, Faber and Faber, London 1957
Harold Pinter, Old Times, Eyre Methuen, London 1971
_ Vecchi tempi, tr. Romeo de Baggis, Giuliano Einaudi editore, Torino 1978
Luigi Pirandello, Enrico IV, in Three Plqys, ed. Felicity Firth, Manchester
University Press, :\1anchester 1969
_ Henry IV, tr. Frederick :\fay, in Three Plqys, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1969
_ Hen~)' IV, tr. Tom Stoppard, Faber and Faber, London 2004
William Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander, HarperCollins,
Glasgow 1951
_ Tutte Ie opere, ed. Mario Praz, Sansoni editore, Firenze 1964
_ Romeo & Juliet, tr. Marco Ponti e Pietro Deandrea, Fondazione del Teatro
Stabile di Torino, Torino 2005
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, in The Complete Plqys of Bernard Shaw, Odhams
Press Limited, London 1934
_ Pigmalione, tr. Antonio Agresti, Arnaldo :\fondadori Editori, Milano 1951
_ Pigmalione, tr. Saba Sardi, Arnaldo :\fondadori Editori, Milano 1980
_ Pigmalione, tr. Leonardo Bragaglia and Lucio Chiavarelli, Tascabili Econo-
mici ~ ewton, Roma 1995
2. Other texts consulted
Susan Bassnett, 'Ways through the labyrinth: Strategies and methods for
translating theatre texts" in Theo Hermans (ed.), The Manipulation of
Lterature, ACCO, Leuven 1985
Alan Bennett, Writing Home, Faber and Faber, London 1994
Pietro Deandrea, "La terribile attualitil di Shakespeare", nota introduttiva a
Romeo & Juliet, tr. Ponti and Deandrea, Fondazione del Teatro Stabile di
Torino, Torino 2005
Umberto Eco, Expenences in Translation, Toronto University Press, Toronto
Buffalo London 2001
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Routledge, London and ~ew
York 1988
R A Henderson, Shakespeak, Trauben editore, Torino 2009
129
Douglas Langworthy, ''Why Translation Matters", in Theatre JoumaI59.3, The
Johns Hopkins University Press 2007
Peter Newmark, A Textbook of Translation, Pearson Education Limited, Harlow
2003
Randolph Quirk and Sidney Greenbaum, A University Grammar of English,
Longman, London 1973
Kenneth Sisam, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, Oxford University Press,
London 1959

130