The tendency in Britain to lack interest in translating foreign theatrical texts is one of the reasons why there have been only two-hundred and thirty stage productions of Pirandello’s plays in England over the past century (Taviano and Lorch 2000: 18). The Royal Shakespeare Company has never staged any of Pirandello’s plays, while the National Theatre has produced only I giganti della montagna [The Mountain Giants], Il giuoco delle parti [The Rules of the Game], Liolà, L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù [Man, Beast and Virtue] and Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (ibid.; National Theatre 2016). This is also partly due to the fact that Italian theatrical culture is said to be perceived as too exotic and has thus hindered the success of Pirandello’s theatre pieces in the Anglophone world (ibid.). Indeed, English audiences tend to arguably have a stereotypical and comic image of the “Bel Paese”’s theatre tradition (ibid.: 20). For this reason, English productions of Italian plays have often misrepresented Italians as overemotional and capable of outrageous behaviour. Hence, they have tended to majorly stage Italian playtexts – such as Eduardo De Filippo’s plays, Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s theatre – that are more distinctly comic than Pirandello’s works. Furthermore, the content of his texts has sometimes been considered unsuitable for performance. For example, when Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore [Six Characters in Search of an Author] was first staged in Britain in the 1920s, the show was given in a private hall, as its references to adultery and incest were regarded as unacceptable at that time (Bassnett 2000: 12). It could therefore be said that the reception in Britain of Pirandello’s plays has been a troubled one mainly because of the way his works depict Italian culture and people, which does not necessarily match the way British audiences are used to see Italians portrayed on stage. The purpose of this essay is to consider how translating practices contribute to the construction of culture, particularly with regard to theatre translation. The focus will be on the issues posed by the rendering and reception in Britain of Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore.
Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore was first staged on 9 May 1921 at the Valle Theatre in Rome, Italy (Lorch 2005: 31). The play opens on an empty stage where Actors arrive and, following the instructions of the Director, start to rehearse Il giuoco delle parti. The arrival of the Six Characters interrupts the rehearsal, as they present themselves as unfinished characters looking for an author to complete their story, ask for their family tragedy to be staged and begin to tell it. The Characters’ desire to have their tale performed – that will not be fulfilled eventually – represents their quest for signification, that can only happen through communication, through the translation of their familiar drama into stage. The play’s fragmented plot and overlapping time levels made of it not only a challenging play for Italian audience, but also an avant-garde piece which took European theatre by storm. This was due to the revolutionary content of the meta-theatrical play which centres around the notion of theatre as an impossible art – impossible to the extent to which it portrays the impossibility of communication between authors, characters, and directors.
The sociocultural elements embedded in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore are what make such a theatre piece so popular among audiences and at the same time so challenging for drama translators. The play is rooted in Pirandello’s peculiar sense of irony, which is rendered by simplified syntactic oppositions where the use of deictics is combined with present tense verbs. For example, when the Director mutters: “Anche il cagnolino! Come se fossimo pochi i cani qua” (Pirandello 1993: 31) [“Now the little dog too! As if there weren’t enough dogs here already”] (Pirandello 1995: 7). This sentence expresses in an ironic way not only the Director’s contempt for the cast, but also Pirandello’s critique of contemporary theatre and of the art of performance in general. To be more specific, the epithet “dog” refers to the Italian idiomatic expression “essere un cane” [“to be a dog”] which means to be unfit and is generally used to describe mediocre actors. Such a metaphor has a different connotation in English, as it points to someone who is perceived as deceptive. Thus, the line uttered by the Director is exemplary of how much Pirandello’s humour is rooted in Italian culture.
Furthermore, the language used by the author is extremely heterogeneous. On the one hand, a familiar register is adopted when the Characters tell their story: their lines are rich in vivid imagery and expressions imbued with the Italian culture. Exemplary of this imbrication in Italian peculiarities is the expression “si dissuga, signore, si dissuga tutto!” (Pirandello 1993: 102) [“it dries out, sir, everything dries out!”] pronounced by the Stepdaughter, as it does not belong to a standard register, but rather to a dialect one. On the other hand, the verbal code becomes more abstract and conceptual when the Characters try to explain to the Actors their need to have their drama performed, yet the style here still features literary devices imbued with the Italian folklore. The speech held by the Stepdaughter to the Director perfectly sums up such an intertwining of abstract and culturally-located elements:
In this passage we find exclamations, ellipses, interjections, parenthetical expressions and vocatives that skilfully expose the Stepdaughter’s aversion to any type of philosophical abstraction as well as her way of speaking which, with its rather convoluted syntax, can be seen as typically Italian. Then, because of the stylistic characteristics mentioned above, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore is highly dramatic and challenging to be translated into another culture. Indeed, in 1925 an anonymous critic of the Times Literary Supplement posited that “beyond a certain point […] it is impossible to translate Pirandello. His characters and situations are so invented as to demand Italian preconceptions, emotions and gestures” (Lorch 2005: 146).
Since Pirandellian characters and situations are so embedded in Italian customs, English translations – or rather adaptations – of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore have often been produced through a stage-oriented approach, thus creating target texts and performances tailored to the audience’s expectations (Bassnett 1998: 98; Perteghella 2004: 6; Wood 2013: 148). Adaptation usually occurs when there is a cultural or semantic gap between the source and the target language, so that the original culture can be rendered into the receiving one in a convincing way (Newmark 1988: 46). This practice is inscribed in the overarching dichotomy between two traditional approaches to translation: domestication and foreignisation. The former strategy, by making the source text adhere to the values of the target culture and language, aims at narrowing the differences between the two (Venuti 1995). The latter contributes to widen the cultural gap, as it stresses the ethno-specific traits of the original work (ibid.). Theatrical adaptation is mostly underpinned by the domesticating approach, as it endeavours to make the translated product as much accessible as possible to the target audience, by adapting the source text to the norms of the receiving culture. For this reason, adaptation has usually been perceived by scholars and translators to modify the textual fabric of the original play considerably more than translation (Perteghella 2008: 55). This is due to the still prevailing assumptions on fidelity to the source text as a criterion of good translation. Yet, by facilitating cultural communication, adaptation can be regarded as producing plays that are faithful to the target culturality and audience’s expectations, therefore engendering innovative forms of faithfulness.
An adapted version of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore directed by Stacy Keach in 1976 replaced the rehearsal of Il giuoco delle parti with that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, thus giving way to a domesticating strategy (ibid.: 147). In such a way, this English interpretation of the source text preserved the reference of the original to a specific theatrical and cultural history by adapting it to its own familiar classic repertoire. It is worth noting that the meta-theatrical nature of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore is enhanced by the substitution of Il giuoco delle parti with Hamlet since both Hamlet and Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore present us with a dead father, a grieving mother, a stepfather, a troubled son and hints to incest. Thus, the insertion of the former within the latter can be regarded as aimed at creating a textual “mise en abyme,” a self-reflection of the original within its translation. Moreover, the use of a Shakespearian playtext featuring a non-English environment (i.e. Denmark) might be symptomatic with an act of revolt against English cultural imperialism. Another example of domestication of Pirandello’s masterpiece is represented by the version directed by Richard Jones at the Young Vic Theatre on 9 February 2001, as, by making use of a clear and sharp language, it was much more accessible to an English audience than the original (Lorch 2005: 161-2).
At other times, by using a foreignising technique to convey the “Italian-ness” of this theatre piece, its comic aspects, movements and gestures have been emphasised. This has been shown in reviews of the 2015 French production (with English surtitles) at the Barbican Theatre of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore where the conflict between Actors and Characters was described as comically absurd (Billington 2015). The satiric traits of this adaptation can be said to underline the discrepancy between Actors and Characters, which in turn can be considered as a synecdoche of the hiatus between the original – represented by the Characters – and its translation – epitomised by the Actors that, in failing to re-enact the Characters’ familiar tragedy, put on a totally different type of play. Moreover, the director Demarcy-Mota succeeded in conveying and reproducing the “otherness” of the play by using lighting and stage effects to highlight the contrast between Actors and Characters (Subialka 2015: 128). It could therefore be said that, in this case, the Characters symbolise not only the “otherness” of the imaginary reality from which they come from, but also the foreignness and “otherness” of the original play. Furthermore, this French translation offered to an English-speaking audience the opportunity to hear the theatre piece in an idiom similar in rhythm to the language in which it was written originally (ibid.: 127). This therefore shows that the use of a certain type of foreignness – such as the French translation of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore – might bring spectators closer to the original flow of the play, and enable them to have a taste of its original “otherness.”
To conclude, all of the opposite and varied translational products discussed in this paper are symptomatic of the fact that when a theatrical text’s semantic and structural features are strongly rooted in a specific culture, its translation into another linguistic and cultural system will necessarily spawn a different version of the original. Although Pirandello’s masterpiece is essentially about the delusion of mutual understanding and the impossibility to communicate, its English adaptations are representative of how channels of communication such as theatre and/in translation not only make the transmission of elements from one culture into another possible, but they also give new life to those elements. By taking part in the production of theatrical texts across cultures, theatre translators reconfigure the practice of drama translation as cultural reproduction and regeneration, as vehicle of the human communication and understanding that Pirandello believed to be impossible.