Censorial Interferences in the Dubbing of Foreign Films in Fascist Italy: 1927-1943
RÉSUMÉ S’inspirant du projet d’Italia Taglia et de son étude de la censure visuelle et des autorisations de projection en Italie, le présent article a pour but d’explorer les interférences liées à la censure dans les versions doublées en italien de films étrangers projetés pendant la période fasciste. L’étude se concentre sur les pratiques liées à l’exclusion de texte verbal dans la langue cible, et illustre la réécriture à travers le processus de traduction des dialogues contenant des références dérangeantes à la politique, à la morale, et à la religion. Nous expliciterons l’influence des commissions de censeurs sur les studios de doublage ainsi que le rôle des censeurs dans le processus de traduction, lorsqu’ils ajustent et négocient le contenu des versions doublées en italien. ABSTRACT Drawing insights from the project of Italia Taglia and its study on visual censorship and screening certifications in Italy, this contribution sets out to explore the censorial interferences in the Italian dubbed versions of foreign films that were publicly screened during Fascism. This study looks at practices behind the exclusion of verbal text in the target versions and highlights the rewriting of translated dialogues which contained uncomfortable political, moral and religious references. It will account for the influence of the film censorship commissions over the dubbing studios and show how the censors interfered with the process of translation, adjusting or negotiating the contents of the Italian dubbed versions.
Translation in Fascist Italy: ‘The Invasion of Translations’
If there is one thing that to my mind characterizes the history of translation in Fascist Italy, it is that this was dominated by an idea of translation rather than the activity itself. The discussion on the subject of translations developed from an aesthetic question in the 1920s, centring on the contribution that literary exchange could potentially make to the modernization and popularization of Italian literature, with the fear expressed in some more culturally conservative quarters that this process, if left uncontrolled, could lead to its impoverishment, to a characteristically Fascist ideological debate in the 1930s which was dominated by the symbolic value attributed to translation as a phenomenon and by the concern that Italy was the weak partner in an international struggle for cultural expansion and that its cultural prestige was being threatened by translation. In this chapter, I intend to focus on the debate that arose around the question of translation in the 1930s and on the way in which the attitude of the regime towards translation evolved from a silent tolerance to an active hostility — an evolution that is, in my opinion, directly related to the regime’s increasingly imperialist political agenda.1
Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition
Seinfeld as a contemporary adaptation of Etherege's Restoration comedy of manners The Man of Mode? Friends as a reworking of Shakespeare's romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing? Star Wars as an adaptation of Spenser's epic poem, The Faerie Queene? The popular culture that surrounds us in our daily lives bears a striking similarity to some of the great works of literature of the past. In television, movies, magazines, and advertisements we are exposed to many of the same stories as those critics who study the great books of Western literature, but we have simply been encouraged to look at those stories differently. In Trash Culture, Richard K. Simon examines the ways in which the great literature and cultural work of the past has been rewritten for today's consumer society, with supermarket tabloids such as The National Enquirer and celebrity gossip magazines like People serving as contemporary versions of the great dramatic tragedies of the past. Today's advertising repeats the tale of the Golden Age, but inverts the value system of a classic utopia; the shopping mall combines bits and pieces of the great garden styles of Western history, and now adds consumer goods; Playboy magazine revises Castiglione's Renaissance courtesy book, The Book of the Courtier; and Cosmopolitan magazine revises the women's coming-of-age novels of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Edith Wharton. Trash Culture concludes that the great books are alive and well, but simply hidden from the critics. It argues for the linking of high and low for the study and appreciation of each form of literature, and the importance of teaching popular culture alongside books of the great tradition in order to understand the critical context in which the books appear.