A Double Dovere/Diletto: Using Alessandro Serpieri’s Translations for Bilingual Productions of Shakespeare’s Plays

Authors

  • Eric Nicholson University of New York, Florence

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v4i1.158

Keywords:

Keywords, Translation for theatre, Shakespeare, bilingualism, hybridity, experimental mise en scène, intersemiotic translation

Abstract

These director’s notes pay homage to Alessandro Serpieri by explaining how his outstanding

translations of The Tempest and Richard II enabled experimental bilingual productions of these

two plays, the one performed mainly in English in Florence (2004), the other performed mainly

in Italian in Verona (2017). A case is made for appreciating how bilingualism can function as an

enhancement rather than an impediment to interpretation, as part of the double ‘duty and delight’

of the director and cast in mixing and sometimes grafting together distinct verbal utterances,

along with disparate cultural references and styles of performance. Also addressed are

questions of intersemiotic translation, as well as the application of Serpieri’s salient, illuminating

insights into deixis and gestic language.

Skenè 4.1 cover

Downloads

Published

2018-05-22

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2018): Transitions – For Alessandro Serpieri

Section

Special Section

License

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).

  1.  The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
  2. The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
  3.  The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.