Theatre and Wordplay: Translating Boris Vian’s Plays

Abstract

This thesis is conceived as a practical-theoretical investigation on theatre translation, with a particular interest for texts in which wordplay, on the one hand, and a deep rooting in the source culture, on the other, pose seemingly insolvable problems to the translational practice.

The first, theoretical section of this work is completed by a practical one: the actual translation into Italian of a wide corpus of theatre texts, consisting in the complete plays by French writer and playwright Boris Vian – a production in which wordplay and the contextual and intertextual elements play a fundamental role.

The theoretical section is further divided into two separate chapters:

(i) the first one deals with the already quoted translation problems. Different subchapters concentrate on drama translation, wordplay translation and the translation of culture-bound terms. An analysis of the state of the discipline in these three fields gives way, in the last paragraph, to the proposal of an original translation strategy. Using a double paratextual apparatus (a brief introduction, addressed to the audience and written in the same playful style of the plays; and a series of more detailed footnotes, addressed to the reader of the printed version), the author tries to pay attention to both the literary and the theatrical aspects of every play, proposing a possible solution to a dichotomy no prescriptive theory of theatre translation has tried to solve until now.

(ii) the second chapter is devoted to Boris Vian’s theatre, analysed from a historical, literary and sociological point of view. This chapter, which takes into consideration the success of Vian’s plays both in France and abroad, is closed by a critical analysis of the existing Italian translation. By affirming its positive and negative aspects, and by operating a comparison with the strategies adopted by other translators in other countries, this analysis demonstrates the need for a new translation, paving the way for the second (practical) section of the work.

The second part of the thesis is devoted to the translation of Boris Vian’s stage production. Following the guidelines established in the first part of the text, the ten translations (five of which have been first translated into Italian in this occasion) are introduced by a note for the audience and accompanied by numerous footnotes, explicitly conceived for the reader. Due to the number of problems posed by the translation of Vian’s plays, every translation is preceded by an introduction which deals with the aspects that, for their higher specificity, could not be dealt with in the first section. Among the subjects treated in this section, one can name verse translation (introduction to Série Blême), song translation (introduction to Le Chasseur français) or the translation of jokes (Chambre de célibataire).