Jeremy Munday - Brigid Maher - Words, Images and Performances in Translation-Continuum (2011)

Words, Images and
Performances in Translation
Continuum Studies in Translation
Series Editor: Jeremy Munday, Centre for Translation Studies,
University of Leeds
Published in association with the International Association for Translation

and Intercultural Studies (IATIS), Continuum Studies in Translation aims
to present a series of books focused around central issues in translation
and interpreting. Using case studies drawn from a wide range of different
countries and languages, each book presents a comprehensive examination
of current areas of research within translation studies written by academics
at the forefront of the field. The thought-provoking books in this series are
aimed at advanced students and researchers of translation studies.
Cognitive Explorations of Translation: Eyes, Keys, Taps

Edited by Sharon O’Brien
Translation as Intervention
Edited by Jeremy Munday
Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates
Edited by John Kearns
Translation: Theory and Practice in Dialogue
Edited by Rebecca Hyde Parker, Karla L. Guadarrama García and
Antoinette Fawcett
Translation Studies in Africa: Central Issues in Interpreting and
Literary and Media Translation
Edited by Judith Inggs and Libby Meintjes
Words, Images and
Performances in Translation
Edited by
Rita Wilson
Brigid Maher
Series: Continuum Studies in Translation

Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Rita Wilson and Brigid Maher and contributors 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN: 978-1- 4411-7261-7
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in India
Contents
General Editor’s Comment vii

List of Figures and Table viii
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction: Transforming Image and Text, Performing Translation 1

Rita Wilson and Brigid Maher
Chapter 1: Translating an Artwork: Words and Images in
Brett Whiteley’s Remembering Lao-Tse 7
Margherita Zanoletti
Chapter 2: Biographical Resonances in the Translation Work of
Florbela Espanca 26
Chris Gerry
Chapter 3: Mediating the Clash of Cultures through
Translingual Narrative 45
Rita Wilson
Chapter 4: Theatre Translation for Performance: Conflict of
Interests, Conflict of Cultures 63
Geraldine Brodie
Chapter 5: The Gull: Intercultural Noh as Webwork 82
Beverley Curran
Chapter 6: The Journalist, the Translator, the Player and
His Agent: Games of (Mis)Representation and
(Mis)Translation in British Media Reports about
Non-Anglophone Football Players 100
Roger Baines
Chapter 7: Drawing Blood: Translation, Mediation and
Conflict in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism 119
Brigid Maher
vi Contents
Chapter 8: Silenced Images: The Case of Viva Zapatero! 139

Federico M. Federici
Chapter 9: How Do ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ Translate?
Gender Images across Italian, British and
American Print Ads 158
Ira Torresi
Chapter 10: Translating Place: The Piano from Screen to
Tourist Brochure 176
Alfio Leotta
Chapter 11: Bad-Talk: Media Piracy and ‘Guerrilla’ Translation 194
Tessa Dwyer
Index 217
General Editor’s Comment
The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies

(IATIS) provides a global forum for scholars and researchers concerned
with translation and other forms of intercultural communication.
The Association facilitates the exchange of knowledge and resources
among scholars in different parts of the world, stimulates interaction
between researchers from diverse traditions and encourages scholars across
the globe to explore issues of mutual concern and intellectual interest.
Among the Association’s activities are the organization of conferences
and workshops, the creation of web-based resources, and the publication
of newsletters and scholarly books and journals.
The Translation Series published by Continuum in conjunction with
IATIS is a key publication for the Association. It addresses the scholarly com-
munity at large, as well as the Association’s members. Each volume presents
a thematically coherent collection of essays, under the coordination of a
prominent guest editor. The series thus seeks to be a prime instrument
for the promotion and dissemination of innovative research, sound schol-
arship and critical thought in all areas that fall within the Association’s
purview.
Jeremy Munday
University of Leeds, UK
List of Figures and Table
Full-colour versions of these figures can be viewed online at

www.continuumbooks.com/resources/9781441172310.
Figure 1.1 Brett Whiteley, Remembering Lao-Tse (Shaving off a Second),

pencil, pen and ink on paper, 66 x 56 cm 14
Figure 7.1 Joe Sacco, Palestine , p. 241 127
Figure 7.2 Joe Sacco, Palestine , p. 242 128
Figure 8.1 Shot from chapter 3, 21’ 05” of Viva Zapatero! 141
Figure 8.2 Shot from chapter 1, 5’ 54” of Viva Zapatero! showing
a clip from Michele Santoro’s current affairs talk show
Sciuscià 149
Figure 8.3 Shot from chapter 1, 5’ 55” of Viva Zapatero! showing
a clip from Michele Santoro’s current affairs talk show
Sciuscià 149
Figure 9.1 Advertisement for Fast Size, Men’s Edge ,
July 2006, p. 109 169
Figure 10.1 ‘100% Pure New Zealand’, Saatchi & Saatchi,
Sydney for Tourism New Zealand, 2001 185
Figure 11.1 A pirated DVD box set of The Wire , HBO, 2002–2008 195
Figure 11.2 Cover packaging of a pirated DVD of Iron Man
(dir. Favreau, 2008) from Vietnam 199
Table 2.1 Four novels translated by Florbela Espanca:

authors, biographical notes, bibliographical
references and synopses 31
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those colleagues who during the peer review
process provided valuable feedback on the contributions to this collection.
We are also grateful to Monica Rogers for her assistance in preparing the
manuscript for publication.
We wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce the images
included in this book: Wendy Whiteley (Figure 1.1); Fantagraphics Books,
Seattle (Figures 7.1 and 7.2); Stefano Massenzi and Lucky Red, Rome
(Figures 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3); Fast Size, California (Figure 9.1); M&C Saatchi,
Sydney (Figure 10.1).
Notes on Contributors
Roger Baines is currently Head of the School of Language and

Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia (UK), where he
teaches and researches Translation Studies and French language. He has
published on a performance-based translation of rhythm in Koltès’s Dans
la solitude des champs de coton , on the translation and adaptation of Adel
Hakim’s 1990 play Exécuteur 14, on personal insults and gender, and ritual
insults, in contemporary French, and on the work of Pierre Mac Orlan.
He co- edited Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice
(Palgrave Macmillan). He is co-host and co-founder of the STRAP (Stage
Translation Research Adaptation Practice) discussion list.
Geraldine Brodie is a doctoral student, jointly supervised at University
College London and Queen Mary, University of London. She is research-
ing the role of the translator in translating for performance on the
London stage and has presented papers at international conferences
(Cardiff and Melbourne) and several postgraduate conferences, includ-
ing Manchester, Cambridge and her home universities. She has an MA in
Comparative Literature from UCL and read English at the University of
Oxford, specializing in Old French and Old and Middle English. She also
studied Spanish at the Instituto Cervantes. Having taught her own course
in Theatre Studies for the Workers’ Educational Association in London,
she went on to convene the Translation Studies core course for the MA in
Translation Theory and Practice at UCL. She is a Fellow of the Institute
of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the
Chartered Institute of Taxation.
Beverley Curran teaches linguistic, cultural and media translation in
the Department of Intercultural Studies at Aichi Shukutoku University
in Nagoya, Japan. She is the author of Theatre Translation Theory and
Performance in Contemporary Japan: Native Voices, Foreign Bodies (St. Jerome,
2008) and articles which have appeared in several collections and journals
such as the Canadian Literature and Theatre Journal . She also collaborated
on the Japanese translation of Nicole Brossard’s Journal in Time. She is the
Notes on Contributors xi
editor of the Journal of Irish Studies and a founding member of the TS-
Kansai Research Group. Her current research projects include an exami-
nation of the circulation of translation on the Pacific Rim, and translation
theories in 1930s Japan and their relationship to English literatures and
English-language translations.
Tessa Dwyer is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and
Communication at the University of Melbourne, researching issues sur-
rounding film and translation. She co-authored an article on the relation-
ship between censorship and translation in communist Romania for The
Velvet Light Trap (2009) and has written on the multilingual environment
of the polyglot film for Linguistica Antverpiensia New Series (2005). Other
articles have appeared in journals, including The South Atlantic Quarterly
and Polygraph , and in the anthology A Deleuzian Century? (Duke University
Press, 1995). In 2008, she co- edited a special issue of the online journal
Refractory on split screens, and her ‘B- Grade Subtitles’ will appear in the
forthcoming B for Bad Cinema anthology (Wayne State University Press).
Federico M. Federici graduated in English and French literature at ‘La
Sapienza’ University, Rome, where he developed an interest in Translation
Studies. At the University of Leeds, UK, he was awarded a doctorate of
research into the influence of creative translation on Italo Calvino’s style.
A Senior Lecturer in Italian, he is the Director of the MA in Translation
Studies at Durham University, UK. Together with chapters and articles,
Federici is the author of Translation as Stylistic Evolution: Italo Calvino
Creative Translator of Raymond Queneau (Rodopi, 2009), editor of Translating
Regionalized Voices in Audiovisuals (Aracne, 2009), and co- editor with Nigel
Armstrong Translating Voices, Translating Regions (Aracne, 2006). His cur-
rent research projects focus on the ideology of translation, the reception of
Italian texts and audiovisuals in translation, and the training of culturally
aware translators. Working as a freelance translator since 2001, in his spare
time, he enjoys translating from French and English, as well as translating
17th- century Italian manuscripts into English.
Chris Gerry is Professor of Economic Theory and Policy and Dean of the
School of Humanities and Social Science at the Universidade de Trás- os-
Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD), Vila Real, Portugal, where his research has
focused on local and regional economic development processes, and the
impact of globalization on local economies and communities. Though he
has published translations of social science texts from French, Spanish and
Portuguese throughout his career, it is only recently that he has widened
xii Notes on Contributors
his interests to literary translation. His English translation of Florbela

Espanca’s short stories will be published in 2011 by Seagull/Faoileán
(Bristol University/National University of Ireland). Currently he is com-
pleting his research on the mutual influences between Florbela Espanca’s
translation work and her prose fiction.
Alfio Leotta currently teaches Film Studies at Victoria University of
Wellington. He has also taught at both the University of Auckland and
Massey University (Albany). He graduated in Communication Studies at
‘La Sapienza’ University, Rome in 2003 and completed a European Master
in Heritage Studies at the University of Nice in 2005. His primary research
interests focus on the relation between film and landscape, the history of
New Zealand cinema, and New Italian Cinema. He recently completed his
PhD thesis on film-induced tourism in New Zealand.
Brigid Maher teaches Italian language, culture, and translation at La
Trobe University in Melbourne. Her main research interests are literary
and multimodal translation, and in particular the translation of humour,
irony, satire and the grotesque. She completed her doctorate at Monash
University, and that research forms the basis of her book Recreation and
Style: Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and English (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 2011). Brigid is also a translator. Her translations of Sardinian
novelist Milena Agus’s works The House in via Manno (Mal di pietre), The
Countesses of Castello (La contessa di ricotta), and Daddy’s Wings (Ali di babbo)
are published by Scribe (Melbourne).
Ira Torresi is a freelance professional interpreter and translator and a jun-
ior lecturer at the SSLMIT of the University of Bologna, where – among
other things – she holds a workshop on gender and advertising. Her publi-
cations on advertising translation, some of which incorporate a gender per-
spective, include the book Translating Promotional and Advertising Material
(St. Jerome, 2010), the articles ‘Women, water and cleaning agents’ (The
Translator, 10, (2), 2004), ‘Translating the visual’ (in Across Boundaries,
2007), ‘Translating dreams across cultures’ (in Betwixt and Between , 2007),
‘Advertising: a case for intersemiotic translation’ (Meta , 53, (1), 2008),
and the entry ‘Advertising’ in the 2008 Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation
Studies. On gender, she has written ‘Consigli per l’identità: uno sguardo
alla pubblicità in una prospettiva di genere’ (Le prospettive di genere , 2005)
and ‘The gender issue in interpreting studies’ (mediAzioni , 1, 2005). She
also works on visual semiotics, Joycean translation, and child language
brokering.
Notes on Contributors xiii
Rita Wilson is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Languages,

Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University (Melbourne). Her research
interests are both interdisciplinary and intercultural, combining literary
and translation theories with studies of contemporary Italian literature
and culture, and investigating questions of transnational identity as well
as the relationship between writing, translation and autobiography. She
is the author of Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative
(Leeds, 2000) and co- editor of Spaces and Crossings. Essays on Literature and
Culture from Africa and Beyond (Frankfurt, 2001); Across Genres, Generations,
and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives (Newark, 2004); Representing Italian
Diasporas in Australia: New Perspectives. Special Issue of Italian Studies in Southern
Africa , 18 (1), 2005; and Power to the Profession (Melbourne, 2006).
Margherita Zanoletti has recently completed a PhD in Translation Studies
at the University of Sydney, with a thesis on the Australian artist Brett
Whiteley (1939–1992). Her dissertation focuses on the link between words
and images in Whiteley’s work from a translation studies perspective, and
parts of her research have been published in various scholarly journals and
volumes, including the books Imagined Australia , edited by Renata Summo-
O’Connell (2009), and Self in Translation , published by Cambridge Scholars
(2009). Margherita’s research interests include comparative literature and
art, translation theory and practice, and word and image. Her monograph,
co-authored with Francesca di Blasio, on the Australian writer Oodgeroo
Noonuccal (1920–1993) is forthcoming in 2011 with The University of
Trento Press.
Introduction: Transforming Image and
Text, Performing Translation
Rita Wilson
Monash University, and
Brigid Maher
La Trobe University
The cultural experiences of globalization have contributed to increased

critical interest in intercultural notions of language and in new forms of
textuality. N. Katherine Hayles argues that in ‘the dynamic media ecol-
ogy of the twenty-first century’ the challenge is to consider the text as a
complex relationship between its physical and signifying structures (2003,
p. 263). In their various ways, postmodern literary theories, interdisci-
plinary scholarship and the advent the internet have all challenged the
dominion of the original, and simultaneously brought into sharp relief
issues of translation. The reason is partly necessity: the asymmetries of glo-
balization and the current inequalities in the production of knowledge and
information are directly mirrored in translation, and this becomes visible
when the directionality of global information flows starts to be questioned.
The increased attention to translation also reflects changed ideologies and
philosophies, albeit inflected by economic concerns. As Yves Gambier and
Henrik Gottlieb note, the ‘electronic media with their polysemiotic codes
somehow disturb the established world of translation and the discipline of
Translation Studies’ (2001, p. xii), forcing us to reformulate and to rede-
fine concepts of ‘text’ and ‘meaning’.
The diverse contributions to this collection of essays on words, images
and performances in translation overlap and interweave in their explo-
ration of topics related to interlingual and intersemiotic translation,
globalization and the international marketplace, and intercultural com-
munication and exchange. The majority are based on presentations at the
2009 IATIS Conference held at Monash University in Melbourne. Although
the authors’ approaches and methodologies vary, all engage with broader
research paradigms that move beyond narrowly defined textual analysis.
They consider translation methods and strategies, different polysystems
and their constraints in terms of meaning and construction, worldviews,
2 Words, Images and Performances in Translation
and so on, but do so in the context of intercultural communication, and

recognizing the socio-cultural value of translation not only as an inter-
linguistic process but also as an intersemiotic activity across cultures and
languages.
The focus of the collection is on translation as a form of mediation
facilitating the global exchange of cultural production. The selected
essays explore how translation can be positioned within the space of
multisemiotic, multimodal texts. Drawing on what Theo Hermans says
in ‘Cross- cultural translation studies as thick translation’, we contend that
focusing on intersemiotic transfer as a new area of investigation has the
potential to ‘counter the flatness and reductiveness of the prevailing jar-
gon of translation studies [. . .] and foster instead a more diversified and
imaginative vocabulary’ (Hermans, 2003, p. 386). The organizing prin-
ciple of the volume is the hypothesis that intersemiotic translation, found
in multimodal texts, is a space of constant representational negotiation.
Contributions examine a range of modes and text types, including litera-
ture, comics, cinema, journalism, print advertising, visual art and theatre
performance.
In the opening essay, Margherita Zanoletti analyses the relationship
between words and images in Remembering Lao-Tse (Shaving off a Second),
a self-portrait by Australian artist Brett Whiteley that features both a
drawing and a poetic inscription. Her three-fold analysis of Remembering
Lao-Tse focuses on interart (the relationship between this self-portrait
and Whiteley’s writings), intermodality (the interplay between words and
images central to his self- depiction) and intertextuality (the relationship
between this artwork and its literary and pictorial sources). Using an inno-
vative approach, namely the interlingual translation process, Zanoletti
arrives at a critical interpretation of the art work. Her experimental pro-
cedure opens a window on the interdisciplinary encounter between the
creative processes inherent in the visual arts and translation theory and
practice.
The link between translation and creativity is examined in a different
way by Chris Gerry. His essay investigates the extent to which the strat-
egy and procedures adopted by the Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca
(1894–1930) in her translation of four French popular romantic nov-
els may have been influenced by key aspects of her tumultuous life and
unconventional views. The use of this biographical ‘prism’ through which
to assess Espanca’s translation work seems appropriate first of all because
the themes covered in the type of popular romantic novels she translated
correspond in many respects with key aspects of her own life and secondly,
Introduction 3
because the often moralizing tone adopted in many such novels touched
on issues on which Espanca is known to have held diametrically opposed
or at least equivocal views.
The way literature is shaped by translation and exchange between cul-
tures and literary systems is also explored in Rita Wilson’s contribution,
which sees transnational narrative as conspicuously conscious of the
ambivalent capacities of translation. Such writing challenges the author-
ity of both ‘original’ and ‘secondary’ literary traditions; guarantees and,
at the same time, undermines ‘authenticity’; doubles, defers or displaces
authorship. Through a reading of Amara Lakhous’ 2006 novel, Scontro di
civiltà per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio (Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in
Piazza Vittorio), Wilson argues that translation works inside the narrative to
negotiate between different languages and cultures, between author and
reader, and even between the conflicting layers of affiliation and identity
that the author brings to the text.
Translingual works (such as Lakhous’s novel) suggest a view of transla-
tion that is indispensable to an understanding of the concrete processes
of cultural translation that shape relationships, identities and interactions
globally. Geraldine Brodie examines the effect of extra-textual theatrical
phenomena on cultural transference in the translation of plays for per-
formance. Through the study of two Spanish plays performed in English
translation on the London stage in 2005 – Federico García Lorca’s The
House of Bernarda Alba and Juan Mayorga’s Way to Heaven – she reviews such
factors as theatrical site, financial and marketing imperatives, the rela-
tionship with the original author, the role of the literal translator, and
copyright obligations to analyse the influences on the translator in the
portrayal of another culture to an English- speaking audience, thus dem-
onstrating the conflicting interests which govern the production of transla-
tions for performance.
The notion of theatre translation and performance as activities involv-
ing multiple agents and modes is further considered by Beverley Curran
in her exploration of the Noh play The Gull by Daphne Marlatt, which
tells a story of the Japanese diaspora, specifically located in the history
of Canadian citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry living on the west
coast of Canada. The dense intertextual nature of Japanese Noh perform-
ance links cultural memory with the specificities of the present through
the emotional resonance of the body in relation to story, movement and
music. Multiple translations weave The Gull into a web of words, images
and performances, using a traditional Japanese theatre form and Japanese
and Canadian tongues and bodies.
Another rich locus of interacting semiotic systems is to be found in the

globalized media circuit. The essay by Roger Baines alerts us to the covert
performances that are part and parcel of transnational journalism, through
a discussion of British media reports about non-Anglophone football play-
ers. As Baines shows, the football industry has become a highly marketable
commodity with a mobile migrant workforce and near-global media cover-
age. The consequent heightened contact between different linguistic com-
munities in the English Premiership has created a heterogeneous area of
activity where linguistic and cultural barriers provide evidence of significant
differentiation. Analysis of the interlingual and intercultural mediation of
press conferences and interviews by footballers and managers suggests that
football agents of non-Anglophone players seek to exploit the hybrid identity
and economic power of their clients to their advantage, and that the numer-
ous modes of fast dissemination of information enhance that process.
A different perspective on international journalism is provided by Brigid
Maher’s analysis of Joe Sacco’s work, which uses certain unique charac-
teristics of the comic book medium to explore aspects of translation
and international conflict. She focuses on Sacco’s representation of the
role of translation and cultural difference in news gathering and report-
ing. Throughout his comics on the conflicts in Palestine and Bosnia, the
involvement and intervention of translators, interpreters and fi xers is made
visible through linguistic, visual and narrative features of the text, as the
author depicts the way intercultural mediation can build relationships and
enhance understanding, while also posing a range of ethical challenges.
The multimodal nature of comics permits the exploration of questions of
translation, global conflict and the dissemination of news in ways that are
rare in traditional journalism.
The politics of international exchange and the imbalance of power in
situations of conflict re- surface in Federico M. Federici’s essay on Sabina
Guzzanti’s Viva Zapatero! (2005). The author discusses translational issues
with regard to this film documentary and its aspirations to international
circulation in translation. Combining a range of written and oral texts
in several languages, the film, produced and released in Italy, narrates
Guzzanti’s expulsion from the national broadcaster RAI. Federici under-
scores the translational limitations of the choice of a single code – subti-
tles – to render the multimodal message, and further highlights issues of
censorship and genre arising from the director’s choices and the transla-
tion dichotomies.
While Federici shows how Guzzanti contests received stereotypes and
power structures, Ira Torresi illustrates the way advertising continues to
Introduction 5
rely on cultural stereotypes, contributing to the propagation and continu-

ation of such stereotypes. She examines two seemingly stereotypical traits
of masculinity as represented in advertisements contained in three com-
parable corpora of Italian, British and US men’s and women’s magazines.
The normativization of grooming aimed at appearing younger and fitter,
and the recurrent allusion to women’s critical gaze vis- à-vis male sexual
performance are discussed from a gender perspective and with a view to
the implications for the translation of multimodal advertising texts.
Advertising and the grammar of the visual are also at the core of Alfio
Leotta’s chapter on the intersemiotic translation of the New Zealand film
The Piano from screen to tourist brochure. Images of a wild, pure and natu-
ral New Zealand have been exploited by the national tourism board to cre-
ate a successful travel brand destination by capitalizing on the possibilities
of non- conventional publicity tools, particularly film-induced tourism. The
essay investigates why The Piano has engendered such a strong impact on
tourism and how tourism authorities have ‘translated’ the story’s appeal
from film to tourist language.
The final essay in the collection explores the way translation practices
are changing in response to technological developments, international
power imbalance, and the ever- expanding global market. Tessa Dwyer
urges scholars to turn their attention to the notoriously ‘bad’ translation
found in pirated audiovisual media. She examines the different dynamics
of fan and non-fan pirate translation side by side, and argues that ‘guer-
rilla’ translation practices raise a host of issues relating to the changing
technologies and broader socio-political context of audiovisual translation
in the era of globalization. While fansubbing provides a useful demonstra-
tion of the cooperative possibilities of new media, the shoddy subtitles and
voiceovers of more traditional media bootlegging start to bring a much-
needed non-Western perspective into focus.
By drawing attention to the significant parallels between linguistic and
media translation, especially the theoretical stakes both fields have in
relating higher-level meaning to the constituent units of the text, the essays
gathered in this volume effectively illustrate that the ‘incessant process of
“translation”, or “transcoding” – transduction – between a range of semiotic
modes represents [. . .] a better, more adequate understanding of repre-
sentation and communication’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 39). The
areas of intersection and overlap between different varieties of translation
are rarely explored in the literature; this volume seeks to fill that gap by
offering a (necessarily limited) selection of perspectives on some of the less
commonly studied instances of translation.
References
Gambier, Y., and Gottlieb, H. (2001), ‘Multimedia, multilingua: multiple chal-
lenges’, in Y. Gambier and H. Gottlieb (eds), (Multi)media Translation. Concepts,
Practices and Research . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. viii–xx.
Hayles N. K. (2003),‘Translating media: Why we should rethink textuality’. The Yale
Journal of Criticism , 16, (2), 263–90.
Hermans, T. (2003), ‘Cross- cultural translation studies as thick translation’. Bulletin
of the School of Oriental and African Studies , 66, (3), 380–9.
Kress, G., and Van Leeuwen, T. (2006), Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual
Design . London: Routledge.
Chapter 1
Translating an Artwork: Words and Images

in Brett Whiteley’s Remembering Lao-Tse
Margherita Zanoletti
University of Sydney
For Australian artist Brett Whiteley (1939–1992), words were an import-

ant means of expression. This is evident when considering not only the
substantial number of writings that he left, but also the fact that all of his
artworks feature words.
Born to a wealthy family and educated at two of the most exclusive
schools in New South Wales, Whiteley started drawing very early in life.
His first significant painting is considered to be The Soup Kitchen, produced
in 1958, while he was still a young student (Hilton and Blundell, 1996,
pp. 15, 40–69). From then and until his tragic death, Whiteley produced
a large number of works: not only visual works, but also writings.1 His stu-
dio in Surry Hills, Sydney, was posthumously converted into a museum
of paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, catalogues, diaries, let-
ters and films, administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This
assorted collection emphasizes the connection between Whiteley’s images
and words, calling attention to the role that words played in the develop-
ment and reception of his work.2
Whiteley’s words and images amalgamate in varied proportions, always
entailing a sense of rhetorical excess. To start with, all his paintings and
drawings include paratexts such as titles, dates, signatures and monograms.
Moreover, many visual works include inscriptions, which accompany and
complement pictures. In addition, some writings are embellished with pic-
tures, others refer to his pictorial activity and in others still the layout of
words is crucial to his self-representation.
This essay analyses the relationship between words and images in
Remembering Lao-Tse (Shaving off a Second), a self-portrait produced by
Whiteley in 1967 that features a drawing and a poetic inscription. The
synergy of visual and verbal elements informing this artwork is discussed

as one of the key aspects of Whiteley’s self- depiction. I argue that words
liaise with pictures in defining and expressing the artist’s self.
The method used in order to analyse Remembering Lao-Tse is interlingual
translation, which thus becomes an interpretative lens. In practice, my
analysis is oriented by the translation of Whiteley’s words from English
into Italian. As a result, the translation process produces a critical inter-
pretation, which actively integrates the analysis of the visual art with the
scrutiny of the words.
Translation, however, serves not only to decipher the literal meaning and
comprehend the symbolic function of Whiteley’s words, but also to high-
light the relation between art (regarded as the range of activities performed
towards the creation of aesthetic objects, environments or experiences
that are appealing to our senses and emotions) and language (conceived
as a dynamic set of visual, auditory and tactile symbols of communica-
tion regulated by a system). From this perspective, beyond the analysis of
Remembering Lao-Tse, the chapter discusses the functioning of images and
the way in which interlingual translation might bring out latent connec-
tions in the source.
The essay is structured in four main parts. The first part presents self-
representation not only as one of the most significant themes of Whiteley’s
work, but also as an interartistic, intermodal and intertextual phenom-
enon. The second part illustrates the methodology adopted to analyse
Whiteley’s self-representation, namely, interlingual translation. The third
part contains the analysis of Remembering Lao-Tse , oriented by the trans-
lation process. The fourth part synthesizes the observations that emerge
throughout the analysis, suggesting that Whiteley’s poetics of excess not
only represents him as a total artist, but also reflects his failed endeavour
to exert control on reality, seen as an all- embracing realm.
Whiteley’s Self-Representation as Interartistic,

Intermodal and Intertextual
Self-representation is one of the most significant themes in Whiteley’s pic-
torial work. To begin with, the quantity of his self- portraits is particu-
larly high.3 Moreover, even when his body is not depicted, many of his
visual works can be regarded as self-representations in absentia , in which
the depiction of other people, animals and objects implicitly defines
Whiteley’s self.
Translating an Artwork 9
The noteworthy aspect, however, is not so much the quantity of Whiteley’s

self- depictions as the fact that this self-representation is expressed and deter-
mined by the combination of words and images. In particular, a significant
number of Whiteley’s paintings and drawings include inscriptions – short
inscriptions such as individual words, or longer ones comprised of individ-
ual phrases, poems or prose pieces inscribed on the artwork.4 Inscriptions
often accompany and complement Whiteley’s self-portraits, enriching his
visual self-representation with a verbal element that integrates and hybrid-
izes his pictorial work.
Such a mixture of images and words calls attention to the composite
dimension of Whiteley’s self- depiction. As is shown through the analysis of
Remembering Lao-Tse, the presence of words in Whiteley’s work is not purely
ornamental, but has the effect of over- emphasizing the artist’s presence.
In this sense, the verbal and the visual are inseparable components of a
complex interartistic, intermodal and intertextual phenomenon.
The first aim of my analysis is to compare Remembering Lao-Tse and his
writings, thus identifying cross-references, thematic affinities and points
of divergence between different pictorial and literary themes and prac-
tices. The intention is to show how through the use of different artistic
practices, Whiteley seeks to represent himself not only as a painter, but
also as a writer. From this viewpoint, his self-representation is program-
matically ‘interartistic’.
However, as Michele Cometa suggests, investigating the link between
words and images means not only studying their similarities and differ-
ences, but also the modifications that images produce on literary language,
as well as their cultural significance (Cometa, 2004, pp. 16–17). In other
words, by analysing the narrative and poetic forms in which Whiteley’s
images are reflected and transformed, we can understand the cultural
topoi related to them, the mythology that they display.
Second, I consider the relationship between the words and the images in
Remembering Lao-Tse a key feature of Whiteley’s self-representation. Because
this self-representation is constructed by a blend of heterogeneous signs
activating different channels, modes, and intellectual and emotional
responses, it can be regarded as an intermodal phenomenon, which entails
various media and stimulates multiple sensory and cognitive reactions.
From this perspective, drawing upon William T. Mitchell’s visual theory, I
regard Remembering Lao-Tse as an ‘imagetext’, that is, a composite, synthetic
work that combines image and text (Mitchell, 1994, p. 89). This entails
paying attention not only to images, or to images and words separately,
but to words and images in a relationship. Reading the words embedded
in Remembering Lao-Tse implies not only decoding their literal meaning,

but also perceiving their layout, position, interaction with the compos-
ition and extratextual implications. Verbal and visual appear inseparably
intertwined.
The concept of Whiteley’s self-representation as an intermodal phenom-
enon echoes Mitchell’s proposition that every art is composite and every
medium is mixed, regardless of the more or less evident relationship among
different disciplines and techniques. On this topic Mitchell writes that:
The image/text problem is not just something constructed ‘between’ the

arts, the media, or different forms of representation, but an unavoidable
issue within the individual arts and media. In short, all arts are ‘compos-
ite’ arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining
different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive
modes. (1994, pp. 94–5)
In agreement with Mitchell, I deem it necessary to account for the image-

word relationship as a dynamic intrinsic to any artistic manifestation,
including Whiteley’s self- depiction.
The third dimension of Whiteley’s self-representation is intertextual-
ity. This fundamental notion – introduced by Julia Kristeva (1969) and
re-elaborated by Gérard Genette (1997) as ‘transtextuality’, or literature
of second degree5 – is that no text, much as it might like to appear so, is
original and unique in itself. Rather, it is a network of inevitable and even
unconscious references to and quotations from other texts. Other texts
condition the meaning of each text. The text is an intervention in a cul-
tural system.
The intertextual effects of Whiteley’s work are particularly pronounced.
On the one hand, it is possible to identify a series of intertextual links between
different works by Whiteley, which call attention to recurrent themes and
features in his work. On the other, his blatant references to artists and
movements as diverse as Cubism, modernism, Dada, junk assemblage, the
Duchamp tradition, surrealism, conceptualism, pop art and performance
art (Smith and Smith, 1991, p. 391) brings to the excess an established tra-
dition in Western art history, according to which artists appropriate from
other works.6 He strategically worked through given, adopted and adapted
material to achieve a depth and subtlety of practice that was transformative
in character. He represented himself in intertextual terms.7
It must be said that Whiteley’s intertextual links are not limited to paint-
ing, but include also literature. Among others, a special relationship linked
him to the Australian modern writer and Nobel Prize winner Patrick
White. Whiteley describes this friendship in an interview with the journal-
ist Andrew Olle, expressing both his admiration and sense of inferiority
towards White’s ordered and disciplined approach to creation.8
In fact, Whiteley’s relationship with literature remains an object of
controversy. His biographers Margot Hilton and Graeme Blundell claim
that although he always showed curiosity about poetry and literature, he
never deepened his literary knowledge in a consistent way (1996, p. 107).
According to Sandra McGrath, by contrast, Whiteley’s interest in poetry
was among the most significant sources of inspiration for his pictorial work
(1979, p. 126). In particular, McGrath explores the mythical presences of
Baudelaire and Rimbaud in Whiteley’s work, delving into the personal and
the emotional elements filtering his comprehension of French poetry.9
As a result of this heterogeneous series of influences, Whiteley’s work
appears as an eclectic mixture of styles, blended and harmonized. This
eclecticism reflects Whiteley’s tendency to appropriate, adapt and trans-
form different sources into original recreations, which express a unique,
yet fragmented, self. His self-representation consists of an assembled com-
bination of imports, references, quotations, adaptations and remakes,
which transfers and re- elaborates an all-inclusive patchwork of intertextual
identities.
Translation as a Hermeneutic Tool
Why do I translate Whiteley’s words? Obviously, translation allows me to

grasp the literal meaning of Whiteley’s words, and makes these words
accessible to an Italian- speaking audience, with plenty of potential impli-
cations for the reception, interpretation and understanding of his work.
Accessibility, however, is only a vital and noteworthy consequence. More
importantly, translation serves a deep hermeneutic purpose: it facilitates
the exploration of a series of multi-leveled meanings, deepens the textual
analysis, and stimulates a new critical interpretation of Whiteley’s visual
art, which emphasizes the link between his literal use of other artists’
imagery and his symbolic self-image. Thus, translation is an interpretative
act, echoing a form and meaning of the source text ‘in accordance with
values, beliefs and representations in the translating language and culture’
(Venuti, 2007, p. 28).
The practical consequences of this approach are visible in the analysis
of Remembering Lao-Tse, where I adopt translation as a tool to reach a better
understanding of Whiteley’s interartistic, intermodal and intertextual self-

representation. My method encompasses four main phases: the translation-
oriented textual analysis, the translation process, the re- elaboration of the
observations stimulated by translation and the final Italian translation.
After examining the visual elements of Remembering Lao-Tse , I investigate
the semantic, phonic, graphic and prosodic characteristics of the words
comprised in this artwork. The first aim is to show that Whiteley’s words
complete and sometimes clarify his visual representation, adding bio-
graphical, conceptual or symbolic elements that affect our understanding.
The second suggestion is that the combination of signs and sounds is as
meaningful as the choice of vocabulary – repetitions, alliterations, ana-
phoras and onomatopoeias emphasize particular aspects of Whiteley’s self-
representation, conveying a sense of obsession, solitude and void. Moreover,
the medium, shape, colour, size and position of his words are analysed
as technical and symbolic choices that affect the viewer’s understanding.
Finally, the length of verses, their shape, rhythm and space organization
are explored as features that strongly contribute to conveying meaning.
This preliminary analysis allows the translation of Whiteley’s words into
Italian. When translating, my physical involvement with the source image-
text produces a performance that expresses spontaneous associations and
unworked possibilities. In particular, because his words are immersed in a
drawing, their physical position, texture, dimension, proportion and hand-
writing are as significant as their literal meaning: therefore, I, in turn, use
typographic variants, colour and repetitions of patterns as tangible ways to
render Whiteley’s intermodal self- depiction.10
While translating, I record the reflections stimulated by translation via
think-aloud protocols (TAP) as much as possible. Think- aloud protocols
have been used by translation experts since the early eighties to study
translation as a cognitive process (Danks et al., 1997, p. 139; Tymoczko,
2007, p. 167). Generally, the translator is asked to think aloud, and an
observer records his or her reasoning; in my case, I have written down my
own reasoning. This procedure could be compared to keeping a diary, a
practical way to gain self- awareness of one’s own choices, practices and
presuppositions. Thinking aloud is primarily used to unveil the transla-
tion process, hence emphasizing its interpretative and imaginative implica-
tions.11 Shifting the attention from the final result (my Italian translation)
to the process (the translation- oriented analysis) allows me to document
some details of the mental images stimulated by the source.
During the translation process, two languages – English and Italian –
meet, generating unexpected results. The mixture of Italian and English
underpinning my discussion can at times render the results unusual or dis-

turbing. However, it is programmatically offered as a tangible reflection of
the cross- cultural process of analysis. Indeed, in the co-presence of at least
two languages, the conference of the tongues (Hermans, 2007a) expands
the source, inserting new images, associations and meanings. As Hermans
suggests, the translator’s ‘agency, subjectivity, intentionality, [and] man-
agement of discourse’ (2007b, p. ix) retraces and multiplies the creative
impulse of the original.
From Theory to Practice: Remembering Lao-Tse

(Shaving off a Second) | Ricordando Lao-Tse
(Radendo Via Un Secondo)
The early drawing Remembering Lao-Tse (Shaving off a Second) (Figure 1.1)
must be considered as a particularly clear example of Whiteley’s self-
representation, produced by the juxtaposition of images and inscription.
Indeed, the act of self-representing is not only explicit, in that his face,
bust and right hand are depicted, but also interartistic and intermodal,
because a poetic inscription accompanies the artwork. Moreover, the refer-
ences to other authors and their works add to the intertextual dimension
of Whiteley’s self- depiction.
In Remembering Lao-Tse as in other artworks by Whiteley (e.g. Art, Life
and the Other Thing (1978), analysed in Zanoletti (2007), the artist’s dis-
torted figure emphasizes the opposition between the finely rendered and
the deformed, the right and the left, and the beautiful and the ugly. In
the left side of the drawing his body and, in particular, his head, eyes,
hair and hand are finely rendered, while the left side of his body is heavily
distorted, as if it was flipping out of the paper surface in a swift whirlpool
(the expression Shaving off a Second | Radendo via un Secondo also evokes a
quick amputation). The distortion depicted in the drawing could also refer
to the saying by the Chinese philosopher and spiritual leader of Taoism
Lao-Tse, ‘To remain whole, be twisted! / To become straight, let yourself
be bent’ (in Huisheng et al., 1999, p. 45). In this way, Whiteley represents
himself as the painter of binarism and contrasts.
This visual self-representation intertextually refers to many of Whiteley’s
works as well as other pictorial traditions. First of all, his choice to draw
only the upper part of his body immediately reminds us of a number of his
self-portraits, in which head, eye, hair and right hand are strongly empha-
sized, while the rest of his body is either absent or hidden (for instance,
Figure 1.1 Brett Whiteley, Remembering Lao-Tse (Shaving off a Second), pencil, pen
and ink on paper, 66 × 56 cm
Art, Life and the Other Thing). In addition, Whiteley’s style is meant to draw
attention to his exceptional technical skills, and alludes almost literally
to Leonardo’s drawings.12 Finally, this composition echoes the traditions
of Chinese and Japanese drawing and calligraphy – traditions evoked not
only by the title (Remembering Lao-Tse | Ricordando Lao-Tse), but also by the
juxtaposition of picture and poetry.
The inscription in ink, located in the upper left corner, consists of 15

verses, containing a chain of opposite images. This is the transcription in
Lucida Handwriting, a font that imitates Whiteley’s handwriting:
7/4/67
Remembering Laotse . . .
He who is to be made to dwindle (in power)
Must first be caused to expand
He who is to be weakened
Must first be made strong
He who is to be laid low
Must first be exalted to power
He who is to be taken away from
Must first be given
This is the subtle light.
Gentleness overcomes strength
Fish should be left on the deep pool
And sharp weapons of state should
be left where none can see them!!!
At first glance, there are no direct connections between the words and the
images, apart from the fact that words are made of the same medium as
the drawing (pen and ink on paper). They do not contribute a straightfor-
ward comment on Whiteley’s face, nor do they seem to explain particular
aspects of the drawing.
However, careful consideration reveals that the drawing and the
inscription are strategically related. A statement by Whiteley’s ex- wife
Wendy about the painting Alchemy draws attention to a theme which also
underpins Remembering Lao-Tse : his fascination with fame and contrasting
forces:
I suppose we would have to begin with Brett’s interest in people like

Mishima, Hitler, Mussolini, and even pop stars, whose power to beguile
large groups of people intrigued him. He had been struggling with vari-
ous portraits of heroes to understand the principle of transformation
and power. He was fascinated by pop stars and how they used their
music, their medium, and the way it brought them fame, money, power
and attention. (Pearce, 1995, p. 47)
The reference to pop stars reflects the widespread phenomenon of art-

ists across the sixties becoming pop icons (Andy Warhol is the clearest
example). From this perspective, Whiteley’s obsession with power and pop-
ularity, together with his interest in Oriental spirituality and art, would
explain the otherwise bizarre link between self-representation and Lao-
Tse.13 Whiteley’s reference to opposites, extremes, and black and white pat-
terns of life are not only a clear reference to Asian culture – Whiteley’s
inscription echoes Lao-Tse’s emphasis on ‘what is generally regarded as
negative morality, such as ignorance, humility, compliance, contentment,
and above all, weakness’ (Wing-Tsit, 1963, p. 13); moreover, according to
Lao-Tse (in Huisheng et al., 1999, p. 47), ‘the soft and weak overcomes the
hard and strong’ – but also express his personality.
Indeed, like a waka ,14 the poetic inscription that accompanies Remembering
Lao-Tse reiterates and reinforces his visual self-representation, contribut-
ing to creating an effect of overload. This overload is particularly evident,
because words add to the portrait of Whiteley the painter, and to the repre-
sentation of Whiteley the poet. Images depict him as the charismatic artist;
words represent him as a poet-philosopher.
A number of typical features of Whiteley’s writing are immediately
noticeable in this inscription. First, he chooses to write in verses, and there-
fore presents himself as a poet. Second, he adopts repetitions, anaphorae,
verbs in the passive form (‘to be made’/‘to be laid down’/‘to be weakened’,
etc.), abstract terms (‘gentleness’/‘strength’/‘power’), exclamation marks
(indexes of vitalism, which serve also as an attention- grabber, and strongly
mark the end of the composition) and rhythmic division of lines. My Italian
translation aims at echoing and emphasizing these devices but, as shown
below through the use of TAP, ends up opening new and significant layers
of meanings:
7/4/67
Ricordando Laotse . . .
[the hyphen between lao and tse has disappeared – sense of suspension and mem-
ory (. . .)]
Colui che sta per scomparire (di potere)
[colui = lui = masculine perspective; gospel-like – prophetic tone; semi- rhyme scom-
parire/potere; scomparire = disappear = hidden inscriptions = Scriptures]
Deve prima essere causa di espandere
[expansion – distortion]
Colui che sta per essere indebolito
[weak and heroin: a paradox]
Deve prima essere rafforzato

[prima / prima repetition – essere / essere]
Colui che sta per essere deposto
[deposto dalla croce]
Deve prima essere esaltato al potere
[come cristo- deposto-sta]
A colui che sta per essere portato via
[deprivato– privato]
Dev’essere prima dato
Questa è la luce sottile.
[light – as in Dylan Thomas – another Gospel reminder]
La gentilezza supera la forza
[contrasts zzz boring] 15
Il pesce dovrebbe essere lasciato in acque profonde
[fish is a symbol of Christ – deepness / Capon’s comments on Whiteley’s lack of
profundity] 16
E le armi taglienti di stato dovrebbero essere lasciate
dove nessuno può vederle!!!
[tagliare il pesce; stato/sta per; l’ascia-te;hidden again]
The expressions that must be examined as crucial to an understanding

of Remembering Lao-Tse are ‘dwindle’, ‘caused to expand’ and ‘exalted with
power’. During the translation process, they have evoked images respect-
ively of movement/oscillation/invisibility (‘dwindle’ | ‘scomparire’ ), distor-
tion (reflected in Whiteley’s distorted face) and landscape (Whiteley’s
drawing titled Expandingness),17 and Whiteley’s portraits of Hitler and
Mishima (mentioned by Wendy Whiteley in the passage quoted above).
The Italian expressions scomparire and esaltato al potere are loaded with these
mental images.
Another significant mental association that occurred during the transla-
tion process links the reiterated word ‘power’ and Whiteley’s right hand –
the symbol of his artistic skills depicted in the drawing, which points to
the audience in a conative and symbolically deictic gesture. The artist has
the freedom and power to influence people, but can completely disappear
from their memory. It is not by coincidence that the word power appears
twice: the first time, it expresses the idea of diminishing power (‘scompar-
ire (di potere)’), while the second time it evokes triumph and victory. The
image of Christ has arisen from the Italian word deposto (the expression
deposto dalla croce corresponds to the English phrase ‘taken down from the
cross’, and refers to the thirteenth station of the Via Crucis). The opposites
defeat/victory (also implicit in the expression portato via [deprivato – pri-

vato, which in English means ‘deprived – private’] / Dev’essere prima dato)
imply Whiteley’s concern with adversities in life and the awareness that
controversial forces rule our existence, despite our attempts to be in con-
trol; it is worth noticing that according to Lao-Tse (in Huisheng et al., 1999,
p. 45), ‘Those that have little, may get more, / Those that have much, are
but perplexed’. It also suggests a religious, idealized and almost fanatical
view of leaders such as Lao and Jesus. The juxtaposition of such different
references suggests Whiteley’s strong eclecticism.
Another verbal–visual connection relates to Whiteley’s bodily representa-
tion. Consistent with the choice of representing only his head instead of the
whole body, in the inscription there are no hints to bodily parts; the only
references to the body are indirect and metaphorical (‘weakened’/‘strong’),
and the only physical action is related to the realm of vision (‘see them!!!’),
a topic that imbues Whiteley’s work.
The most poetic image is la luce sottile (better in Italian than in English,
in my view),18 a synaesthetic combination of ‘light’ and ‘wit’ (sottile means
‘subtle’ in the sense of delicately humorous), which can be interpreted also
as a reference to the philosophical conception of illumination. However,
the image sottile (that is, the ‘subtle’ image – in Italian one can place the
noun before the adjective) could also refer to the drawing technique – pen
and ink – which has produced thin and ‘light’, yet black, lines.
This inscription also presents other noteworthy features of Whiteley’s
writing. These aspects are the sensitivity for sounds (evident in his insisting
on the combination of dental and labial sounds in words such as dwindle ,
subtle and gentleness); the presence of nonsense – an extreme version of
the ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, which reflects Whiteley’s interest in
the subconscious and his freedom from intellectual commitment; and the
dogmatic mindset behind expressions such as should , must be , is to be , a pre-
scriptive stance that appears to match not only the pose of Whiteley in the
drawing – his index finger pointing to the viewers – but also the contrasts
between order/disorder and fine/distorted. Things are not always as they
‘should’ be.
In particular, the use of nonsense is very common in Whiteley’s writings
and characterizes his use of words in general (McDonald, 1995; James,
2000). His tendency to play with words and to abandon himself to streams
of consciousness (reciprocated by the translator in tagliare il pesce; stato/
sta per; l’ascia-te , which means ‘to cut the fish; been/is going to; let’, where
l’ascia means ‘the axe’) is possibly a reflection of a combination of factors,
such as the use of drugs, a form of diversion from reality and rationality,
and a form of derangement from common sense; an expression of freedom

from rules; an expression of his self- determination; a refusal to commit to
intellectualism; the dissatisfaction with social commitment that informs all
the waves of artists after the Vietnam War; and on a psychological level, a
sign of depression and renunciation, a symptom of solitude.19
Below is the final Italian translation:
7/4/67
Ricordando Laotse . . .
Chi dev’essere fatto diminuire (di potere)
Va fatto prima espandere
Chi dev’essere indebolito
Deve essere prima rafforzato
Chi dev’essere umiliato
Deve essere prima esaltato al potere
A chi dev’essere rimosso
Dev’essere prima dato
Questa è la luce sottile.
La mitezza supera la forza
Il pesce dovrebbe essere lasciato nel pozzo profondo
E le armi taglienti di stato vanno lasciate
dove nessuno può vederle!!!
The major change from the previous draft is the translation of has to be
as va fatto, rather than dev’essere fatto. The revised translation maintains
the passive meaning, emphasizing a sense of acceptance that resembles
the language of Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew (5: 3–12) and the
Magnificat in the Gospel of Luke (1: 46–55). I have also turned acque pro-
fonde (‘deep waters’) into pozzo profondo (‘deep well’), which suggests a more
enclosed space.
In conclusion, a close analysis of Whiteley’s words, complemented by the
process of translating, suggests that in Remembering Lao-Tse multiple signs
convey one chief message: I am the total artist, who expresses himself in
images, verses, art, philosophy, body, spirit, politics and nonsense. I am
free, and you must look at me. In this sense, Whiteley’s interartistic, inter-
modal and intertextual self-representation must be interpreted not only
as an aesthetic choice, but also as a communicative strategy. Pictures and
words redundantly convey Whiteley’s central message – the idea that he is
a charismatic, almost prophetic artist. By overloading his work with a series
of verbal-visual repetitions, he intends to represent himself not only as a

painter, but also as a writer, with the ultimate aim of promoting his work.
The accumulation of words and images allows Whiteley to repeat his
message in a bombastic way. Parallel signs multiply his message, so that if
we are not convinced by the images, we will be persuaded by the words,
and vice versa.20 In this partnership of excesses, words reinforce and com-
plement the images, adding extra emphasis to the already hyperbolic
composition.
From Textual to Imagetextual
The translation process displayed has facilitated identifying and highlight-

ing the connection between the words and the images in Remembering Lao-
Tse, suggesting that they cooperatively contribute to Whiteley’s interartistic,
intermodal and intertextual self- depiction. This appears to be the result of
the combination of a verbal element and a visual element that are spatially
contiguous, intratextually linked, yet medially heterogeneous.
First of all, the translation of Whiteley’s words has implied a careful
examination of his visual self- depiction. This scrutiny has shown that
through his pictorial self-representation, Whiteley calls attention to the
intellectual and the technical qualities of his artistic personality. To this
end, he represents himself by depicting his head and his right hand, while
the rest of his body remains implicit.
Moreover, the joint analysis of Whiteley’s images and words through
translation has highlighted two major features: Whiteley’s overloaded style,
and his self-representation as a total artist. The first feature is his poetics
of excess, that is, his tendency to load his work with myriad different signs,
so as to reinforce his message. The second feature is realized through the
combination of words and images whereby Whiteley aims at representing
himself not only as a painter, but also as a poet.
First, in Remembering Lao-Tse, the co-presence of words and images pro-
duces an overload of signification, which draws attention to Whiteley’s poet-
ics of excess. The title and the date are conventional yet crucial components
of Whiteley’s self-representation. The combination of paratexts and images
produces a complex ensemble of signs, in which the words repeat or clar-
ify the images, diverting, attracting or guiding our understanding. In this
sense, Whiteley’s rhetorical overplay can be seen as a fetishistic practice, and
the repetition of the same ideas through verbal and visual signs highlights
his tendency to represent himself in a bombastic and even buffoonish way.
The title, the date and the inscription have different roles in relation to
Whiteley’s self- depiction. The title Remembering Lao-Tse (Shaving off a Second)
clarifies the subject and highlights some aspects of his artwork, so that
the viewers feel guided in their reading of the drawing. In this sense, the
function of the title is not only to identify and clarify the piece of art,
but also to establish some contact between the artist and the public. The
date serves as a biographical element that alludes to Whiteley’s physical
presence, thus implying his historical intervention. The inscription also
contributes strongly to defining Whiteley’s self- depiction, by adding infor-
mation about the artist, evoking his presence or, more importantly, ver-
balizing the meaning of the artwork. In fact, the inscription serves as a
metonym which in praesentia of the artist multiplies his presence.
Secondly, as the inscription is neatly divided from the images, it is evi-
dent that Whiteley represents himself not only as a painter, but also as a
poet. The separation between the drawing and the writing has the effect
of representing Whiteley as a double artist.
Whiteley’s tendency to perform as a total artist can be viewed as a com-
pensatory and fetishistic mechanism aiming for control, that lies halfway
between a great Gesamtkunstwerk , an all- embracing work of art that makes
use of all or many art forms, and an unwitting pastiche similar to a comme-
dia . As in a commedia , Whiteley’s performance is based on archetypes (i.e.
the artist, the alter ego), distortion – verbal and pictorial – and a largely
improvised format (i.e. use of the line as a virtuoso exercise), which call
attention to his addiction to drugs. From this perspective, Whiteley’s com-
pulsion to incorporate literary and pictorial references in his work suggests
the artist’s failed attempt to exert power on reality, seen as an all-inclusive
realm.
Whiteley’s self- depiction has been accounted for and reciprocated
by my translation, through a deliberate and liberal appropriation of his
work, in which author and translator become two composite writing sub-
jects (Karalis, 2007, p. 231). My translation has freed the text from its hic
et nunc (at the present time), opening its modality to the questioning of
another linguistic pattern and another cultural tradition. The co-presence
of English and Italian has produced unforeseen associations, observations
and discoveries. Through the dialogue between the author and the trans-
lator, different historical perspectives, cultural agendas and geographical
dislocations have provided the setting to a new interpretative path.
Among the major challenges of this approach has been the attempt to
combine visual, linguistic and literary analysis, drawing upon different dis-
ciplines such as translation studies, comparative literature, semiotics, the
history of art and visual studies. Different disciplines have provided a rich
theoretical framework to analyse Whiteley’s self-representation in all its
complexity. In this sense, one of the aims has been to open up a framework
of analysis that could be applied to other visual authors. My cultural and
linguistic background has required translation as a necessary and effec-
tive instrument to investigate Whiteley’s work, and this perspective could
be applied to analyse the interaction of words and images in other artistic
contexts.
To conclude, an interdisciplinary approach that has considered Whiteley’s
Remembering Lao-Tse as an imagetext combined with an innovative perspective
on translation has yielded new insights into the interpretation of his work,
highlighting a series of complex issues inherent in his self-representation
that up until now had not been adequately considered. But also, the shift
from textual to imagetextual has hopefully stimulated new reflections on
interdisciplinarity as the locus from which to contribute actively to a new
understanding of cultural phenomena. Indeed, going beyond established
frameworks is a way to take part in the ever- evolving dynamics of art.
Notes
1. Whiteley’s earliest paintings, produced in Europe (1960–1965), were par-

ticularly influenced by the modernist British art of the time, and signal the
emergence of his tendency to combine different media and techniques, includ-
ing the use of painted and collaged words. From 1969 on, Whiteley spent most
of his time in Australia, and translated a mixture of European, American and
Asian models into the typically Australian subjects of his works. In this period,
it must be remembered, Whiteley moved from alcohol to more serious mind-
altering chemicals (Pearce, 1995, p. 249; Dickins, 2002, pp. 62–3).
In the seventies, Whiteley’s career reached its apex (Hilton and Blundell, 1996,
pp. 106–15, 159). Some of his most famous artworks were produced in this
period, including Alchemy, his ‘most ambitious self-portrait’ (Pearce, 1995,
p. 164), and his depictions of the Sydney Harbour and Lavender Bay, where he
lived and worked from the mid seventies until the late eighties (McGrath, 1979,
pp. 165–210).
In his later years, Whiteley became increasingly dependent on alcohol and her-
oin. His work output began a steep decline, although its market value continued
to climb. After several attempts to rehabilitate, all ultimately unsuccessful, on
15 June 1992, Whiteley was found dead from an overdose in a motel room in
Thirroul, on the south coast of New South Wales (Hilton and Blundell, 1996,
pp. 237–46).
2. The images of some of Whiteley’s most famous paintings, including Alchemy and
Art, Life and the Other Thing, are available on the website of the Brett Whiteley
Studio, www.brettwhiteley.org.
3. Whiteley produced not only a prolific amount of self-portraits, but also a sub-
stantial number of paintings and drawings that are not self-portraits but do
include a physical depiction of himself. For this reason, his tendency to self-
represent has been often criticized as one of the most obsessive leitmotivs of his
production (e.g. Maloon, 1983; McDonald, 1995).
4. In the catalogue Brett Whiteley: Art and Life (Pearce, 1995), more than half of the
visual works reproduced feature inscriptions.
5. Building on Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, Genette proposes a more
inclusive term, transtextuality, to refer to ‘all that which puts one text in rela-
tion, whether obvious or conceived, with other texts’ (1997, p. 1).
6. Art history and art historical practice have a long tradition of borrowing and
using styles and forms from the past. Therefore, from an art historic per-
spective, Whiteley’s tendency to appropriation is not a unique phenomenon.
However, I wish to stress that his appropriation is a particularly significant fea-
ture of his work and a key dynamic of self-representation.
7. Arguably, the seminal phase in Whiteley’s career was his European period
(1960–1965), during which he saw and learnt from artists and works often very
different from himself, historically and geographically. Another influential
experience was his sojourn in New York at the end of the 1960s. In that period
Whiteley was particularly ‘exposed to the powerful and confl icting pressures of
abstract expressionism and Pop art’ (Smith and Smith, 1991, p. 390), and this
exposure further enhanced his awareness of the international art scene. On
the intertextual dimension of Whiteley’s work, see Zanoletti (2009a, 2009b).
8. It is well known that White was inspired by Whiteley’s art and persona to develop
the main character of his novel The Vivisector, which follows the life of a Sydney
painter. However, their friendship also produced a series of drawings and paint-
ings that Whiteley dedicated to White (e.g. Patrick White as a Headland , 1981).
On this topic, see Hewitt (2002). The transcription of Whiteley’s interview with
Olle is currently on display at the Brett Whiteley Studio, in Sydney.
9. A future development of the present study will involve analysing Whiteley’s
appropriation of Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s work in light of Clive Scott’s writ-
ing on translating these authors from French into English (Scott, 2000, 2006).
10. This approach, recently discussed by Scott (2009), hinges on the phenomeno-
logical assumption that we perceive the universe with the totality of our bodies,
and encourages regarding translation as physiological involvement with a text
instead of a cognitive activity.
11. On translation as an imaginative process and the relationship between transla-
tion and creativity, see Bassnett and Bush (eds) (2006), and Aranda (2009).
12. Similarly, the handwritten inscription immediately reminds us of Leonardo’s
manuscripts. An example of Whiteley’s admiration for Leonardo’s work is the
drawing Self-portrait after Looking at Leonardo (1973) (McGrath, 1979, p. 98) (Illus.).
13. On Lao-Tse’s biography, see Wing-Tsit (1963, pp. 35–59).
14. Waka is the Japanese word for ‘poem’ (Miyamori, 1938, p. 3), and alludes to
the use of brief poems to accompany paintings in Japanese culture. Although
interdependent, verbal and visual elements are visually and thematically dis-
tinct in Japanese art. On the concept of Japanese juxtaposition – a concept that
informs the production of wakas – see Perniola (2006, pp. 129–34).
15. The repetition of the sound [ts] has created the combination of letters zzz,
stimulating the image of sleep and boredom, and the idea that this inscription
is particularly repetitive.
16. Edmund Capon maintains that Whiteley’s sensuality does not reach the pro-
fundity that stretches beyond the realm of human experience, engaging the
human condition: ‘Whiteley’s investigations have no profounder aspirations
than to immortalize the experience, and this he achieved with unrelenting
imagination, individuality and ultimately an immense and humane beauty’ (in
Pearce, 1995, p. 7).
17. Pearce, 1995, Illustration 29.
18. The combination of luce and sottile creates a particularly gentle sound that
echoes and possibly intensifies the grace of the English expression ‘subtle light’.
19. These aspects of Whiteley’s personality are discussed by a number of critics,
including David Shteinman (1996), John Olsen (1996), and Bruce James
(2000).
20. This parallel has a communicative effect similar to propaganda posters, in
which words and images jointly convey the message.
References
Aranda, L. V. (2009), ‘Forms of creativity in translation’. Cad. de tradução, 1, (23),
23 – 37.
Bassnett, S., and Bush, P. (eds) (2006), The Translator as Writer. London and New
York: Continuum.
Cometa, M. (2004), Parole che dipingono. Roma: Meltemi.
Danks, J. H., Shreve, G. M., Fountain, S. B., and McBeath, M. K. (1997), ‘Cognitive
processes in translation and interpreting’. Applied Psychology: Individual, Social
and Community Issues, 3, 137–160.
Dickins, B. (2002), Black and Whiteley: Barry Dickins in Search of Brett . South Yarra:
Hardie Grant Books.
Genette, G. (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hermans, T. (2007a), The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St. Jerome
Publishing.
—(2007b), ‘Foreword’, in M. Perteghella and E. Loffredo (eds), Translation and
Creativity. London: Continuum, pp. ix–x.
Hewitt, H. V. (2002), Patrick White, Painter Manqué: Painting, Painters and their
Influence on his Writing. Carlton South: The Miegunyah Press.
Hilton, M., and Blundell, G. (1996), Whiteley: An Unauthorised Life. Sydney: Pan
Macmillan.
Huisheng, F., Waley, A., and Guying, C. (eds) (1999), Laozi . Changsha: Hunan ren
min chu ban she.
James, B. (2000), Whiteley with Words. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Karalis, V. (2007), ‘On transference and transposition in translation’. Literature and
Aesthetics, 17, (2), 224 – 36.
Kristeva, J. (1969), Séméiôtiké: Recherches pour une Sémanalyse . Paris: Edition du

Seuil.
Maloon, T. (1983), ‘Maloon on Whiteley on Van Gogh’. The Sydney Morning Herald ,
23 July, n.p.
McDonald, J. (1995), ‘What if Brett Whiteley was just very, very overrated?’ The
Sydney Morning Herald , 9 September, n.p.
McGrath, S. (1979), Brett Whiteley. Sydney: Bay Books.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation .
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Miyamori, A. (1938), An Anthology of Japanese Poems . Tokyo: Maruzen.
Olsen, J. (1996), ‘Whiteley’. The Sydney Morning Herald , 29 June, n.p.
Pearce, B. (1995), Brett Whiteley: Art and Life . London: Thames & Hudson.
Perniola, M. (2006), ‘The Japanese juxtaposition’. European Review, 14, (1), 129–34.
Scott, C. (2000), Translating Baudelaire. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
— (2006), Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
— (2009), ‘Intermediality and synaesthesia: literary translation as centrifugal prac-
tice’. Paper presented at the CRASSH conference on Intermedia Translation,
May 2009, University of Cambridge.
Shteinman, D. (1996),‘Tribute to a Dionysian free spirit: the Brett Whiteley retro-
spective’. Philosopher, s.n., 9–13.
Smith, B., and Smith, T. (1991), Australian Painting, 1788–2000. Third edition.
Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Tymoczko, M. (2007), Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester:
St. Jerome Publishing.
Venuti, L. (2007), ‘Adaptation, translation, critique’. Journal of Visual Culture , 6,
(1), 25–43.
Wing-Tsit, C. (1963), The Way of Lao Tzu . New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Zanoletti, M. (2007), ‘Figures of speech | Figure retoriche: verbal and visual in
Brett Whiteley’. Literature and Aesthetics, 17, (2), 192– 208.
— (2009a), ‘Self in translation’, in E. Bellina, L. Eufusia and P. Ugolini (eds),
About Face: Depicting the Self in the Written and Visual Arts . Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholar Publishing, pp. 105–207.
— (2009b), ‘In other images. Brett Whiteley’s image of Europe | Europe’s image of
Brett Whiteley’, in R. Summo- O’Connell (ed.), Imagined Australia . Bern: Peter
Lang, pp. 233–48.
Chapter 2
Biographical Resonances in
the Translation Work of Florbela Espanca
Chris Gerry
Universidade de Trás- os-Montes e Alto Douro
Introduction
Flor Bela de Alma da Conceição Lobo was born in 1894 in Vila Viçosa, a
conservative rural backwater about 180 kilometres east of Lisbon, Portugal.
The details of her short and turbulent life read like the plot of a romantic
novel: she was the illegitimate daughter of a petty entrepreneur and a domes-
tic servant, became one of the first generation of Portuguese girls to attend
public secondary school, idolized her younger brother Apeles to the point of
obsession, began a law degree at Lisbon University, had published two collec-
tions of poetry by the time she was 30, was married three times and divorced
twice, and enjoyed a number of extramarital affairs. By her early 30s, Florbela
Espanca (as she now called herself, having adopted her father’s name) ‘had
no money, lived with her in-laws, [. . .] translated mediocre novels, and was
ill’ (Bessa Luís, 1984, p. 172, my translation). She also appeared to have lost
her poetic inspiration and was unsuccessfully trying to interest publishers in a
third collection of sonnets. Notwithstanding this inauspicious state of affairs,
during the second half of the 1920s, while also experiencing a very product-
ive burst of short story writing, Espanca translated ten novels for two publish-
ers in the northern coastal city of Oporto. By 1930, with her third marriage
a sham and her creative powers waning, she had reached her lowest ebb, and
committed suicide on the eve of her 36th birthday. Following her death, and
the publication of her remaining poems, her work came to be accepted as a
key element in the canon of twentieth- century Portuguese poetry.
The aim of this essay is to assess the extent to which aspects of Espanca’s
life and views may have influenced the strategy and procedures she adopted
in four of the French popular romantic novels she translated.1 Authors
such as Delisle recommend the use of this biographical prism to cast light
on the translator’s work (2002, pp. 1–2); while others, such as Hermans,
Biographical Resonances in Translation Work 27
would see the translator’s attitude towards the source text as one of the
constitutive factors of the ‘diegetic margin’ that allows his/her voice to
consciously or unconsciously obtrude (2001).
With specific regard to Espanca, such an approach is plausible for two rea-
sons. First, the themes covered in the type of novels she translated (focus-
ing on how women, in their search for an enduring emotional relationship,
often find themselves caught between the pressures of social conventions
and the temptation to assert their personal freedom), correspond to key
elements of Espanca’s own life (e.g. her three marriages, her love affairs,
family disapproval of her divorces, her thwarted ambition to make her liv-
ing as a writer, and her parlous physical and mental health). Secondly, the
moralizing in which popular romantic novels often indulged touched on
issues on which Espanca held diametrically opposed or at least equivocal
positions (e.g. on the subordination of women’s personal freedom and pro-
fessional self-affirmation to androcentric bourgeois morality, and on the
sanctity of marriage and life itself).
The recent growth of interest in female translators has produced a num-
ber of book-length surveys and studies (e.g. Simon, 1996; von Flotow, 1997;
Delisle, 2002; Santaemilia, 2005), that have employed varying methodolo-
gies (ranging from conventional historiographical, sociological and cul-
tural studies approaches, to explicitly feminist perspectives), as well as
numerous papers on specific translators, themes, periods and problems
(e.g. Arrojo, 1994; Al-Jarf, 1999; Stark, 1999; Pieretti, 2002; and Wolf,
2006). Delisle (2002) identifies a number of features common to the spe-
cific habitus of women translators of the past that shed light on the particu-
larities of their work, the specific obstacles they faced and the translation
strategies they adopted: a subordination to male- dominated social, eco-
nomic and cultural norms that constrained every aspect of a woman’s life;
the pecuniary imperative that often drew them into translating; the way
they frequently combined translating with their own literary endeavours;
and their explicit or implicit solidarity with women’s struggle for greater
personal, political, professional and creative autonomy. However, in the act
of translation – particularly when performed by women – key dimensions
of the habitus intersect and interact with the translator’s ‘intervenience’
(Maier, 2007), generating moments in which his/her biography and per-
sonal values display their potential to mediate, more or less consistently,
more or less consciously, between the author’s voice and what will become
the reader’s perception of the author’s purpose.
Legitimately, research on women translators first of all focused on the
scholarly women of the past whose translations of literary classics, key
philosophical tracts or scientific texts for an elite readership have only

recently brought them the recognition they deserve (see, for example,
Delisle, 2002). On the more rare occasions that analysts have examined the
work of contemporary women translators, they have understandably taken as
their main point of departure the globalized capitalism of the publishing
sector, the full commoditization of cultural goods and services, and recent
mutations in gender inequalities (see, for example, Kalinowski, 2002).
However, in Europe and the Americas of the Belle Époque, sandwiched
between the erudite artisanal amateurs of the past and the proletarian-
ized professionals of the present,2 there emerged a generation of ‘ jobbing
translators’, many of whom aspired to be writers themselves, who were
recruited by publishers eager to meet a growing demand for popular litera-
ture on the part of the new educated middle classes. Florbela Espanca was
one such translator: the work undertaken and the lives led by these proto-
professionals – a large number of whom were women, as were the writers
they translated and the readers they hoped to reach – provide a distinctive
vantage point from which to contemplate some of the complexities of the
act of translation.
Espanca’s Translations
By the 1920s, middle class Portuguese families that had benefited from the
opening up of secondary education to their daughters constituted a grow-
ing market for local publishers. On the demand side, the tastes of women
readers now went far beyond what fashion and housekeeping magazines
could provide; on the supply side, publishers were obliged to supplement
their meagre stock of home- grown authors by buying the rights to translate
foreign novels – mainly from France, Spain and Britain – ranging from the
classics, through ‘morally improving’ works inspired by the late nineteenth-
century French Catholic cultural renaissance, to sensationalist literature
from Europe and Latin America.3 To satisfy the growing demand for popu-
lar fiction, publishers had to supplement the work of author-translators4
with that of new recruits, among whom women became increasingly promi-
nent due to their availability, their eagerness to enter professional life and,
undoubtedly, the cost of their services. Furthermore, under pressure of
both demand and competition, publishers began to manage the work of
their network of translators more rationally.5
Florbela Espanca’s reasons for seeking work as a translator were more
pecuniary than literary. She had left her second husband in late 1923 and,
though her life with the physician who was to become her third husband
was financially secure, it was not lavish. She had no income of her own,
and both her lover and her father had apparently refused to finance the
publication of her most recent poems. Augusta Bessa Luís confirms that
by June 1926 Espanca was already translating (1984, p. 132), Guedes states
that by the spring of 1927 she was already working for Civilização (1986,
p. 64), and in a letter dated June 1927, Espanca herself makes an oblique
reference to the new line of work in which she has been engaged (Espanca,
1986b, p. 69). However, it is more likely that Espanca began translating in
the summer of 1924, or even earlier: among the books found on her shelves
after her death there was a number of popular romances in French, mainly
from the Arthème Fayard publishing house, and the flyleaves of five of
them had been dated August 1924 by Espanca, strongly suggesting they
had been sent to her by a publisher so she might decide which to translate.
Over the period from mid-1924 to late 1927 – by which time all but one of
her translations had been published, and she was working full time on a
second collection of short stories – Espanca’s productivity as a translator
was impressive, averaging around three novels a year, in addition to the
short stories she was writing and the compilation and revision of what was
to be her last volume of poetry.
The few commentators that have mentioned Espanca’s translations
assume, with Augusta Bessa Luís, that they were popular romantic novels,
mediocre romances cor de rosa written by equally mediocre authors. Before
offering a more balanced assessment of the style and quality of these nov-
els, it would be useful to try to clarify of what the popular romantic genre
consists. Holmes defines it as follows:
What is at stake, the enjeu , is the possible achievement of a mutual, last-

ing, passionate love. The narrative is sustained by the series of obstacles
that delay (. . .) or finally prevent the desired outcome [. . . important
among which] are the rivals, and particularly the female rivals, who
act as foils to the heroine’s incarnation of a positive or ideal model of
femininity. (2003, p. 17)
Seen in these terms, of the ten novels that Espanca translated, five can
be plausibly categorized as popular romantic novels, with the remaining
five sharing only some of the genre’s thematic, structural and stylistic
characteristics. Of the four novels analysed in this essay, two (Maryan’s
Le Secret de Solange and Rameau’s Le Roman du Bonheur) correspond fairly
closely to Holmes’s definition, and the remaining two (de Peyrebrune’s
Doña Quichotta and Benoit’s Mademoiselle de la Ferté )reflect only some of the
model’s key features.6 Biographical and bibliographical notes on the four
translations under scrutiny here are presented in Table 2.1.
In terms of quality, regardless of whether the novels that Espanca trans-
lated meet Holmes’s criteria, a few (those by Georges Thierry, Claude
Saint- Jean and, arguably, Jean Thiéry) can be legitimately categorized
as ‘potboilers’ turned out by authors whose productivity exceeded their
talent. And yet the majority of her authors had well- established national
and even international reputations: they were contracted to prominent
literary publishers, some had already had novels translated, the quality of
their work had been publicly recognized7 and, in two cases, the authors
would see some of their novels transformed into films.8 However, a neatly
dualistic distinction between purveyors of quantity and providers of qual-
ity would be deceptive, for the reality is more complex: towards the middle
of the continuum lie not only the more talented authors such as Maryan
and Champol (who both wrote for a living), but also those whose initial
talent or luck simply ran out, and who subsequently found refuge in writ-
ing to order.
Tracking Down the Original Texts and Translations
While an extensive literature exists on Espanca’s poetry, critics have largely

ignored her short stories and, to date, neither Espanca the translator nor
the novels on which she worked appear to have attracted any interest, des-
pite the insights into her poetry and her prose that such analysis might pro-
vide. In 2008, I was in the final stages of translating Espanca’s short stories
into English and had found a casual reference in Guedes’s introductions
to the Dom Quixote and Bertrand editions of the contos, to the fact that
she ‘had started to undertake professional translations of French authors’
(Espanca, 1995, p. 9; Guedes, 2000, p. 16). Having found in Guedes’s own
archival research references to ten novels (nine French and one Spanish)
translated by Espanca (Guedes, 1986, pp. 95–6), I was eager to find out the
type of books she had translated, and intrigued as to whether this ‘other
Florbela’ (Gerry and Reis, 2008) could cast any light on the more familiar
Florbelas already encountered.
Before presenting the results of the parallel reading of the four novels
and their translations, it may be of interest to outline how the source
texts and translations were uncovered. Internet searches (1) provided
biographical and bibliographical details on the better-known authors she
Table 2.1 Four novels translated by Florbela Espanca: authors, biographical notes, bibliographical references and synopses
Author Biographical Notes Original (and Original (and Synopsis

Portuguese) Portuguese)
Title Publication
M. Maryan Pseudonym of Marie Rosalie Virginie Le Secret de Paris: Gautier, In order to marry Savinien,
(1847–1927) Deschard, author of almost 100 novels that Solange ; 1888; Solange must reveal the secret
Biographical Resonances in Translation Work

were popular with generations of young (O Segredo de (Porto: behind her father’s strange
French women. Many were translated (e.g. Solange). Figueirinhas, behaviour: he has served a jail
Annie , Reconquise , La Faute du Père , Le Secret 1927). sentence for altering a relative’s
du Mari and Le Secret de Solange), several into will in his own favour, a crime of
Portuguese. which he is innocent. Savinien
unmasks the real culprit, who
commits suicide.
George de Pseudonym of Mathilde- Marie Georgina Doña Quichotta ; Paris: Librairie Madeleine Delarive, driven away
Peyrebrune Élisabeth de Peyrebrune who, like Espanca, (Dona Quichotta). Plon, 1903; by her husband’s cruelty, returns
(1841–1917) was illegitimate. She only began writing in (Porto: sick and penniless years later,
her late thirties, publishing more than 30 Civilização, hoping to see the children she
novels (e.g. Victoire la Rouge , Une Separation 1927). felt compelled to abandon.
and Giselle). Though she died in poverty and Both her daughter (nicknamed
obscurity, she is today considered – along Quichotta) and son refuse to take
with Marcelle Tinayre and Myriam Harry, a their father’s side, who finally
key proto- feminist Belle Époque writer. repents at the bedside of his
dying wife.
Jean Rameau Pseudonym of poet and prolific novelist Le Roman du Paris: Albin Le Gal, a rich widower, adopts a
(1858–1942) Laurent Lebaigt, many of whose novels Bonheur ; Michel, 1926; street urchin as an experiment
(e.g. Moune , La Rose de Grenade , Le Champion (O Romance de (Porto: in practical philanthropy. He
de Cythère and Les Chevaliers de l’Au- delà) Felicidade). Civilização, manages only to turn the child
were published by the same Librarie Paul 1927). first into a spoilt brat, then into
Ollendorf that had championed the work of a swindler. In the process, Le
Poe, Balzac, Maupassant, Alain- Fournier and Gal loses both his fortune and
31
George Sand. Mayette, the young woman he
secretly loves.
32
Table 2.1 (contd.)
Words, Images and Performances in Translation

Author Biographical Notes Original (and Original (and Synopsis
Portuguese) Portuguese)
Title Publication
Pierre Benoit Journalist who interviewed such political leaders Mademoiselle de la Paris: Albin Anne de la Ferté, having inherited
(1886–1962) as Haile Selasse, Mussolini, Salazar and Goering Ferté ; Michel, 1923; only debts, loses her beloved
for Le Journal and France- Soir. In 1919, his early (Mademoiselle de la (Porto: to the heiress Galswinthe who,
work L’Atlantide won the Grand Prix du Roman Ferté: um Romance Civilização, widowed within a year, adopts a
of the Académie Française. Many of his novels da Actualidade). 1927). dissolute lifestyle, and eventually
(including Koenigsmark , Le Lac Salé, La Chaussée contracts tuberculosis. Finding
des Géants, Le Puits de Jacob) are set in exotic or that her husband’s family only
dangerous locations (e.g. Indo- China, the New covet her assets, Galswinthe is
Hebrides, Palestine, Dublin). selflessly cared for by Anne, to
whom she bequeaths everything.
had translated; (2) identified the French publishers of popular romantic

literature from whom Portuguese publishers would have bought transla-
tion rights; and (3) indicated libraries from which source texts or transla-
tions might be borrowed and second-hand booksellers from whom the
remaining texts might be purchased. By 2009, I had succeeded in acquir-
ing the originals of seven of the ten novels on which Espanca worked
(often in the edition she would have used) as well as the corresponding
translations.9
Biographical Resonances in Espanca’s Translations
Initial reading of individual texts was followed by more systematic paral-

lel reading, the focus of which was to examine the contextual and other
factors that may have influenced the procedures and strategy Espanca
adopted. To this end, the main priority was to look for evidence of two key
aspects in her translations:
(1) Biographical resonances corresponding to events in her own life or to

values she held dear (or those she opposed) that may have caused her
consciously or unconsciously to adopt a specific translation procedure
or adjust her translation strategy; and
(2) Figurative echoes reflecting how some of the specificities of the type of
novels she was translating may have resurfaced in her own short stories
in the form of particular themes, or plots and, in particular, imagery.
Only the first of these parameters is discussed here; the results of using the
second prism have been reported on elsewhere (Gerry, 2010).
Since most critics have acknowledged the profoundly autobiographical
nature of Espanca’s short stories, it made sense to assess the extent to which
aspects of her unconventional lifestyle and views (unconventional, that is,
for 1920s Portugal) might help to explain some of the translation proce-
dures and strategies she adopted. The examples of ‘biographical reson-
ance’ presented below constitute a small but representative sample of the
numerous cases that were detected as the four pairs of texts were read. The
explanations offered are tentative, largely because our knowledge of pre-
cisely when and in what personal circumstances Espanca made each of the
translations is minimal. Notwithstanding this limitation, the assessment
provides an initial test of the extent to which her personal and creative life
may have ‘bled into’ her translations.
Biographical resonances appear to have asserted themselves in Espanca’s

translations in various forms, notably minor ‘adjustments’ achieved by way
of specific translation procedures (such as substitution, omission/deletion,
addition and hardening/softening of the original text) as well as more sub-
stantial ‘manipulations’ of the authors’ poetics. The remaining sections of
this essay focus successively on three interlocking aspects of Espanca’s life
that appear to have constituted mediating factors in her translation strat-
egy: her proto-feminist views, her sexuality and her mental health.
Espanca’s Translation Strategy as Mediated by Her Proto- Feminism

While there is a general consensus that Espanca’s poetry contains an abun-
dance of what Pitta (2007) has called her ‘proto-feminism’, this is also true
of her prose – as articulated in her contos (both by her characters, and
when her own voice as author obtrudes), in the diary she wrote in the last
year of her life and in her letters. This being so, her views on a woman’s
right to sexual, professional and artistic autonomy offer an elucidative per-
spective from which to assess Espanca the translator.
In the 1920s, Espanca’s proto-feminism was directed at much the same
series of constraints that young educated middle class women had faced
earlier in the more advanced countries of Europe: irrespective of whether
they were of noble, bourgeois or humble origins, they were expected to
affirm themselves through marriage and child-bearing, with any per-
sonal preferences regarding partners subordinated to family strategies of
upward socio- economic mobility and/or defence of traditional privileges.
Since art tends also to reflect the friction of social change, it is hardly sur-
prising that both the preservation of traditional ruling class status and/or
its appropriation by parvenus from the emerging industrial, commercial
and professional bourgeoisie often provided a context for the plots of late
nineteenth- century European romantic novels.
More specifically, the tension between marriage and a woman’s per-
sonal freedom is a recurrent theme in popular romantic fiction and, while
addressed in only two of Espanca’s own short stories,10 the motif can be found
in many of the novels she translated, albeit in different guises: sometimes
it is treated in a moralistic and androcentric manner (as in Rameau’s Le
Roman du Bonheur or Maryan’s Le Secret de Solange), sometimes in a nuanced
fashion that is more sympathetic to the woman (as in de Peyrebrune’s Doña
Quichotta) or more sardonically (as in Benoit’s Mademoiselle de la Ferté ).
This same contradiction was a constant in Espanca’s life: while she
yearned for the normal, stable, bourgeois family existence she herself had
never experienced, she found marriage, when it came – and it came three
times – intolerably stifling. None of the partners she chose proved able to
offer her either the emotional or material conditions in which she might
focus on her writing, or provide her with someone to idolize as she idolized
her brother Apeles.
Espanca had already developed a highly sceptical view of marriage by
her early twenties; in a letter to her friend Júlia Alves, she writes:
Marriage is brutal, as possession always is brutal – always! [. . .] with

the exception of those women who are more carnal than spiritual in
temperament, we all find marriage to be the greatest disappointment
[. . .] If we manage to have a man as a good friend, how we suffer! All
that is delicate in us, all that is offended and angered by the countless
affronts [. . .] rises up in revolt! And there isn’t a man – not even the best
of them – that understands this revulsion or would excuse it! (Espanca,
1986a, p. 130, my translation)
The following examples from Espanca’s translation work illustrate how

her defence of a woman’s right to greater autonomy in her relations with
men led her to ‘interfere’ with the text she was translating. In the first,
from Maryan’s Le Secret de Solange, the hero’s aunt describes to her nephew
Savinien, her daughter’s stubbornly unconventional attitude to marriage:
Original: [U]n parti presque inespéré s’est offert récemment. Rien n’a pu
la convaincre de l’accepter. J’ai dû la contraindre à réfléchir, l’interroger
même, pour découvrir si, à son insu, une autre image n’occupait point sa
jeune imagination. Elle est libre autant que pure, mais elle non plus ne
veut pas se marier. (Maryan, 1900, p. 22)
Translation: [A]inda há pouco teve, inesperadamente, uma bella ocasião
de se casar; mas, apesar de todos os meus esforços, não consegui
modificar-lhe a resolução inabalavel. Disse-lhe mesmo que pensasse, que
reflectisse, chegando até perguntar-lhe se, sem eu o saber, já teria dado a
alguem o coração. Mas vi que não. Martha é ainda a mesma donzella que
não pensa sequer nessas cousas, porque aspira á liberdade e não sente,
portanto, tentações pelo casamento. (Maryan, 1927, pp. 26–7)11
Having stretched and strengthened one phrase to stress the mother’s role
(‘despite all my efforts I was unable to alter her unshakeable resolve’), and
added another to underline that there was no rival suitor (‘I saw that it
was not the case’), Espanca inserts yet another to further emphasize the
young woman’s disinterest in marriage (‘Martha is still the same sweet girl
who doesn’t even think of such things’). While the word she uses (donzella
or ‘maiden’) does imply the ‘purity’ that is explicit in the French, Espanca
ends the sentence by asserting that Martha refuses to marry because she
wants to retain her independence. Thus, freedom and purity are placed in
contradiction to one another, transcending the simple juxtaposition in the
original (‘elle est libre autant que pure ’ – ‘she’s as free as she is pure’).
In the second example, from the novel Doña Quichotta , by the proto-
feminist George de Peyrebrune, the heroine Germaine listens to her fiancé
Antoine explain how a modern couple might conceivably reconcile the sup-
posedly natural differences between the sexes so as to consummate their
wish for greater equality in marriage:
Original: [La femme] est moins avertie que l’homme, moins entraînée,
jusqu’ici, a se débattre seule contre les difficultés de l’existence. En
s’affranchissant délibérément de toute tutelle, de tout contrôle, elle court
de grands risques [. . .] Mais elle doit, en retour, concéder à celui- ci [le
compagnon de sa vie] le droit de contrôle et de conseil. (de Peyrebrune,
1906, p. 205)
Translation: [A mulher] está menos experiente do que o homem, está
menos preparada, até a esta data, para lutar sozinha contra as dificul-
dades da existência. Libertando- se deliberadamente de toda a tutela,
de todo o freio, corre grandes riscos [. . .] Mas deve, em compensação,
conceder a este [o seu companheiro de vida] o direito de crítica e de
conselho. (de Peyrebrune, 1927, p. 198)
The husband’s right to ‘control and counsel’ his wife appears as ‘criticize and
counsel’ in Espanca’s translation – a small but significant alteration that
has the effect of disproportionately shifting the balance of power between
husband and wife, boosting the degree of autonomy de Peyrebrune had
intended women to be accorded in modern marriages.
A particular difficulty that women of Espanca’s generation faced was that
of affirming themselves in professions involving the arts. In Le Secret de
Solange, the eponymous heroine writes novels out of economic necessity,
and Maryan provides the reader with a cautious defence of women authors,
stressing that their novels should be morally uplifting, and that this creative
act should not interfere with a woman’s primary role as wife and mother
(1900, pp. 80–9). However, it is in Rameau’s Le Roman du Bonheur – where
the more general issue of the difficulties experienced by young artists (male
or female) in establishing themselves professionally arises – that Espanca
chooses to intervene, perhaps more so as a poet than as a woman. When

Le Gal is told by a cynical friend that even ‘the poet who wants to produce
alexandrines’ needs publicity, Espanca opts for the more specific verb ‘to
publish’: at a time when she had no publisher for what was to be her last
book of poems, Espanca’s choice of words is not without significance.
Original: . . . et vous devez savoir qu’on ne vit plus sans publicité; tout le
monde est obligé de la faire; depuis le confiseur qui vende des berlin-
gots jusqu’au poète qui veut produire des alexandrins. (Rameau, 1926,
p. 40)
Translation: . . . e você deve saber que se não vive sem reclame; toda a
gente é obrigada a fazel- o, desde o confiteiro que vende bonbons até ao
poeta que quer publicar alexandrinos. (Rameau, 1927, p. 41, original
emphasis)
Espanca’s Translation Strategy as Mediated by Her Sexuality

As a writer whose poetry was often passionate and frequently erotic (at
least by the standards of the day), and whose unsuccessful search for an
ideal partner figured prominently in both her interpersonal relations and
in her literary output, it is legitimate to ask whether Espanca’s translations
bear the mark of this particular dimension of her life and work.
A first example of how Espanca’s views on a woman’s right to both social
and sexual equality may have influenced the content of her translations
is to be found in Rameau’s novel Le Roman du Bonheur. Emmanuel Le Gal
falls in love with Mayette, a woman much younger and from a lower social
class than himself, and agonizes over whether to take her as his mistress,
or to accept the social opprobrium that marriage to her would inevitably
provoke.
Original: Mayette, entretenue, dégradée, proposée au vice, dirigé vers

le terminal ruisseau [. . .] Non, non, elle méritait mieux. Elle serait sa
femme légitime ou rien. (Rameau, 1926, p. 158)
Translation: Mayette por conta, aviltada, destinada ao vício, atirada para
a prostituição final [. . .] Não, não, ella merecia mais. Seria sua legítima
mulher ou nada. (Rameau, 1927, p. 154)
Here, Espanca hardens a key phrase relating to the plight of ‘kept women’:
whereas Rameau uses the familiar metaphor of the gutter (ruisseau) to sug-
gest that a mariage de la main gauche (i.e. a morganatic relation) – particularly
where there is a considerable age difference – is an almost inevitable prel-

ude to the ultimate of moral degradations, Espanca pulls no punches,
opting to employ both the word prostituição and a stronger, more active
verb atirar (here, ‘to throw’ or ‘thrust’) rather than the more euphemistic
ruisseau and dirigir (‘to lead’). Though Espanca the translator equivocates
between social convention and self-interest just as much as Rameau’s hero,
she ultimately inclines towards a harsher condemnation of concubinage:
express your sexuality freely, she is saying, or find yourself a good man to
marry – a circle she strove to square without success in her own life.
Of the four novels under consideration here, it is only Benoit’s that con-
tains a strong erotic undercurrent, ranging from suggestions of a lesbian
relationship between heroine and anti-heroine, through an exploration of
the confluence of sex and illness, to the cynical salaciousness of the medi-
cal profession with respect to women patients. In Mademoiselle de la Ferté ,
the sexual appetites of Galswinthe, a widowed heiress, increase and diver-
sify as her health declines; her friends visit her less and less, and finally
she no longer needs to make an effort to keep her new loves secret (‘n’eut
guère de peine à garantir le mystère des ses nouvelles amours’) (Benoit, 1923,
pp. 86–7). This phrase could conceivably imply partners of either gender;
however, as the plot unfolds, and Galswinthe and Anne de la Ferté become
neighbours, not only does Benoit hint that Galswinthe’s feelings for Anne
are sexual in nature, but that Anne’s selfless decision to nurse the heiress
in the final stages of tuberculosis – the very woman for whom her fiancé
abandoned her – contains a sexual, almost necrophiliac element.
Whenever Benoit hints at lesbianism, Espanca’s translation never shies
away from or suppresses the suggestion: sometimes she maintains the
phrase’s original ambiguity, sometimes she transforms it into something
more explicit. In just one of many scenes in which this takes place, when
Galswinthe falls and sprains her ankle, Anne simply wants to lean the ‘fine
body’ of the injured woman up against the side of the ditch into which she
had fallen (a sexually neutral gesture). In the translation, Espanca makes
it Anne’s intention to thrust Galswinthe away from her, implying she was
motivated by antipathy rather than by some indefinable ‘confusion’ caused
by close physical contact with another woman, making Benoit’s hint more
explicit and anticipating the later developments in the plot. Also, as Anne
comforts Galswinthe, in the original the heiress pushes her head more firmly
into Anne’s neck, a gesture that Espanca characterizes as being ‘with even
greater abandon’ (Benoit, 1923, pp. 117–18; 1937, pp. 105–6, my emphasis).
Much of the speculation concerning Espanca’s own sexuality has focused
on her feelings for her brother, rather than on the possibility that her
orientation was bisexual or lesbian, though the tone of many of her let-
ters to Júlia Alves bears the hallmark of someone with a schoolgirl crush.
According to Bessa Luís (1984, p. 150), when Espanca met the Portuguese
novelist and translator Aurora Jardim Aranha, she called her ‘the blond
prince with the Atlantic blue eyes’ – a comment replete with the poetess’s
characteristic lyricism, but which also resonates with a sexual ambiguity
that is normally absent in her writing.
Espanca’s Translation Strategy as Mediated by Her Mental State

Madness was a common theme of popular romantic fiction; nineteenth-
century middle- and upper- class parents took seriously any hint of insanity,
physical infirmity or serious disease in the family of a potential son- or
daughter-in-law, for the intergenerational transmission of mental and
other illnesses was apt to undermine a family’s attempts to consolidate or
improve its social status. In Maryan’s story Le Secret de Solange – part romance,
part detective novel – insanity constitutes one of the potential obstacles
(in Holmes’s [2003] sense of the word) to the marriage that Savinien and
the eponymous heroine are planning. Early in the original version of the
novel, Savinien uses the word pénible when speculating that the protracted
absence of Solange’s father may be due to some serious illness.
Original: Je crains (. . .) que sa maladie ne soit d’une nature . . . pénible,

et n’ait exigé son éloignement’. (Maryan, 1900, p. 87)
Translation: Quer parecer-me que a doença delle deve ser . . . terrivel;
e que, por isso mesmo, não foi elle quem pediu que o separassem da
familia. (Maryan, 1927, p. 86)
Not only does Espanca make a point of stressing that the absence of
Solange’s father must have been against his will (‘he was not the one who
asked to be separated from his family’), she also enhances both the gravity
and potential threat of the mystery ailment, describing it somewhat melo-
dramatically as terrível , and thereby hinting at the possibility of insanity
earlier than the plot demands.
Maryan also takes up the debate over the origins and nature of insanity:
in the original text, when Savinien’s aunt voices the popular myth that all
madness is hereditary, the physician defends a more scientific perspective,
albeit with a degree of qualification, saying that the effects on future gen-
erations of mental imbalance resulting from illness or emotional shock are
not necessarily ‘fatal’ or irrémissible (here, ‘inevitable’ or ‘permanent’). In
her translation, Espanca distances the doctor even more from the popular
myth by having him stress that such afflictions need not necessarily be
passed on to one’s children (‘pode não se transmittir ’), perhaps reflecting her
own belief – at least at the time – that the emotional disturbances from
which she was suffering could be cured or at least alleviated by conven-
tional medicine.
Original: La folie n’est pas toujours héréditaire, dit-il. Un cas accidentel,

déterminé soit par une maladie, soit par un choque moral trop violent,
peut ne pas avoir une transmission fatale, irrémissible. (Maryan, 1900,
p. 165)
Translation: A loucura nem sempre é hereditaria – disse elle. Um acaso
accidental, determinado por uma doença ou por um choque moral
demasiado violento, pode não se transmittir. (Maryan, 1927, p. 162)
In her novel Doña Quichotta , de Peyrebrune provides a purely physical

description of the pitiful condition of the heroine’s father Delarive as he
approaches his estranged wife’s deathbed to seek reconciliation and for-
giveness (1906, pp. 316–17): his face was ‘ravaged, eyes puffy, beard long
and white as snow, his back bowed, his gait faltering’ (my translation).
By translating the next phrase – ‘son regard vacillant s’orientait ’ – as ‘o seu
olhar vacilante parecia enlouquecido’ (‘his wandering gaze seemed that of a
madman’), Espanca taints with insanity the old man’s disorientation as he
makes his shamefaced entrance (de Peyrebrune, 1927, p. 302). No stranger
to marital violence herself (Espanca, 1986b, p. 21), the translator may have
felt that a husband could not possibly treat his wife as badly as Delarive
had, unless he were mentally unbalanced, or shame over his behaviour had
turned his mind.
The theme of madness is one towards which Espanca had an equivocal
attitude: she was simultaneously appalled by the possibility she might be
suffering from something more than the ‘nerves’ so commonly attributed
to women in the early twentieth century, and fascinated enough to refer to
madness both in her poetry and in several of her short stories. Two of the
contos (‘Between the lines of a sonnet’ and ‘When my son comes home’)
from her collection O Dominó Preto (Espanca, 1982) – work on which partly
overlapped with many of her translations – deal explicitly with madness, as
do at least two of the short stories in The Masks of Destiny (Espanca, 1931), a
later collection that she dedicated to her dead brother. The incidence of the
same theme in the novels she was translating, mediated by her growing con-
cern with her own mental state – which only began to seriously deteriorate
after 1927 when all but one of her translations had already been published –
may help to explain the strategy of accentuation adopted here.
Conclusions and Further Research
In the four novels analysed here, there are many examples of Espanca
‘adjusting’ the texts that she translated. Many of these adjustments would
be familiar to students of translation (smoothing, correcting infelicitous
repetitions or word- choices, explaining unfamiliar terms or practices,
etc.). When, however, a novel touched on issues that resonated positively
or negatively with her key beliefs on women’s autonomy in their emotional
relations and in their professional life, or other sensitive aspects of her
life (such as her sexuality and her mental health), there is no doubt that
Espanca consciously or unconsciously altered the original text to conform
to her own views.
A fuller analysis of the extent to which the final form of all ten of
Espanca’s translations bear the marks of her very particular life and life-
style lies in the future. The parallel reading of the three remaining pairs
of texts currently available has yet to be undertaken, and the original ver-
sions of three more rather obscure novels still must be tracked down. If
the relevant material exists in the archives of her two publishers, it may
be possible to clarify the precise chronological sequence of her various
translations, and thereby confirm or reject hypothetical links between
biographical ‘causes’ and translation ‘effects’. Nevertheless, the initial evi-
dence presented here may be of interest to those seeking to complement
their understanding of Florbela Espanca the poet and short story writer
with reflections on Florbela Espanca the translator. Furthermore, those
wishing to assess the translation strategies of women translators – and, in
particular, author-translators – in early twentieth- century Europe may find
some useful points of departure in what is, after all, a preliminary study.
Notes
1. My thanks go to Rita Wilson and Lawrence Venuti for so constructively encour-

aging someone who is a beginner in both literary translation and translation
studies. Comments provided by two anonymous reviewers were also very help-
ful, as were the inputs of Anabela Oliveira, Elisa Gomes da Torre and Maria
José Cunha (all colleagues at Universidade de Trás- os- Montes e Alto Douro) on
some tricky points of translation.
2. The dichotomy between the ‘artisan’ and ‘commodity producer’ understates

the complexity of the continuum. Kalinowski reports that, as early as the
eighteenth century, Leipzig’s ‘translation factories’ organized their work on
a production-line basis (2002, p. 47). Milton’s research on mass fiction dur-
ing the twentieth- century Brazilian dictatorships suggests that the state, in
addition to the use of censorship, promoted the publication of bowdlerized
translations of classics as a means of moulding popular reading habits; he also
refers to the early adoption of fordist translation processes by publishers of
mass fiction as a means of meeting market demand (2000). By the second half
of the twentieth century, the ‘homeworker ’ was the predominant form of transla-
tion labour, ‘epitomizing the flexibility criteria of rational management – [. . .]
paid by the piece, available on demand, supplying the tools of their trade and
their own office space, with no rights to social benefits, [. . .] in total submis-
sion to the conditions imposed by the publisher, [. . .] with incomes equivalent
to the minimum wage, working in creative solitude and painful isolation’
(Kalinowski, 2002, p. 47, p. 49, my translation). Today, global publishing and
media companies outsource their foreign language needs to companies that
manage a network of translators working from home who, despite their osten-
sible autonomy, are little more than disguised wage-workers.
3. In its Colecção de Hoje , Civilização offered a variety of foreign novels, ranging
from daringly controversial Cuban works (e.g. by Álvarez Insúa and Alfonso
Hernandez Catá), through French novels full of gentle satire or thrilling
exoticisms (e.g. by Vautel and Benoit), to Spanish works reflecting mild social
disenchantment (e.g. by Palacio Valdés and Wenceslao Fernández Flórez).
However, four of Espanca’s translations (of books by Thiéry, Saint-Jean, de
Peyrebrune and Champol) appeared in Civilização’s Biblioteca do Lar, a series
that explicitly promoted traditional moral values, and which included novels by
the Dellys, Maryan and Jeanroy.
4. Established Portuguese authors (from Camilo Castelo Branco, Eça de Queiroz
to Fernando Pessoa and, more recently, José Saramago) have typically consti-
tuted a first port of call for local publishers seeking reliable translations, with
the work providing a useful supplement to a writer’s often- sporadic income.
5. Instead of giving the same person the works of a single author to translate
sequentially, publishers began to employ several translators simultaneously on
novels by the same author. For example, at the same time that Espanca was
undertaking her first translation (Georges Thierry’s L’île Bleu) for Figueirinhas,
Sousa Martins was working on another of Thierry’s novels for the same pub-
lisher. Four books by Jean Thiéry published by Civilização between 1926 and
1929 had four different translators, including Espanca.
6. Of the seventeen contos Florbela wrote, only four seem to meet Holmes’s cri-
teria: two early pieces, ‘Sacrificial love’ and ‘A woman’s soul’ (both written in
1916), and two later short stories, ‘The siren’ (probably an unfinished attempt
at a novel) and ‘A love from times long past’. For a detailed discussion of this
assessment (in Portuguese), see Gerry and Reis (2008).
7. Champol’s novels Les Justes and Sœur Alexandrine won Académie Française prizes,
as did an early novel, Moune (1890), by Rameau. George de Peyrebrune was for
many years one of the judges of the Prix Fémina. Benoit’s early work l’Atlantide
was one of the first novels to win the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie
Française. Such was the prestige enjoyed by Armando Palacio Valdés that the
Spanish literary establishment proposed him for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
8. Some of Palacio Valdés’s stories were filmed, one with a screenplay by Alberto
Moravia, while Pabst, Epstein and Tourneur directed films based on Benoit’s
novels.
9. Two of the missing French texts are by more obscure authors; the third, by the bet-
ter-known novelist Champol, published in Portugal under the title Dois Noivados,
appears to consist of two yet-to-be-identified novellas published in tandem.
10. The self- same friction between marriage and freedom is central to the two
short stories Espanca wrote in something approaching the popular romantic
style. In ‘The siren’, naval officer João Eduardo is caught between settling down
into safe and comfortable marriage and embarking on a potentially disastrous
and ultimately self- destructive liaison with a femme fatale . In ‘A love from times
long past’, Cristina finally abandons her attempt to rekindle her first love affair
when she comes to understand that by single-mindedly pursuing her freedom
and happiness, she is destroying a marriage and, above all, her lover’s relation-
ship with his young son.
11. In the quotes from the various Portuguese translations, I have respected the
original orthography, which is not always consistently used, and which is at
times different from today’s Portuguese orthography.
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Chapter 3
Mediating the Clash of Cultures through

Translingual Narrative
Rita Wilson
Monash University
Introduction
Studies on the interconnection of language and power in postcolonial con-

texts have radically re- evaluated the relationship between text and trans-
lation, interrogating the standard metaphors of fidelity and equivalence
and opening the field up to consideration of the power relations imbri-
cated in any linguistic or cultural exchange (Niranjana, 1992; Mehrez,
1998; Apter, 2001). In this body of scholarship, language is never distant
from the dialectic of authority and resistance: the meeting (or clash) of
languages and cultures in colonial and postcolonial conditions has been
widely credited with producing hybridized literature that breaks down the
homogeneous discourse of nationalism and cracks its authority (Bhabha,
1994, pp. 139–70).1
Those studies, however, tend to focus on the politics of translation as a
process applied to a text rather than a process that takes place within it. In
contrast, literary studies of hybrid texts, which focus on the ‘impure’ lan-
guage of the source text, have not generally utilized the concept of trans-
lation to talk about narrative.2 Many studies of the ‘hybridized’ language
of postcolonial texts (the writings of Salman Rushdie and North African
beur writers being oft- cited examples) analyse their impact on the ‘major’
language and its literary culture, while assuming that language inside the
narrative (i.e. language as used and perceived by the narrator and charac-
ters) remains a transparent medium. Thus, we find that the linguistic inno-
vations and transgressions of Francophone and Anglophone writers are
usually either celebrated or criticized as the contamination, infiltration or
hybridization of one language – the receiving or ‘host’ language – rather
than being viewed as explicit and conscious negotiation between distinct

languages taking place within the writing of the text.3
Samia Mehrez insightfully draws attention to the intratextual role of
translation in Arab Francophone writing, asserting that ‘by drawing on
more than one culture, more than one language, more than one world
experience, within the confines of the same text, postcolonial Anglophone
and Francophone literature very often defies our notions of an “origi-
nal” work and its translation’ (1998, p. 122). To describe such works, she
proposes the notion of the ‘double’ text, one that can be decoded only
by the bilingual reader conversant in both cultures and traditions, and
whose reading can, therefore, be ‘none but a perpetual translation’ (1998,
pp. 122–4). However, while Mehrez adduces the translation process as
essential to the decoding of the ‘double’ text, she does not identify transla-
tion as an integral component of the narrative code itself.
This chapter takes as its point of departure the thematic function of
translation within the internal dynamics of the narrative code, and seeks
to examine the topos of translation in narratives by writers who are vari-
ously described as ‘migrant’, ‘diasporic’ and, more recently, ‘transnational’
(Seyhan, 2001). Following Arjun Appadurai,4 I use the term ‘transnational’
to describe narratives that operate outside a national canon and are
located between languages: whether languages in the conventional sense
of the term or different modes of discourse operating within and drawn
from discrete polysystems. Contrary to postcolonial writers whose narra-
tives self- consciously engage with their own linguistic hybridity by explic-
itly thematizing the negotiation between different linguistic strands, the
narratives of transnational writers explore new identities by constructing
new dialogic spaces that, at once, foreground, perform and problematize
the act of translation. In such texts, the relationship of the language(s) to
the dominant structures of power not only informs the narrative implicitly,
but also comes to the fore in the narrative as part of its thematic material.
Translation then operates inside the narrative both in the traditional, prag-
matic sense (in terms of the conversion of language) and in a derivative,
metaphorical sense, as the narrative symbolically ‘converts’ the contested
structures of power through strategic, intentional moments of linguistic
or communicative slippage. In the latter case, translation is less a distinct
operation and more a habitus,5 in which the breathing space between two
languages, or between the message intended by the speaker and the mes-
sage received by the listener, becomes a space of latent resistance.
Translation frequently appears, both as a literary topos and as meta-
narrative, in works by translingual authors, who ‘write in more than one
Mediating the Clash of Cultures 47
language or in a language other than their primary one’ (Kellman, 2003,

p. ix). Amara Lakhous, a contemporary Algerian-Italian novelist, living in
Italy and writing in Italian,6 is a good example of a translingual writer
who, in attempting to navigate between two languages and their associated
social contexts, has brought both linguistic and cultural translation into
play as processes potentiating encounter and transformation. Through a
reading of Lakhous’s 2006 novel, Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a piazza
Vittorio (Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio), this chap-
ter will examine how thematizing translation and interlinguistic tensions
serves as a vehicle for disrupting the truth value of the dominant ‘national’
discourse and how the choice of a translator as the main character intrigu-
ingly emphasizes the complex implications of ‘translating’ one’s self from
one culture to another.
Locating Transnational Narratives
My premise is that transnational/translingual narrative introduces into

the centre of a different polysystem peripheral elements that serve both to
renew literary language and literary traditions and to highlight the value
of difference. Marked by those ‘multiple deterritorializations of language’
that Deleuze and Guattari find in ‘minor literatures’ (1986, p. 19), tran-
snational narratives transform literary and cultural discourse, not only
by relocating it on cultural margins, and by foregrounding intercultural
dialogue and translation, but also by drawing discrete literary traditions
into contact.7 Such narratives doubly manifest that particularly ‘palpable’
heterogeneity that Even-Zohar finds in ‘bi- or multilingual’ societies, mani-
fested ‘within the realm of literature [. . .] in a situation where a commu-
nity possesses two (or more) literary systems, two literatures, as it were’, one
of which is typically ignored by scholarship (1990, p. 12).
A distinctive feature of such narratives is the conscious effort to trans-
mit a linguistic and cultural heritage that is articulated through acts of
personal and collective memory. In this way, writers become chroniclers of
the displaced, whose stories will otherwise go unrecorded (Seyhan, 2001,
p. 12) and their narratives perform the essential function of giving a voice
to ‘paranational’ communities (p. 10). As Gnisci notes, they have already
undertaken il salto triplo (the triple jump), going beyond multi- and inter-
culturalism and providing a new model of reciprocal education that can
be defined as ‘transcultural’ (2007, n.p.).8 Lakhous is exemplary in offer-
ing a new transcultural outlook on the Italian way of life by representing
a mixed and decentred subjectivity that is always in dialogue with cultural

otherness. His narrations are the locus of multiple dislocations, transla-
tions and border crossings, which range from his linguistic choices to the
typographical composition of his texts, to the culturally defined geograph-
ical spaces in his narrative.
Transforming Italian Spaces
Lakhous’s first novel, written in Arabic and published in Algiers in 1999,

was published in Italy in the same year in a bilingual edition: al-baqq wa-l-
qursan / Le cimici e il pirata [Bedbugs and the Pirate].
This is truly a ‘double text’ (Mehrez, 1998), not only in that it straddles
two worlds, but in that it is literally written (and read) in two languages.
This bilingual edition constructs a privileged space where double linguistic
and cultural palimpsests create an intricate relational model between two
worlds. The double palimpsest – horizontally from language to language
and vertically from oral tales to text – destabilizes meaning and deterritori-
alizes both source and target language, while simultaneously reterritorial-
izing them through the ‘mirroring’ effect of a bilingual edition. This is a
process akin to what Ioanna Chatzidimitriou has described as a ‘minoriza-
tion’ process in which the ‘host body’ undergoes ‘a dehistoricization of
sorts, rendering [. . .] the palimpsest of its potentialities visible, and allow-
ing its signifying pluralities to take shape and subsequently assign form to
novel historical associations’ (2009, pp. 23–4).
The original Arabic version of Cimici begins at what for an Italian reader
would be the ‘back’ of the book. Both the Italian version, translated by
Francesco Leggio, and the Arabic version end in the ‘middle’ of the book.
Thus, the space of the translingual writer’s in-betweenness materializes in
Cimici, not only as the obvious division separating the two texts, but most
importantly, as a process of displacement both vertically (from oral story-
telling to text) and horizontally (Arabic to Italian).
The ‘meeting in the middle’ of the two texts is a useful metaphoric
construct to bear in mind when considering the mediation at work in
Amara Lakhous’s second novel. Also originally written in Arabic, it was
released in 2003 in Algeria with the title Kayfa tarḍa’u min al-dhi’ba dūna an
ta’aḍḍaka [How to Be Suckled by the She-Wolf Without Getting Bitten]. The novel
was later re-written in Italian and re-titled Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore
a Piazza Vittorio (Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio).
Lakhous emphasizes the fact that the Italian version is not ‘simply’ a
translation but an act of re-writing that transcends the limitations of lin-

guistic precision while validating linguistic choices that mimic the voices
of the characters:
Prima scrivo il mio testo in arabo. Poi dico che lo riscrivo in italiano, per-
ché non si tratta di una semplice auto-traduzione, non essendo obbligato
a rispettare il testo originale, lo ricreo a mio piacimento. In tal senso
godo di una libertà che il traduttore normalmente non ha. [. . .] Cerco
di usare il napoletano, il milanese a seconda del linguaggio che usano i
diversi personaggi. (Lakhous, 2005, n.p.)
First I write my text in Arabic. Then I say that I re-write it in Italian,
because it is not simply a case of self-translation; as I am not obliged to
respect the original text, I re- create it as I wish. In that sense, I enjoy more
freedom than a translator normally has. [. . .] I try to use Neapolitan, or
Milanese according to how the different characters would use language.
(my translation)
Further, by inscribing within written Italian the trace of oral Arabic,

Lakhous again creates a double palimpsest: not only, as he says, does he
‘Arabicize Italian and Italianize Arabic’ (2009, p. 137), he also arguably
performs an intermodal translation (oral into written).
In the case of transnational narratives, such as this one, which relate
to a culturally and linguistically heterogeneous minority group, the very
affirmation of diversity burdens the creative voice with the additional task
of social and cultural interpretation, of mediating not only between dif-
ferent spaces but also between different histories. In other words, in a situ-
ation in which cultural and linguistic homogeneity cannot be assumed, the
characters, the author and the readers do not necessarily belong either to
the same spatiality – as illustrated, for example, by the different dialects –
or to the same temporality, as exemplified by different migrant (hi)stor-
ies. The very language in which the novel is written, while it is seemingly
the ‘national’ language, nevertheless calls for translation because its idiom
includes the legacies of many other idioms.9
Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio is a novel ‘about transla-
tion’, which directly confronts the social challenges faced by the ‘new Italy’
(i.e. a country that has gone in less than a decade from being a largely
mono- cultural and mono-religious state to a diverse multicultural soci-
ety). The story is shaped around a single apartment building on Piazza
Vittorio in the Esquilino suburb of Rome. The building’s residents, whose
stories interweave, offer a microcosm of modern Rome as they battle over
the deteriorating condition of their elevator. It is the catalyst for daily

clashes between the tenants: an out- and- out war that brings to the fore
the inability to relate to the other: be the ‘other’ a foreigner, like Johan
Van Marten, a Dutch film student who wants to revive 1950s Neorealism
by making a movie (titled, naturally, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator
in Piazza Vittorio), or a ‘native’ Italian, like Antonio Marini, a Milanese who
has moved to Rome to take up an academic post at La Sapienza University,
thinks southern Italians are all criminals and believes the unification of
Italy was an ‘irreparable historical mistake’ (2008, p. 76). In short, Scontro
can be said to epitomize a ‘narrative space in which language and identity
conflicts become textualized’ (Millán-Varela, 2004, p. 52).
The elevator, with its frequent breakdowns, is a metaphor for contempo-
rary Italy and the difficulties faced by contemporary Italian society on the
road to living together (convivenza). The attitudes of the ‘natives’ toward
migrants are represented as ranging from cordial acceptance, to indiffer-
ence, to guarded diffidence, to explicit hostility. The story’s sub-text is that
cultural diffidence exists not only between natives and migrants, but also
between different migrant nationalities as seen, for example, in the frus-
tration of Iqbal’s rhetorical question:
Perché la polizia non si comporta con fermezza con gli immigrati delin-
quenti? Che colpa hanno quelli onesti che sudano per un pezzo di pane?
(Lakhous, 2006, p. 73)
Why can’t the police be strict with immigrants who are criminals? Why
should the honest ones who sweat for a piece of bread suffer? (Lakhous,
2008, p. 54)10
The constant shifts between the perspectives of the multiethnic cast of

characters generate a ‘plurality of independent and unmerged voices and
consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices’ (Bakhtin, 1984,
p. 6), each of which has a different opinion on the recent disturbances in
the neighbourhood.
Whose Truth Is It Anyway?
One of the three epigraphs at the start of the novel is taken from Il giorno
della civetta (The Day of the Owl ) by Leonardo Sciascia (1961), and sig-
nals the start of a process of writing that delves into the ambivalence of
truth, in its fragmentation and individualization, exposing its gradual

disappearance:
La verità è nel fondo di un pozzo: lei guarda in un pozzo e vede il sole

o la luna; ma se si butta giù non c’è più né sole né luna, c’è la verità.
(Lakhous, 2006, p. 9)
The truth is at the bottom of a well: look into a well and you see the
sun or the moon: but throw yourself down and there is neither sun nor
moon, there is the truth. (Lakhous, 2008, p. 11)
Lakhous, following Sciascia, believes that a writer ‘discloses the truth by

deciphering reality’ and, to this end, adopts the discourse of the detec-
tive story, ‘a form of narrative aimed toward the truth of the facts and
the indictment of the culprit, even if the culprit can’t always be found’
(Sciascia, 1994, p. 97), and constructs the plot of his novel around the
murder of Lorenzo Manfredini, a thug nicknamed ‘The Gladiator’, whose
body is found in the building’s elevator. The neighbourhood is thrown
into disarray, especially because one of the residents, Amedeo, who has
apparently disappeared, becomes the chief suspect. The police question
everyone who knows him, and each character gets a chapter to relate the
truth as he or she knows it (or wants it known), in the form of a deposition
to the police.
By allowing the individual voices to take the floor, Lakhous offers new
perspectives and reveals new social dynamics – with a marked emphasis
on the conflictual side of these interactions. The complexity at the base
of urban social relations is further entangled by the need to negotiate the
uncertain articulations of racial, class and gender differences between
both the ‘natives’ and the migrants as well as between the different ethnici-
ties of the migrants. Indeed, as the words of the first voice to be heard, that
of the Iranian cook Parviz, suggest, not all meanings can be immediately
understood, and complex questions, like those relating to identities, often
do not provide answers but rather allow endless queries to lie dormant:
Ma poi chi è italiano? Chi è nato in Italia, ha passaporto italiano, carta

d’identità, conosce bene la lingua, porta un nome italiano e risiede
in Italia? Come vedete la questione è molto complessa. Non dico che
Amedeo è un enigma. Piuttosto è come una poesia di Omar Kayyam, ti
ci vuole una vita per comprenderne il significato, e solo allora il cuore
si aprirà al mondo e le lacrime ti riscalderanno le guance fredde.
Adesso, almeno, vi basti sapere che Amedeo conosce l’italiano meglio
di milioni di italiani sparsi come cavallette ai quattro angoli del mondo.

(2006, p. 14)
But then who is Italian? Only someone who was born in Italy, has an
Italian passport and identity card, knows the language, has an Italian
name, and lives in Italy? As you see, the question is very complicated.
I am not saying that Amedeo is an enigma. Rather, he’s like a poem by
Omar Khayyam: you need a lifetime to understand its meaning, and only
then will your heart open to the world and tears warm your cold cheeks.
Now, at least, it’s enough for you to know that Amedeo knows Italian bet-
ter than millions of Italians scattered like locusts to the four corners of
the earth. (2008, p. 15)
As the testimonials unfold, the uncertainty about Amedeo’s true identity

increases, with the discussion centring around his ‘real’ name. Although
in Rome everyone calls him Amedeo, this is as a result of an initial error on
the part of the local barista, Sandro, who mishears the Arabic pronuncia-
tion and inadvertently changes it to an Italian name:
quando Sandro mi ha chiesto il mio nome gli ho risposto «Ahmed». Ma

lui l’ha pronunciato senza la lettera H perché non si usa molto nella lin-
gua italiana, e alla fine mi ha chiamato Amede’, che è un nome italiano
che si può abbreviare con Amed. (2006, p. 139)
when Sandro asked me my name I answered, ‘Ahmed’. But he pro-
nounced it without the letter ‘h,’ because ‘h’ isn’t used much in Italian,
and in the end he called me ‘Amede’ which is an Italian name that can
be shortened to Amed. (2008, p. 99)
On the level of the narrative, this slip- up characterizes Sandro’s mono-

lingual worldview. The same slip-up, however, also functions on the level
of meta-narrative as a strategic communication aimed directly at the
reader: a linguistic error that bears the real truth value within Lakhous’s
economy of meaning. The manipulation of the cognate Ahmed/Amedeo
exemplifies Lakhous’s narrative strategy: from here on, the tale that
unfolds is one of slight shifts, of double entendres, in which appearances
of familiarity are misleading. While such moments of ‘play’ are inter-
spersed throughout the novel, often it is not simply language, but actual,
material survival that is at stake: these verbal exchanges are power plays
as much as they are wordplays. The representation of linguistic negotia-
tions (i.e. translation and mistranslation) between the mix of cultures
represented by the characters becomes an internal literary strategy,

deployed first in order to expose the mechanisms of power, and then to
subvert them. Sandro’s error draws attention to a writing process that
Michaela Wolf describes as ‘the authorial unmasking of another’s speech
through a language that is “double- accented” and “double- styled.” [. . .]
[T]hrough this hybrid construction [. . .] one voice is able to unmask
the other within a single discourse. It is at this point that authoritative
discourse becomes undone’ (2000, p. 133). The thematic potential of the
‘hybrid construction’ is exploited by Lakhous throughout the novel to
make a point not only about the instability of language itself, but more
particularly about the relationship between names and ‘national’ identi-
ties. Not only can language come to ‘mean’ something other than what
the speaker intends, but cognates and shared roots can cross the delin-
eating boundaries of language and national identity, thereby destabi-
lizing the distinction between self and other. The error caused by the
homophony of the two names coincides with a self- translation that has
been taking place all along, and results in a fortuitous ‘double’ identity:
the re-naming allows the protagonist to construct an Italian life, per-
fectly integrated thanks to his excellent grasp of the Italian language
and his generous nature, that enable him to become a positive role model
and ‘point of reference’ for all the residents in the condominium and the
neighbourhood.
The relationship between name and identity intensifies as the conflict
between cultures builds up, and becomes the driving force in the struggle
for recognition within the public, hence political, spaces of a community,
as exemplified in Sandro’s recollection of his first encounter with Ahmed/
Amedeo:
Ha chiesto un cappuccino e un cornetto, si è seduto e ha cominciato a

leggere la rubrica di Montanelli sul Corriere della Sera . Non ho mai visto
nella mia vita un cinese, un marocchino, un rumeno o uno zingaro
o un egiziano leggere Il Corriere della Sera o La Repubblica ! Gli immi-
grati leggono solamente Porta Portese per vedere gli annunci di lavoro.
(2006, p. 130)
He asked for a cappuccino and a cornetto , and then he sat down and
began reading Montanelli’s column in the Corriere della Sera . I’ve
never in my life seen a Chinese, a Moroccan, a Romanian, a Gypsy,
or an Egyptian read the Corriere della Sera or La Repubblica ! The only
thing the immigrants read is Porta Portese , for the want ads. (2008,
pp. 92–3)
From these episodes we can conclude that Sandro is not so much an unrelia-
ble as an ‘uninformed’ witness. Thus, to make sense of the narrative, readers
must fill in the gaps by knowing what Sandro does not. In some cases, this
knowledge is linguistic; in other cases it requires familiarity with Italian or
Arabic cultural discourses and symbolic resonances, as with Mehrez’s notion
of the ‘double’ text, and as embodied in the double name Ahmed/Amedeo.
Representing the doubleness of selfhood, the protagonist’s ‘split identity’
can be said to correspond to a translation conflict: between the memory
of his lost ‘original language’ and the curative potential of his adopted lan-
guage (cf. Lakhous, 2009). Ahmed/Amedeo, a man in transit, in transla-
tion, is the central component required to solve the murder mystery and at
the same time is the mediator, not only of the clash of cultures between the
various characters, but also between their disparate views on the ‘truth’ and
the reader: through his diary entries which alternate with the testimonials
of all the other characters, the reader is provided with a more balanced view
of events as they unfold. Ahmed/Amedeo’s voice, or rather his ululato (howl)
stitches together the individual lives and the collective reality.
The Fiction of the Translator
In a number of contemporary novels which focus on intercultural interac-

tions in conflicting cultural encounters, the fictional main character is a
translator, represented as a figure of mediation.11 Thus, it is not surprising
to discover that Ahmed/Amedeo, as well as being the ‘cultural mediator’
par excellence , is also a professional translator and interpreter.
Ahmed o Amedeo – come lo chiamate voi – lavorava alla Corte suprema

di Algeri come traduttore dal francese all’arabo. Aveva comprato un
appartamento a Bab Azouar per andarci a vivere con Bàgia dopo il mat-
rimonio, ma il destino gli ha riservato un’altra via. Come vedete la sto-
ria di Ahmed Salmi è semplice, non è poi così complicata. La verità è
un’altra, non è quella a cui avete creduto fino a ora. (2006, p. 164)
Ahmed or Amedeo – as you call him – worked at the Supreme Court in
Algiers as a translator from French into Arabic. He had bought an apart-
ment in Bab Azouar for him and Bagia to live in after their marriage, but
destiny held another life in store for him. As you see, the story of Ahmed
Salmi is simple, it’s not that complicated. The truth is different, it’s not
what you thought up to now. (2008, p. 115)
Several scholars have commented on the growing awareness of the funda-

mental role of translation in the cultural exchanges that characterize the
globalized society in which we live. This heightened awareness has led to a

view of the translator as a mediator between texts, as someone who enables
bridges to be built across linguistic and cultural boundaries (cf. Bassnett,
1999). In the case of transnational narratives, as exemplified by Scontro,
the translator mediates not only between languages and cultures but is
also the locus (or meeting place) of internalized dispositions and societal
norms –‘a figure who is emblematic of the world today: someone who occu-
pies the liminal space in between cultures, who operates from a position of
plurality and who carries out a role that is charged with immense responsi-
bility’ (Bassnett, 1999, p. 213):
Tanta gente considera il proprio lavoro come una punizione quotidiana.

Io, invece, amo il mio lavoro di traduttore. La traduzione è un viaggio
per mare da una riva all’altra. Qualche volta mi considero un contrab-
bandiere: attraverso le frontiere della lingua con un bottino di parole,
idee, immagini e metafore. (2006, p. 155)
So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love
my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one
shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the
frontiers of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and meta-
phors. (2008, p. 109)
Here translation, by fostering the possibility of imagining, learning, under-

standing and performing other languages, is akin to the kind of dialogue
that, according to Walter Benjamin, expresses the ‘reciprocal relationship
between languages’, instigates a ‘transformation and a renewal of something
living’ and particularly a transformation of the ‘language of the translator’
(1969, pp. 72–3). Ahmed/Amedeo thus occupies a central role in connect-
ing two worlds, in trying to build a dialogue to create an equal interchange
between cultures. This figure of the mediator who is directly involved in an
interchange between two cultures seems a positive representation of a com-
plex practice: one that opens up new interpretative perspectives.
From the Mother Tongue to the Mother of Language12
What distinguishes Ahmed/Amedeo from the other translingual charac-

ters is his relationship with the host language – Italian, considered his
nuova dimora (2006, p. 157; ‘new dwelling place’, 2008, p. 110). The inter-
textual reference to noted translingual writer, Emil Cioran, Romanian-
born but French by adoption, ‘Non abitiamo un paese ma una lingua’ (2006,
p. 157; ‘We inhabit not a country but a language’ 2008, p. 110) intimates
that for Ahmed/Amedeo ‘inhabit’ (abitare) takes on multiple connota-

tions: to populate, traverse, learn, translate, transform. The connotation
of ‘dwelling in a “new” language’ reminds us once again of the transla-
tional process undergone by the migrant. We are also reminded that such
a process offers the possibility of an interlinguistic mediation, of imagin-
ing, learning, understanding and performing other languages. It follows
that the function of translingual literature is not primarily a pragmatic,
but an aesthetic and an ethical one. Its aim is more symbolic than realis-
tic: it symbolizes the variety, the contact and the crossing of cultures and
languages.
At the centre of Lakhous’s plot is the complex task of revealing one’s
own cultural world to people from different cultural contexts. The dif-
ficulties of mediating between cultures are represented by dramatizing
the contact between languages, as, for example, in the Italian lessons
Stefania gives to Bengali women (2006, pp. 156–57) or the interaction
between the Milanese academic and the Dutch student (2006, p. 110).
The translative nature of the translingual experience is also evident in
the self- conscious processes of intralingual and interlingual translation
( Jakobson, 2004 [1959]) that dominate the narrative space: from the occa-
sional humorous anecdote of linguistic incompetence (the Neapolitan
concierge who thinks merci is an Albanian swearword, 2006, p. 48), to the
intrusion of words and phrases of the native language into the linguistic
fabric of the adopted tongue (the series of nostalgic rhetorical questions
listing all the different components that epitomize the feast of Ramadan,
2006, p. 169).
Language is also thematized throughout the novel in other ways. Most
notably, the centrality of language in the construction of identity is unmis-
takable in Ahmed/Amedeo’s representation of his adopted language as a
primary form of nourishment:
Sono come un neonato, ho bisogno del latte tutti i giorni. L’italiano è il

mio latte quotidiano. [. . .] Mi allatto della lupa insieme ai due orfanelli
Romolo e Remo. Adoro la lupa, non posso fare a meno del suo latte.
(2006, pp. 155, 168)
I’m like a newborn. I need milk every day. Italian is my daily milk. [. . .]
I suckle on the wolf with the two orphans Romulus and Remus. I adore
the wolf, I can’t do without her milk. (2008, pp. 109, 118)
The moment of transmission of the language and the basic knowledge

required to survive is depicted as a symbolic suckling:
Ormai conosco Roma come vi fossi nato e non l’avessi mai lasciata. Ho
il diritto di chiedermi: sono un bastardo come i gemelli Romolo e Remo
oppure sono un figlio adottivo? La domanda fondamentale è: come farmi
allattare dalla lupa senza che mi morda? (2006, p. 142)
By now I know Rome as if I had been born here and never left. I have the
right to wonder: am I a bastard like the twins Romulus and Remus, or an
adopted son? The basic question is: how to be suckled by the [she-]wolf
without being bitten? (2008, p. 101)
Ahmed/Amedeo, as the powerful embodiment of ‘living in translation’,

does not abandon his identity; rather he goes beyond the identities, car-
rying ‘the responsibility of articulating the signifying bridge between
contexts and [becoming] author of a fragmented translation that is both
linguistic and cultural’ (Parati, 2005, p. 122). Through this character,
Lakhous places a special emphasis on translation as an essential compo-
nent of an efficient intercultural process and of a plural identity, both in
the individual and in the collective domain.
Migrations, Translations, Rewriting
By constructing translingual and transcultural spaces and affirming values

of reciprocity in his writing, Lakhous is among many transnational writers
who write new identities for themselves and encourage others to do so. His
fictional translator becomes a cultural mediator who, dialoguing between
cultures, carries on a transcultural interaction. As a result, ‘interstitial
spaces’ can be seen as ‘translational spaces’: spaces where relationships,
identities and interactions are shaped through concrete processes of cul-
tural translation. A ‘translational’ view of an intercultural situation makes
visible those all too easily forgotten elements inherent in any intercultural
communication: understanding, mediating, misunderstanding, resistance
and so on– it makes complexity more transparent and thus easier to handle
because we can deconstruct it into component parts.
Works like Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio suggest an
understanding of translation that is not only something that happens after
the story ends, but a crucial part of the narrative itself; one that generates
plot and meaning, pointing towards a theory of translation in which it is
not equivalence, but the necessary lack thereof, that reveals and delivers
the actual truth value of the statement. These are texts in which nearly any
statement may have a double meaning, an inside joke between author and
reader, delivered at the character’s expense. In the thematic representa-

tion of communicative breakdown, we see language recognizing its own
inevitable fiction, acknowledging how tenuous is the absolute link between
symbol and referent, how easily it is obstructed. In this, and doubtless many
other translingual texts, translation works inside the narrative to negoti-
ate between different languages and cultures, between author and reader,
and even between the conflicting layers of affiliation and identity that the
author brings to the text.
Open Conclusions: Towards Convivenza or ‘Co-Evolution’
While Lakhous’s fiction successfully exploits his position as someone who

is ambiguously located between cultures, it also exemplifies that sense of
expatriation described by other intellectuals who have converted this very
sense of being on the border between national cultures into a positive life-
project. Writing in the ‘new’ language becomes an act of affirmation, as
translingual narrators position themselves as active participants in the des-
tination culture.
Lakhous has stated that choosing to write in Italian is not primarily
a pragmatic choice, but an aesthetic and an ethical one. If, as Graziella
Parati suggests, writing becomes ‘a means to assert a migrant’s position
as interpretative subject’, it follows that writing in Italian ‘also involves
an act of territorial appropriation, as the result is a book that enters
into the published, and therefore public, texts about a culture’ (2005,
p. 15). Lakhous’s writing contests borders; it is infused with linguistic,
spatial and cultural ‘elsewheres’ which destabilize Italian traditions/
conventions. His narrative is ‘out of place’ with respect to the literary
canon: written in Italian but located ‘between domains, between forms,
between homes, and between languages’ (Said, 1994, pp. 332–33). It is
in this sense that it contributes to the ‘decentring’ of the historical nar-
rative of European metropolitan centres, which is being disrupted by
people shifting among multiple locations and whose diasporic sensibili-
ties refashion prior defi nitions of national canons, notions of citizenship
and political representations. Migration to and from Europe is not a
new phenomenon, but translingual narratives explore the metaphoric
dimension of migration as a form of double imagination and critical
awareness where borders are a fictional dimension of the mind upon
which to construct new forms of belonging. As Lakhous perceptively
writes:
It appears literature knows no frontiers. With it, we build bridges; through

it, civilizations and peoples meet. (2009, p. 137)
Lakhous’s words resonate with current debates on ‘world literature’ and

serve as a timely reminder that, in Goethe’s initial conceptualization, a
general world literature is one that is open to exchanges between cultures
(cf. Damrosch, 2003).
In this context, transcultural narratives have the same crucial role to
play as the one that Michael Cronin identifies for translation in the era of
globalization, that is, to ‘bring foreign elements, extraneous ideas, fresh
images into cultures without which the kick start of otherness remains
stalled in an eternity of mediocrity’ (2002, p. 94). The wonder of this con-
ceptual alterity can both give pleasure – if we use our affective imaginations
to empathize (translate ourselves into the situationality of the other) – and
stimulate learning – if we use our intellect to figure out the ‘fresh’ meta-
phors. It is, among other things, this possibility of renewal that fuels David
Held’s vision of a ‘cultural cosmopolitanism’ that has at its core ‘the abil-
ity to stand outside a singular location (the location of one’s birth, land,
upbringing, conversion) and to mediate traditions’ (2002, p. 58). Perhaps,
as Gnisci (2007) augurs, transnational literature will contribute to a ‘co-
evolution’, a different (hi)story in which imagined communities can become
physical rather than just literary spaces.
In addition to the enjoyment derived from gaining new perspectives on
‘other’ cultures, reading transnational narratives can lead to greater cul-
tural self-knowledge. By entering into contact with these stories and seeking
to understand the ‘network of connections’13 that marks Scontro di civiltà ,
we become for a time transcultural, too, as we adapt our own conceptual
systems and follow the shifting viewpoints from which the complexities of
acts of migration turn into the complexities of constructing cultural identi-
ties. As Lakhous himself has observed, in reflecting on how translingual
writing has provided him with a ‘cure for homesickness’:
I have never been to Pakistan, Albania, Poland, Peru, Egypt, but I can
honestly say that I know who and what Pakistanis, Albanians, Poles,
Peruvians, and Egyptians are, by virtue of having shared tears, laugh-
ter, dreams, and disappointments with immigrants from all of these
countries as we sought to reconcile our personal histories with our new
realities. [. . .] Piazza Vittorio makes one thing clear: despite popular
tradition, we are not born Italians, we become Italians. (Lakhous, 2009,
p. 136)
Notes
1. For a more detailed discussion on postcolonial translation studies, see Tymoczko

(1999, 2000).
2. Much of the work in this area by translation studies scholars concentrates on
the relationship between postcolonial theory and translation practices. Maria
Tymoczko, for example, holds the view that ‘interlingual literary transla-
tion provides an analogue for postcolonial writing’ (1999, p. 20, emphasis in
original).
3. Assia Djebar, for instance, reflects at length within her narrative upon her own
relationship with the French language and what it means to be ‘writing the
enemy’s language’ in Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985, pp. 213–17), but
this appears as a kind of digression in the voice of the author, outside the world
of the narrative (plot, characters, etc.).
4. Arjun Appadurai has been the most articulate proponent of this notion of
transnationalization. See Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization ,
especially, ‘Global ethnoscapes: notes and queries for transnational anthropol-
ogy’ (1996, pp. 48–65).
5. As Moira Inghilleri notes, it is ‘through the habitus – embodied dispositions
acquired through individuals’ social and biological trajectories and continu-
ally shaped and negotiated vis- à-vis fields – that social agents establish and
consolidate their positions in social space’ (2008, p. 280).
6. It is interesting to note the multilingual presentation of the author’s biography
on his website. See www.amaralakhous.com
7. While Deleuze and Guattari attribute the ‘revolutionary’ value of minor litera-
tures to a kind of collective authorship or enunciation, they also suggest that
they have the capacity to reinvigorate a reified literary language, making it
‘vibrate with a new intensity’ through deterritorialization (1986, pp. 17, 18, 22).
8. ‘Il salto che si fa quando l’incontro pacifico di esseri umani di culture diverse
nella stessa dimora supera la separazione del multiculturalismo e attraverso una
nuova educazione interculturale reciproca arriva a creare una dimora comune
imprevedibilmente nuova, va oltre e si propone come transculturale (dal latino
trans-, che vuol dire “andare oltre” “andare al di là”). Una via coevolutiva che
dobbiamo e possiamo percorrere tutti insieme.’ (Gnisci, 2007, online).
9. Many studies have described how the novel has historically allowed people to
imagine the ‘special community’ that is the ‘nation’. In Imagined Communities,
Benedict Anderson pointed to the correspondence between ‘the “interior time
of the novel” ’ and the ‘ “exterior” time of the reader’s everyday life’, which
‘gives a hypnotic confirmation of the solidity of a single community, embrac-
ing characters, author and readers, moving onward through calendrical time’
(1991, p. 27). Transnational narratives challenge the notion of a ‘single’/‘same’
community embracing characters, author and readers.
10. All subsequent quotes from Lakhous’ novel and its English translation are
from these editions respectively.
11. To mention just a few written in English: Leila Aboulela, The Translator
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); John Crowley, The Translator
(New York: William Morrow, 2002); Ward Just, The Translator (Boston, New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991); John Le Carré, The Mission Song (New York:
Little, Brown and Company, 2006). See also Wilson (2007).
12. To borrow an expression from another transnational/translingual writer, Yoko
Tawada (2006).
13. Italo Calvino in his essay on ‘Multiplicity’ introduces the theme of the con-
temporary novel as encyclopedia, as method of knowledge, and, above all, a
‘network of connections between the events, the things and the people of the
world’ (1988, p. 105).
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Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1986), Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature . Translated
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Chapter 4
Theatre Translation for Performance:

Conflict of Interests, Conflict of Cultures
Geraldine Brodie
University College London
My friend and colleague Kate Eaton likens her task as the translator of
the plays of Cuban playwright Virgilio Piñera to the job of producing
oven-ready chickens (Eaton, 2008, p. 60). The result is there to be cooked
and served up by the director and actors to the audience, but Kate also
admits to spending as much time in rehearsal as possible ‘to stand up for
Piñera’.1 Divided loyalties are an occupational hazard for many translators,
but when translating for performance, the incidence of a large number of
interested parties can place varying pressures on the theatre translator.
And what about the translator’s own artistic integrity? J. Michael Walton
highlights this problem in his analysis of modern practices in the transla-
tion of Ancient Greek drama, Found in Translation:
For the translator there are fundamental decisions to be made between

identifying the nuances and rendering the text playable. The only real
question in all this is what licence the translator may claim to nudge,
tickle or just plain sabotage the original? (2006, pp. 195–96)
Theatre translators, he points out, may consider themselves as ‘original

artists, perhaps, but therein lies a conflict of interests’ (p. 2). This struggle
for the translator to combine a perceived duty to represent the original
author with the expression or suppression of the translator’s own voice is
inherent in most translation, especially the translation of literary texts.
However, in the field of stage translation, the specific manifestation of this
conflict brings certain elements into closer focus.
An examination of the translation processes for the stage highlights
an idiosyncratic translator/author/audience relationship, complicated by
the intervention of additional agents in the field. In particular, it is com-
mon practice in English- speaking commercial theatre to adopt a two- stage
translation process whereby an expert speaker of the source language pre-

pares a literal annotated translation. A non-language- specialist theatre
practitioner then uses this literal translation to prepare what is generally
identified as a version or adaptation for performance, generating a further
forum for conflict in translation circles. There are those who believe that
this two- stage, or indirect, method is limiting both to the original author
and the literal translator, while others take the view that a professional
theatre practitioner is more likely to create a performable work. David
Johnston discusses the difficulties for the translator attempting to recon-
cile ‘the original author’s words as fi xed on a page’ with the creation of ‘a
memorable night in the theatre’ (Johnston, 1996, p. 8), while Eva Espasa,
examining the notion of ‘performability’, favours the recognition of ‘thea-
tre ideology and power negotiation’ (Espasa, 2000, p. 58) in the factors
that surround translation. Such metatextual issues, including the visual
and commercial exigencies of performance investigated below, exhibit
a potential for conflicts of interests which may impinge on the cultural
representation of a staged translation.
Two recently produced Spanish plays will serve to demonstrate the pull
on translators of the differing agents and narratives arising in the transition
from source text to target performance. These plays were both performed
in English on the London stage between March and July 2005, and were the
only Spanish plays during that period to be advertised in The Official Guide
of the Society of London Theatre, a trade association that represents the produc-
ers, theatre owners and managers of the major commercial and grant- aided
theatres in central London.2 While they share a common source culture,
these two plays vary widely in subject matter, style, period, translation pro-
cess and production. In this brief study, rather than deconstructing textual
decisions, I will confine myself to examining the translations in the wider
cultural context of these productions, focusing on the part played by the
translators in relation to both metatextual and non-textual elements of stage
performance. These translational features display a negotiation of conflict
beyond what might usually be considered to be the domain of the translator.
But are they peculiar to the theatre or might they also have resonance in a
more general study of the terrain of cultural conflict arising in translation?
A National Production: The House of Bernarda Alba
The better-known of the two plays is Federico García Lorca’s The House
of Bernarda Alba , in a new English version by David Hare from a literal
Theatre Translation for Performance 65
translation by Simon Scardifield. The production was shown on the pro-

scenium stage of the 890- seat Lyttelton Theatre, one of three theatres in
the Royal National Theatre (popularly known as ‘the National’) complex
on the South Bank of the Thames in central London. The mission state-
ment of the National, as expressed on its website, places the theatre com-
plex, geographically and ideologically, at the centre of English theatrical
culture:
The National Theatre is central to the creative life of the country. [. . .]

It aims constantly to re- energise the great traditions of the British stage
and to expand the horizons of audiences and artists alike. It aspires to
reflect in its repertoire the diversity of the nation’s culture. [. . .] Through
an extensive programme [. . .] it recognises that the theatre doesn’t begin
and end with the rise and fall of the curtain. And by touring, the National
shares its work with audiences in the UK and abroad. (National Theatre,
2009a)
In short, the National aspires to live up to its name and provide a holis-
tic theatrical service to the nation, although the degree to which it is
successful in its aspiration is a matter of debate in theatrical circles. Its
public responsibility is to some extent a prerequisite of its funding: the
financial accounts for the 52 weeks ended 2 April 2006 (during which
period The House of Bernarda Alba was performed) show that 44 per cent
of the National’s income came from Arts Council grants, compared with
30 per cent from box office receipts and touring income. A quick calcula-
tion shows that the Arts Council subsidized each paying member of the
audience during this period by £26 per head.3 The Arts Council England
is a quasi- governmental body whose function is to distribute government
and National Lottery funds to the arts in England. That the National is the
recipient of such substantial public funding inevitably provokes debate as
to its duties with regard to the public it serves and the official bodies which
provide sponsorship. The ambitious tone of its mission statement and the
attempt to combine new and classic, diversity and tradition, reveal the con-
flicting criteria a commissioning director must try to satisfy. The inclusion
of translated plays within these boundaries raises additional questions.
The National’s translation policy, as expressed by its Literary Manager
from 1994 to 2006, Jack Bradley, is to commission playwrights to prepare
translations using a literal translation.4 The inclusion of this Lorca play in
the National repertory conforms to the aims of the mission statement: the
play is presented as a new English version by David Hare. His publishers
repeat his designation by the Independent on Sunday as ‘one of the great

post-war British playwrights’ (Faber & Faber, 2009). He is a regular con-
tributor at the National. The Artistic Director of the National, Nicholas
Hytner, in his report for the year ended 2 April 2006, claimed an ‘inherent
worth’ for all the work carried out by the National, placing The House of
Bernarda Alba within a group which ‘involved the re-investigation of great
plays that will always be staged for the universal truths that they embody’
(National Theatre, 2006, p. 5). This gives some indication of what might
have been expected in arranging a marriage between a well-known estab-
lishment playwright and an international classic.
Further contextual imperatives for this translation arise in the physical
theatre setting. The Lyttleton Theatre’s proscenium arch provides the most
traditional stage in the National complex, embodying the ‘fourth wall’
which divides audience from performers and lending itself, in Nicholas
Hytner’s words, to ‘forensically precise’ theatre (National Theatre, 2009b).
The 890-person capacity of the theatre is also significant: unlike West End
theatres, the National does not cancel a play if critical reviews are poor and
ticket sales suffer, therefore the aim should be to fill seats every night of a
pre-assigned time- scale. This, along with the formal setting, may be seen as
an incentive to produce a certain type of translation; to make it accessible
to a wide audience, to acknowledge the heritage and tradition of a play,
while also re- energizing it and making it new.
A consideration of the circumstances of place and market assists
in reviewing the cultural negotiations in Hare’s version of The House of
Bernarda Alba . Lorca, identified by Gunilla Anderman as approaching
Ibsen and Chekhov in the group of ‘honorary British dramatists’ (2006,
p. 8), merits a place in the British classic repertoire, while Hare can be
expected to fill seats. This production was also supported by accompany-
ing Platform performances of lesser-known Lorca works and screenings of
Carlos Saura’s 1981 film of Lorca’s play, Blood Wedding, so that enthusiastic
followers would have the opportunity to immerse themselves in Lorca’s
general oeuvre. The most recent Lorca production at the National prior to
this run was Blood Wedding, in a translation by Gwenda Pandolfi at the small
Cottesloe theatre 13 years earlier in 1991. David Hare, on the other hand,
had been represented at the National as writer or adaptor six times in
the same period (including twice in 2004, the previous year). Even so, the
programming of supplementary Lorca offerings makes clear the respect
accorded to the original author alongside the presence of one of the most
high-profile of contemporary British playwrights. There was no danger of
the reviewers failing to mention the fact that this piece was an English
version from a Spanish original, or to name the agents responsible. All

clearly distinguish between Hare and Lorca, although they remain largely
silent as to the third agent in the translation process, the literal translator,
Simon Scardifield, who composed a detailed annotated literal translation
from which Hare created the final version for performance.
Scardifield is credited in the programme, albeit between the Design
Associate and the Research Assistant in the smaller print of the second
page, and acknowledged by Hare in his Adaptor’s Note to the published
text. Any queries Hare might have had in relation to the original text when
working on his own drafts would have been addressed to Scardifield in the
first instance in his position as language expert. It is apparent from the
annotations in the (unpublished) literal translation held in the National’s
archives that the literal translator, an actor himself, was at pains to preempt
such queries by providing substantial linguistic and cultural detail. Thus,
the literal translator to some extent took on the role of dramaturge, as iden-
tified in Manuela Perteghella’s study of collaboration in theatre translation
(Perteghella, 2004, p. 206). His translation addressed not only translational
but also cultural and staging issues in the text relevant to the London audi-
ence. That this was needed is acknowledged by the fact that a new literal
translation was commissioned, even though there are many translations of
this play in existence, including scholarly versions. As I hinted above, the
use of a literal translator is the source of heated disagreement in transla-
tion circles, one of the reasons given being the low value in which the
literal is held, both financially and in terms of status. The fact that this
literal was commissioned especially for this production, rather than using
existing academic texts, denotes its cultural if not monetary value. Hare’s
indirect translation required a tailored literal, and access to the translator.
Provided with these linguistic resources, Hare was in a position to create a
personalized version.
One area of conflicting interests for Hare, therefore, is the extent to
which he should claim authorship of this version in relation to the original
playwright and the literal translator. He is unable to consult the author, but
the privileged position of Lorca in the canon should make it possible for
Hare to present this work as his own reading of Lorca’s play without fear of
compromising the standing of the original. Not all critics agree with this
approach, however, as I discuss below. Nevertheless, Hare’s personal nar-
rative is well known at the National, to practitioners and audience alike,
and his name attached to this translation would act as a pointer to the
way in which the work would be presented. Hare’s identity is that of an
explicitly political playwright, commenting on affairs in his own country
and also internationally, as exemplified recently by his 2009 work for the
Royal Court, Wall , ‘a searching 40-minute study of the Israel/Palestine sep-
aration barrier’ (Royal Court Theatre, 2009a). His interpretation of The
House of Bernarda Alba as a ‘stunningly clear’ metaphor for the political
situation of its time, still relevant today (García Lorca, 2005, p. v), ena-
bles him to absorb Lorca’s work into his curriculum vitae, adding it to
Pirandello, Brecht, Chekhov and Schnitzler in his list of adaptations. Thus,
Lorca and Hare experience a symbiotic relationship, each enhancing the
status of the other in the canon for the British audience. The conflicts of
culture and interest in this translation are consequently laid out overtly to
the onlooker.
Even Hare’s legal ownership of the translation is explicitly jointly held:
unusually, the published play text includes a post-publication addendum
stating that the copyright is held by David Hare and Herederos de Federico
García Lorca (the Lorca family trust) (García Lorca, 2005). The standard
position is that the copyright for an original is owned by its author, while
translators may claim rights over their own translation. The shared copy-
right in this case suggests that the Lorca family exercises an interest in any
additions to its intellectual property, and the question arises as to whether
this interest extends beyond the legal to artistic decisions. This would act
as a reminder to the reader of the text that Lorca is present in the transla-
tion itself and not only the original. It may also be a reminder to Hare that
he has a responsibility to Lorca while working on a version which bears
his own name. He has commented, in an article relating to another of his
translations, that it is important to him to allow the identity of the original
author to be presented (Hare, 2006). Although it is not clear how he might
achieve that, particularly in situations where he does not speak the original
language, it is nevertheless the case that he recognizes the position whereby
he has to negotiate the conflict between his own and another voice.
Hare’s view that Lorca’s play ‘is not at all some timeless, literary version of
Spain’ (García Lorca, 2005, p. v) explains his approach, moving away from
the usual treatment of the tyrannical mother enclosed with her five daugh-
ters in a stifling, black- clad, white-walled environment. Backed up by a set
described in a review as ‘a handsome Moorish- style mansion, with gilt, lofty
ceilings and stained glass’ (Hepple, 2005), and a cast dressed in colourful
period costumes, the production reinterpreted the repressive elements of
the play, downplaying the Andalusian pueblo surroundings and present-
ing the characters as women who speak and behave in a way that is rec-
ognizable to modern audiences. Bernarda, for example, is a physically fit
woman in early middle age who likes to smoke and dance, her stick making
a limited appearance as a weapon, not required as a support. While this

reading broadens the application of the tensions within the play to a wider
audience, echoing the ‘universal’ appeal lauded by Nicholas Hytner, it
moved too far for at least one critic, who complained that it ‘seems to para-
chute us into the sexual morality of Cheltenham Ladies College [a trad-
itional girls- only boarding school] as it must have been thirty years ago,
rather than into the stifling aridity of conservative Spanish Catholicism
at its worst’ (May, 2005).5 The Lorca scholar Gwynne Edwards similarly
considers the set ‘misconceived’ and complains that ‘because the produc-
tion was conceived for a southern English audience, it is likely too that, set
in the 1930s, it was somewhat influenced by the bourgeois English plays of
that period’ (Edwards, 2005, p. 384). While this reception reveals unwill-
ingness on the part of some viewers to accept a retelling which is overtly for
a modern audience not necessarily familiar with Spanish culture and his-
tory, it also acknowledges the cultural issues arising from translation and
indicates that the audience engages with the translation debate. The inter-
vention of Hare, his approach to writing and the cumulative effect of his
earlier work is significant in its acknowledgement by the critical reviews. In
spite of, or perhaps, paradoxically, because of, its overt acknowledgement
of an English audience, The House of Bernarda Alba is a visible translation
differentiating itself from the original, and the conflicts within its transla-
tion framework were readily identified by the audience. This can to some
extent be attributed to the specific identity of the named translator and the
wider theatrical context in which he was operating.
A Royal Court Production: Way to Heaven
Translator identity and theatrical context display marked differences in

my second case study. Juan Mayorga’s Way to Heaven , translated by David
Johnston, was presented in the 85- seat Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the
Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea, a residential and commercial inner sub-
urb of West London, about 3 miles (5 kilometres) from the National. The
Royal Court’s website outlines its position as follows:
The Royal Court Theatre is Britain’s leading national company dedi-

cated to new work by innovative writers from the UK and around the
world. The theatre’s pivotal role in promoting new voices is undis-
puted – the New York Times described it as ‘the most important theatre
in Europe’.
[. . .] The Royal Court’s success has inspired confidence in theatres across

the world and, whereas new plays were once viewed as a risk, they are now
at the heart of a revival of interest among artists and audiences alike.
(Royal Court Theatre, 2009b)
This outlook is not dissimilar to that of the National, inasmuch as it pro-

motes a central, national role for the theatre and aims to expand its influ-
ence beyond the United Kingdom. Where it differs is in its focus on new
writing: the Royal Court is quite clear in its attention to the voice of the
playwright and its emphasis on its standing among artists and theatres,
including its international status. As its governing Council reports: ‘It is an
artistically led theatre that creates the conditions for writers, nationally and
internationally, to flourish’ (Royal Court Theatre, 2006, p. 6). The focus
on the writer creates a degree of risk with regard to audience numbers,
as can be surmised from an examination of the accounts. Financial infor-
mation is not posted on the Royal Court’s website, but from the annual
report for the year ended 31 March 2006 (during which Way to Heaven was
staged), it is possible to calculate that Arts Council England grants repre-
sented 54 per cent of its total incoming resources, while a mere 19 per cent
of those resources came from box office and associated income.6 More in
line with the National, however, is the Arts Council subsidy per head of
audience: approximately £27.7 Clearly, both institutions are dependent on
the public funding allotted to them by Arts Council England and as such
need to be aware that they will be monitored for ‘artistic quality, man-
agement, finance and public engagement’ (Arts Council England, 2009a),
but whereas the National, a major recipient of funding (£18,715,431 in
2008/2009) (National Theatre, 2009b), undertakes a full range of theatri-
cal activities in line with its public image, the Royal Court (£2,189,627 in
2008/2009) (Royal Court Theatre, 2009c) receives funding because it is
‘an exemplary centre for the development and production of new writing
for theatre. It has strong Young Writers and International programmes
and a commitment to developing theatre practice with writers at the cen-
tre’ (2009c). Its public offerings are thus differentiated by their emphasis
on writing.
Where writers are at the centre of theatrical strategy and there is a clear
emphasis on the development of new, unknown work, the audience may
be less easily identifiable. The Royal Court recognizes this problem, the
Council’s report in 2006 explicitly stating in a section headed ‘Factors
affecting performance’:
The work produced by the Royal Court is often risky, challenging

and experimental, which can, by its very nature, make it difficult to mar-
ket [. . .] Whilst this diversity and originality is part of the Royal Court’s
reputation for producing pioneering drama, it also presents a challenge
to the Press, Marketing and Development departments, even more so
this year when a significant amount of the repertoire would not necessar-
ily attract mainstream audiences. (Royal Court Theatre, 2006, p. 12)
These challenges can affect translation strategies, as I discuss below.

The above statement may also explain Way to Heaven’s appearance in the
Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, a space employed for plays more suited to an
intimate audience (whether for reasons of theme, experimentation or
financial risk), which gives an indication of the Royal Court’s expectations
for the play.
In view of the prominence given to international writing, it is not surpris-
ing to learn that, in contrast to the National Theatre, the Royal Court has
an International Department with its own dedicated Associate Director,
Elyse Dodgson, whose stated aim is ‘to bring international plays into the
core programme and present these alongside home- grown plays’ (Little
and McLaughlin, 2007, p. 331). The International Department sets out
its translation policy on the Royal Court website: ‘The department has
pioneered the use of theatre practitioners as translators and the integral
involvement of the translator in the play development and rehearsal proc-
ess’ (Royal Court Theatre, 2009c). Nevertheless, the Royal Court is gener-
ally acknowledged among the translating community for commissioning
source-language experts to create a direct translation for performance.
As suggested, these translators tend to be drawn from a group who reg-
ularly translate for the theatre and may also be the creators of original
plays in English. Thus the direct translator for this piece is David Johnston,
Professor of Hispanic Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast, frequent trans-
lator of Spanish-language plays for performance and original author of
other performed works.
Way to Heaven was presented in the published text, which also functions
as a programme, as ‘part of the Royal Court’s International Playwrights
series’ (Mayorga, 2005, n.p.). The series is distinct from a season , which
is defined on the Royal Court website as ‘a season of international work
which offers full productions of specially commissioned international
plays in translation and associated performances, readings and events’
(Royal Court Theatre, 2009c). The production of Way to Heaven was fol-
lowed in the Theatre Upstairs by an Iranian play, Amid the Clouds , by Amir
Reza Koohestani, but no other events or translated plays were presented as
international works at that time, reflecting the Royal Court’s then objective
to ‘more fully integrate the International Playwrights programme into the
core work of the theatre, rather than as a separate festival’ (Royal Court
Theatre, 2006, p. 6).8 Koohestani had developed his play during a Royal
Court International Residency in 2004. Juan Mayorga also participated in
earlier international programmes, with some of his works given rehearsed
readings in translation. However, Way to Heaven was first produced under
its original title Himmelweg at the Teatro Alameda de Málaga, Spain, in
2003, and was not a direct product of a formal international programme.
The inclusion of both international plays in the Royal Court repertoire
for that period was probably more to do with their synchronicity with
the trend towards ‘overtly political drama’ (Royal Court Theatre, 2006,
p. 12) than their national provenance. They were presented in this light
rather than as explicitly international plays, which suggests that the focus
of the translations might be to express ideological rather than national
characteristics.
David Johnston was commissioned to translate Way to Heaven for the
first full professional staging of a Mayorga play in London. Mayorga’s work
had been staged in Spain, Croatia, Portugal, Venezuela, Argentina and
the United States (Theatre Catalyst, Philadelphia, a fringe theatre) by that
time, both in the original Spanish and in translation. Even so, Johnston was
effectively introducing a play and an author that were both relatively new
to English audiences. Mayorga is also a new writer in the sense that he was
born in 1965 (in Madrid) and his first professionally performed play was
staged in 1992. He fits the Royal Court profile as an author who takes on
challenging themes, as demonstrated by Way to Heaven and his other work.
In 2003, he published his study, Revolución conservadora y conservación rev-
olucionaria. Política y memoria en Walter Benjamin [Conservative revolution and
revolutionary conservation. Politics and memory in Walter Benjamin], to which I
shall return, which supports his dramatic output in strengthening his pol-
itical and intellectual credentials in the Royal Court repertoire. He had
also been awarded several prizes for his theatrical work by 2005, including
the Premio Enrique Llovet for Himmelweg in 2003. In short, Mayorga had
recognition and a substantial track record in Spain and elsewhere; already
the author of a defined body of work, he was unknown only in the sense
that his work had received very limited exposure in London and to other
English- speaking audiences. The translation, therefore, had to reflect the
fact that this was the work of a confident, established and well-regarded
playwright, while acknowledging its unfamiliarity but simultaneous suit-
ability for the Royal Court audience.
The advertising material addressed this as follows:
The heart of Europe. 1942. Children playing, lovers’ tiffs, a deserted

train station and a ramp rising towards a hangar. This is what you can
see, but what should the Red Cross representative report say?
Juan Mayorga was a participant on the Royal Court’s International
Residency 1997. WAY TO HEAVEN has previously been produced
at the Teatro Mara [sic] Guerrero, Madrid by the Centro Dramatico
Nacional. His other work has been produced in Spain and around
Europe as well as in Argentina, Venezuela and USA. (Royal Court
Theatre, 2009d)
The biography emphasizes Mayorga’s links to the Royal Court, his status
within the Spanish theatrical field and his international standing. The
play is positioned in Europe (vaguely, considering the text itself specifi-
cally places the action ‘thirty kilometres north of Berlin’ in the first spoken
lines of the play (Mayorga, 2005, p. 19)). The circumstances of the setting
are made personal to the audience (‘This is what you can see . . .’) and the
wartime context referred to only obliquely by including the date 1942. The
image accompanying the advertising material, of a clock-face with shadowy
figures super-imposed, is equally mysterious. The invitation extended to
the prospective audience is open in its scope. Does the translation reflect
the flexibility of this invitation?
Way to Heaven has been described by its translator as a work of ‘extended
monologues and hypertheatricality [. . .] where the monstrosity of the
Holocaust is reflected through the story of the camp at Theresienstadt’
(Mayorga, 2009, p. 13). The play reflects upon the report of an unnamed
Red Cross Representative who, on visiting a concentration camp, fails to
notice that the apparently well-treated Jewish prisoners are following a
script devised and stage-managed by the camp Commandant. The camp
station clock permanently stands at six and a ramp leading from the station
to a closed-up hangar is called ‘the way to heaven’. The visit is discussed and
displayed from the differing perspectives of the Red Cross Representative,
the Commandant and Gershom Gottfried, a prisoner. Johnston’s direct
translation is from Spanish, but once in its English translation, the genesis
of the play is obscured as only its original language gave any clue to its
source culture.
Mayorga has changed some of the historical details of the notorious Red
Cross visit to the concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic,
creating a fictional camp and characters whose motives and allegiances are
of more relevance than their nationalities. As I have pointed out, the site
of the play’s action is explicitly set 30 kilometres north of Berlin in 1942.
There are no allusions to Spain, other than the Commandant’s inclusion
of Calderón alongside Corneille and Shakespeare in his library (Mayorga,
2005, pp. 41–2), and the fact that the clock’s balances originated from an
earlier clock built in Toledo (Mayorga, 2004, p. 20). The international
nature and themes of the play for its Spanish audience would have been
underlined by the title, a German word: Himmelweg. The first lines spoken
explain that this means ‘Camino del cielo’ in the Spanish version (Mayorga,
2004, p.13), translated as ‘way to heaven’ in English. This German-language
title has been retained in translations of the play into other languages such
as French, Italian and Norwegian, but the Royal Court production used the
English translation of the title for the reason, as I have heard informally,9
that foreign-language titles, particularly in German, are perceived to be
less favourable for ticket sales in London. This anecdotal explanation is
supported by the reference of the advertising material to ‘the heart of
Europe’ rather than Berlin, echoing the Commandant’s enigmatic words
(Mayorga, 2005, p. 48), which implicate Europe while querying German
responsibility. Looking back to the Royal Court’s concern, expressed in the
financial accounts as discussed above, that its work ‘presents a challenge
to the Press, Marketing and Development departments’, it is possible to
discern here an example of external influences imposed on the translator:
commercial imperatives, in this case built on cultural assumptions, may
interfere with the transmission of the author’s intention and the transla-
tor’s scope.
These cultural assumptions are not necessarily shared. The official
website of the off-Broadway production of David Johnston’s translation
at the Teatro Círculo in New York between May and August 2009 shows
Himmelweg prominently in brackets below the English title of the play (Way
to Heaven The Play, 2009). The published French translation translates
Himmelweg on the inside cover to Chemin du ciel , in brackets, but not on the
outside front cover (Mayorga, 2006). The Spanish published text does not
translate the German into Spanish other than in the course of the playtext
itself (Mayorga, 2004). The English published text operates the same non-
translation approach but reversed in that Himmelweg only appears in the
playtext and is not used to subtitle the play (Mayorga, 2005). Similarly, it
was not used in the advertising material. The absence of this German title
serves to blur the site- specificity of the Royal Court production and transla-
tion, at least prior to arriving at the theatre or opening the text. It offers
the play as a subject for open interpretation. A review of Mayorga’s drama
suggests that in this, the translation was echoing a persistent theme of his
composition.
Mayorga broadly adopts a pan- European approach in his work. His
plays make international references to place, as in Hamelin (2005) and
Love Letters to Stalin (1999), and even, perhaps in an allegory for his work
as a whole, a train crossing Western Europe in the case of Blumemberg’s
Translator (2000). His work also ‘draws upon, and enriches itself from,
the radical philosophical tradition of Montaigne, Kant, Benjamin and
Agamben’, according to Johnston (Mayorga, 2009, p. 14), thus covering a
wide range of European philosophy. On the one hand, this pan-European
approach is reflected in the geographical vagueness of the Royal Court’s
advertising material. On the other hand, the translation of the play’s title
into English, especially when compared with the strategies I discussed
above, to some extent negates the otherness of the play and the fact that
it deals with issues outside London boundaries. It presents theatre practi-
tioners, including the translator, with the challenge of signalling the cul-
tural conflict inherent in the original title to an English- speaking audience
unfamiliar with Mayorga’s work. In the event, this was attempted once the
audience had been drawn inside the theatre, in various ways. Johnston,
as translator, retains the back-translation of Himmelweg in the first utter-
ances of the play, and this was very clearly articulated and repeated by the
actor playing the Red Cross Representative. Even before that, the props
list and rehearsal notes show that each member of the audience was to
be presented with a book supposedly from the Commandant’s library on
entering the theatre, these books being ‘“classic European paperbacks”
from several different European countries in their own language’.10 These
props would serve as a reminder to the spectators of the interlingual
nature of the play, but also draw them into the creative process in a ges-
ture of inclusion.
Does this inclusion process, already noted in the advertising material
(‘This is what you can see . . .’), sharpen or blur the cultural confl ict
inherent in the play? It might be expected that the international nature
of this play’s characters and subject matter lessen the pressure on the
translator to negotiate cultural difference. The play already presents a
neutral canvas: the Red Cross Representative is not connected with any
national allegiance. The cultural dilemma for the translator is whether
to pursue the indeterminate portrayal of the character, permitting the
viewer to impose their own back story, or to intervene in the script to

clarify that the Red Cross Representative must be from a neutral country
(Switzerland, in the historical event). In other words, should the trans-
lator go beyond the original text to make explicit to the English audi-
ence that this is not an English play? Johnston’s translation maintains
the neutrality of the original with no furtherance of the Anglicization of
the title. The effect of this can be seen from the newspaper reviews. Out
of 13 reviews collected in the journal Theatre Record (2005), two specifi -
cally identify the Red Cross representative as British or English,11 demon-
strating the extent to which the audience identifies with the character,
domesticating his nationality. On the other hand, ten reviews include a
reference to Spain, suggesting that the writers are clear about the prov-
enance of the play, but not concerned with the implications of its trans-
lational status: only three reviews include the word ‘translation’ and only
one critiqued it (‘lucid’, The Times (Theatre Record, 2005, p. 850)). The
name of the translator is shown prominently close to that of the author
in the publicity material and the programme/text, along with a reference
to the International Playwrights series. The importance of the paratext
in identifying and locating the translation is thus evident, but even so
the receivers choose to focus on other aspects of the play from their own
national perspective.
Possibly, this reception of Way to Heaven demonstrates Mayorga’s
intended effect. Interviewed in El Pais (Vallejo, 2008), he explained: ‘That
character . . . resembles myself and many people around me, who want
to help, but end up complicit in cruel or unjust actions’ (my translation).
Perhaps a portrayal of the Everyman is appropriate here. Johnston has
the advantage of access to Mayorga, and indeed has written in regard to
his translation of Nocturnal that Mayorga works with the translator and is
prepared to rewrite if necessary (Mayorga, 2009, p. 14). The subject mat-
ter of Mayorga’s plays and his detailed study of Benjamin also indicate on
his part an interest in the theory and practice of translation. Way to Heaven
itself reflects upon translation and the relationship between author and
translator. Specifically, the Commandant appoints Gottfried as his psy-
chological translator to pass on his directions to the other prisoners: ‘You
will find the right words’ (Mayorga, 2005, p. 47). This demonstrates the
importance of the translator’s role and the significance of collaboration
in translation for performance. The evidence suggests that Johnston is
able to consult Mayorga when approaching a translation, producing a
result acceptable to both parties, and Mayorga, with his understanding
of the role of the translator, is prepared to act as dramaturge for his own
plays, if necessary, customizing and possibly deforeignizing them for a

particular audience. The potential of this relationship between the author
and translator may allow a rapprochement between the text and the audi-
ence, which can reduce the level of conflict for the translator. However,
the broader theatrical context, such as funding and marketing require-
ments, also intervenes in the translational status of the eventual cultural
production.
Concluding Remarks
Analysis of the circumstances surrounding the translations of these two

plays demonstrates the effect of extra-textual theatrical phenomena on
cultural transference in the translation of plays for performance. Although
very different plays, they are linked by more than just their original lan-
guage. Both theatres, the National and the Royal Court, by advertising
under the banner of the Society of London Theatre, place themselves
among mainstream London venues. However, as I have suggested, they
each operate under a different mandate and would not necessarily expect a
similar audience demographic. Although both are substantially funded by
public money via the Arts Council, these theatres have to fulfil their fund-
ing requirements in markedly dissimilar ways. The National makes the gen-
eral public its priority; the Royal Court privileges the writer. Accordingly,
the two plays, already positioned apart in the Spanish-language canon,
were presented very differently to their English- speaking audiences: The
House of Bernarda Alba to large numbers in a theatre which emphasizes the
national heritage, and Way to Heaven in a small studio space associated with
the new and risky. Nevertheless, in both cases, consideration of context
not only suggests reasons for which certain translational decisions were
made, but also reveals the strategic importance of non-textual factors in
directing the textual form of a translation. My preceding reviews of the-
atrical site, financial and marketing imperatives, and the possibilities for
interaction between original author, literal translator and translator (as
affected by copyright obligations) show the complexities beyond the text
which have to be negotiated by the translator in the portrayal of another
culture to an English- speaking audience. They also promote factors affect-
ing translation as intersemiotic activity which have an application beyond
the theatre. Thus, the contextual study of theatre translation can furnish
particularly visible examples of sociocultural pressures on translation, as
I have shown.
Similarly, while non- textual factors may affect the content of a translated
text, where a text is to be performed, translational issues may become vis-
ible and communicate themselves through non- textual means. Because
theatre is a multi- agency medium, the external factors imposed on the
translator, and the conflicting interests I have discussed, can appear
more overt, such as in the translation of Himmelweg (the title) and the
splendour of the atypical scenery for The House of Bernarda Alba . Publicity
materials, programmes and reviews, set design, costumes and direction
may all supplement or even replace the text for the target audience, in
the same way that the translated text supplements the original, as Sirkku
Aaltonen suggests.12 The translator within a team of theatre practition-
ers has to address these issues. In 1982, André Lefevere reviewed suc-
cessive translations into English of Brecht’s Mother Courage between 1941
and 1972 and declared that ‘the degree to which the foreign writer is
accepted into the native system will [. . .] be determined by the need that
native system has of him in a certain phase of its evolution’ (Lefevere,
2004, p. 243). My case studies of these productions in 2005 show that even
for a sophisticated internationally inclined audience, such as at the Royal
Court, a rapprochement to the target culture is still perceived as needed
to bring the audience to the play. Thus, the translator’s negotiation of
culture may be influenced by many external factors, not limited to a rela-
tionship with the original text but also affected by the theatrical trans-
lation policy, the expectation of the audience and the marketing and
funding requirements. As I have shown, the counter-intuitive result can
be that a play like Way to Heaven , whose original lends itself to translation
and which might therefore be hailed and analysed as such, is absorbed
into the English- speaking repertoire, while an extensively domesticated
The House of Bernarda Alba foregrounds translation. The translator per-
forms a paradoxical role, both highlighting and suppressing cultural
difference. The conflicts remain.
Notes
1. In private conversation at Pieces of Piñera , Arcola Theatre, London, 4 October

2009.
2. Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding in a version by Tanya Ronder was also
shown during this period at the Almeida Theatre in north London, but the
Almeida does not advertise through the Society of London Theatre.
3. Based on Arts Council grants of £17,261,000 divided by total paid attendances
of 663,000 (National Theatre, 2006, pp. 41–2). For comparison purposes,
tickets for the David Hare play The Power of Yes on Saturday 12 December 2009
at 7:30 p.m. were selling for between £10 and £35.
4. My own notes taken from Jack Bradley’s talk, ‘Not . . . lost in translation’
at the conference ‘Staging Translated Plays: Adaptation, Translation and
Multimediality’, University of East Anglia, 30 June 2007.
5. Hare’s move away from a stereotypical Andalusian flavour echoes the
approach taken by the fi rst director of La casa de Bernarda Alba in Madrid
in 1964, Juan- Antonio Bardem, who was concerned to distance his produc-
tion from the zarzuelero of Spanish lyric- dramatic opera (García Lorca, 1964,
p. 119).
6. Calculations obtained by comparing Arts Council of England revenue grant:
£2,000,000 (Royal Court Theatre, 2006, p. 24, note 3) and box office and asso-
ciated income: £681,998 (p. 25, note 5) to total incoming resources: £3,661,111
(p. 19).
7. Based on Arts Council grants of £2,000,000 (Royal Court Theatre, 2006, p. 24,
note 3) divided by the total attendance for the year of 74,185 (p. 7). Top price
tickets during the period were reduced to £25 (p. 10).
8. There was, in fact, an additional translated production running in the Jerwood
Theatre Downstairs from 12 May to 18 June 2005, The Woman Before , written by
Roland Schimmelpfennig and translated by David Tushingham, but this was
not included in the International Playwrights Programme.
9. From David Johnston in an answer to a question at the conference, ‘Translation:
Process and Performance’, Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies,
University of London, 24 November 2007.
10. My own notes from the Royal Court prompt book for Way to Heaven, viewed 15
April 2009.
11. Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard and Paul Taylor in the Independent.
12. In her lecture ‘Translations as supplements in the theatrical practice of drama’
at ‘Translation: Process and Performance’, Institute for Germanic and Ro-
mance Studies, University of London, 24 November 2007.
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Walton, J. M. (2006), Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English . Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Way to Heaven The Play (2009), ‘Way to Heaven’. [Online, accessed 29 October
2009 at www.waytoheaventheplay.com]
Chapter 5
The Gull: Intercultural Noh as Webwork

Beverley Curran
Aichi Shukutoku University
Introduction
Eminent translator Arthur Waley described the Noh play, ‘at its simplest,
[as] a dance preceded by a dialogue which explains the significance of the
dance or introduces circumstances which lead naturally to the dancing of
it’ (1957, p. 17), but much about Noh, its stylized performance, and circula-
tion in translation, is decidedly complex. Amid the modernization of the
Meiji period (1863–1912), traditional Japanese arts such as Noh were deval-
ued, while in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they aroused
keen interest in the West, with more than 40 Noh plays translated into
English, French, and German. Literary figures such as William Butler Yeats
and Ezra Pound were excited by Noh’s potential to inspire new ideas about
performance and poetry. At the same time, the Fenollosa- Pound transla-
tions of Japan’s ‘noble’ plays celebrated the ancient, unchanging quality of
Noh; Ernest Fenollosa described the art form as an extant ‘form of drama,
as primitive, as intense, and almost as beautiful as the ancient Greek drama
at Athens, [which] still exists in the world’ (Pound and Fenollosa, 1959,
p. 59). Further, Pound approached the ‘finishing’ of Fenollosa’s transla-
tions with a Modernist sensibility which demonstrated ‘the extent to which
formal knowledge of the source language no longer constituted a require-
ment for the practice of translation’ (Yao, 2002, pp. 10–11). Partly as a
result of translations into Western languages, there was renewed critical
interest in Noh among Japanese intellectuals in the 1930s, associating the
traditional art with ‘the myth of a “natural” nation that had no history
but was timeless and composed of individuals connected through natural
bonds’ (Tansman, 2009, p. 3). Theatre critic Uchino Tadashi suggests that
theatre culture within Japan has continued to release Noh from its histori-
cal context in order to operate as a confirmation of Japan’s ‘uninterrupted
The Gull: Intercultural Noh as Webwork 83
continuity and [. . .] endless present’ (Uchino, 2009, p. 85), reinforcing

Japan’s past as myth rather than history.
Among those who published articles and books on Noh and translation
during the 1930s was Nogami Toyoichirô, a Noh specialist and scholar and
translator of English literature, who saw translation as one of the inter-
national movements of that turbulent period. In the preface to his 1938
discussion of the theory and practice of translation, Nogami uses the inti-
mate idea of a reading circle (dokusho sa- kuru) to describe the circulation of
ideologies and cultural productions in translation that overrides national
boundaries (1938, pp. 1–4). As part of that circle, Japan has access to the
works of Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Molière, Tolstoy and
others, while making available such works as Genji Monogatari (The Tale of
Genji ) and Noh plays. In his multifaceted considerations of how success-
fully Noh can be translated into Western languages, Nogami singles out
the difficulty of the density of the classical literary allusions embedded in
the repertoire of this art form that dates back at least to the fourteenth cen-
tury. While considering the potential of intercultural collaborative transla-
tion to help bring attention to Noh’s ‘universal’ appeal, Nogami’s position
is still representative of many Noh scholars and practitioners, who see Noh
as an intrinsically Japanese cultural production whose complex structures
are just further complicated or obfuscated by translation; the idea of a Noh
play’s creation in another language or its translation into Japanese is never
broached.
But what happens to such stubborn ideas about translation and timeless,
uniquely Japanese Noh if a play is written in English about the Japanese
diaspora on the WestCoast of Canada and then translated into Japanese
for bilingual performance? This chapter will consider the implications of
just such a cultural production, namely The Gull , a contemporary Noh play
written by Canadian writer Daphne Marlatt, which grounds the Japanese
dance drama in Canadian history, specifically the uprooting and intern-
ment of Japanese Canadians following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on
7 December 1941, but harnesses the emotional and somatic intensity of
the stylized Noh movement and music to renew the story through per-
formance. The Gull was written mainly in English, and then translated by
Toyoshi Yoshihara into Japanese for the play’s bilingual intercultural per-
formance by a Noh master and Canadian cast. Using the Japanese language
and art to redress the cultural loss through assimilation that was acceler-
ated by the internment and dispersal of the Japanese Canadian commu-
nity also repositions Noh as a collaborative intercultural performance that
foregrounds change. In its inscription of the poetry of Roy Kiyooka, Joy
Kogawa, and Roy Miki, The Gull both extends the allusive system of Noh to
include Japanese Canadian writers and introduces Noh as a viable form of
Canadian cultural production.
This chapter will approach The Gull as an intercultural Noh play whose
linguistic, cultural and semiotic translations reveal its extensive ‘webwork’,
a term Marlatt has used to describe both the ‘connective tissue’ of etymol-
ogy, which has been an ongoing part of her writing praxis, and our links
to the environment:
[I]t seems to me that the various ways in which words connect, from
semantic links to the variety of musical links that poetry has always worked
with – that these links form a verbal analogue for the ecological webwork
we actually live within. Just as we tend to be unconscious about the extent
of the connective tissue between words because we are so intent on get-
ting our immediate meaning across, so we tend to be unconscious about
the vast extent of the ecological webwork that supports us, and we loot it,
exploit it, for our immediate needs. (2009a, p. 28)
Marlatt’s interest in etymology, as well as the connection between lan-

guage and environment, was shared by Fenollosa, who saw Chinese char-
acters as a script where ‘the etymology is constantly visible’ (Fenollosa and
Pound, 2008, p. 97). As he explained in his controversial The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry, edited and published by Pound in 1919,
the character was ‘a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature’,
that spoke ‘at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility
of sounds’ (p. 45). Pound took the mistaken idea of the written character
as ideogram and ran with it in the direction of a new universal language
‘more basic than Ogden’s Basic English and more reliable’ (Saussy, 2008,
p. 7), whereas Fenollosa, informed by Buddhist thought, saw it as part of
the web of interpenetrations that grounded language in nature. As both
a Buddhist and a contemporary poet, Marlatt understands webwork as a
fundamental aspect of Noh:
Noh Theatre is not about plot or character in a realist sense, although it

is very much about human emotions such as jealousy or longing. In fact,
the principal roles are less individualized characters than figures in a
net of relationships torn apart by some traumatic event. In a Noh script,
they are indicated simply by their generic names, Shite , or principal per-
former, and Waki and Wakitsure , secondary performers, and there is the
Ji or chorus. (2009a, p. 48)
In other words, character and plot development are not the focus of a
Noh play, at all; what are important are the relationships that resonate in
performance.
Marlatt’s notion of a webwork of association and chance is also found in
her ideas about translation. In describing her own approach to writing and
to translation as a creative literary mode, Marlatt has foregrounded the gaps
in the webwork where the work of the writer and translator are inflected
or diverted by unintentional differences (1998, pp. 69–70). The web of
sound and meaning in The Gull is enriched by its bilingual mix of English
and Japanese in performance and the multi- sensory intercultural weave of
words, images, voices and bodies that tell a story of the Japanese diaspora on
the West Coast. At the same time, an awareness of this webwork draws atten-
tion to ‘the ways that the movements of groups always necessarily intersect,
leading to exchange, assimilation, expropriation, coalition, or dissension’
(Edwards, 2006, p. 92) and the multiple and contradictory roles that trans-
lation can play in all these interactions. This suggests that webwork is not
just about deliberate connections being made, but also those that emerge
by chance in the mesh of contingencies. This chapter will examine some of
the layers of translation that create and comprise part of the complex and
mutable webwork of The Gull as collaborative intercultural theatre.
Translating Steveston Migrations
In November 2002, Heidi Specht, the Artistic Director of Vancouver- based

Pangaea Arts, an intercultural theatre group, approached Marlatt about
the possibility of writing a contemporary Noh play about Steveston, a fish-
ing village located at the mouth of the Fraser River on the Pacific coast
of British Columbia. According to Specht, she had been deeply moved by
‘Unearthing the Silence’, an archaeological dig which had uncovered arti-
facts from the Japanese Canadian community there prior to the Second
World War: ‘Once a thriving fishing community, Steveston seemed to be
the perfect setting for a Ghost Noh, common in the Noh play repertoire’
(Specht, 2006, p. 7). She also wanted the play to make an historical link
between Steveston and Mio, a small fishing community on the coast of
Wakayama Prefecture in Japan. In the 1880s, villagers from Mio had begun
emigrating to Steveston to fish the waters teeming with salmon and work in
the cannery, which for a time was the busiest on the West Coast.
Before the Second World War, Steveston was the second-largest Japanese
Canadian community, with the majority tracing their roots back to Mio.
From the outset, however, the Japanese residents in Steveston faced racist
discrimination within and outside the fishing industry. In 1893, the white
and First Nations fishermen went out on strike to demand a reduction
in the number of fishing licences issued to Japanese fishermen; until
the 1920s, it was illegal for them to use motorized fishing boats. Things
got much worse, however, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Canada
immediately declared war on Japan, and under the War Measures Act,
Canadian citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry found themselves
officially translated into enemy aliens. On the West Coast, houses, fishing
boats, cars and other property were seized, Japanese language schools
closed, and Japanese Canadians forcibly removed from their homes and
legally restricted from venturing within 100 miles of the coast. By the end
of 1942, more than 12,000 Japanese Canadians were living in internment
camps in the interior of British Columbia, and the government sold their
property to pay for their incarceration. When the war ended in 1945, they
were encouraged to ‘repatriate’ to Japan, regardless of whether they had
been born in Canada, spoke only English or had never seen Japan before.
Travel restrictions were not lifted on Japanese Canadians until 1949, when
28 fishermen were allowed to return to Steveston to work after negotia-
tions with the fishermen’s union (Marlatt, 2009b, p. 16), with more follow-
ing in 1950.
Initially, Specht had asked Joy Kogawa about writing a Noh play about
Steveston; Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1994 [1981]) had been the first fic-
tional treatment of the internment by a Japanese Canadian writer. Kogawa
declined but suggested Marlatt because of the latter writer’s literary
engagement with the town over several decades. In the early 1970s, Marlatt
had been hired as the editor of a small oral history project, and along
with photographers Robert Minden and Rex Weyler, had gone to Steveston
with Maya Koizumi, who was interviewing retired Japanese Canadian fish-
ermen in Steveston to gather a history of the community. The uprooting
and internment came as a shock to Marlatt as she listened to the first-hand
accounts: ‘[I]n 1972, the internment and all the suffering it entailed was
still a suppressed episode of Canadian history, not taught in the public
school system and barely written about’ (Marlatt, 2009a, p. 30). Koizumi
translated the interviews she conducted in Japanese and in 1975 Steveston
Recollected: A Japanese Canadian History, edited by Marlatt, was published by
the Oral History Division of the Provincial Archives of British Columbia.
As Marlatt explains, ‘Because my introduction to Steveston was through
oral history, voices have been an important part of my work there’ (2009a,
p. 30), although later works creatively grounded in Steveston have added
‘textual voices’ to the vocal interweaving (p. 45) and insisted on being told
in more than one medium.
The oral history of Steveston began as taped interviews in Japanese that
were translated into English and edited, and supported by photographs
taken during the project as well as historic photographs from the provincial
archives. In Steveston (Marlatt and Minden, 1974), a poem cycle paired with
photographs by Robert Minden, Marlatt tried to write the ‘motion of fluid
space’ (Kamboureli, 1991, p. 118) and locate the voices of the community
in the context of the eco- system of river, ocean and the migratory cycles
of salmon and people. Steveston has been published twice since then by
two different publishers, with poems and photographs rearranged, essays
added and even a new poem written for the 2000 edition. In her collec-
tion Salvage (Marlatt, 1991), in which she rewrote selected Steveston poems,
Marlatt turned to the language of photography to describe the poetic proc-
ess of a first and second ‘take’ on poems written in two different decades.
Rewriting earlier poems by viewing them through a feminist lens allowed
Marlatt to foreground the background and make present what had been
absent or overlooked. In The Gull , as will be shown, the words move towards
music and performance to ‘sound some of the deeper emotional layers’
(Downey, 2006, online) of the traumatic removal of Japanese Canadians
from the West Coast, their internment and delayed return. Noh’s formal
difference helps expose still hidden aspects of the story that go beyond a
dark historical incident that has been officially redressed and laid to rest.
Marlatt has called her returns to Steveston over the past several decades
‘writing migrations’ (2009a, p. 26), but a sense of mutability and cyclical
return is characteristic of all her work. When The Gull: The Steveston Noh
Project was staged on 10–14 May 2006, it was performed inside a large tent,
pitched in front of the Richmond City Hall, a larger municipality adja-
cent to Steveston that has absorbed the fishing community. The temporary
nature of the tent spoke not only to the voluntary and enforced movement
that had marked so many Japanese Canadian lives, but also to the fleeting
nature of performance. Steveston, as Marlatt observes, ‘now exists only in
people’s memories’ (2009a, p. 26), but the words, images, exhibits and per-
formances, such as The Gull , extend its afterlife.
Noh Play, Replay and Interplay
For Marlatt, the proposal to write a contemporary Noh play linked her
long- term literary engagement with Steveston with her interest in Noh,
which had begun in the early 1960s with a course in Japanese literature
in translation taught by Dr Kato Shuichi at the University of British
Columbia; she was fascinated by Noh’s mix of poetry, music and dance,
and the ‘otherworldly personages’ and their poignancy (Marlatt, 2009b,
p. 16). Nevertheless, there was much she needed to learn in order to
write a Noh play, so Specht introduced her to Richard Emmert, a Tokyo-
based American deeply engaged in Noh as a certified instructor and
performer of traditional Noh, artistic director of Theatre Nohgaku
(a company of English- speaking Noh performers) and composer and
musician.
To prepare for the project, Marlatt read and analysed Noh plays in
English translation and visited Japan to watch performances in Japanese
and access Emmert’s personal Noh library in Tokyo. Her research also took
her to Mio in Wakayama Prefecture and the small museum there dedi-
cated to the emigrants who went to live on the West Coast of Canada. In
Wakayama City, she also met Matsui Akira, a renowned Noh actor of the
Kita School, who would agree to direct, choreograph and play the role
of the shite (doer) in The Gull . Matsui’s lifelong commitment to tradi-
tional Noh has not made him uneasy about innovative performances. He
has written scripts and choreographed productions, and, with Emmert,
co- directed three English-language Noh productions: Yeats’s At the Hawk’s
Well and Allan Marrett’s Eliza at the University of Sydney in 1984 and 1989,
respectively; and Arthur Little’s St. Francis, at Earlham College in Indiana
in 1988.
Emmert collaborated with Marlatt as her dramaturge and was the com-
poser and music director of The Gull . According to Emmert, thinking of
Noh in terms of ‘theatre’ or ‘play’ is misleading: ‘Noh is a dance drama
where elements of highly stylized modes of music, song and dance are
prominent and even dialogue is a stylized rendering which is more akin
to singing than speaking’ (2009, p.10). Further, the physicality of the per-
former and the relationship of movement, text and music are primary to
the art form: ‘[I]t is the physical aspects and their creation of a level of
energy that builds and subsides but is always maintained that makes nô nô’
(Emmert, 1997, p. 25). Workshops on chant and movement led by Emmert
acquainted participants, including Marlatt, with the musical structure of
Noh. His thorough knowledge of Noh and ability to explain it in Japanese
and English made him an essential liaison between the Noh musicians
from Japan who played the traditional instruments – the nôkan (Noh flute),
kotsuzumi (shoulder drum), ôtsuzumi (hip drum), and taiko (flat drum) –
and the Canadian chorus singing in English.
Marlatt worked with Emmert to adapt the (mainly) English words of the
script to the waka style of alternating seven- and five- syllable lines set to
eight bars of music:
As we sounded the syllables of each line, adding one or two here, cut-
ting one or two there, finding alternate words for those that would be
difficult to enunciate clearly in chant, I learned the difference between
poetry to be read and poetry to be sung. [. . .] I learned that I had to con-
dense what was being said, rely on images to carry verbal associations,
and rely on the music of the words in rhyme, off-rhyme and alliteration.
(Marlatt, 2009b, p. 26)
The English script then had to be translated into Japanese for the
purposes of rehearsal and performance. Although he speaks English,
Matsui preferred to use Japanese in his performance of the shite . In
terms of the story, this seemed apt as he plays the spirit of a Mio- born
mother who speaks little English (Emmert, 2009, pp. 5–6). The task of
script translation was given to Yoshihara Toyoshi, an experienced thea-
tre translator responsible for the Japanese translations of most of the
Canadian plays that have been performed in Japan. After completing
the fi rst draft, Yoshihara found collaboration with Matsui necessary to
ensure the translation was rhythmically compatible with the dance and
music of Noh.
This cycle of collaborative learning about Noh was repeated at every
stage in the development of The Gull in workshops, training sessions and
rehearsals. It extended to the public, who received information about
Noh through open workshops and exhibits, such as the Noh Mask exhibit
and lecture demonstration on making a Noh mask held at the Richmond
Museum, to display the work and share the expertise of Hakuzan Kubo,
the Wakayama artist and Noh mask maker who carved special masks for
The Gull . In short, before a Noh play could tell a Canadian story, there
was a need for actors, musicians and viewers to understand at least some
of the history of the art and the principles on which its stylized structure
is based. Yet in the development and performance of The Gull , the his-
torical context of the West Coast was always present, too, whether in the
staging of two public readings of The Gull at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery
National Historic Site and National Nikkei Museum and Heritage Centre
and inviting critical feedback from the audiences, or in the multicultural
background of the people involved.
Translation and the Traditional
The repertory of traditional Noh plays consists mostly of plays from the
Muromachi period (1336–1573), with most of these written by Kannami
and his son Zeami. The language is archaic but the stories are familiar
to Japanese audiences. The plays are usually classified into six groups:
god pieces (kami mono); battle pieces (shura mono); wig or woman pieces
(katsura mono); mad pieces (kuruimono) and revenge pieces (onryômono);
earthly pieces (genzaimono) and last pieces (kirinohmono). The types of
plays in each group are further classified in terms of dance or story. Plays
in the first group usually, but not necessarily, appear first in a formal pro-
gramme, with plays from the other groups following in order. According
to Nogami, there are many ways to build a programme, but the funda-
mental principle that governs the order of the plays in a programme is
that of jo (initial part), ha (middle part), and kyû (final part), which is
related to the tempo and tension of music, movement and voice during
performance: ‘The initial part is to be represented solemnly and power-
fully; the middle part finely and delicately; the final part briefly and rap-
idly. The middle part is the substance of the programme and the longest’
(Nogami, 1934, p. 41). Between the plays, it is customary to relieve the
emotional intensity with a comic interlude of kyôgen , performed by actors
trained in this separate art.
A Noh play is more focused on the visual and the auditory than on plot
and character development. In ‘How The Gull / Kamome Took Flight’,
her introduction to the Talonbooks edition of her play (a bilingual edition
which includes Yoshihara’s Japanese translation), Marlatt mentions Karen
Brazell’s term for the style of many Noh plays as ‘stream- of-imagery’:
Because the text is conveyed in images, a Noh play can powerfully trans-
late psychological conflict into a series of repeating images that verbally
re- enact the obsessive nature of this conflict. Noh re- enacts attachment
to lovers who are transient, to enmities long-played- out, to bodies that
have withered and died, to places that have become nearly unrecogniz-
able over the years, and it conveys the emotional truth of how this attach-
ment amounts to a haunting that is a form of intense suffering. The play
in its unfolding works as a ritual release from that suffering. (Marlatt,
2009b, p. 31)
Working with levels of association, a Noh play weaves phrases and images
from classical Japanese poetry and other plays into its texture; these are
‘replayed over and over from play to play, and each time they accrue a
slightly different meaning’ (Marlatt, 2008). In The Gull , there was ‘a kind
of space’ Marlatt was trying to reach through words, as Noh’s highly meta-
phorical and symbolic nature and a ‘zen feeling’, allowed her to approach
‘a large view of life and death’ (2008) in the telling of a story of a suffering
spirit ‘that revolves around contested notions of what constitutes home as
that place where one belongs’ (2009a, p. 49).
In performance, The Gull was not presented as part of a multiple-play
programme; instead, like a traditional play, it was presented in two acts,
the maeba and nochiba , simply called Act I and Act II in the performance
programme. Between the two acts was a prose interlude, which borrowed
the comic aspects from kyôgen but was ‘both longer and more conversa-
tional’ (Marlatt, Programme, p. 5), and an integral part of the play.
Before a Noh performance begins, the musicians enter, carrying their
instruments. The order of entry is fi xed: the nôkan player is first, followed
by the drummers with their respective kotsuzumi , ôtsuzumi , and taiko, who
take their positions at the back of the stage in the hayashi- za , or musician’s
place, with the flute player and taiko player seated on the floor of the stage
and the other two drummers sitting on small stools. The chorus ( ji ) then
enters and sits in rows on the right side of the stage, with the chorus leader
sitting in the back row. (The chorus is usually comprised of six to ten men,
but The Gull used five, with Emmert as the leader.) Then it is time for the
entry of the actors, which is usually accompanied by music, called shidai .
The waki usually appears first, accompanied by one or more wakitsure and
recites his opening song. When he is finished, the chorus chants the lines.
Next is the namori , where the waki identifies himself by name and gives
the reason for his appearance. If he is a traveler, as the waki is in The Gull ,
making his way up the coast with his brother, the waki sings a michiyuki
song, which traces his progress and when finished, signals arrival at his
destination.
The Gull conforms to the order of a Noh play described above, but tradi-
tion is translated when the waki and wakitsure begin their entrance song in
English: ‘in late spring’s drenching sea-mist we return at last . . .” (Marlatt,
2009b, p. 41), a familiar language in an unfamiliar style for most in the
audience. Although the waki is usually the first to appear, the focus of a
Noh play is on the shite, or doer. The waki and wakitsure , who witness the
action of the shite, are strictly secondary actors. The shite, usually in a differ-
ent kimono and mask in each act of the play, is visually the most important
presence on the stage: ‘On stage the waki is relegated to an inferior place
in relation to the shite, clad in a drab costume, back to the audience and
half hidden by the [downstage left] waki pillar’ (Brandon, 1997, p.13). In
The Gull , the relationship between the shite and waki / wakitsure is played
out in provocative ways that involve language, sound and image. As men-
tioned, the shite is a Japanese- speaking woman from Mio, while the waki
and wakitsure are two Japanese- Canadian brothers, born in Canada and
English- speaking. As ‘Nisei fishermen heading up the coast from Steveston’
(Marlatt, 2009b, p. 42), they identify themselves as the Canadian-born chil-
dren of the Issei generation, who emigrated from Japan. Many of the Nisei
as well as third- generation Sansei experienced internment and felt inferior
and ancillary to both cultures. In Canada, they were estranged from their
Japanese heritage through the process of assimilation that was accelerated
by endemic racism and the trauma of internment. They spoke English but
were racially marked. In Japan, where the population had little knowledge
of or interest in the foreign-born Nikkei and their experiences elsewhere,
the Japanese Canadian was visually inconspicuous but culturally and lin-
guistically different. In Canada, they were considered Japanese; in Japan,
foreigners. The Gull does not blur the formal distinctions between shite and
waki , and closely follows the structure and stylized sequencing of Noh, but
by giving the waki and wakitsure greater prominence, and a distinct voice, it
not only nudges Noh conventions but politicizes the performance.
The Gull as Webwork
The creation of a Noh play by a West Coast Anglophone author and local
performers in collaboration with professional Noh artists from Japan not
only offers an innovative approach to Noh, but also initiates its recogni-
tion as an art form that can tell Canadian stories. Growing up on the West
Coast, Specht feels that Asian elements are integral to the narratives of
all who live there, regardless of their ancestry (2008). The multicultural
makeup of the West Coast was apparent in the casting. There were four
Japanese Canadians, including the waki , Simon Hayama, whose hometown
is Steveston, and David Fujino, who plays the role of an older Japanese-
born fisherman in the comic kyôgen interlude, who was born in an intern-
ment camp. The wakitsure Alvin Catacutan was born in the Philippines and
raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Specht felt the lead characters should be
played by actors of Asian ancestry to ‘really get at the underlying racism
against the [. . .] Asian population in a white dominated society’ (2008),
which is a part of West Coast history embedded in the specific historical
themes of the play.
The story takes place on the West Coast of British Columbia in the sum-
mer of 1950. In the first act, two Japanese Canadian brothers (the waki
and wakitsure) have returned to the coast to resume fishing now that the
restrictions on their movement have been lifted. Their parents died dur-
ing internment, and their father’s boat was seized, but as they head up the
coast in a rented fishing boat, the two brothers enjoy resuming their lives
and livelihood. When it looks like a storm is coming, the brothers seek
shelter at the coastal village of China Hat (Klemtu). As the brothers tie up
to wait out the storm, a creature (the shite, wearing the mask of a young
woman/gull) appears. To the waki , it seems to be a young woman, ‘hiding
her face in the fold of her sleeve’; the wakitsure sees a gull, ‘tucking its head
under a wing’. As the shite sings in Japanese of Mio, her lost home, and pit-
ies the brothers as Mio birds the waki listens: ‘Listening to her is like listen-
ing to our mother – I understand only part of her Nihongo [the Japanese
language]’ (Marlatt, 2009b, p. 47). Still, he must translate for the wakitsure ,
who as the younger brother has even less Japanese. The chorus sings a song
of the young woman arriving in Steveston as a picture bride, expecting a
better life and a younger husband, but finding she has been deceived. The
initial disappointments and hardships of her life on the West Coast are fol-
lowed by the internment.
In the kyôgen interlude, an older fisherman (the aikyôgen) visits the broth-
ers on their boat. As they drink and talk together, the aikyôgen asks after
the boys’ parents, and learns that their mother died of tuberculosis in
New Denver shortly after the end of the war. He remembers her fondly:
‘[S]he was quite a woman. She had that old Wakayama spirit. What a catch!’
(Marlatt, 2009b, p. 59). As they talk about the mother and the seagull on
the wharf, the boat rocks, but when they look outside there is no sign of a
real storm. The aikyôgen suggests that the young woman/gull they saw on
the wharf might be a ghost. ‘There are stories about China Hat, you know.
Some men have seen ghosts on their boats’ (p. 59).
As the second act begins, the nochijite (or shite of the second act), wear-
ing the mask of a middle-aged woman, appears again before the groggy
brothers dozing on the wharf. This time they recognize their mother, who
speaks of her sense of abandonment in Canada and tells them to go home,
back to Wakayama. The waki asks for forgiveness, but resists his mother’s
order (the English script says the shite speaks in English ‘home – you must
go!’ but this line is actually rendered in Japanese, except for the word
‘home’) with his answer, ‘what was home to you / Mother, is not home to
us’ (p. 71), revealing within the bilingual dialogue of the play the linguistic
and cultural drift that has taken place between the generations. The shite
then does a powerful dance of ‘grief, anger and confusion’ (Downey, 2006,
online), but, as the chorus sings of her understanding of the ocean as con-
nection, of ‘ joining here and there’ (Marlatt, 2009b, p. 73), the spirit is
released from its suffering and ‘quick as a bird’ (p. 74) she disappears.
The production of The Gull localized the Noh stage, costumes and
masks. Set designer Phillip Tidd used Noh stage-building specifications
(Knutson, 2008, p. 8) but replaced the traditional painting of a pine tree
usually found on the backdrop of the Noh stage with a photograph of the
island and harbour of Klemtu, foregrounding the background of the story
with this image of the distinctive coastal landform that had given China
Hat one of its names. The hashigakari , or bridge, which is used to enter or
exit the Noh stage, was draped with fishing nets to resemble a wharf, with
wooden pilings marking the four performance pillars of the stage.
Margaret McKea, the costume designer, dressed the waki , wakitsure and
the aikyôgen in clothing actually worn by fishermen in the 1950s, and the
waki and wakitsure make their entrance carrying lantern, gaff and net. Even
the shite, clad in the mask and kimono associated with traditional Noh, had
to adapt to conditions on the West Coast: the mask worn in the first act is
framed by fishing net and the shite wears a kimono and a grey rain cape.
The waki wears a Cowichan sweater, an iconic symbol of the West Coast
associated with the First Nations. This visually serves to not only locate the
story but also to overlap the identity of the Steveston-born waki , who calls
the West Coast home, with the First Nations who called the West Coast
home prior to colonization and immigration, and are a fundamental but
silent part of the story unfolding on the Noh stage.
The Webwork of Languages
Marlatt calls the title of her play The Gull a ‘tragic pun’ based on the idea
of being a ‘gull’ or gulled, and the image of sea bird/woman, who feels she
has been deceived. The writer felt, however, that she did not play nearly
enough with language. Just as Nogami saw the dense intertextual construc-
tion of the classic works of Noh as an obstacle to translation, Marlatt found
it an obstacle to writing Noh because she could find nothing in the ‘classic’
Canadian canon that matched the wealth of allusion inscribed in Japanese
Noh plays nor a local geography of place-names imbued with symbolic
association. There was a longstanding and rich oral tradition among the
First Nations of the coast, but like much on the colonized coast, what did
not exist in English did not exist at all:
The West Coast and particular places along it have a rich and lengthy
oral history in the myths of the First Nations peoples who have lived here
for thousands of years. But because of the federal government’s long
attempt to deculturate the indigenous peoples, these are not generally
known within the context of Canadian culture at large. In our literature
there is little that has been written about the village of Klemtu or the vil-
lage of Steveston. Neither name registers on the Canadian literary map.
[. . .] Setting the play on a boat tied up at Klemtu/China Hat is a small
bow towards that long oral tradition. (Marlatt, 2009b, p. 25)
The lack of foundational literary texts and allusions marks gap and
absence as an integral part of the history of the West Coast in general,
and of Japanese Canadians in particular. In fact, part of the ‘accumulating
weight of histories, memoirs, novels, photo exhibits, historic sites’ (Marlatt,
2009b, p. 24) and poetry by Nikkei writers comes from the stones of silence
that are necessarily part of the story. Within The Gull , it is the spare but stra-
tegic use of a Japanese word, such as Nisei or Nihongo in the English text,
as well as the terms of Noh themselves, which operate as stones thrown in
the ‘fluent drifts of culture’ (Marlatt, 1998, p. 71), creating ripples that may
redirect ideas in different directions and towards an awareness of all the
languages operating unofficially in bilingual Canada.
The Gull draws on a selective but suggestive constellation of texts to create
its own network of literary allusions, including the Noh play Sumidagawa
and poems by Joy Kogawa, Roy Miki and Roy Kiyooka, Canadian writ-
ers with frayed relationships to both Japanese and English, whose works
nevertheless are filled with word play. Yoshihara’s Japanese translation of
some of these poetic fragments embedded in The Gull does not quite come
to grips with the sense of linguistic estrangement which has marked the
Nikkei experience in Canada, which has included both the loss of Japanese
through assimilation accelerated by internment and a troubled relation-
ship with English, which is the language they use, but also the language
which was used against them to stifle their Japanese identity. For example,
Marlatt uses lines from ‘Sansei Poem’ by Miki (1991), who was born on
a sugar beet farm in Francophone Manitoba where his Nisei parents had
been forcibly resettled. The poem recalls images of the West Coast prior to
the uprooting, but it is not just the words but the gaps between them that
are crucial to the impact of the poem:
the sun
the sea our children
like marigolds our boats
Yoshihara’s translation fills in the gaps of the poem in English, linking the
children and ocean and sun [kodomoto umito taiyô]. The lines in translation
no longer contain the absences that allow the poem to operate within the
play to impart a sense of the emotional silences and linguistic blockage
that are such a profound part of the history of Japanese Canadians.
The work of artist Roy Kiyooka also forms part of the literary webwork
of The Gull . Kiyooka, who was raised in Calgary, developed his own lan-
guage, which he called ‘inglish’, a language visually and semantically dis-
tinguishing itself from English and ‘inflected by the memory of speaking
his mother tongue’ (Miki, 1998, p. 50), his mother’s Japanese. The appar-
ent slippage in terms of spelling and grammar in the quotation below is
wholly deliberate; Kiyooka was trying to create a language out of English
that could express the particulars of a life marked by the experience of
growing up within a racist pecking order, and the emotional loss involved
in linguistic assimilation:
[E]verytime I have tried to express, it must be, affections, it comes out

sounding halt, which thot proposes, that every unspecified emotion I’ve
felt was enfolden in an unspoken Japanese dialect, one which my child-
hood ears alone, remember. (Kiyooka, 1990, p. 116)
The war interrupted Kiyooka’s formal education at grade seven; the rest
was all self-learning. As Marlatt recalls, ‘His Japanese had stopped devel-
oping in childhood, and as soon as he was in Calgary, English “thicken-
ings” began to happen all the time but the Japanese ones didn’t’ (2008).
There were many lines from Kiyooka’s poems that Marlatt could have used
in the play but she ‘kept going back to those about the distance and the
sea’ (2008), looking for one to link to an image of the ocean that sepa-
rates rather than estranges the shores of Wakayama and the West Coast;
that ‘washes against and joins both there and here’ (2009b, p. 54). Marlatt
finally chose a passage from Kiyooka’s ‘Wheels’, which sounded for her ‘a
sense of incredible longing and distance and separation’, to be chanted by
the chorus just before the shite dances in the second act, giving voice to ‘the
fragmented heart of generational difference shaped by both settlement
and the historic unsettling of the community’ (2009a, p. 54): ‘nothing but a
mouthful of syllables / to posit an ocean’s breath, the poet wrote / nothing but brine
and a little bit of air – ’ (p. 72). This is reiterated by the shite ’s dance, which
articulates the anger and dismay of a community that was both afraid and
ashamed to express anger at the injustice of their unsettling and dispersal,
but also performs its resolution. As Yoshihara commented, ‘Noh is the best
way to express quiet anger, which is why I [was] interested in this particular
project. The style and subject perfectly match’ (Abell, 2007, online).
The Gull as Translation and Performance
The last line of The Gull is sung by the chorus, a unity of voices chanting
in English of the ‘unbroken sea’ that unites rather than separates. This
idea is strikingly similar to Marlatt’s fluid notion of translation, which she
describes in her essay ‘Translating MAUVE’, about the creative potential
of translation to rework linguistic constructions of women’s identities into
another field of associations. Marlatt writes of her sense of the reciproc-
ity of the process of her creative English translation of ‘Mauve’, a poem
by Quebec writer Nicole Brossard, and Brossard’s French translation of
Marlatt’s ‘Character’:
There is the horizon line of language which represents the edge thought
comes to, and then there is the leap beyond that borderline of words,
beyond the edge of the page, which I came to see as a leap beyond the
separateness of two languages, two minds. [. . .] [T]his erotic transgres-
sion of borders, corporeal, cultural, and linguistic, where meaning seeps
through the poem from one mind to another [. . .] is a fiction, yes, but
it carries an element of truth, like my etymological shift from malva
(mallow) to maiwa (gull or mew riding that horizon line between two
elements). (1998, pp. 72–3)
This idea of translation operating in a Noh play of the Canadian West

Coast adds a further contour to The Gull ’s important acknowledgement
of the different trajectories and diverse stories of citizens that go so often
unseen and unheard. That is, it suggests that instead of being a process
that privileges a text or a traditional practice or a target language – having
a subject and an object – translation is a process with two reciprocating
subjects. In a world marked by migration and ocean crossings, translation
is a necessary operation not just for the migrant but for the ‘in-place citi-
zen’ who also has ‘a responsibility to learn new ways of hearing and see-
ing the issues’ (Hunter, 2006, p. 158) and must recognize that silence and
absence must be given their due weight, as well.
The Gull as successful intercultural theatre – it won the prestigious
Uchimura Naoya Prize in 2008 – was a complex collaborative performance
of linguistic, cultural and semiotic translation. Noh as a ‘traditional’ form
of Japanese theatre offered a new way to tell a Canadian story; the story of
the West Coast repositioned Noh as a style of performance that was neither
‘essentially’ Japanese nor outside history. In the process, it drew attention
to Japanese, and more broadly Asian languages and cultural practices and
productions, which have shaped and been shaped by the history of the
West Coast; it also showed how a cultural practice such as Noh, which uses
stylistic rigour, sound and the intensity of a thoroughly trained body to
move beyond language, draws attention to the way that translation oper-
ates in multi- sensory productions. The vocal and somatic iterations and
elaborations of what is said in two languages render The Gull exemplary
of how the ‘same’ narrative can be framed in very different ways and be
embedded in larger narratives (Baker, 2010, p. 119), and provides a model
for collaborative translation, especially where partial cultural and linguis-
tic knowledge must be pooled.
References
Abell, T. (2007), ‘Noh Plays about Steveston?’ The Richmond Review. [Online,
accessed 12 September 2010 at www.pangaea- arts.com/press/richmond-review.
htm]
Baker, M. (2010), ‘Reframing conflict in translation’, in M. Baker (ed.), Critical
Readings in Translation Studies . London: Routledge, pp. 113–29.
Brandon, J. R. (1997), ‘Introduction’, in J. R. Brandon (ed.), Nô and Kyôgen in the
Contemporary World . Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, pp. 3–15.
Downey, J.M. (2006), ‘Healing Japanese Canadian diasporan history – multicul-
tural Noh play The Gull’. Kyoto Journal 68. [Online, accessed 15 August 2010 at
www.kyotojournal.org/10,000things/043.html]
Edwards, B. H. (2006), ‘The futures of diaspora’. Kokusai Heiwa Kenkyû Hôkoku, 24,
91–109.
Emmert, R. (1997), ‘Expanding Nô’ s horizons: considerations for a new Nô perspec-
tive’, in J. R. Brandon (ed.), Nô and Kyôgen in the Contemporary World . Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, pp. 19–35.
— (2009), ‘Reflections on The Gull and English Noh’, in D. Marlatt (ed.), The Gull .
Vancouver: Talonbooks, pp. 9–14.
Fenollosa, E., and Pound, E. (2008), The Chinese Written Character as a Medium
for Poetry. Edited by H. Saussy, J. Stalling and L. Klein. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Hunter, L. (2006), ‘Daphne Marlatt’s poetics: particulars and public participation’.
Open Letter, 12, (8), 156–83.
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Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Kiyooka, R. (1990), ‘We Asian North Americanos: an unhistorical “take” on grow-
ing up yellow in a white world’. West Coast Line , 3, 116–18.
— (1997), various works, in R. Miki (ed.), Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy
Kiyooka . Vancouver: Talonbooks.
Kogawa, J. (1994 [1981]), Obasan. New York: Doubleday.
Knutson, S. (2008), ‘Through pain to release: Japanese and Canadian artists col-
laborate on a British Columbian ghost Noh drama’. alt.theatre , 6, (1), 8–17.
Marlatt, D. (1991), Salvage . Red Deer: Red Deer College Press.
— (1998), ‘Translating MAUVE’, in D. Marlatt (ed.), Readings from the Labyrinth .
Edmonton: NeWest, pp. 69–73.
— (2008), Personal interview. Vancouver, 25 February.
— (2009a), At the River’s Mouth: Writing Migrations . Nanaimo: Institute for Coastal
Research.
— (2009b), The Gull . With Japanese translation by Y. Toyoshi. Vancouver:
Talonbooks.
Marlatt, D., and Robert Minden (1974), Steveston . Vancouver: Talonbooks.
Miki, R. (1991), Saving Face: Poems Selected 1976–1988. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press.
— (1998), ‘Inter-face: Roy Kiyooka’s writing, a commentary/interview’, in R. Miki
(ed.), Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: The Mercury Press,
pp. 54–76.
Nogami T. (1934), Japanese Noh Plays: How to See Them . Tokyo: Board of Tourist
Industry, Japanese Government Railways.
— (1938), Honyakuron: honyakuno rironto jissai. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Pound, E., and Fenollosa, E. (1959), The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan . New York: New
Directions.
Saussy, H. (2008), ‘Fenollosa compounded: a discrimination’, in H. Saussy,
J. Stalling and L. Klein (eds), The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.
New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 1–40.
Specht, H. (2006), ‘Notes from Heidi Specht, producer’, The Gull Programme, 7.
— (2008), Personal interview. Vancouver, 25 February.
Tansman, A. (2009), The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism . Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Uchino, T. (2009), Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New
Millennium . Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Waley, A. (1957), The Nô Plays of Japan . New York: Grove Press.
Yao, S. G. (2002), Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics,
Language . New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chapter 6
The Journalist, the Translator, the Player and

His Agent: Games of (Mis)Representation and
(Mis)Translation in British Media Reports
about Non-Anglophone Football Players1
Roger Baines
University of East Anglia
English language news reports relating to first language interviews given

by non-Anglophone football players or managers working in England often
appear to have been skewed or misrepresented when filtered back from
their source language context. Searching for ‘mistranslation’ and ‘foot-
ball’ or a similar combination of words with an internet search engine pro-
vides many examples of players defending themselves from comments that
the UK press claim they have made in interviews in their own language.
This interpretative essay considers examples of mistranslation and/or mis-
representation in the interlinguistic mediation of sports news relating to
non-Anglophone footballers in the context of the English Premiership.
Globalization is the overarching context which creates the interlin-
gual news events in the reporting of the football industry in the United
Kingdom. However, there are also local factors which influence the media-
tion of this news: the hypothesis is that both the tabloid press and players
and agents use spin to capitalize on the potential for misrepresentation
that interlinguistic transfer brings. This hypothesis is explored through
three case studies.
First-hand interview data are difficult to obtain, not least because of the
highly protective barriers placed around expensive players by their multi-
million-pound clubs,2 and this makes an empirical approach unrealistic.
Accordingly, examples for analysis were collected via a search on the inter-
net and in the written press for incidents of UK press news information
relating to non- Anglophone Premiership footballers which included refer-
ence to mistranslation or misrepresentation. The data was then narrowed
down to examples which provided evidence of the processes under enquiry
The Journalist, Translator, Player and His Agent 101
and for which I had the resources to analyse text in both source and target
languages. Globalization and news translation theory are discussed first as
background. This is followed by description and analysis of three examples
and the concept of resemiotization/recontextualization is then taken up in
the final discussion.
Globalization and News Translation
The forces and effects of globalization are apparent both in the sports
and translation industries. My case studies show ways in which interlin-
guistic mediation events demonstrate the effects of familiar elements of
globalization – both in the nature of the events themselves and in their
interlinguistic mediation in sports news. However, I also suggest that there
may be factors which influence the mediation other than those forces com-
monly identified in existing analyses of the process of global news transla-
tion. These commonly identified forces tend to be time pressure created
by a highly competitive global market for the commodity that is ‘news’,
space restrictions and news relevance for the target audience. It is generally
argued that these forces contribute to practices which include rewriting
(often from more than one source), summarizing, deleting, synthesizing,
reordering, the addition of background information for a different reader-
ship and acculturation.3
In academic terms, in line with the expansion of the sports and media
industries, news translation, sport, and sport and the media have all become
significant areas of research activity – see, for example, Bielsa and Bassnett
(2009) on news translation and Bernstein and Blain (2002) on sport and
the media. Sport has a vast international audience. It is big business and,
consequently, big news. Sports news is, therefore, subject to a great deal of
interlinguistic mediation. Globalization is significant in both fields. Bielsa
and Bassnett describe its main features as follows:
Two fundamental features of globalization are the substantial overcom-

ing of spatial barriers and the centrality of knowledge and information,
resulting in the increased mobility of people and objects and a height-
ened contact between different linguistic communities. Thus, globality is
manifested not only in the creation of supraterritorial spaces for finance
and banking, commodity production [. . .] and global markets, but also
in the increased significance of travel and international movements of
people [. . .], and the consolidation of a global communications system
which distributes images and texts to virtually any place in the world.
(2009, p. 18)
There is evidence of features of globalization in the football industry in

general, in the English Premiership in particular and in news reporting on
that industry. In terms of increased mobility of people and heightened con-
tact between different linguistic communities, much has changed in the
UK football industry since McGovern’s research on the internationaliza-
tion of the English League between 1946 and 1995, in which he concluded
that the influx of foreign players came from cultures which most resem-
bled local sources in terms of climate, culture, language and style of foot-
ball (McGovern, 2002). Since then, there has been enormous migration of
footballers into the Premiership from a very wide range of cultures for two
main reasons. Firstly, the establishment of the Premiership in 1992 pro-
gressively brought with it huge player contracts, enabled by the injection of
television money. Secondly, the 1995 EU Bosman ruling removed restric-
tions on the movement of professional football players between clubs in the
European Union and made illegal restrictions on the number of foreigners
permitted to play for clubs. This encouraged non-EU players to seek nat-
uralization in the EU and allowed a boom in the international transfer
market. For example, in the 2008–2009 season, there were 330 non-UK
players in the Premiership from more than 60 countries (Stokeld, 2008),
compared to 116 from a much smaller range of countries in 1999 (Lowrey
et al., 2002). This makes the Premiership a rich site for interlinguistic and
intercultural exchange, and interlinguistic and intercultural conflict.
The global communications system to which Bielsa and Bassnett refer,
which distributes images and texts to virtually any place in the world, is
also significant in the context under discussion. The system enables the
interlinguistic mediation events under investigation but has also facilitated
the growth of the market within which the reporting of such events, across
a multiplicity of modes, occurs. Football has become a huge global com-
mercial industry.4
Bielsa and Bassnett point out how globalization studies has ‘obscured the
complexities involved in overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers and
made the role of translation in global communications invisible’ (2009,
p. 18). The study of sport and the media, and translation studies, have
both questioned the local versus global dichotomy that is often the basis of
generalized descriptions of globalization and have highlighted the prob-
lems inherent in understanding globalization as a homogenizing process
(see, for example, Bernstein and Blain, 2002; Cronin, 2003). There is now
a considerable amount of work in both these fields, as well as in globaliza-

tion studies, which underlines how the forces of globalization have in fact
created a tension between differentiation and homogenization, ‘glocaliza-
tion’ and globalization, and this is a significant element in the analysis of
the data in this essay.
Case Study 1
In 2009, the Danish Arsenal player Nicklas Bendtner used the UK Press
Complaints Commission to force an apology from the British tabloid news-
paper the Daily Mirror for a story which, using a Bendtner interview with
Danish publication B.T. as a source, made inaccurate claims about the
player’s attitude to whether he should be in the Arsenal team or not. The
relevant extract of the original B.T. piece read:
Jeg mener stadig, at når jeg spiller op til mit bedste, så skal jeg spille fra
start ligegyldigt, hvem der er klar eller skadet. Jeg går ind hver gang med
den samme tro og indstilling, og hver gang forsøger jeg at vise, at jeg skal
spille fra start. (Josevski, 2009)
[I still think that, when I am playing at my best, I should play from the
start, regardless of who is ready or injured. I always have the same belief
and attitude, and every time I try to show that I should play from the
start.]
The Daily Mirror quoted this, under the headline ‘Big ’Ead Bendtner’, as: ‘I
should start every game, I should be playing every minute of every match
and always be in the team’ (Cross, 2009a, p. 66). Even in this short extract,
the summarizing and deleting practices of global news translation can
be identified. The quotation inaccurately summarizes Bendtner’s words
by deleting the qualification about his fitness and form and the temper-
ing of his self- confidence via the phrase ‘try to show’. Bendtner is conse-
quently misrepresented as having made an arrogant claim. Although it can
be argued that this is evidence of the overarching forces of globalization,
there are more obvious local factors involved.
It is useful first to examine what the mediation process may have been
and some evidence of this comes from the journalist, John Cross. Following
an initial complaint from the player, Cross claims in a separate article that
the quotes he used were offered directly by a Danish paper to him and a
colleague on a broadsheet newspaper (Cross, 2009b). The website ‘Sport
Without Spin’, which investigates misleading information in sports stories,

pointed out that the news agency The Press Association had disseminated the
news about the original Danish interview on 10 February under the less dra-
matic headline ‘Bendtner keen to stake claim’, but then later repeated the
story that the Daily Mirror ran on 15 February under a less restrained head-
line, ‘Bendtner backs himself as top Gunner’ (Sport Without Spin, 2009).
News agencies aspire to be impartial and accurate and follow stringent
double- checking procedures.5 However, these two accounts suggest that
the news story did not come to the Daily Mirror from a news agency, where
the translation would have been subject to standard double- checking, but
that there was direct contact between national media outlets. The transla-
tion could accordingly have been provided by a journalist-translator from
B.T., possibly by machine translation as a cheap and rapid way of managing
the highly competitive global market for the commodity of news, or even by
a journalist-translator at the Daily Mirror. There is no evidence for where in
the process the translation occurred. However, it appears that someone in
either the translation process or the journalistic process (or both) elected
to practise what Baker (2006, p. 114) calls ‘selective appropriation of tex-
tual material’ for a better story.
It seems possible that this particular news translation process may have
been influenced by what the particular paper saw as being a story that
would sell papers. Such manipulation is not unheard of when there are
no linguistic barriers. For example, Poulton’s account (2005) of the way
in which British hooliganism was reported during the 2004 European
Championships in Holland and Belgium provides conclusive evidence
of the British tabloid press chasing and even managing the situations in
which supporters found themselves in order to produce the kinds of vio-
lent events that would feed the story and, consequently, sell more newspa-
pers. In the Bendtner case, the mistranslation/misrepresentation is due
to manipulation of information by the Daily Mirror for profit via increased
sales. Although there is no available evidence of the misrepresentation
being explicitly due to mistranslation, it is probable that the linguistic
barrier enhanced the opportunity for profitable misrepresentation. That
there was misrepresentation is undisputed because Bendtner complained
to the Press Complaints Commission, which required the following pub-
lished apology from the newspaper:
On 15 February, under the headline ‘Big ’Ead Bendtner’, we quoted

Nicklas Bendtner, from an interview given to a Danish newspaper, as
saying ‘I should start every game, I should be playing every minute
of every match and always be in the team’. Nicklas Bendtner actually

said, ‘I constantly believe that when I am in my best playing form then
I should play from the start, whoever is ready or injured’. We are happy
to make this clear and regret any misunderstanding. (Press Complaints
Commission, 2009)
The process of globalization is apparent in the Bendtner news story because

his participation in the Premiership is an example of labour migration and
the global media interest in him reflects the commercial commodity that
football and its players have become. The motives behind the misrepresen-
tation, however, operate on a more local level than the macro level forces
of globalization. As Baker points out, sensationalizing in order to improve
circulation is common in the tabloid press in most countries (2006, p. 119).
It is particularly marked in the British tabloid press (see Conboy, 2006,
p. 13) and the Bendtner example suggests that sensationalizing/spinning
is a local factor which, in conjunction with globalization and because of the
opportunity afforded by linguistic barriers, affects the exchange and trans-
lation of information in the football industry in the United Kingdom.
Case Study 2
My second example involves an instance in which misrepresentation in the

UK media is described as being explicitly due to mistranslation. Unlike
in the Bendtner case, analysis of the texts involved provides no evidence
of inaccurate transfer that could be due to translation, but the subjects of
the news stories, their representatives and journalists use mistranslation
prominently to explain the divergences which emerge when the stories are
mediated in the UK press. There is evidence of the kind of sensational-
ist reporting examined in the Bendtner example above, but also evidence
of the subjects of the interlinguistically mediated stories using spin from
behind the shield of claimed mistranslation to try to influence what is
reported in a way that benefits them, regardless of factual or translational
accuracy.
The Bendtner example illustrates a news story about a non- Anglophone
football player in the Premiership. However, news stories about such play-
ers are most prevalent when there is potential transfer activity surround-
ing a player, and this is when questions of translation are most prominent.
For example, the following players were involved in transfer news stories
between 2007 and 2010: the Gabonese Daniel Cousin (then Glasgow
Rangers, now Hull City, December 2007); the Belarusian Alexander

Hleb (then Arsenal, now Stuttgart, July 2008); the Ivorian Didier Drogba
(Chelsea, January 2009); the Paraguyan Roque Santa Cruz, (then Blackburn
Rovers, now Manchester City, May 2009); the Spaniard Cesc Fabregas
(Arsenal, June 2009); the Russians Roman Pavlyuchenko (Tottenham
Hotspur, August 2009) and Andrei Arshavin (Arsenal, April 2010). There
are many more, but what all these particular news stories relating to the
English Premiership have in common is that at some point, the agent or
player claims that words attributed to the players in the UK press have been
misrepresented through mistranslation or because they were taken out of
context.6 This can happen to British players in the United Kingdom but it
is much less frequent: the absence of linguistic barriers means the mate-
rial is less susceptible to the kind of gaps in communication that journal-
ists can exploit for sensationalist reporting. Such reporting provides the
news material that can create potentially beneficial transfer rumours/news
stories for players and their agents. In the first case study, the motivation
of UK tabloids to create sensationalist stories to improve circulation was
identified as an additional factor affecting the exchange and translation of
information in the football industry in the United Kingdom, in conjunc-
tion with the conditions created by globalization. A further factor may be
the influence of the agent, as suggested in the following report by Setanta
of a press conference by the Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. This is his
response in April 2010 to news speculation that Andrei Arshavin wanted to
leave the club, following UK reporting of an interview Arshavin had done
in Russian:
I just put one question mark behind the things that come back trans-
lated. Usually you have direct access to him, you can ask him where that
comes from. I don’t forbid you to talk to him, but I take with a little bit
of distance what comes back translated sometimes with the help of some
agents who want to move the players. (Setanta, 2010)
The Argentinean player Carlos Tévez (now of English Premiership club

Manchester City) signed for Manchester United in the summer of 2007 on
a two-year deal where he was effectively on loan and the club had an option
to buy him outright after two years. On 5 January 2009, Tévez conducted a
radio interview in Spanish with the Argentine radio station Radio del Plata
which was not authorized by his club. English Premiership players are usu-
ally very strictly controlled by club press offices in terms of what they can
and cannot say to the press – a consequence of the huge amounts of money
involved in the football industry, particularly in the United Kingdom.7 In

the interview, Tévez was ostensibly specifically contradicting reports which
suggested that he had been made an offer to stay at the club and was not
happy with this offer. However, the press reports in the United Kingdom of
the interview presented a different story.
On 6 January, The Independent quoted the Radio del Plata interview
accurately under the headline ‘Tevez fires contract volley at Ferguson’
(Wallace, 2009). The Mirror, however, presented it differently. It is not the
quotes in the article but rather the headline – ‘Carlos Tevez could sign for
Manchester City or Real Madrid after contract row’ (Nixon, 2009) – which
stretches what was said and speculates on the information rather than
reporting it. In neither article is there evidence of any inaccurate informa-
tion which could be explained by mistranslation. However, the news story
swiftly developed beyond Tévez expressing his dissatisfaction with the way
Manchester United had treated him. An additional specific comment that
he would like to move to Real Madrid in Spain is reported inaccurately as
having been made in the radio interview on the website Clubcall later the
same day. The text indicates that Tévez made the comment about wanting
to play for Madrid in the Radio del Plata interview:
[. . .] The Argentinean striker voiced his frustration to a radio station

over comments made by Sir Alex Ferguson that Tevez had rejected a
permanent deal to stay at the club. The 24-year- old also confirmed that
he would be interested in joining Real Madrid should he fail to agree a
long term contract with Man Utd. [. . .] Going on to speak about Real
Madrid Tevez had nothing but praise to lavish on the Spanish giants.
‘Like Manchester, they are one of the best clubs in the world and it would
be a pleasure to play for them,’ Tevez added. (Clubcall, 2009)
The Clubcall text is evidence of the practice of news translation rewrit-

ing from more than one source, but rewriting from more than one source
in a way that produces a significant misrepresentation. The extracts relat-
ing to Real Madrid from the original Radio del Plata interview show that
Tévez does mention Real Madrid, but at no point does he say what he is
quoted as saying by the Clubcall website (and, subsequently, many other
news outlets):
Fernando Niembro (FN): Cuando uno lee en los diarios españoles, dicen:
«Tévez está muy cerca del Real Madrid» ¿Hay algo de cierto de en eso?
Carlos Tévez (CT): No, todavía ni yo sé mi futuro, ¿no? Pero como te

decía, seguro que ahora están todos igual de condiciones para poder
arreglar el contrato, ¿no? Un contrato con el Madrid o con cualquier
club; yo creo hoy están todos en esa posición porque, digamos que hoy
puedo, hoy puedo arreglar mi contrato con cualquier club, ¿no?
FN: Pero Carlos, ¿te quedarías ahí en el Manchester, o te vas a ir del
Manchester?
CT: Sí, me quedaría, pero no, ellos tampoco hicieron una oferta para
que yo me quede.
(Tévez, 2009)
[Fernando Niembro (FN): When you read the Spanish newspapers,
they’re saying: “Tévez is very close to Real Madrid”. Is there any truth in
that?
Carlos Tévez (CT): No, I still don’t know what my future holds . . . no? But
as I was saying to you, I’m sure everyone’s just as capable of arranging a
contract now, no? A contract with Madrid or whatever club; I reckon eve-
ryone’s in that position now ’cause, let’s put it this way: right now, I could
sign with any club, no?
FN: But Carlos, would you like to stay with Man U, or are you looking to
leave?
CT: Yeah, I’d stay, but they haven’t made me an offer to make me stay.]
So, if mistranslation can be ruled out, what did happen? According to The
Sun , the Radio del Plata interview was followed up by a phone call from
Tévez to the UK tabloid on the same day as the radio interview (see Custis,
2009). The next day, under the headline ‘Tevez: I’d love to play for Real
Madrid’, The Sun journalist Shaun Custis makes no mention of the radio
interview but does make a new claim ‘Tevez admitted in a Spanish maga-
zine: “Who wouldn’t want to play for Real Madrid? Like Manchester, they
are one of the best clubs in the world – and it would be a pleasure to play
for them.” ’ (Custis, 2009). This is arguably the source for the additional
claim. The consequence for the consumer of news is that the latter, more
newsworthy story takes over and there is evidence of this inaccurate, con-
flated story being repeated on websites and in newspapers and various
other media outlets, too.
In the wake of these press stories, it was suggested by Tévez’s agent/rep-
resentative, Kia Joorabchian, that the comment reported by The Sun and
subsequently conflated with the Radio del Plata material ‘had been made
in a Spanish magazine interview a few months earlier and was in fact a
comment on the possibility of then team mate Ronaldo moving to Real

Madrid’ (see Herbert, 2009). So, while the Clubcall article is evidence of
journalism using more than one source to create a new story, it is also evi-
dence of sensationalist reporting based on inaccurate information, jour-
nalistic spin regardless of factual accuracy, what Joorabchian called in a
BBC interview ‘mischievous reporting’ (BBC Sport , 2009).
The cause of the misrepresentation has nothing explicitly to do with
interlinguistic transfer but the response of Joorabchian to the misrepre-
sentation is an example of spin. Players seeking to move clubs without their
employer’s agreement can make themselves unpopular as doing so can
alienate colleagues and fans. It can also be costly to the player, as he for-
goes certain economic rights if the initiative does not come from the club.
Joorabchian’s media briefings provided the defence that the additional
quote came not from the radio interview but from a different and dated
source. However, he also commented, as reported by The Guardian , that
there had been ‘something lost in translation from his original interview’
(Taylor, 2009), even though there is no evidence for this. This strategy is
not unusual.
Case Study 3
Evidence of similar spin can be found in the reporting of a press confer-

ence held in Seville by the Spanish manager of Spanish club Sevilla, Juande
Ramos, in August 2007 in which he said that he had been made a ‘dizzy-
ing’ (mareante) offer to join Tottenham Hotspur. Once this was reported in
the United Kingdom, denials came from Ramos and Tottenham to explain
what had become an uncomfortable situation, because Tottenham had a
manager and had made no formal approach to Sevilla about their man-
ager. The UK reports of the press conference focused on the word ‘dizzy-
ing’. The Tottenham Hotspur website claimed no job offer had been made
and suggested there had been some mistranslation (see Lowe, 2007), while
Ramos, according to the Eurosport website, claimed ‘translation problems
caused his words to be misconstrued’ (Chick, 2007), and in an interview
with The Times he claimed to have been misrepresented: ‘When I described
a possible offer as “dizzying”, I only meant the kind of money English clubs
can pay at the moment makes any possible offer dizzying. People have put
words in my mouth’ (Balague, 2007). As with the Bendtner example, we can
only speculate on where in the process the actual translation occurred – it
might have been done by journalist-translators at the press conference, or
by journalist-translators working for news agencies or for particular UK
media outlets. However, an examination of the text of Ramos’ press confer-

ence reveals unequivocally that there was no ambiguity, no mistranslation
and no misrepresentation in the UK reporting:
A mi, me trasladan una oferta muy buena, excelente, mareante, si queréis,

lo que vosotros queráis pero yo tengo un contrato con el Sevilla hasta
junio de 2008, y lo normal es que lo cumpla. (Canal Sevilla, 2007)
[They’re making me a very good offer, an excellent offer, dizzying, if you
want, however you want to put it, but I’ve got a contract with Seville until
June 2008, and the normal thing would be for me to fulfil it.]
This does not, however, prevent Ramos, Tottenham Hotspur and journal-
ists from claiming misrepresentation and mistranslation, as we have seen.
Once again, in the interlinguistic mediation of information in the context
of football, blaming the emergence of undesired information on a ‘bad’
translation is perceived as appropriate, even when there is no evidence to
support such a claim. Mistranslation is a handy scapegoat; in fact, the jour-
nalists could have looked more closely at the translation and taken Ramos
to task for his duplicitous disavowal, for his own misrepresentation of what
he said. As with the Tévez case, nothing was lost in translation, but the
responses of Ramos and Tottenham Hotspur again demonstrate spin for
the target text context of the United Kingdom where Ramos would shortly
arrive to work, spin which is designed to protect economic interests.
Discussion
The first case study was an instance of mistranslation/misrepresentation by

journalists within which mistranslation may have played a part, the second
case study one of misrepresentation by journalists through conflation, not
through mistranslation, even though translation is called into question, as
it is in the third case study where the claimed misrepresentation is unfairly
blamed on mistranslation by both a club and journalists. The scapegoat-
ing of translation in the Tévez and Ramos cases suggests that there is an
awareness of the potential usefulness of the interlingual communication
gaps that interviews in a foreign language can create when mediated into
English, and agents can exploit this. Whether the misrepresentation was
as unwelcome for Tévez and his representative as it was for Bendtner and
Ramos, for example, is debatable. When the inaccurate story about Tévez
is disseminated widely, it clearly signals the potential availability of the
player without the player having to take the unpopular, and potentially
costly, step of asking for a transfer and can lead to a transfer or to an
improved contract; either way, the effect is generally one of improved eco-
nomic circumstances. The migrant non- Anglophone footballer and/or his
agent operating in the wealthy globalized football industry may knowingly
use linguistic difference to help enhance his career prospects, aware that
the fact of a foreign-language interview mediated into English can pro-
tect both player and agent from responsibility for the information. One
journalist-translator who works in the football industry suggests that this is
common practice:
I think there are clearly cases where the foreign press are utilized delib-
erately to issue broadsides at the player’s club, especially at times of con-
tract negotiations. Agents certainly know all about using this as a tactic.
And the player always has the ultimate get- out clause by playing the ‘lost-
in-translation’ card, if the comments come back on him. (Anonymous,
pers. comm., 27 May 2009)
There is research evidence of news being adjusted in translation in order

to serve ideological ends, for example in the contrastingly domesticated
and foreignized translations of Saddam Hussein’s trial in the Iraq war-
supportive The Daily Telegraph and the Iraq war- critical The Independent ,
respectively (see Bassnett, 2005). Ideology, though, does not appear to
be what is at stake here. The common thread for all the misrepresenting
participants in the examples above is that they seek to present a version
which is to their advantage because of the economic gain this can bring –
the Daily Mirror in the Bendtner case, various news outlets in the Tévez
case via improved sales and Ramos via the desire to protect his reputa-
tion but also not to jeopardize the ‘dizzying’ deal that did in the end take
him to Tottenham. For Tévez and his representative, any misrepresenta-
tion is ostensibly accidental but potentially very lucrative. This is in line
with examples of cases in which agents of social power can influence the
translation process more than translators; these include ‘monied clients,
principled or unprincipled editors, potential contractors, and other agents
wielding rather more social power than do those who merely translate’
(Pym, 1992, p. 176).
Once economics constitute a factor, power becomes significant. The
interlinguistic processes under investigation involve an examination of a
global business but while the subjects of these processes, the players, may
be migrants, they are far from being locked in the kind of power asymmetry
debated by postcolonial translation theorists such as Niranjana (1992) and

Spivak (2004), because they have considerable economic power, especially
when there is a potential transfer/contract renegotiation from which they
and an agent can gain. In the context of literary translation, Venuti (1998)
has argued that the dominant players/agents in the Anglo-American pub-
lishing industry exert power via a homogenizing influence on the type of
literary texts which are translated into English, and he has demonstrated
the acculturating strategies of such ethnocentric translations. It has been
shown by Bassnett (2005) and Bielsa and Bassnett (2009), among others,
that the requirement for news translation to produce acculturated texts
produces a similar homogenizing effect because the objective is to bring
a message to the target reader in a clear, concise and wholly comprehen-
sible way. The patronage here, like the patronage of the Anglo- American
publishing industry, comes from the power of the worldwide news outlets,
which demand acculturation. These conclusions are general ones, based
on sizeable data. The examples of the interlinguistic mediation of foreign
language interviews by non- Anglophone footballers (and a manager) in
the English Premiership that I have examined are necessarily a restricted
pool of data. Nonetheless, my examples do suggest that the mediation into
the UK press of foreign language interviews given by non-Anglophone
players (and a manager) is not an acculturating process in which differ-
ence is eradicated. In all three examples, linguistic difference, or the
expectation of linguistic difference, is central to the mediation of the news
stories. Linguistic difference gives journalists and editors the opportunity
to spin stories, to edit in a way which misrepresents in order to sell papers
(Bendtner), and to exert economic power. Linguistic difference or the
expectation of the problems this may cause gives the subjects of the news
stories the power to misrepresent themselves (Ramos). Although the power
dynamic in the Tévez case study is not as explicit as in the other two exam-
ples, in my view, considerable power lies with the player’s agent or repre-
sentative. Their economic capital enables them to dominate the foreign
culture and manipulate it to their ends. In arranging foreign language
interviews, agents have the power to take advantage of the potential for
interlingual mediation to broaden gaps, a process which enables them to
safely diffuse the information they want to diffuse, but which also provides
them with a screen behind which they can hide. The Tévez example is not
an isolated occurrence, as demonstrated by the list of examples above of
non-Anglophone players who, personally or via their agents, denied trans-
fer rumours which had emerged following a foreign language interview
mediated into English.
The complications of interlingual mediation create an environment which

is ripe for exploitation. This is enhanced by the dissemination across a wide
range of modes creating a complex network of unregulated dissemination
which broadens gaps, potentially providing room for agents to create produc-
tive tension. The media through which the Bendtner and Tévez news stories
are disseminated present a distinctly multimodal aspect in that the stories
appear in the printed press, on radio, on television and on websites where var-
ious channels of information operate simultaneously. However, multimodal-
ity is not the main factor in the power dynamics under consideration. It is the
wide variety of modes of dissemination through which the information passes
sequentially which greatly enhances the effect of the news stories. The huge
effect of the internet on the speed of dissemination of information enables
misleading stories about players to affect huge numbers of news consumers,
thus enhancing the power of the message. Because different modes present
information differently, ‘translate’ information differently, what occurs to any
interlingually mediated information that is disseminated in different modes
is what could be termed resemiotization, defined by Iedema as ‘how meaning
making shifts from context to context, from practice to practice, or from one
stage of a practice to the next’ (2003, p. 41).
All that is being dealt with here is a kind of recontextualizing shift from
context to context. In the cases where the mode changes, there is a shift in
code, in signs with which the information is relayed, from radio to written
press, or television to internet, for example. Resemiotization can thus be
said to be occurring across contexts between Tévez’s radio interview and
paper and digital press reports, for example, where it has been identified
that an inaccurate story emerges due to source conflation, and between
Ramos’s press conference and written press reports. In both the Ramos
and Tévez cases, it is the subjects of the news stories who appear to actively
seek to use resemiotization/recontextualization as a shield when those
who do not have access to the source language context question the infor-
mation that has been mediated.
In an essay entitled ‘Inter- semiotic translation and cultural represen-
tation within the space of the multi-modal text’, Desjardins (2008) dem-
onstrates how the aural or verbal texts in Québecois newscasts about
reasonable accommodation and immigration are accompanied by images
of a cultural stereotype of ‘otherness’, of headscarves, YMCA pools and
sugar shacks. She comments that:
Because intersemiotic translation creates cultural artefacts, it is a part

of the overall process of cultural translation, in which we (as in the
collective ‘we’) try to understand and negotiate our identities in relation

to identities that are ‘Other’ to us. In so doing, intersemiotic translation
needs to mobilize some of the insights provided by other disciplines such
as postcolonial thought and ethics in order to revert some of the power
imbalances we are currently faced with. (Desjardins, 2008, p. 54)
As already stated, it is not multimodality but rather the sequentiality of mul-

tiple modes which are in evidence in the examples in this essay. However,
in contrast to Desjardins’s illustration, what is striking about what I am sug-
gesting is how the balance of power differs. In the Ramos and Tévez cases,
it can be argued that much of the power in the interlinguistic exchanges
mediated through textual translation is in the hands of the ‘other’, of the
migrants. This is because, within the framework of a very wealthy business
that is the football industry, non- Anglophone players and their agents are
extremely powerful economically. Not only are the players very wealthy, the
agents command huge fees; in the 2008–2009 season, £70.7m was spent
on agents by Premiership clubs in a 12-month period (see Smith, 2009).
This indicates the financial importance of agents in the industry and, con-
sequently, indicates the economic motivation behind the work of agents
seeking transfers for their Premiership clients. Being ‘other’ gives the play-
ers, and by extension their agents, a shield to hide behind if necessary, but
it does not give the players a weak position like the postcolonial ‘other’ –
quite the opposite.
Conclusion
In terms of globalization, Miller et al.’s comment that ‘the move towards a

global sports complex is as much about commodification and alienation as
it is to do with utopian internationalism’ is apposite (2001, p. 4). The play-
ers/managers are commodities in the sense that they can be bought and
sold and the English Premiership is necessarily a site of linguistic conflict,
with the potential for alienation because of the enormous hybridity of its
workforce. There is no levelling out of difference that utopian internation-
alism implies, far from it. The material that has been analysed supports the
argument that the globalization process which has transformed the foot-
ball industry into a highly marketable global commodity with near- global
media coverage, strong evidence of a mobile migrant workforce and conse-
quently heightened contact between different linguistic communities has
not created a homogenized area of activity. Globalization has created an
industry where linguistic barriers provide evidence of significant differen-

tiation, and of the tension between differentiation and homogenization.
Non-Anglophone footballers in the English Premiership create communi-
cation gaps and the potential for meaning-making shifts. Foreign language
interviews may well be a subtle weapon in the armoury of these footballers
and their agents. It provides them with the potential to have an impact to
their own advantage on transfer activity, and enables them to be absolved
of responsibility for that impact, an impact which is enhanced by the mul-
tiple modes of fast dissemination of information available.
The material examined appears to uncover processes that have not yet
been explored in detail and raises some questions. If linguistic differentia-
tion is used by editors, journalists and participants in news stories in sports
journalism to aid spin, to present news in a way that is advantageous to
them, is it likely that differentiation plays a similar role in the process of
news reporting in other areas of journalism where economics and power
are similarly at stake, such as international business and politics? Or does
the fact that sports news reporting is particularly transient and therefore
not subject to the same kind of rigorous scrutiny as business and political
journalism make sports journalism prone to mistranslation and misrepre-
sentation for economic gain? An examination of spin in interlinguistically
mediated texts in business and politics, as well as more empirically based
enquiries into the mediation of sports news across linguistic and cultural
boundaries are potentially fruitful areas for further research.
Notes
1. Thanks to Ben Engel, Bjorn Lofgren, Mari Webber and Leticia Yulita for their
help with obtaining, translating and transcribing material, and to the editors
of this volume, the anonymous referees and Marie-Noëlle Guillot for invaluable
advice on drafts of this essay.
2. For example, one interpreter who worked for a Premiership club refused to be
interviewed commenting on the club as follows: ‘[I]t is their strict business pol-
icy not to take part in any research studies because even if the project itself is
100% above-board there are people who could use the information contained
in such a project to their own advantage and against certain clients and busi-
nesses.’ (Anonymous, pers. comm., 27 June 2009).
3. See, for example, Bani (2006), Bassnett (2005), Bielsa (2005), Bielsa and Bassnett
(2009), Hursti (2001) and Orengo (2005).
4. The transfer fees paid in the summer of 2009, in the midst of a global recession,
help to illustrate this: the Brazilian Kaka moved from AC Milan to Real Madrid
for £56.5m and the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo moved from Manchester
United to Real Madrid for £80m, one surpassing the other in a matter of weeks
as a world record transfer fee. It is estimated that the English Premiership alone
will earn, in the 2010–2011 season, well over £3 billion in television revenue
(Gibson, 2010, p. 5).
5. See, for example, the description of the practices of the AFP agency in Translation
in Global News (Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009, p. 88).
6. The field of enquiry for the purposes of this essay is the English Premiership
but such stories are, of course, not confined to the interlingual mediation of
interviews by players working in the English Premiership.
7. There are indeed PR companies who offer players specific training in dealing
with the media. For example, Media Mentor have a ‘Lost in Translation’ sec-
tion on their website, which presents their radio training courses as a way of
avoiding ‘mishaps like Mr. Tevez’s’ referring to this specific interview (Media
Mentor, n.d.).
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at www.setanta.com/ie/Articles/2010/04/30/Boss- Arshavin- shock/gnid-
67633/]
Smith, J. (2009), ‘If agents are a waste of money, why do clubs still happily pay us
millions?’. The Times, 2 December. [Online, accessed 2 December 2009 at www.
timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/article6939848.ece]
Spivak, G. (2004), ‘The politics of translation’, in L. Venuti (ed.), The Translation
Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 369–88.
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February [Online, accessed 2 April 2009 at www.sportwithoutspin.com/foot-
ball090216bendtnerspin.htm]
Stokeld, N. (2008), ‘Football’s credit crunch’. New Statesman , 11 December. [Online,
accessed 11 December 2008 at www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/12/
wenger- arsenal-football-league]
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Guardian , 7 January. [Online, accessed 7 January 2009 at www.guardian.co.uk/
football/2009/jan/07/manchester-united- sir- alex-ferguson]
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Buenos Aires: Radio del Plata, 5 January.
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and New York: Routledge.
Vuorinen, E. (1995), ‘News translation as gatekeeping’, in M. Snell-Hornby,
Z. Jettmarová and K. Kaindl (eds), Translation as Intercultural Communication.
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Chapter 7
Drawing Blood: Translation, Mediation and

Conflict in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism
Brigid Maher
La Trobe University
Through a case study of the comics journalism of Joe Sacco, this essay
explores visual representations of the all-too-often invisible act of transla-
tion between languages. The processes whereby meaning is transformed
through translation can often be difficult to detect since translation gen-
erally involves replacement, as the source text is elided by its new target
language version. Some multimodal texts constitute a partial exception to
this; because they operate through more than one interpretative channel
at a time, multimodal texts have the potential to help make translation
seen and heard. In subtitled films, for example, source and target texts are
simultaneously present, reminding us of the linguistic and cultural trans-
fer taking place, regardless of whether we are able to understand both or
only one of the linguistic texts in question. Even if we rely on subtitles to
understand a film, we still hear and interpret elements of the audio track;
if we understand the source language, on the other hand, it can neverthe-
less be near impossible to ignore the subtitles. Through the juxtaposition
and interaction of words and images in his comics about war and interna-
tional conflict, Sacco, too, finds ways of ways of highlighting cultural and
linguistic difference, though not through the creation of a bilingual text.
Rather, he uses a range of semiotic and narrative techniques to highlight
the place of translation and interpreting in his own news-gathering and
reportage.
Comics and Journalism
Sacco is a Maltese-born American who trained as a journalist. His report-

age from conflict zones takes comic book form; black and white drawings
and narration are interwoven with commentary, dialogue, background
information, interviews, maps, and excerpts from newspaper reports or

press conferences. He combines many of the processes of journalism,
including the use of eyewitness input, research and careful fact-checking,
with the creative and artistic power of visual images in a composition that
uses techniques similar to, yet also distinct from, those of cinematic or
literary creation, including storytelling, the control of dramatic tension,
directing the reader’s visual field and perspective, and the use of irony.
Dragana Obradović describes Sacco’s work as ‘hybrid and liminal’ in
the way he presents recognizable and well-documented events in a non-
traditional form that requires very different reading strategies from most
journalism (2007, pp. 93–4). The use of comics to create a journalistic
account is, of course, unusual and the general unfamiliarity with this type
of journalistic-artistic production is evident in the range of labels schol-
ars have used to describe Sacco’s work, including ‘documentary comic’
(Obradović, 2007), ‘graphic travelogue’ or ‘graphic reportage’ (Walker,
2010). I use ‘comics journalism’ in order to highlight both the artistic debt
Sacco’s work owes to comics in a range of genres, as well as his scrupulous
journalistic methods.
Although comics have been very important in the global diffusion
and exchange of popular culture throughout the twentieth century and
beyond, they have been the subject of relatively little academic investiga-
tion. Recently, there has been an increasing appreciation of the artistic
and literary potential of comics and graphic novels (see Eisner, 2008,
pp. 148–49 on the concept of the graphic novel), especially as more and
more high-quality, well-produced texts have appeared. It is now widely
acknowledged that comics can treat a range of topics and themes, well
beyond the ephemeral light entertainment for children or the poorly
educated that had previously been associated with the medium and had
resulted in its stigmatization. In fact, the pluri-semiotic nature of comics
means they can be very complex indeed, and their conventions and expres-
sive possibilities require quite particular reading techniques in order to
be fully appreciated and interpreted. Sacco’s work demonstrates both the
semiotic potential of comics, and their effectiveness in exploring serious
and highly emotive topics in world affairs.
Sacco’s best-known works are about the conflicts in Palestine and in
Bosnia; he has also produced some short pieces on Iraq (Sacco, 2005b,
2006b, 2007b). In the present essay, I focus on three book-length com-
ics. The first, Palestine (Sacco, 2007a), originally appeared in serial form
between 1993 and 2001, but has since been collected as a single volume
of some 280 pages recounting Sacco’s visits to a number of different parts
Drawing Blood 121
of Palestine and Israel.1 Safe Area Gorazde (2006a, first published 2000) is
about the war in Goražde, Eastern Bosnia. Surrounded by Serb forces, the
town was declared a United Nations ‘Safe Area’ during the conflicts in the
former Yugoslavia. Sacco visited after the worst of the fighting in Goražde
was over, but at a time when travel was still restricted and the local popu-
lation was traumatized and uncertain about the town’s future. The Fixer
(Sacco, 2003) also focuses on the war in Bosnia, and in particular on a man
called Neven, who worked for Sacco as an interpreter, guide and all-round
fixer during his visits to Sarajevo in the mid-1990s, and whom he meets
again in 2001.2
In interviews about his work (Cooper and Kim, 2007; Farah, 2003;
Khalifa, 2008), Sacco has explained that he sees himself as telling stories
he feels usually do not get told or do not get enough attention, particularly
in the United States, where different ‘public narratives’ (Baker, 2006, p. 33)
dominate the news media. He tends to stay longer in a place than many
journalists would, and his interviewees are not generally the big decision-
makers, military men, politicians or bureaucrats, but ordinary people try-
ing to survive in a conflict situation.3 In both Palestine and Bosnia, Sacco
uses local contacts to find his subjects, and he frequently uses translators,
interpreters and fi xers to overcome linguistic and logistical barriers.
In conflict zones where there is strong international media interest,
translators and interpreters can be in high demand. Journalists do not
necessarily have the luxury of drawing on the skills of a trained and expe-
rienced professional; sometimes they may simply have to make do with
someone who has adequate skills in the target language and hope for the
best. At the same time, the skills required of translators and interpreters
in such situations often go well beyond the task of transfer between two
languages, as they may be required not only to provide linguistic and cul-
tural expertise, but also to find talent for interviews, organize transport,
make bookings, check facts and much more (Witchel, 2004; Working,
2004, p. 12). In other words, the kinds of qualities that are most sought
after are not only translation skills but also journalistic and networking
skills (Goldscheider, 2004). As Catherine Baker observes with reference
to interpreters working with peacekeepers in the region, for many locals
the job was a stop-gap or sideline rather than a career choice (2010, p. 73).
Given their varied backgrounds and the stressful conditions in which they
work, translators, interpreters and fi xers in a conflict zone are not always
entirely impartial, a point Sacco himself makes in The Fixer, yet he con-
cedes that ‘ journalists are dependent on these people, for good or bad’
(McKenna, 2004, n.p.).
What makes Sacco’s comics journalism unusual from the perspective

of translation studies, is that he quite often makes the process of transla-
tion visible in his work. This is in contrast to typical practice in more tra-
ditional forms of journalism, in which translation and interpreting tend
to be invisible. Much international news-gathering involves negotiating a
mix of languages and cultural identities but traces of these are rarely to
be found in news texts. In newspapers, radio and television, questions of
translation are generally considered peripheral, and an easy, invisible writ-
ing style is preferred. The speed imperative is central, and relates both to
the speed with which translations are completed, and the speed with which
news reports are consumed (Bani, 2006, p. 37). Thus, a newspaper article,
for example, could have involved an interpreter during face-to-face inter-
views in the field, or in-house translation of press releases, background
material or whole articles (Bani, 2006, p. 35; Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009), yet
this largely takes place behind the scenes and readers are likely to remain
entirely unaware of it.
In general, there is the perception that audiences prefer not to have to
think about the multiple agents behind a news story; the focus is rather
on getting the news across in the most succinct, effective and speedy way
practicable. Indeed, in an interview, the academic and former journalist
Barbie Zelizer says:
It’s not in journalism’s best interest for the public to realize how depend-
ent the story is on an interpreter. [. . .] It’s kind of like the maid. You want
your house to be clean; you want it to look like it always looks clean. But
you don’t want anybody seeing the maid coming in and that you’re pay-
ing dirt-cheap wages. (Goldscheider, 2004, n.p.)
Bielsa and Bassnett point out the gulf between the prestige and glamour
attached to the globe-trotting foreign correspondent and the low status
(not to mention poor pay and conditions) afforded their local interpreters
(2009, p. 60), and this low status is reflected in Zelizer’s ironic comparison
with maids.
The task of translators and interpreters in news production is multifac-
eted and often involves the blurring of boundaries between journalist,
interviewee, local expert and translator/interpreter, as well as, potentially,
a range of ethical complications. The loyalties of a local native-speaker
interpreter may be divided; Catherine Baker documents concerns about
this with interpreters for peacekeeping forces in Bosnia (2010, p. 166).
Interpreters and translators generally live in the community to which they
Drawing Blood 123
belong, but their employment by an outsider sets them apart somewhat

and, as noted above, they often lack formal training. Where they have pro-
vided input for a news item, the extent of their contribution to the finished
product often goes unacknowledged, although there are exceptions, as
some print outlets are now beginning to acknowledge in the byline the
role of local contributors in the production of news stories (Goldscheider,
2004; Witchel, 2004).
In situations that already involve significant conflict, where time is of the
essence and immediate facts and objectivity are highly valued, the intro-
duction of an extra level of complexity in the form of an acknowledgement
of translation and linguistic difference can sometimes be seen as muddying
the waters excessively. The widespread assumption elucidated by Zelizer is
that just as we would not be interested in hearing how our friends’ floors
got so shiny, we would not care to know how an interviewee was found, how
their eyewitness account got put into English, what risks a translator takes
by working for a journalist, or other such details of the cultural and linguis-
tic exchange that lies at the heart of much international news.
Given the widespread phenomenon of the invisibility of the translator
in other domains (cf. Venuti, 1995), the invisibility of translation in news
is hardly surprising then, especially given the very practical concerns that
underlie it. Sacco’s work, because of its different medium, production and
audience, provides something of a corrective to this. He draws attention to
the presence of interpreters in his interactions, acknowledging and eluci-
dating their crucial role, thus reminding readers of the mediated nature of
much journalism. Sacco uses many of the news-gathering methods of tra-
ditional journalism but the way he presents his reportage is quite different
and allows him the space and time to shed light on aspects that more con-
ventional journalistic texts often have to elide or ignore. Less constrained
by the demands of time-sensitive news dissemination, he fully exploits the
multimodal nature of comics to make his interpreters seen and heard.
Multimodality and Meaning-Making
As a freelance journalist working in an unusual subgenre, comics journal-

ism, Sacco has a degree of independence with regard to expectations com-
pared to someone seeking to publish in the traditional news media. Not
only are time pressures reduced, his works have a longer life than regular
journalism, especially now that they have appeared in bound collections.
This distinguishes them from more transient forms of news production,
such as reports in daily newspapers or in television bulletins. Furthermore,

reader input is likely to be considerable, because while the word count
may be low, attention to detail is required in processing the semiotically
complex messages of these comics, particularly the painstaking drawings.
For these reasons, as well as the fact that he does not rely on the patronage
of a major news outlet, Sacco’s journalism can be more personal and can
include a range of perspectives and considerations, including questions of
linguistic and cultural difference.
Sacco’s medium shapes not only the kind of news and analysis he pro-
duces for his readers, but also his news-gathering and interviewing style.
To reach the final stage where the printed comic recounts a story ver-
bally and visually, prior stages of translation and interpreting have taken
place. Interviews are interpreted and documents translated thanks to the
efforts of Sameh, Edin, Emira, Neven and others whose work as Sacco’s
guides and interpreters is depicted in his comics; moreover, these linguis-
tic mediators render day-to-day life in Bosnia or Palestine comprehensible
and liveable for Sacco, an outsider, by providing him with the kind of prac-
tical and cultural information he needs to understand his new environ-
ment. In addition, after Sacco’s interlocutors put their experiences into
words via the English of his interpreters, Sacco, in turn, performs a kind
of ‘intersemiotic’ translation by recreating these words and descriptions
as comics.
Sacco has described this process – the transformation from spoken word
into visual representation – in prefaces and interviews (e.g. Sacco, 2007a,
pp. xxii–xxiii; see also Groth, 2002, pp. 61–3). He asks his interviewees for
detailed visual descriptions, and in some cases even sketches, to aid in his
depiction of flashback scenes. In order to faithfully recall details of his own
experiences, he takes photographs and keeps a journal. His work is char-
acterized by a combination of the non-realistic features of comics art, and
detailed, at times almost documentary-like, drawings of landscapes, build-
ings, clothing and weapons. These include details of everyday life that help
give his work added authenticity and ask the reader to focus not only on
war but also on people’s day-to-day survival; such details are not usually
found in more conventional journalism (Obradović, 2007, p. 98). Sacco
explains that he tries to seek a balance between the factual detail essential
to journalism, and the power of the image uncluttered by words.
Multimodal texts like comics can provide a refreshing perspective on lan-
guage, by virtue of the very fact that they often eliminate or move beyond
language. One extreme example of the replacement of words with mean-
ingful images is Shaun Tan’s picture book The Arrival (2006), which tells
Drawing Blood 125
a story of migration and exile without using any written language at all.
By completely defamiliarizing all language and communication, Tan rec-
reates his protagonists’ sense of isolation and incomprehension, focusing
our response on the story’s emotional content rather than details of time
or place. It appears that at a basic level Sacco’s work, too, can transcend
language barriers. He says,
My guide had a copy of Palestine on my last trip to Gaza. He’d bring it out
and show people what I was trying to do. That usually went over pretty
well [. . .] they were able to look at it and say, ‘Oh, this is me, this is much
like the refugee camp I’m living in.’ (Gilson, 2005, n.p.)
By showing people the kind of work he does, Sacco can win trust and
encourage collaboration even without a shared language. While images
are by no means culture-free, and are no less at risk of manipulation than
language, a recognizable drawing can be an important reassurance for
people who might otherwise feel somewhat uneasy about foreign languages
and the prospect of being translated. When an interviewee’s story is inter-
preted into English, they may have no way of knowing what message will
come across, whereas if they can see the finished product in pictures, they
can at least recognize the places or people depicted. This can be particu-
larly important for groups that feel vulnerable, victimized, misrepresented
or misunderstood.
Making Translation Visible
Because of the visual nature of comics, we know what Sacco’s interpret-

ers look like – he includes them in some of his panels and does not try
to create the illusion that he works entirely single-handed. In one scene
in Palestine , for example, Sacco meets and interviews Ammar; his friend
Larry, an American expatriate, interprets for them and this mediating role
is depicted quite clearly. One panel includes a tearful Ammar on the left,
Larry on the right and Sacco in the middle, facing Larry, whose six speech
bubbles translate Ammar’s story:
He says he hasn’t worked in two years. He tried to start a business repair-

ing refrigerators but it never got off the ground. He says there’s no work
in Gaza. [. . .] He wants to know if it’s possible for him to get work in the
west . . . (Sacco, 2007a, p. 158)
Instead of just using a first-person translation as an outright replacement

of the original (‘I haven’t worked in two years’ etc.), Sacco’s inclusion of
Larry and his ‘he says’-reformulations draws our attention to the fact
that this is translated discourse, that a third figure is present, enabling
the interaction to occur. Without this framing device, the reader might
unquestioningly consider the translation to be a straightforward substi-
tute for the original utterance, or even forget altogether that Ammar’s
remarks were in Arabic and reached Sacco through an interpreter’s medi-
ation. It should also be observed that a further ‘translation’ from oral to
written discourse has taken place here, as the original bilingual conversa-
tion is ‘reshaped’ to fit into the spatial and rhythmic constraints of the
speech bubble.
In addition to depicting interpreters relaying information, Sacco also
makes translation visible by exploiting a key element of the semiotic rep-
ertoire of comics, the speech bubble. Although he never includes foreign-
language dialogue, the double-voiced nature of translation is ingeniously
depicted by varying the placement of the speech bubble, showing that
both the interviewee and the interpreter are speaking in a given inter-
action, building the final meaning between the two of them. Escorted
by Sameh, a resident who acts as his interpreter and guide, Sacco visits
an elderly woman in Jabalia refugee camp; in one scene of the inter-
view, the speech bubble comes from the woman’s mouth, but Sameh is
also pictured and appears to be speaking (Sacco, 2007a, p. 235). Several
pages later, the woman finishes relating her tragic story: ‘Seven months
after Ahmed died, my husband died . . . He had a heart problem . . .
They didn’t give him permission to go to Egypt to be treated until the
end . . . He died on the road . . .’ (2007a, p. 241). In the final panel
of the sequence, the speech bubble containing this last utterance, ‘He
died on the road’, is attached to Sameh, rather than the interviewee (see
Figure 7.1). By depicting the same story coming from both speakers, we
get a sense of the way both contribute to its enunciation. Sameh’s pained
expression at this dramatic moment tells us that translating the woman’s
trauma is emotionally difficult for him. He has, in a sense, taken on her
story as his own, hence his appropriation of a speech bubble that had
previously been hers.
Rendering translation visible in this way, Sacco also shows the traumatic
effect the translation of conflict can have on the individuals involved,
particularly interpreters working for someone like him, who needs a
great deal of detail and ‘vivid descriptions’ because of the visual nature
of his medium and his journalist’s desire to represent his interviewees’
Drawing Blood 127
Figure 7.1 Joe Sacco, Palestine , p. 241
experiences faithfully (Sacco, 2007a, p. 219). Reflecting on Sameh’s role as

mediator, Sacco writes,
How many soldiers? How did they beat you? Then what happened? He
helps me wring it out of the people I interview . . . And he’s heard every
blow and humiliation described twice, once by the person telling me,
and again when it’s come out of his mouth in translation . . . (Sacco,
2007a, p. 219, emphasis in original)
Mona Baker makes a similar point about the traumatic effect of interpret-
ing in child abuse cases or in the Truth and Reconciliation trials in South
Africa (2006, p. 32). She suggests that ‘ontological narratives’ – which she
defines as ‘personal stories that we tell ourselves about our place in the
world and our own personal history’ (2006, p. 28) – may be the most dif-
ficult to translate or interpret, as they require the translator to take on
another person’s story, all too often a painful one. Sacco’s panels certainly
seem to corroborate this, as he depicts the personal toll the translation of
trauma can take. Speaking another’s story, as Sameh does in the example
discussed above, means living that story, at least for a time. The shifting
speech bubble expresses this shared identity in a visual way, reminding
readers that the interpreter does not simply parrot or ventriloquize but is
actually part of the collective narrative into which each interviewee’s indi-
vidual (or ‘ontological’) narrative fits.
The comics medium allows Sacco to draw his readers’ attention to the
position of the interpreter, as he shows that as an intercultural expert, the
interpreter is simultaneously one of ‘us’ (speaking our language) and one
of ‘them’ (a member of a community whose culture, language and collective
experience differ greatly from our own). At the end of their conversation,
Figure 7.2 Joe Sacco, Palestine , p. 242
the woman interviewed in Jabalia expresses her cynicism about journalists

and questions what can really be achieved by yet another one observing
and commenting upon her people’s misery. As Sacco prepares to leave she
fires a barrage of questions at him, through his interpreter:
She asks, what good is it to talk to you? [. . .] She wants to know how
talking to you is going to help her [. . .] Aren’t we people too? She says
[people in Germany support us] with words only. [. . .] She says she wants
to see action. (Sacco, 2007a, pp. 242–3, see also Figure 7.2)
Sacco makes some attempts to justify his presence and convey the West’s
goodwill, but the woman is unmoved. We share his discomfort as ultimately
he seems to concede he has no answer to her question: ‘Well . . . Tell her I
don’t know what to say to her. Where’s my shoes?’ (p. 243). Relayed through
Sameh, the woman’s speech becomes more powerful because we get a sense
of two voices relentlessly asking these questions on behalf of a whole com-
munity of people. The faces crowded into some of the panels further add
to this impression of a collective challenge issued in two languages, even
Drawing Blood 129
though the text on the page is all in English. The depiction of Sameh’s
active participation in the exchange means we see him not simply as a
mouthpiece but as a fully-fledged member of this community.
Irony and the Task of the Journalist

Humour often plays an important part in comics. While some are char-
acterized by non-critical humour that serves largely as ‘a hidden rein-
forcement of the dominant myths and values’ (Eco, 1994, p. 38), others
use humour to reflect upon and critique complex situations. Because of
their multimodal nature, comics have considerable ironic potential, as the
superimposition of modes permits the simultaneous expression of more
than one perspective. For example, in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison
Bechdel (2006) at times uses captions as an expression of inner voices and
feelings, creating a contrast between the commentary by the text’s autobio-
graphical narrator and the scene depicted on the page. Sacco, too, exploits
the interplay between words and images to achieve ironic distance from
traumatic or frightening situations and to reflect in critical and humor-
ously self- deprecating ways on his own role as journalist. So while he gives a
sense of the potential for translation – and journalism – to create a space for
cultural exchange and understanding, as I discuss below, he also displays
a cautious irony towards his own desire to find voices of harmony or opti-
mism (see, for example, Sacco, 2007a, pp. 76, 131). Expressing both hope
in humanity and awareness of the complications of long-term conflict, his
ironic and self-deprecating tone echoes that found often in contemporary
travel writing which, in a globalized and postcolonial era, begins to turn to
irony and irreverence to express the de-centred position of the present-day
traveller and international commentator (Polezzi, 2006, pp. 180–1).4
Perhaps the central feature of Sacco’s irony is his cartoon-like depiction
of himself as unusually small and weedy with exaggerated facial features.
Most importantly, we never see his eyes behind his glasses. He has com-
mented that this might be a way of protecting himself and concealing his
own emotional response to his interviewees’ trauma (Cooper and Kim,
2007). Obradović suggests it can be seen as representing either the purity
of his gaze, or the blindness of an outsider (2007, p. 101), whereas for
Walker it serves as a ‘screen’ for the projection of the interviewees’ trauma
(2010, p. 76). It also means that Sacco often comes across as rather naïve
and lost, and he is certainly very open about the fear he feels at times in the
conflict zones he visits, especially Palestine (e.g. Sacco, 2007a, p. 118).
Sacco’s self-mockery is evident when he first arrives in Palestine. He

declares: ‘I will alert the world to your suffering! Watch your local comic
book store . . .’ (2007a, p. 27). In ironic contrast to his hopes of achiev-
ing great things through his journalistic intervention, the cartoon Sacco
reminds us of his – and our own – sense of powerlessness in the face of
war. His self-representation is a far cry from the ‘streak of machismo’ that
Ulf Hannerz finds in the autobiographical writings of many foreign cor-
respondents (1996, p. 123). While many of Goražde’s residents get excited
about the presence of an American journalist in their midst, ‘One old man
took one look at me and abandoned all hope that the U.S. military could
rescue Bosnia. “Americans are short and wearing glasses,” he noted to Edin
[the translator]’ (Sacco, 2006a, p. 190, original emphasis). Irony serves as
a sure-fire way of preventing Sacco’s fogged-up glasses – and the reader’s –
from becoming rose-coloured at the prospect of the utopian potential of
international journalism. Self-directed irony has been said to contribute
to a sense of community (Mizzau, 1989, pp. 105–6). Moreover, cartoon-like
figures (as opposed to more detailed, realistic depictions) are generally
believed to facilitate reader involvement and be easier for readers to iden-
tify with (McCloud, 1994, pp. 27–59, 204; Groth, 2002, p. 61). Thus, Sacco’s
multimodal depiction of his own moments of apparent self-importance in
ironic contrast with a decidedly unprepossessing cartoon image of himself
as bespectacled and at times befuddled, enables us to put ourselves in his
shoes as cultural outsiders trying to make sense of complicated conflicts.
Sacco’s frequent deployment of irony emphasizes his occasional discom-
fort with his role, as well as the unequal power dynamic in which the foreign
journalist functions. Sacco is totally dependent on his local contacts, but he
also knows he can leave at any time and return to the comforts of home.
I discussed above the distressing effect on Sameh of having to translate
accounts of personal trauma in Palestine. Further to this, Sacco learns that
Sameh’s job is at risk and he might be demoted, possibly because he has
been working for Sacco. He writes: ‘It’s an office politics thing [. . .] But my
presence has been the catalyst . . . Well think about how I feel . . .’ (2007a,
p. 220, original emphasis). The pair of them walk despondently through
the squalor of Jabalia, but in the first panel of the next page, we see that
Sacco’s inner journalist never rests: ‘That’d make a good picture . . .’ is his
thought as they pass by some goats nosing around in the rubbish (p. 221).
The irony here comes from the juxtaposition of Sacco’s empathy for Sameh
with his journalistic tendency to be always on the lookout for a good story
or image, even as someone else’s life might be falling apart.5 While he gives
readers what they want (realistic, heart-rending depictions of suffering), his
Drawing Blood 131
self-referential irony draws attention to his own intervention as mediator

and interpreter of this environment.
Mediating Agendas
Sacco’s depiction of his interpreters and their work emphasizes not only
the transfer of words and meanings but also the transmission of culture
and experience, the sharing of stories, and the importance of building
relationships and trust. This interpersonal aspect means that his work has
some overlaps with travel writing, but at the same time his journalistic
training and method show through and his comics offer revealing insights
into the news-gathering process.
Sacco highlights the journalist’s reliance on people’s generosity: shar-
ing their stories, homes, and often-scarce food (see, for example, Sacco,
2007a, pp. 43, 75, 164, 174; 2006a, p. 35). In what could seen as a recipro-
cal exchange, Sacco mediates the stories of his interpreters – particularly
those of Neven in The Fixer and Edin in Safe Area Gorazde – by relating
them to us, his audience. In this way, they become subjects in their own
right, as Sacco depicts some of the other roles they have in life – soldier,
teacher, student, brother, girlfriend – and reminds us that they have their
own personal struggles to relate, and an identity beyond the work they
perform for him.
Sacco’s interpreters are generally locals, and when they tell him about
their own experiences, he retains some of their non-native or not-quite-
idiomatic constructions, giving the sense that they really are speaking in
their own voice. This effect is enhanced by the medium, which requires
utterances to be short and simple, or broken up into several speech bub-
bles. Examples of some unusual turns of phrase include the following:
I’m not looking for such a home . . . I want some money only to make a
proper floor, not sand (2007a, p. 169)
We were thirsty the whole time walking (2006a, p. 137)
We were greeting each other on the street occasionally (2003, p. 38).
Michael Cronin (2000, p. 42) discusses some similar examples of travel

writers using non-native English forms to convey the idea that their inter-
locutors are speaking a foreign language. However, Sacco’s interpreters’
language is marked by non-native features only when they are talking about
themselves in English, not when they are translating other people’s stories.6
In this way, Sacco avoids giving the impression that everyone he speaks to is
somehow ‘foreign’; rather, the emphasis is on the fact that in these conver-
sations his friends are translating themselves for his (and our) benefit. The
technique seems somehow to make the reading experience more authentic
or documentary, as well as more personal.7 Thus, Sacco’s painstaking artis-
tic depictions of Gaza, Goražde, Sarajevo and elsewhere are backed up by
linguistic cues confirming the sense of place and of identity.
In Sarajevo, the charismatic Neven, fixer extraordinaire, offers comfort
and reassurance to Sacco, who feels like a fish out of water among the
tough guys he encounters (Sacco, 2003, p. 24). Guiltily indebted to Neven,
Sacco finds himself constantly buying him drinks, but at the same time,
as a budget-conscious freelancer, he is alarmed at the way when Neven is
around, ‘my wallet [. . .] eases out of my trousers and starts spewing money!’
(Sacco, 2003, p. 59). His account of his relationship with Neven constantly
reminds us of the power of money in a conflict zone. In her short piece
‘10 things journalists should know about fi xers’, Kathlyn Clore includes
as number two, ‘The motivations of a good fi xer should be transparent. Is
he in it for love or for money?’and she seems to prefer the idea that a fi xer
will be ‘passionate’ about their work (Clore, 2009, n.p.). However it seems
rather naïve and even unfair to hope that in a conflict zone a fi xer would
not be motivated at least partly by the prospect of earning some money;
certainly, Neven wants to exploit his skills in any way possible to get ahead
during a time of hardship, in which people have little to live off apart from
their own initiative and imagination. And at the same time, Sacco reminds
us that the journalist has quite a bit in common with their interpreter –
both make a living out of conflict and pain and, in a sense, the greater
the pain, the better the living to be made: ‘ “When massacres happened”,
Neven [tells him], “those were the best times. Journalists from all over the
world were coming here” ’ (Sacco, 2003, p. 49).
As Francis Jones has observed, translators (and interpreters) are ‘indi-
viduals with relationships, loyalties and political/social ideologies of their
own’ (2004, p. 712), and in a conflict situation, such as Bosnia in the 1990s
or Palestine, they cannot possibly be expected to pretend otherwise. Sacco
is initially rather naïve and wide-eyed when it comes to Neven’s transition
from fixer to interviewee. However, he comes to learn that while Neven
may be a well-connected fi xer and genial companion, he is not always a
reliable informant and is wont to exaggerate his own heroic participation
in the war (Sacco, 2003, p. 61). Yet in a sense, this is just a more extreme
manifestation of the ambiguity that can stem from the complex combina-
tion of agents involved in translating, interpreting and news-gathering. As
Drawing Blood 133
Milton and Bandia note, in exploring the translator’s role as an agent ena-
bling intercultural exchange and shaping our knowledge of the other, we
should not fall into the trap of assuming that all translators are benevolent
and trustworthy (2009, pp. 14–16). Even when not relating their personal
stories for journalists, translators, interpreters and fi xers play a key role in
shaping international news reports, through the directions in which they
guide their overseas charges (McKenna, 2004). Sacco’s work brings this
complexity to the forefront by depicting his reliance on such people, who
contribute to his knowledge about their country and its conflict, and indi-
rectly help him put together his story.
Media Attention and Cultural Exchange
If locals provide enormous emotional, material and logistical support

to Sacco, as outlined above, we also see that he and his fellow journal-
ists bring something highly valued to the conflict zones they visit – the
capacity to transmit people’s stories to an international public, as well as
a much-needed breath of fresh air in a stifling atmosphere of conflict and
frustration. For example, in the isolated Safe Area of Goražde, the arrival
of the press is greeted with excitement by people who have felt neglected
because of all the attention focused on ‘media darling Sarajevo’. Sacco
himself is ‘movement’ by virtue of his ability to come and go via the ‘Blue
Road’ with UN convoys (Sacco, 2006a, pp. 6, 65).
Sacco documents some of the outside influences that conflict, and the
media interest in it, can bring into a place. In Bosnia, his English-speaking
friends love his idiomatic expressions – figure out , nothing to write home about
and you’re full of shit – and use them at every opportunity (Sacco, 2006a,
p. 101). There is also a shared cultural baggage of American popular music
and cinema that brings Sacco and his new friends together. He writes down
the lyrics to American pop songs for his friend Riki (2006a, p. 151), and
he and his Goražde friends watch Hollywood action movies on video –
‘ “American Ninja II” or whatever other video [Edin’s] brother had dug
up’ – as long as the homemade generator on the river Drina holds out
(2006a, p. 49).8 Neven describes a highly dramatic moment in his colour-
ful (and possibly partly apocryphal) career as a soldier as ‘like in the Doc
Holiday [sic] movies’ (Sacco, 2003, p. 43).
Films shape Sacco’s Bosnian friends’ perceptions of the United States,
and it is interesting to note the way Neven uses the familiar genre of the
Western to ‘translate’ his own war-time experience for Sacco and his
readers. However, Westerns – for all their dramatic shootouts – cannot be

as graphic and confronting as the actual experience of war, as Sacco knows
from more than once being invited to sit through what he calls ‘Gorazde’s
Own Most Horrifying Home Videos’, gruesome amateur footage of war-
time attacks, injuries and surgery (2006a, p. 120). The shared global herit-
age of the Hollywood movie serves as a way of bringing to life the tension
and excitement of war, yet at the same time, for the reader safely ensconced
in a peaceful country, this scene underscores just how difficult it is for most
people to comprehend the unsanitized, unglamorous violence of real-life
war. As Sacco’s work shows, war does not take a conventional narrative
shape with a beginning, middle and foreseeable end, and it comprises a
punishing daily grind to survive as much as moments of adrenaline-fuelled
action.
Concluding Remarks
International conflict is a site of cultural exchange in which the role of lan-

guage, translation and interpreting is often ignored. Although it is not the
main focus of his production, Sacco’s work often touches upon the com-
plex interaction of agents and agendas in international news- gathering as,
through a mixture of visual techniques and metatranslative reflection, he
reminds us that the communication that takes place during his journalis-
tic research in Palestine and Bosnia is by no means monolingual. For this
reason – above and beyond their artistic and documentary value as inves-
tigations into the effects of international conflict on daily life in Bosnia
and Palestine – his comics provide an interesting contrast to more conven-
tional forms of news reporting, which tend to gloss over their reliance on
translation.
Sacco gives readers an insight into the role of interpersonal and intercul-
tural relationships – including friendships, generosity and obligations – in
news-gathering, and introduces some of the individuals mediating, both
culturally and linguistically, between journalists and the casualties of inter-
national conflict. These are figures that are often invisible and inaudible
to consumers of world news, yet Sacco reminds readers that his interpret-
ers have stories and identities of their own, and that these are inextricably
mixed up in the very conflicts that give them their living. Their stories
provide readers with a rare insight into the skills, motivations, opinions
and personal lives of people who, whether by circumstance or by vocation,
find themselves interpreting for foreign correspondents, helping not only
Drawing Blood 135
to convey but also to shape news content. This is an under-researched topic

both within journalism and within translation studies, and something con-
sumers of news are rarely required to reflect upon. Thanks to this willing-
ness to engage – often through the prism of irony – with the complexity
of both his own task and that of the interpreter, Sacco is able to introduce
readers to the positive exchanges enabled by translation as well as to the
ethical challenges and ambiguities that can be associated with the transla-
tion of conflict, including the personal sacrifice or inconvenience it may
entail for the interpreter.
This sensitivity to questions of language and culture mirrors Sacco’s
emphasis on the effects of conflict on people’s daily lives and on their sense
of identity. As mediation becomes personalized, we see that its purpose is
not purely instrumental, that of facilitating communication, it also shapes
relationships and narratives. At the same time, Sacco’s emphasis on his
local interpreters gives him a degree of distance from his subjects. It helps
him avoid speaking for his interviewees, allowing them instead to speak for
themselves, and through English-speaking members of their own commu-
nity.9 The different stages of mediation from interview to published comic
are made visible through Sacco’s deployment of a range of semiotic, stylistic
and narrative techniques offered by his medium. He uses space and fram-
ing, speech bubbles, accents and ironic self-reflexivity in order to depict
cultural and linguistic exchange, as well as his own intersemiotic media-
tion, as he takes the content of his interviews and his own experiences
and research, and reformulates them as comics. Through this interaction
between medium and method, his work provides an example of how multi-
modal texts can explore questions of language and translation in ways that
set them apart from other media.
Notes
1. More recently, Sacco has returned to Palestine for his book, Footnotes in Gaza
(2009), but this later work is not examined here.
2. Another multimodal depiction of the war in Sarajevo is Joe Kubert’s (1996)
comic Fax from Sarajevo. Kubert’s panels are supplemented by photographs and
faxes sent by his Bosnian friend during the early years of the siege.
3. One exception to this is his fleeting encounter with Radovan Karadžić (Sacco,
2005a). Frustrated at his own inability to reconcile the rather ordinary-looking
man before him with the crimes for which he is indicted, with self-irony and
black humour Sacco focuses largely on the antics of his fellow journalists. At the
end, we see scenes of destruction in Sarajevo, including a family home damaged
by shelling, perhaps indicating that for Sacco, the most meaningful understand-
ing of war comes from reflecting upon its effects on ordinary people.
4. Walker (2010), too, notes the affinity between Sacco’s work and travel writing.
5. One is reminded here of the title of Edward Behr’s book on his career as a for-
eign correspondent, Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? (1982), another
blackly ironic assessment of the journalist’s craft. Behr overheard a British
television reporter asking this question of refugees from the former Belgian
Congo.
6. Tom Stoppard’s (2006) play Rock ’n’ Roll uses a similar technique. The play is
entirely in English; when the protagonist Jan is in his native Czechoslovakia, his
language is unaccented (since in Czech, the language he is ‘really’ speaking, he
has no accent), whereas when he is in England, he has a Czech accent.
7. See also Baccolini and Zanettin (2008) on the use of broken English to express
trauma in Spiegelman’s Maus comics (2003), in which the English of Holocaust
survivor Vladek bears traces of the anguish he has suffered.
8. In his portrait of Zalmai Yawar, a young Afghan man who worked as a translator
and fixer for a number of foreign correspondents in Kabul from 2001–2003, Eric
Goldscheider writes that Yawar ‘formed a rapport with the reporters, in part
through his knowledge of American culture and colloquialisms gained from
novels, history books, and movies. He’s a big Clint Eastwood fan’ (2004, n.p.).
9. See Polezzi, 2006, pp. 179–80 on the reluctance of contemporary travel writers
to ‘speak for’ their subjects.
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Chapter 8
Silenced Images: The Case of Viva Zapatero!

Federico M. Federici
Durham University
Introducing an Issue of Audiovisual Translation
The Italian docu-film Viva Zapatero! (2005) [lit. ‘Long Live Zapatero!’] was
written, directed and co- edited by Italian actress, comedienne and film-
director Sabina Guzzanti. The film documents, from Guzzanti’s point of
view, the events leading to the banning of her satirical television programme
RaiOt. In 2003, RaiOt, directed and performed by Guzzanti, commissioned
by RAI, the Italian State- owned national television network, and sched-
uled for a late night slot, was taken off air after the first episode, as Silvio
Berlusconi’s media corporation Mediaset filed a suit for defamation against
the programme. Despite an extremely successful debut in terms of audi-
ence share, Guzzanti’s show was axed while its production still continued;
the show was censored following a sketch in which Guzzanti gave financial
details of Berlusconi’s business affairs. The legal suit was dismissed in 2004
and Guzzanti was completely acquitted of the accusation of defamation.
The title Viva Zapatero! is an intertextual reference to Elia Kazan’s Viva
Zapata! (1952), while, at the same time, paying homage to Spanish Prime
Minister José Luis Zapatero for his legislative initiative to prevent political
power from managing state television and thus invading and controlling
public information. Guzzanti’s docu-film aims to describe the conflict of
interest arising from retaining control of both public and private television
networks and executive political power, to show the effects of legally imposed
censorship (filing a suit for 20 million euros), and to experiment with film
editing so as to produce a memorable narrative. Co- editing the film with
the digital editor Clelio Benevento, Guzzanti intended to adopt innovative
techniques to narrate the events surrounding the censorship of RaiOt.
Renowned in Italy as the female impersonator of Berlusconi, Sabina
Guzzanti released Viva Zapatero! with English subtitles for the 2005 Venice
Film Festival, where it was met with a 12-minute applause. Italian audiences
are familiar with Guzzanti as a theatre actress, impersonator and satirical

television performer; following on from her 1985 graduation from the act-
ing academy Silvio D’Amico in Rome, her popularity came through her
participation in the talented and experimental group of performers and
writers who created the RAI broadcast La TV delle ragazze (‘The Girls’ TV’,
1988). In the 1990s, her career took an even sharper satirical turn and
led to her famous impersonations of left-wing politician Massimo D’Alema
(Italian Prime Minister at the time of the 1998 Kosovo War) and of right-
wing Prime Minister Berlusconi, among many others.
Guzzanti’s third film, Viva Zapatero! presents both satirical and aesthetic
challenges for the viewer. From its anchoring sequence, the docu-film posi-
tions itself within the European context of satirical programmes: Guzzanti
impersonates Berlusconi in a sketch in English together with British satirist
Rory Bremner, who impersonates Tony Blair. Thus, the docu-film initiates
Guzzanti’s discourse from the perspective of a foreign audience. Guzzanti-
as-Berlusconi meets Bremner- as-Blair, and after a short sketch on how to
run effective press conferences with friendly journalists, Bremner and
Guzzanti take off their masks to introduce the story of Guzzanti’s ban to
the real journalists attending their sketch. After this preamble, the opening
soundtrack is followed by a voiceover introducing Guzzanti as a buffoon.
The chronology of how she was barred from performing on public televi-
sion quickly unfolds in the first five minutes as she recounts the convoluted
way in which she was taken off the RAI schedule altogether following the
RaiOt case. To reconstruct the event, she reads newspaper headlines that
appear in the frame, links television footage with old sketches and planned
and impromptu interviews, and edits private recordings into the docu-film
so as to finish her narrative with clips showing thousands of people coming
to the theatre to attend her most recent (post- RAI ban) satirical stand-up
comedy performance.
Guzzanti constructs her narrative by assembling interviews, first with
Enzo Biagi and Michele Santoro, two investigative journalists also banned
from broadcasting on RAI after discussing the financial situation of
Berlusconi’s corporations, and then with the board members of RAI who
made the decision to axe RaiOt . Her journey continues with interviews
attempting to define satire with comedians (Daniele Luttazzi, Dario Fo)
and discussing satire and censorship with intellectuals (Luciano Canfora),
as well as with politicians belonging to both ruling and opposition parties.
People’s voices often cut to shots of Italian newspapers read by the Italian
voiceover, and the opinions of the Italian press are contrasted with for-
eign newspapers and journalists reporting on Italy. Guzzanti uses several
Silenced Images: The Case of Viva Zapatero! 141
filming techniques for the interviews that are sometimes shot on a set, often
outdoors, most of them impromptu. The shots are often medium close-up
zooming in, the close-ups are followed by quick panning scenes, with well-
timed cuts, and, for emphasis, individual shots are digitalized in jigsaws of
minuscule mirror images. Juxtaposed with the interviews, Guzzanti edits
in material from her television broadcasts, her stand-up in theatre and clips
extracted from other Italian comedians’ shows and from French, British
and Dutch broadcasts. Her subjective narrative voice ‘Sono un buffone ’ [I
am a buffoon] allows her to play the satirist role in the Italian theatrical
tradition of commedia dell’arte and to colour the register of narration. The
narrative of Viva Zapatero! is not multilingual, although the 80-minute film
does include sequences in English, French, Dutch and Danish. In the ren-
dering of all of these components into English, the subtitles appear in dif-
ferent colours – not always to distinguish different speakers – and appear
in different positions on the screen, so the viewer has to look for them at
the top or bottom of the screen. To illustrate this complexity, the shot in
Figure 8.1 is emblematic. The Anglophone audience is presented with a
shot of an Italian newspaper with the English subtitles in white; at the same
time as reading the subtitles, words in the Italian newspaper are being
highlighted, thus drawing the eye towards the Italian text. In addition to
the multiple visual signs, the narrator’s voice in Italian is paraphrasing the
text being highlighted and there is a circus- style musical score.
Figure 8.1 Shot from chapter 3, 21’ 05” of Viva Zapatero!

Viva Zapatero! narrates Guzzanti’s own story, which is, in turn, merged
into a complex text with the use of material from different sources, such
as shots picturing original newspaper headlines, steadicam videos, 35mm
films, television recordings, parliamentary recordings, recordings of the-
atrical performances, soundtracks and voiceovers. If we follow Baldry and
Thibault in defining modality as a semiotic resource – that is, something
‘used for the purposes of making meaning’ (2006, p. 18) – then this docu-
film can be described as a multimodal text embedded in Italian culture,
working as it does with an overabundance of resources to construct its
meaning. The composite texture of Viva Zapatero! renders it a multimodal
text whose codes refer to many means of expression, and whose modalities
have different functions in the construction of meaning – that is, newspa-
pers create the socio-historical context, the interviews give authenticity and
so on. Adopting a Hallidayan functional linguistic perspective, the com-
ponents can be said to include scripts and unplanned spoken messages,
visual elements, elements of timing, gestures, sartorial elements and casual
background noises; and in each of these, every form of meaning making is
analysed as part of the multimodal text (see also Díaz Cintas and Ramael,
2007, pp. 45–55). Thus, audiovisual materials such as Viva Zapatero! are
complex multimodal texts whose language and ‘Extralinguistic Cultural
References’ or ECR (Pedersen, 2008, p. 102) represent a cultural and trans-
lational challenge, especially when the author translates the multimodal
complexity into a different language by integrating an additional code,
the subtitles.
This essay first looks at Viva Zapatero! as a docu-film in relation to the
translation challenges of the genre. I then outline my methodology of
analysis, which draws upon current research in Audiovisual Translation
(AVT) so as to discuss one significant and emblematic example. From this
microanalysis, the paper broadens into the issue of censorship to reach a
definition of oblique censorship.
A Question of Genre and Translation
The docu-film’s mix of scripted dialogues, real interviews and written doc-
uments on screen creates what Maria Pavesi succinctly terms a ‘multimodal
setting’, referring to film dialogue in which ‘spoken language typically takes
place in a shared context in which verbal signs co- occur with non-verbal
signs’ (2008, p. 88). The multimodal complexity of Viva Zapatero! increases
the translational constraints, raising the issue of whether multimodal
texts are doomed to self- censorship in translation, as the present essay

seeks to show. This very same complexity is part of the docu- film genre
and of the authorial voice. In Viva Zapatero!, author and translator may
be referred to by adopting Norman Fairclough’s definition of ‘text pro-
ducers’ (2003) because the final scriptwriting of the docu-film is indeed
polyphonic. Guzzanti’s perception of cinema focuses on its message and
draws upon traditional notions of directors as authors, thus leaving her
views quite remote from the international shifting trends of audiovisual
consumption:
Ho pensato al cinema perché ero convinta che fosse una storia forte,
pensavo che fosse abbastanza potente, pur essendo un documentario, da
andare nelle sale cinematografiche. Anche vederlo in tanti è importante.
(Bandirali, 2005, p. 5)
[I thought of cinema because I was persuaded that, although a doc-
umentary, it was an effective story; I thought that it was powerful
enough to be projected in cinemas. It is also important that many peo-
ple watch it].
In the technological era of multi- support releases of fi lms (Blu-ray,

DVD, streamed, satellite, internet television, etc.), Guzzanti’s notion of
cinema appears to be romanticized, but her international aspirations
do indeed need mediation into a widely used language. Just as she sees
English subtitles as the mode of international circulation, she also sees
cinema from an almost activist perspective, which values the multimodal
fi lmic text and its effects beyond the viewers’ immediate consumption.
An experienced and observant writer and performer in theatre and tel-
evision, her view is not born out of naivety. Courageously fighting against
the dominant powers in cinematic production and distribution in Italy
(cf. Freedom of Press Reports, 2006 to 2010), Guzzanti wants the physi-
cal experience of cinema- going to become part of her denunciation, a
way of reclaiming the public space (as shown by the clips of the audi-
ence attending her live performance). Her notion of cinema refers to the
Italian tradition of director-auteur, as defined by André Bazin. For Bazin,
Italian directors were text producers more than ‘clever technicians’ and
they were ‘true auteur[s]’ who gave shape to the scripts (Bazin, 1967, p.
63). Guzzanti’s experimental editing of mixed material aims to create a
memorable docu- fi lm held together by the director’s cut and her voice-
over. This perspective makes it easier to understand why Guzzanti relies
on cinema as a creative setting within which the choice of a subjective
narrative voice is a fundamental choice (una scelta fondamentale). She

explains that
La cosa che avevo chiara da subito, o meglio da quando avevo stabilito

che l’inizio sarebbe stato ‘Io sono un buffone’, era che non potesse essere
una voce giornalistica, oggettiva, ma che dovesse essere compatibile con
il buffone, il narratore della storia. (Bandirali, 2005, p. 10)
[What was clear in my mind from the beginning, or rather, from the
moment when I decided that the beginning would be ‘I am a buffoon’,
was that it could not be a journalistic voice, an objective voice, it had to
be compatible with the buffoon, with the narrator of the story].
Thus, the choice of her own voice as the narrative voice is rooted and
explained in her perception of cinematography. This authorial perspective
is crucial to understanding the aesthetic values underlying the assembling
of her film as well as the form of creative translation that the subtitles try to
achieve. This authorial perspective is important in current products of the
genre.
As a genre, the docu-film is hybrid. Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane define
its main features as (1) its subject, a ‘focus on something other than the
human condition involving individual human feelings, relationships, and
actions: the province of narrative fiction and drama’; (2) its purpose:
‘what filmmakers are trying to say about the subjects of their films’; (3) its
form, ‘documentary filmmakers limit themselves to extracting and arran-
ging from what already exists rather than making up content’; and (4) its
methods and techniques of production: ‘the use of nonactors’, ‘shooting
on location’. ‘[M]anipulation of images and sounds is largely confined to
what is required to make the recording of them possible, or to make the
result seem closer to the actual than inadequate techniques might’ (2005,
pp. 2–3). The particular qualities of Viva Zapatero! necessitate definitions of
‘author’ and ‘translator’ that take into account the complexity of the arte-
fact. Its combination of different modalities of expression contributes to
creating the filmic text . Guzzanti experimented with editing – the sequence
after 20’ 22”, for instance, illustrates allegorical use of technology to inte-
grate real material with the narrative voice: by multiplying the close-up
shot of a single person until it fills the screen with hundreds of miniatures
of the original shot, she satirizes the person’s claim of speaking on behalf
of the Italian population. The processes involved in deploying the differ-
ent modalities to produce a composite and coherent text are at the same
time the director’s aesthetic challenges and characteristics of the genre.
Prior to looking at a specific example of the use of subtitles in the docu-

film, it must be clarified that attempting to render such an intricate multi-
modal text would lead any expert subtitler to face critical issues. Some of
these translation issues are linked to spotting (also known as cuing or tim-
ing), which refers to deciding the exact time when a subtitle appears and
disappears from the screen (cf. Díaz Cintas and Ramael, 2007, pp. 30–8;
Perego, 2008, pp. 212–13). In Guzzanti’s film, the blend of different forms
of discourse – newspapers, interviews and television clips – affects the aes-
thetic product, as the film already uses captions at the bottom of the screen
to introduce speakers, giving their name and their occupation. The cap-
tions in Italian appear to have been burnt onto the master copy and cannot
be digitally substituted by other captions in English (cf. Díaz Cintas and
Ramael, 2007, pp. 22–3). Additionally the captions, which, along with writ-
ten material, often occupy the bottom of the shot, must coexist with the
English subtitles that render all the other informative components (voice-
over, different speakers, written texts and so on). Timing the subtitles to
the pace of the voiceover while navigating through Guzzanti’s experimen-
tal editing would not have been easy. The question of genre, from a trans-
lation perspective, becomes a question of timing, of translation cohesion,
of cultural references. The meaning-making process is hampered because
the discourse is a dialogical exchange between the voiceover narrative
and the written documents filling the visual space, and because the docu-
film relies on ‘Extralinguistic Culture-bound References’ (Pedersen, 2008,
p. 102). To illustrate these points, I draw upon a specific framework of
analysis, presented in the next section, to examine the renderings of the
multimodal text and to argue that the translation choices constitute forms
of oblique censorship.
Multimodal Analysis: Visual Grammar and

Analysable Units
This essay presents research that was carried out by adopting the analyti-
cal framework of Anthony Baldry and Paul Thibault, who devised a flex-
ible tool for multimodal transcription (2006). Their framework of analysis
draws upon notions of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, such as
the notion of meaning created by the message and the context of creation,
which they expand to the codes of multimodal writing – where verbal and
non-verbal codes work together, as happens in films, websites and so on.
The framework can be adjusted in order to carry out investigations into
the ways in which translated multimodal texts drive their readers towards
the construction of meaning. Previously used for the analysis of subtitles
by Christopher Taylor (2003), this framework offers a versatile way of look-
ing at meaning-making units for multimodal texts such as film, television
adverts, newspaper adverts and every combined message in which codes
mix. Parsing complex meaning into recognizable units with a functional
and systemic notion of grammar, the model makes the process of analysis
more effective, as it permits the investigation of verbal and extra-verbal
issues such as those embedded in the genre of Viva Zapatero! and in the
film itself that have an impact on the construction of meaning.
The docu-film’s semiotic signs integrate the narrative of the voiceover,
with the visual prompts that remain in Italian (contained in the newspa-
per articles and headings). English subtitles that include content from the
voiceover as well as text from the Italian newspapers, used as evidence
in several sequences of Guzzanti’s work, represent what Gottlieb labels an
‘intersemiotic translation’, defined as a translation in which ‘the one or
more channels of communication used in the translated text differ(s) from
the channel(s) used in the original text’ (2005, p. 3). The Baldry-Thibault
framework allows us to compile a visual corpus of blackouts in the transfer
of meaning. The microanalysis presented below offers an idea of the cru-
cial, macroscopic limitations in the transfer of meaning, through subtitles
which may be considered an obsolete translation technique in dealing with
multilayered and multimodal products such as Viva Zapatero!.
Sequences of the docu-film were carefully parsed to scrutinize their vis-
ual grammar ; in other words, an examination was carried out of the indi-
vidual simpler communicative components that combine to bring forward
the nuances of meaning in audiovisual texts. These nuances are provided
by the multisemiotic composition of the message, but also by the multimo-
dal use of them in the meaning-making process (see Baldry and Thibault,
2006). The elements to consider are the visual frame, the visual image, the
kinesic action in the frame, the soundtrack details and, for the purposes
of this study, the position and content of subtitles. All the elements in the
docu-film message are from different semiotic systems mainly referring
to the original language, Italian and its main context of use, Italy; inter-
lingual transfer of these diverse elements with a sole translation mode,
subtitling, is at the best of times an enormous challenge that Viva Zapatero!
makes even more difficult.
The Baldry-Thibault model considers communication a multimodal
combination of the individual elements. Each element acts in exactly the
same way as a grammatical item functions for a language: providing atomic
information that constructs more complex relations of meaning with its

context. These relations are constructed in combinations that establish the
field, tone, register and mode of the communication. I have simplified the
explanation of this model, due to space constraints, but the simplification
also aims to attest to the strong correlation between notions of visual gram-
mar and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. This inherent correla-
tion makes crucial the link with Fairclough’s model of critical discourse
analysis (discussed in the next section), whereby cohesion and coherence
in multimodal texts are achieved through their visual grammar and its
discursive syntactical combinations. A wealth of examples might have been
used in the following section, but the selection fell on a key sequence to
illustrate the crucial limitations of the chosen translation mode.
Samples 1 and 2: Anchoring the Content

Using Christiane Nord’s functionalist definition, docu-film subtitling could
be considered a documentary translation because it ‘serves as a document
of a source culture communication between the author and the source text
recipient’ (1991, p. 72). Guzzanti uses experimental techniques to organize
her discourse and endeavours to anchor the Italian context in which her
satirical show was taken off air as one underscored by the political arro-
gance of Silvio Berlusconi’s party (at the time called Forza Italia). The par-
ticular context is as follows: after their success at the 2001 Administrative
Elections, Berlusconi and his coalition (at the time called Casa delle
Libertà) decided to regulate media discourse more strictly to favour a
pro- government press. At a conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, Berlusconi
announced that well-known journalists Enzo Biagi and Michele Santoro,
together with satirist Daniele Luttazzi, had been de facto ostracized from
RAI channels because their shows had attacked democracy by criticizing
the government; in actual fact, their investigative reports had focused on
Berlusconi’s financial and political dealings. Guzzanti’s first episode of
RaiOt reported factual information concerning Berlusconi’s businesses, yet
the media corporation Mediaset filed a suit for defamation for an amount
of compensation that apparently persuaded the board of RAI to preempt
the economic risk by axing the show. The complete acquittal of Guzzanti
was apparently not a good enough reason to reinstate her shows, either.
In the case of Santoro, his Sciuscià programme had conducted enquiries
into the new laws in favour of the prime minister, and soon after compar-
ing Berlusconi to Mussolini his show was taken off air. Biagi’s journalistic
investigations had looked into the affairs of Berlusconi’s corporations and
holdings. Guzzanti uses interviews with both banned journalists and clips
from their shows to contextualize the wider picture surrounding the nar-
rative of her own ban. The shots in Figures 8.2 and 8.3 are key indicators
of the multimodal complexity of the film. The sequence shows a politician
from Berlusconi’s party who is strongly arguing that nobody has the right
to compare Berlusconi to Mussolini on RAI programmes. The context
is explained to an Italian audience with captions yet these are not trans-
lated in the subtitled version, thus excluding international audiences from
even a verbal understanding of some of the ECR. Guzzanti’s attempt to
emphasize that it is not just satire but also investigative journalism which is
censored is undermined for the Anglophone audience by the translation
mode. This example also shows technical slips in subtitling, where the spot-
ting, which is undeniably complicated (cf. Díaz Cintas, 2001, pp. 204–7),
goes wrong. Drawing on Gottlieb’s recent semiotic taxonomy of multidi-
mensional translation (2005), these shots show what happens when four
different signifying codes (speech, image, subtitles, toptitles) operate at
the same time: the source text is too complex for one single mode of trans-
lation and the multimodal message is thus only partially conveyed – as will
be seen later when looking at the Anglophone reviews of the film.
The Baldry-Thibault framework allows researchers to make contrastive
comparisons of shots in tabular form, which are not presented here as the
focus is on a specific tool of this framework: namely, multimodal transcrip-
tion which has been used here for a deeper analysis of single shots in this
film so as to emphasize emblematic constraints of the translation mode
chosen (subtitles). In the following shots the Italian audience is provided
with a visual shot of a television show with an irate speaker against the
background of a silenced studio. This is led in and out of the docu-film by
Guzzanti’s voiceover, and the caption ‘Ultima puntata di Sciuscià di Michele
Santoro’ [‘Last broadcast of Sciuscià , Michele Santoro’s talk show’]. The pol-
itician from Berlusconi’s party says, ‘We believe it’s a matter of freedom to
not [sic] have to hear someone compare us to the Mafia, or Berlusconi to
Mussolini on public TV’. The sentence takes three seconds to say and three
single frame shots. Anglophone viewers need to decode the non-linguistic
signs that provide context at the same time as reading the subtitles that
integrate both the speaker and voiceover content. In addition to this extra
level of attention demanded of the Anglophone audience, the caption that
Guzzanti felt necessary for the Italian audience is not translated, depriv-
ing the Anglophone audience of the immediate visual reminder that after
this studio discussion, Sciuscià was axed. However, the presence of this
caption forces the subtitles from their standard position at the bottom of
Figure 8.2 Shot from chapter 1, 5’ 54” of Viva Zapatero! showing a clip from
Michele Santoro’s current affairs talk show Sciuscià
Figure 8.3 Shot from chapter 1, 5’ 55” of Viva Zapatero! showing a clip from
Michele Santoro’s current affairs talk show Sciuscià
the screen in Figure 8.2 to toptitles in Figure 8.3. The sheer number of
semiotic resources the Anglophone audience is presented with in a single
shot creates an information overload, sometimes compounded by linguis-
tic issues and the movement of the subtitles to a toptitle position, but at the
same time diminishes the information and thus the crucial message that
Guzzanti aims to convey.
The information overflow from one shot to the other, and the lack of
contextualization caused by omitting a translation of the caption, increases
the multimodal complexity of the sequence. Furthermore, the semiotic
resources here are constructing a very complex meaning with all the ECRs
that are giving clues to the Italian viewers, but are less effective for the
Anglophone viewers. The Anglophone audience must absorb them while
simultaneously reading subtitles to decode the Italian in what is, in several
cases such as Figure 8.2 and Figure 8.3, a question of two seconds. The inter-
cultural mediation does not take place in the subtitles; as a direct result of
the inadequacy of subtitles to fully and comprehensively render the multi-
modal original, context and content are reduced. The issues illustrated in
these shots are emblematic of the subtitling throughout the film.
Censored Satire or Censored Translation Tools?
In this section the reflections focus on three hypotheses which are extrapo-
lated from the micro-analysis: (1) that circulation difficulties may be tied
in with the docu-film genre; (2) that subtitling as a translation mode led to
some serious misinterpretation of Guzzanti’s message; (3) that the choice
of subtitling as translation mode can be discussed in the context of censor-
ing the message. Just two examples of spotting show that the translation
mode adopted fails Guzzanti’s aim of effective international circulation of
her docu-film. With Viva Zapatero! Guzzanti wanted to achieve international
circulation and collaborated on the subtitles, but an alternative translation
mode to subtitling was needed to avoid what is to all intents and purposes
a ‘censored translation mode’. As discussed below, problems with distribu-
tion may be blamed for the low numbers for cinema attendance in Europe,
yet do not explain the wider context. The wider context leads one to believe
that the translation mode may have hampered the transfer of the cultural
context, which does need explaining because the visual message is dense.
To illustrate the level of impediment, the following review from a profes-
sional critic, who misunderstands essential information, is emblematic:
Guzzanti clearly understands the ramifications of her argument: Italian

democracy is sick, and unless drastic reforms are carried out soon, its
problems will only get worse. Through the government’s control of RAI,
Berlusconi was able to force off the air two of Italy’s most respected jour-
nalists because they compared him with Mussolini. As the docu shows,
the comparison was all too accurate. (Weissberg, 2005, p. 59)
Weissberg misread the anchoring sequence and an important though not

crucial detail stuck with him: he identifies Biagi’s case with Santoro’s dis-
missal, so the comparison with Mussolini is foregrounded over the broader
issue of freedom of speech. The comparison to Mussolini, albeit an import-
ant point, is not exactly the only reason for Santoro’s fate, and certainly not
for Biagi’s. A similar misreading is found in Popham who, writing for The
Independent , feels that such is the cultural distance in political behaviour
that an explanation is required for a British audience:
One has to translate what happened in November 2003 to British shores

to get a feeling for how weird it was. It was as if Maggie Thatcher or
John Major or Tony Blair had got so maddened by a Ben Elton or a Rory
Bremner sketch that they resolved to put an end to such nonsense once
and for all. And then woke up the next morning and went ahead and did
so and ran that particular comic’s career right off the rails. (Popham,
2005, p. 24)
Popham, an experienced and competent fi lm reviewer, has failed to

understand that the issue of the ban on satire is an issue of freedom of
speech.
Viewers’ access to the information conveyed by the docu-film emerges
as the issue, pointing at a discrepancy between the filmic success in using
experimental editing and the uncertain alignment of the subtitles with the
other communicative codes of Viva Zapatero!. Elisa Perego recently empha-
sized that ‘readability issues deserve to be addressed and explored prima-
rily for the benefit of the audience thus making use of audiovisual products.
This could include viewers, who deserve to have access to a quality product
to enjoy it fully without being unduly aware of or disturbed by subtitles’
(2008, p. 212; see also Chiaro, 2008, 2009). Viva Zapatero! does not achieve
readability because its multimodal texture is too complex for the transla-
tion mode. A list of examples in which subtitling cannot begin to render the
verbal and non-verbal density of the original could include shots referring
to political satire with regional accents, foreign languages which are not
necessarily distinguishable for audiences without linguistic training (e.g.

17’ 22”), translator’s ideological interference (1h 2’ 49”) and many more.
In an email exchange with the author in 2006, Guzzanti discussed how
she took an active role in the translational process. It is indeed possible
to assert that, due to such close involvement in the translation process by
Guzzanti, the text producer of the subtitles is influenced by the ideological
importance of this documentary translation. What Simeoni termed the
translator’s habitus (1998) has an evident impact on creative translations,
especially in what Jeremy Munday, in his reading of critical discourse anal-
ysis perspectives, terms ‘register’:
The macro-level context of culture, related to the predominant ideology

of the society, is communicated through the variables of Register as they
are interpreted by the author or translator. This allows for some element
of personal decision-making, even within the constraints of the overrid-
ing sociocultural environment. (Munday, 2008, p. 47)
Not only does Guzzanti’s register suffer from a limitation in conveying the
quantity of information that her multimodal text imposes, but it also suf-
fers from its relational approach to the material. As defined in Fairclough,
relational approach focuses on the relations between a text and its context –
specifically on the role that these relations play in the contextual meaning-
making process. The relations in question can be external or internal; for
Fairclough, the ‘analysis of the “external” relations of texts is analysis of
their relations with other elements of social events and, more abstractly,
social practices and social structures’ (2003, p. 36). In this perspective,
language is considered the social structure in which all potential mean-
ings can be realized; the social event is the text as a final product of the
mediation of social practices. In the case of Viva Zapatero!, its purpose is a
response to the social practices of Italian politicians of interfering with
satire and freedom of speech. Social practices are ‘a broader social dimen-
sion of discourse than [. . .] various acts accomplished by language users in
interpersonal interaction’ (van Dijk, 1997, p. 5). The context of Guzzanti’s
discourse affects her authorial style and consequently the translational
style, and the translation choices.
In the subtitles, Guzzanti’s narrative voiceover becomes a legitimization
of the evidence provided; internal relations in translational choices appear
to make a subjective authority into a reliable authority. From her chosen
register, the director’s voice risks superimposing itself on the evidence, thus
undermining the message. However, instead of portraying the reality of the
situation, the issues with readability and information overload, involuntarily

aided by some erroneous or misleading translation choices, undermine the
text producer’s intention of showing what the situation is like by colouring it
with a visible set of internal relations connected with the author’s ideology. In
terms of internal relations, the rhetorical devices of the voiceover do not work
in the subtitles – another translation mode was needed. Possibly, choosing a
voiceover in English would have achieved a more cohesive and intrinsically
legitimizing text – as happens with Michael Moore’s docu-films in Italy. For
these reasons, the translation mode becomes a form of oblique censorship.
The multimodal elements of Viva Zapatero! affected the translation qual-
ity; the intercultural mediation became difficult to achieve. Yet the text pro-
ducers decided to subtitle it in order to deal with space-related translation
constraints that other translation modes, for example, dubbed voiceover,
might have partially effaced. Taking cinema viewers as a sample, whereas
Guzzanti’s docu-film had little international circulation with only 419,000
cinema admissions,1 her inspiring model, Michael Moore, had 9.4 million
admissions for his Fahrenheit 9/11,2 according to the Lumière database. Run by
the European Audiovisual Observatory, this database systematically collects
data available from the European member states; however, the data needs
to be considered indicative because the Observatory is unable to verify the
accuracy of the data provided by national sources. Incidentally, Moore’s
docu-film was translated with a mixture of translation modes: his voiceover
was dubbed and his interviews were subtitled, even in Italy, the most accom-
plished ‘dubbing country’. These numbers are statistically significant, even if
the European Observatory signals that Italian admissions especially tend to
be higher than the quota registered. Notwithstanding all these caveats, the
numbers emphasize an issue with the European circulation of Viva Zapatero!
that is not attributable to the genre, but more to translation mode, which, as
I have argued above, effectively became a form of oblique censorship.
Final Remarks: Accessibility vs Affordability
The observations presented so far emphasize that in 2003 Guzzanti, Biagi,

Santoro and Luttazzi suffered the effects of a direct form of censorship.
Francesca Billiani offers a useful definition of censorship, particularly but
not exclusively suited to describe regime censorships, ‘Censorship itself
must be understood as one of the discourses, and often the dominant
one, produced by a given society at a given time and expressed through
repressive cultural, aesthetic and linguistic measures or through economic
means’ (2007, p. 2). The issue of film distribution deserves to be mentioned

as the Italian distribution system enforces translation modes based upon
preconceived ideas of preferences in the audiences targeted in the foreign
market. How do producers and distributors decide whether to dub, subtitle
or do a voiceover translation? Are these decisions dictated by preconceived
notions, or marketing studies, applied to the foreign markets? Are they
budget- driven only? Common justifications for using one translation mode
instead of others usually name target audiences’ expectations as set market
constraints. Within Translation Studies, these expectations have been stud-
ied from the user- end perspectives only in a few language combinations.
More recently, a considerable amount of research is becoming available
on perception and appreciation of audiovisuals dubbed from English into
Italian (to mention but a few, Antonini et al., 2008; Bucaria, 2006, 2008).
For translations out of Italian, as with the case of Viva Zapatero!, budget
constraints on translations may not be necessarily focused on income or
profits but on preconceived ideas of viewers’ expectations.
Guzzanti experimented with Viva Zapatero!, constructing a new narrative
voice while reviving the Italian tradition of docu-films. Unfortunately her
experimental techniques were not well served by her reliance on existing
translation modes. Hazel Morgan notes ‘the best subtitles are the ones you
hardly notice because they make you feel you are understanding the origi-
nal as you hear it’ (2001, p. 164). Discussing the quality of subtitles, Morgan
touches on two cardinal points: the constraints of affordability influenc-
ing quality and the ideals of accessibility, according to which audiovisual
materials ought to be made available to wider audiences (subtitling activi-
ties interest European governments: in the United Kingdom, legislative acts
on discrimination and accessibility including the Broadcasting Act 1990
and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 brought forward an increase in
intralingual subtitling activity and quality). In December 2009, European
governments had to transpose a directive into national law ‘concerning the
provision of audiovisual media services’ known as the Audiovisual Media
Services Directive, 2009/0056(COD). Such a directive has at its heart concerns
with accessibility and linguistic and cultural pluralism, as premises 5 and 6
attest (cf. 2007/65/EC Recital 1 (adapted),3 and 2007/65/EC Recital 3).
Almost a reply to the questions above, the European directive highlights
issues that affect successful circulation: a good rendering of a film increases
accessibility and sales:
Audiovisual media services are as much cultural services as they are eco-
nomic services. Their growing importance for societies, democracy – in
particular by ensuring freedom of information, diversity of opinion and

media pluralism – education and culture justifies the application of spe-
cific rules to these services. (Art. 6, 2007/65/EC Recital 3)
The film industry needs to select translation modes no longer on the basis of
perceived market expectations but on using modes appropriate to particular
source texts. As the market, the film industry and the viewers have finan-
cial interests at stake, support for quality and accessibility becomes an issue
of end-user perception. Studies in this area have considered the dichotomy
between affordability and cost-effectiveness to be part of a notion of audio-
visual translation as a service. This service necessitates researchers’ attention
to ‘enjoyment’ and success of translation via close monitoring of its percep-
tion among viewers and the increase of viewers’ enjoyment as a result of fuller
comprehension (see Antonini and Chiaro, 2008; Bucaria, 2008; Fuentes
Luque, 2003). Recently, Yves Gambier pointed out that ‘no one [in Translation
Studies] seems to approach the people who decide translation policies’ (2007,
p. 2). There are case studies concerning France and Italy which show that
quality is no longer a requirement and pressure, if not censorship, remains
the most common denominator affecting audiovisual translators (Gambier,
2006, 2009; Sarthou, 2009; Paolinelli and Di Fortunato, 2005).
Finally, it must be emphasized that Guzzanti’s censored satire becomes
an obliquely censored fi lm because the quality of the translation mode
does not match the complexity of the original. The paradox of circulation
to which Guzzanti’s fi lm falls victim is that translation modes are defined
according to preconceived ideas about viewers’ perceptions that con-
tinue to dominate the industry despite research into alternative modes.
Experimental and committed fi lm directors such as Guzzanti deserve
to reach the international audience they aspire to without suffering the
oblique censorship imposed on their products by an inadequate transla-
tion mode. The European directive represents an important step forward
and reinforces the view that there is a great need for further research into
Anglophone audiences’ perception of translated audiovisuals in order to
establish more appropriate and effective modes of translation.
Notes
1. Source Lumière database, [Online, accessed 31 August 2010 at http://lumiere.

obs.coe.int/web/film_info/?id=23995]
2. Lumière database, [Online, accessed 31 August 2010 at http://lumiere.obs.coe.
int/web/film_info/?id=21934]
3. ‘In the light of new technologies in the transmission of audiovisual media serv-
ices, a regulatory framework concerning the pursuit of broadcasting activities
should take account of the impact of structural change, the spread of informa-
tion and communication technologies (ICT) and technological developments
on business models, especially the financing of commercial broadcasting, and
should ensure optimal conditions of competitiveness and legal certainty for
Europe’s information technologies and its media industries and services, as well
as respect for cultural and linguistic diversity.’
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Chapter 9
How Do ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ Translate?

Gender Images across Italian, British and
American Print Ads1
Ira Torresi
University of Bologna
Introduction: About Stereotypes
Gender stereotypes, like all stereotypes about a given sub- group of soci-
ety, fall within traditional definitions of the stereotype as an automatic
and pre-logical inference about a group’s supposedly shared characteris-
tics (Villano, 2003, p. 29), or, more particularly, as ‘a coherent and rather
rigid set of negative beliefs that a certain group shares about another social
group or category’ (Mazzara, 1997, p. 19, my translation).
Elsewhere, however, I have argued in favour of a more general under-
standing of what is meant by ‘stereotype’ (Torresi, 2004). This broader
meaning includes all fi xed modules of thinking and behaving by which
we orientate and move through our social and cultural world, ‘all pre-
conceptions and conventions based on, and replicated by, popular “com-
mon sense” and/or their [own] diffusion’ (p. 271): for instance, the
whole nebula of qualities and practices connected with the concept of
cleanliness. This defi nition goes well beyond the notion of group stere-
otype, and may be termed cultural stereotype. At the same time, group
stereotypes can be seen as one subset of cultural stereotypes rather
than a totally different kind of stereotype – however well- defi ned this
subset may be.
By this alternative definition, a stereotype is an assumption which is not

based on and is usually not subjected to conscious rational judgement,
which is crystallized within a given cultural area, and which is supported
and reinforced by the degree of diffusion and consensus it gains or main-
tains within a society. (Torresi, 2004, p. 271)
How Do ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ Translate? 159
This understanding of stereotypes owes much to the notion of memes,

the cultural equivalent of genes, initially expounded by Richard Dawkins
(1976). Additionally, at first sight, cultural stereotypes may be thought to
closely resemble cognitive categories (see for instance Lakoff, 1987). The
concept of cultural stereotypes, however, is not a cognitive one, as it places
the focus on the propagation and replication of fixed ideas rather than
the way in which these influence any individual’s understanding of the
world (although the two dimensions are, of course, closely inter woven).
The means of propagation of cultural stereotypes are diverse and may
encompass all agents of socialization, including the media. Thus, in a
methodological perspective, we can safely speak of the existence of a cul-
tural stereotype when we see a given assumption recur across the media of
a given cultural area; while to discover and define a cognitive category one
would need to rely on specific experimental surveys among the members
of the culture in question, such as the ones carried out on colour catego-
ries by Berlin and Kay (1969).
All this is very well, one might think, but what does it have to do with
translation? The short answer is, a lot, especially when working with pro-
motional text types. The translation of promotional material and, notably,
advertising is ‘consumer- oriented’ (Hervey et al., 2000) and usually ‘covert’
(House, 1981). The success of a translated promotional or advertising cam-
paign depends on how carefully it is adjusted to the target readership or
audience – not only to their native language, but also to the social and psy-
chological levers that may push them to buy the product being advertised.
Advertising relies heavily on stereotypes that the target community can
immediately recognize and uncritically accept as a given that conforms
with their own world views, so that they will be more inclined to accept
new elements such as the product being promoted (Williamson, 1978, p.
170). To make the most of the little space and time available for an adver-
tisement or commercial, advertisers resort to shared cultural values and
symbols (Van Zoonen, 1994, p. 79) that further circumfuse such stere-
otypes with an aura of normality, as if they stemmed from the nature of
things rather than having been socially and historically constructed, thus
turning them into mythical ‘what-goes- without-saying ’ (Barthes, 1972, p. 11,
emphasis in the original).
Assessing how cultural stereotypes travel across cultures, languages and
markets cannot therefore be ignored if one looks at advertising translation
as a holistic process that is not confined to verbal language. If the source
text relies on stereotypes that are at least partly different in the target mar-
ket’s culture(s), then any target text that is not adapted or trans- created
accordingly is doomed to functional failure. This particularly applies to

those hidden, largely unquestioned stereotypes that translators might not
recognize as cultural constructs, but may rather take as the universally
‘normal’ way to be. Arguably, gender stereotypes below the threshold of
blatant sexism can be said to fall in this category.
Given this perspective, although gender stereotypes would fit perfectly
in the definitions of group stereotypes mentioned above, throughout this
chapter I will be referring to them in the second, broader understanding of
the cultural stereotype, for two main reasons. The first is that stereotypes
as defined by the first meaning (social group stereotypes) are often taken
to be necessarily positive or negative. This may be maintained for gender
stereotypes as they are commonly understood, of the easily recognizable
kind (e.g. women are tactful, or emotionally fragile; men are brave, or tact-
less). In this chapter, however, the focus will be placed on the normative
dimension of the stereotypes carried by advertising specifically targeted at
women or men: in other words, how gender- specific media create models
with which men and women are implicitly encouraged to conform in order
to be normal, up to standard.
This process by which a given gender trait is recurrently presented as
the ‘right’ way to be or behave can be termed as the normalization, or
normativization, of stereotypes, or, following Barthes’s indignation at see-
ing how nature and history are confused in contemporary mythopoiesis,
their naturalization. Such a process can either be initiated by secondary
socialization agents (such as the media) and be accepted and kept up
in primary socialization contexts (the family, the community of peers,
teachers and other groups of people a child or adolescent comes in direct
contact with), or the other way round. The directionality of stereotype
normalization is not the focus of interest here. Rather, the analysis will
be focused on the reiteration of certain stereotypes – in particular, those
concerning good looks, or in other words, a positive body image – that
are consistently presented as normal or positive (i.e. normalized) by the
media.
Material and Methodology
To highlight which gender stereotypes are more recurrent (therefore, more

strongly normative) in the media specifically targeting women and men in
the Western world, three comparable corpora were collected of men’s and
women’s magazines, respectively published in Italy, the United Kingdom
and the United States. Before describing my particular corpus, let me very
briefly qualify the term.
By ‘corpus’ here I do not mean an electronic and tagged collection of
texts, but, following the historical use of the word, simply a body of text
that is as complete and consistent as possible, and whose elements are as
homogeneous as possible, being selected according to specific criteria. In
fact, my use of the term differs from those of corpus analysts (e.g. ‘a large
collection of authentic texts that have been gathered in electronic form
according to a specific set of criteria’, Bowker and Pearson, 2002, p. 9) only
in that my corpora are not in electronic form – storing the scanned ads in
a hard disk hardly counts if they are not further processed for automatic
searching and investigation.
The selection criteria were manifold and operated at different levels.
The very first level was the choice of the kind of media to be used, and
how to collect it. Magazines were selected mainly because of the relative
ease with which they could be gathered through internet subscription, and
also because the volume of advertising they would contain was expected to
be comparable across the three countries chosen for analysis (this expec-
tation was confirmed). Yearly subscriptions (which were made in August
2005) were also deemed a good way to ensure that no issues would be
missed over a homogeneous period of time, and that the magazines would
all start to come in at approximately the same time. Unfortunately, several
issues were lost in the mail and publishers took different times to process
subscription orders, but this variable could not be foreseen at the media
selection stage.
The second stage of corpus selection concerned the kind of magazines
to be chosen. I have already outlined above how the focus of my research
was on the normative aspect of normalized stereotypes. As a consequence,
I was more interested in those gendered images that told readers how they
should behave, appear and, ultimately, be, rather than what stereotypi-
cal gender traits they should be more inclined to seek in their partners
(although the latter, arguably, can be seen as a component of the former).
The obvious choice was therefore women’s and men’s magazines, which not
only address readerships that are identified by their gender, but also tend
to provide them with advice about their image and life. It was expected
that the kind of advertising they contained would not be different from
non- commercial content in this respect, and the results supported this
expectation. Magazines that were gender- specific only in that they were
dedicated to activities that are stereotyped as gendered, such as knitting,
home-making or, conversely, hunting or do-it-yourself, were excluded from
the corpora; all the selected magazines had to be devoted to general ‘life-
style’, with a possible slant for fashion or fitness (since, as already stated,
the main interest was in body image stereotyping).
The next step was to seek a newsagent’s advice to draw up a list of all such
magazines available from Italian newsstands. The correctness of that infor-
mation was then checked on the internet before proceeding to search for
equivalents of the Italian magazines in the United Kingdom and the United
States. For some magazines, finding comparable titles was easy, since Vogue,
Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan , Glamour, GQ and Men’s Health all have national
versions in the three countries under consideration. Finding comparable
titles for the Italian Silhouette – focusing on women’s fitness and figure – also
seemed rather simple, and the choice settled on the British Health&Fitness
and the American Women’s Health&Fitness. Unfortunately, it was not pos-
sible to subscribe online to Health&Fitness at the time when all the other
subscriptions were made, and therefore the British magazine had to be
taken out of the corpus. It was replaced by New Woman , which, however,
does not count as comparable to Silhouette and Women’s Health&Fitness, but
rather as a contrast, since the magazine was known for promoting exactly
the opposite kind of women’s body image than the other two – a flexible,
diverse array of shapes and sizes rather than a much narrower range of
variations on the slim and fit figure. Interestingly, however, the advertising
contained in New Woman was less different from the kind featured by the
other British women’s magazines than expected.
Another inconsistency is the lack of a British equivalent for Italian For
Men and American Men’s Edge . Since these two magazines seemed highly
compatible in content and tenor, and highly interesting in terms of gen-
der stereotypes (both of them being more ‘popular’ than Men’s Health ,
published by ‘genre’ magazine publishers – Cairo Editore and Future,
respectively – and indulging in what I might define as simplistic renderings
of inter- gender relationships), I decided not to eliminate them from the
respective corpora, and to leave the British corpus with seven magazines
instead of eight.
Each one of the three corpora, then, consists of all the advertisements
found in the magazines of the relevant country that contain verbal and/
or visual references or allusions to a gendered person. So- called ‘edito-
rial advertising’ (longer promotional texts where products were adver-
tised together with, or endorsed by, the magazine itself), subscription
promotion and magazine supplements were excluded from the corpus.
The analysis was qualitative and carried out on both the verbal and the
visual parts of the ads; the main reference for visual analysis was Kress
and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (1996). Due to editorial and copyright
constraints concerning images, relevant visual elements will be mostly
described verbally.
Some Results
Although I was looking for differences, what I found among the Italian,
British and US corpora were mostly similarities. It seems that most stere-
otypical traits associated with women and men and promoted by gender-
specific magazines do not undergo significant variation across the three
countries, as might have been expected, given that they are all located in
the so- called industrialized Western world.
A few stereotypical traits do, however, seem to be articulated differently
across the three corpora. Due to space constraints, and since they appear
to mark dramatically different trends than the ones outlined in past
research on gender advertising, in what follows I mainly focus on recur-
rent, therefore normalized, body image stereotypes as linked to masculin-
ity. The stereotypical traits outlined in the section ‘Beauty and Youth: It’s
a (New) Man’s World’ are recurrent across the three corpora, whereas the
one analysed in the section, ‘What Makes a Man a Man, or, What It Takes
to Make a Woman Happy’ is pre- eminently American, and can be found
only in (or rather, pervades) Men’s Health US and Men’s Edge .
Beauty and Youth: It’s a (New) Man’s World

According to psychologist Jean Kilbourne (1979, 1987, 1995), advertising
pushes women towards obsessions about their own body image, whereas
values other than care for one’s looks, youth and slimness (e.g. status,
wealth, maturity, intelligence, success in general) are more usually pre-
sented as male standards. Kilbourne’s research into American advertising
spans three decades, but apparently in more recent times youth and, if not
slimness, then the absence of fat, have become pre- eminent features of a
man’s ego and self-perception, as well.
In the men’s magazines included in my three corpora, in fact, the pur-
suit of self-assertion in the form of acquiring a satisfactory body image
is a constant feature not only in advertisements, but in non- commercial
content, as well. According to advertising, the standards for handsome-
ness invariably include appearing younger than one’s age and being fit
and muscular – extremely so in ads for high-protein dietary supplements
circulated in Men’s Health , For Men and Men’s Edge ; always, however, without
any trace of fat.
Starting with the body, the American versions of Men’s Health and Men’s
Edge both contain large quantities of advertisements for specialty foods and
supplements, gym equipment and drugs aimed at increasing muscle tissue
and/or training performance. It is interesting to note that such advertise-
ments are less frequent in British men’s magazines, and virtually missing in
Italian ones. This is probably a consequence of more stringent European
Union bans on certain muscle-building products, which might also explain
why one of the very few such ads found in the Italian corpus, promoting
MM USA’s Thermo Serum, insists on the absolute safety of the product
rather than on fabulous results: prodotti assolutamente affidabili , sicura ed effi-
cace, in modo sicuro [absolutely reliable products, safe and effective, safely]
(Men’s Health Italy, August 2006, pp. 30–1). Leaving legal and safety issues
aside, however, such cases show the extent to which fat is becoming an issue
that – according to advertising – deserves attention and public discussion
for men, as has long been the case for women.
Although this kind of advertising is still much less frequent in men’s
than in women’s magazines (especially the fitness-related ones), in adver-
tising targeting men, too, fat is very frequently presented as an enemy to
be fought or, more routinely, burnt. In the Thermo Serum ad mentioned
above, for instance, the product is said to act bruciando i grassi in eccesso, bru-
cia il grasso accumulato [burning excess fat, burns fat build-ups]. Arguably,
‘burn fat’ is a specific collocation rather than a metaphor, but nonethe-
less it may acquire new undertones when used in connection with unmis-
takable war metaphors such as ‘attacking’ or ‘targets problem areas’ (e.g.
Nutrex’s Lipo- 6 capsules ad, Men’s Edge, July 2006, pp. 112–13). This way of
representing fat as an enemy to be defeated, and the product as an ally, is
very similar to what happens in the much more ubiquitous advertising of
women’s slimming or anti- cellulite products. Incidentally, war metaphors
are recurrent in advertising for home cleaning products and ‘purifying’
foodstuffs, as well (Torresi, 2004), which highlights the close relationship
between the concepts of dirt and fat in the kind of body image normalized
by advertising.
The ad for Nutrex’s Lipo- 6 capsules mentioned above also contains an
interesting element that is not usually found in ads targeted at women,
but on the other hand is recurrent in ads for men’s grooming products.
In its body copy we find ‘enhances muscle definition and brings out a lean
midsection’ (my emphasis). The wording suggests that the fat being burnt
is an unwanted addition to the body and that the real midsection, the lean
one, is lying under it waiting to be uncovered. The hidden message being,

‘What you are is not the real you. The real you will only come out if you use
our product’. This seems to confirm the conventional notion that, while a
woman’s beauty is constructed by something that is put on – makeup, per-
fumes, creams and lotions, hair dye and the like (Kilbourne, 1979, 1987) –
a man should always look natural, authentic, even unrefined. Advertising
appropriates this traditional notion and tells men that in order to look that
way, they should buy more or less the same kind of products women do,
only men are not supposed to apply such products onto themselves but to let
the products help them reveal their real looks (which in turn implies that,
puzzlingly, men not complying with the normalized handsomeness stand-
ards do not quite look like themselves). For instance, an ad for an ‘abs diet’
book sports before-and- after pictures and the headline, ‘Is there a great
set of abs hiding under your gut, too?’ (Men’s Health US, August 2006, p. 113,
my emphasis). In another ad, Just For Men hair dye is said to grant a ‘real
natural look’, the word ‘real’ being highlighted in lilac against the dark
grey headline and repeated in each title of the four body copy sections;
the same idea of authenticity is reiterated in the phrase ‘natural look’
(repeated three times across the copy) (Men’s Health US, May 2006, insert
between pp. 56 and 57). The advertised product is actually said to cover
grey hair and, at the same time, ‘match your natural color precisely’, as if
grey were not a natural hair colour. Stating that men look distinguished
with grey hair, unlike women – as one advertisement shown by Kilbourne
(1979) maintained – clearly seems outdated, and old age or even maturity
seem to have drifted out of the acceptability borders of stereotyped hand-
someness, as confirmed by the increasing number of ads for men’s anti-
ageing products. In Men’s Health UK, for instance, we find that Clinique’s
anti-ageing moisturizer ‘brings skin back to a more healthy-looking state’,
as if ageing were not healthy (January/February 2006, p. 7).
Another appropriation of stereotypical traits traditionally associated
with masculinity to advertise grooming products that are traditionally
seen as anti-masculine is the frequent reference to moisturizing creams or
lotions that energize, strengthen or add power to a man’s skin. To provide but a
few examples, Nivea for Men is described as energia pura , rivitalizzante , rivi-
talizza , rinforza [pure energy, revitalizing, revitalizes, strengthens] (Men’s
Health Italy, December 2005, p. 179); Clinique offers an ‘anti- ageing power-
house’ (Men’s Health UK, January/February 2006, p. 7); and Shiseido Men
products are said to ‘power your skin’ thanks to their ‘high-performance
skincare system’ that ‘restores vitality by strengthening’ and brings out ‘the
power of Shiseido Men’ (Men’s Health US, September 2005, p. 27 of the
‘Styleguide’). The relatively frequent recurrence of such examples across

the three corpora shows the cross- cultural reach of the association of reas-
suringly familiar stereotypes of manliness with new standards of groom-
ing, which include facial treatments and seeing the signs of one’s age as
problematic.
Reference to energy, power and strength can also be found in the body
copies of ads for L’Oréal’s Men Expert skincare products. The campaign
for such products, however, more prominently sports a new and perhaps
more interesting trait. Admittedly, it is only one campaign, but it recurs in
all three corpora and it is worth analysing for its stigmatization of ageing
and reversal of the male gaze paradigm (see the ‘Conclusions’ section),
which, as we will see in the section ‘What Makes a Man a Man, or, What
It Takes to Make a Woman Happy’, reaches far beyond this case study.
Moreover, at least in Italy, for a period of several months, the print cam-
paign was accompanied by pervasive and voluminous installations in high-
visibility public spaces such as train stations. Here I will account for one
ad only, promoting the Hydra Energetic anti-fatigue moisturizer, although
the corpora also contained another ad from the same campaign that had
the same characteristics.
The visual part of the ad is split in two: on the left (the position of given
elements according to Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996), we find a picture
of the handsome model’s face as a whole, and a caption conveying what is
supposed to be his own self-perception, reading in Italian Pensi di avere una
bella faccia ? [Do you think your face looks good?], echoed by the British
English ‘You think you look the business?’ and by the more direct ‘You
think you look wide awake?’ in the American counterpart (respectively,
Men’s Health Italy, January 2006, p. 23; GQ UK, September 2005, p. 205; and
Men’s Health US, September 2005, p. 35). The man’s perception about his
own looks, and the picture of his face – which apparently does fall within
the current handsomeness stereotypes – is contrasted with the close-up of
his slightly tired-looking eye on the right, accompanied by the respective
captions, Lei pensa soprattutto che hai una brutta cera [Above all, she thinks
you look unwell/tired], ‘She thinks you look overworked’, and ‘She thinks
you need a wake-up call’ (in the figurative sense of ‘you need something to
make you look less tired/sleepy’). The body copy goes on to describe the
energizing effect of the moisturizer.
The left-hand and right-hand captions are built in such a way that
the wordplay they contain has the effect of highlighting the opposition
between what ‘you’ think and what ‘she’ thinks. Right-hand captions start
with ‘lei’ or ‘she’; additionally, the right-hand picture, besides being in the
half of the page that is usually devoted to new elements or the rheme, and
is naturally more salient (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996), is a close-up,
which denotes closer personal distance between the model and the reader
than in the previous photograph. The fact that the model looks straight
into the camera, and therefore seems to be looking out of the page directly
at the reader, also elicits the reader’s emotional response (Kress and Van
Leeuwen, 1996). All this has the effect of presenting what is in the right-
hand part of the ad (what ‘she’ thinks of you) as more important than
the left-hand part (what ‘you’ think of yourself). An external authority is
introduced whose opinion of a man’s looks is more important than what
the man thinks or feels about his own appearance. And, surprisingly, it is a
woman, or rather, a generic feminine entity only hinted at in the captions.
The implication is that dissatisfying such external authority, even in small
details, would spell failure – not just failure to conquer her or keep her by
one’s side, but failure on a more general, social or even existential level.
Suddenly, then, men seem to be pushed towards caring for their appear-
ance through the ‘scare’ techniques referring to peer or partner stigmati-
zation, of the kind that Fenati (1987) describes as typical of the 1950s. As I
show in the section ‘What Makes a Man a Man, or, What It Takes to Make
a Woman Happy’, a more straightforward version of the same technique is
used in connection with parts of the male body other than the face and,
interestingly, once again in connection with men’s body image as judged by
women. It thus appears that the burden of the ‘beauty myth’ (Wolf, 1991),
far from being taken off women’s shoulders (as confirmed by the analysis
of the advertisements in the women’s magazines in my corpora, which is
not discussed here), is starting to cast its shadow on men, too. The phenom-
enon has already come to the point of extreme body fragmentation that is
frequently applied to female bodies in all kinds of advertising, and is indi-
cated by Kilbourne (1979) as one of the causes of distorted body images in
girls and adult women. An ad for BodyBuilding.com, for instance, displays
a muscular male body that is a collage of different pictures, each detail
displaying handwritten captions such as ‘32” waist’ or ‘ripped 6 pack’ and
with a hand- drawn smiley face replacing the head. The headline reads ‘you
know what you want to look like . . . we can make it happen!’(Men’s Edge ,
May 2006, p. 43).
That men are having to cope with unattainable ideals of good looks,
unfortunately, does not imply a feeling of solidarity with women in real-
izing how burdensome the beauty myth they have been subjected to for
millennia is. Quite the contrary, the responsibility for setting up the new
standards for male handsomeness is often placed on women as relentless
and authoritative judges. It appears, then, that women, in addition to

having to go through the consequences of their own beauty myth, might
unwittingly become the imaginary perpetrators of the introduction of the
male ‘handsomeness myth’, with all the complications for inter- gender dia-
logue that this might bring about, as is further discussed in the section
‘Conclusions’. This fictitious women’s over- critical gaze is in no way limited
to a man’s face; in American advertising it becomes much more invasive, as
we will see in the following section.
What Makes a Man a Man, or, What It Takes to Make a Woman Happy
I worked with Freud in Vienna.
We broke over the concept of penis envy.
He thought it should be limited to women.
Woody Allen, Zelig
A conspicuous difference that sets the American corpus apart from the
Italian and British ones and that would need to be taken into considera-
tion should similar material be submitted for translation is the pervasive
and open allusion to sexual performance and what is presented as a man’s
sole resource in the bedroom – the penis – as central in relations with
women. In two of the American magazines, Men’s Health and For Men (but
not in GQ ), ads for chemical or surgical penis enlargement, sex- enhancing
drugs and even sex toys are ubiquitous. They invariably use the same scare
technique we have seen in the Men’s Expert campaign: the implacable
she-judge, the fictitious feminine entity for whom being a man really boils
down, not to what she sees on a man’s face this time, but to his being able
to give her sexual pleasure, and therefore, metonymically, to the penis.
For example, in an ad for Xomax, male readers are told that ‘what she
wants’ from her man is a ‘bigger, thicker, longer penis’ (Men’s Edge , June
2006, p. 100). In a Sustain ad, the man is further commodified as his
sexual partner becomes ‘another satisfied customer’, obviously present-
ing having several partners as a plus for a man (Men’s Health US, January/
February 2006, p. 139). An ad for FastSize (see Figure 9.1) makes the she-
judge rhetoric more visual, featuring a young woman whose attire would
suggest the imminence of an erotic situation, but who is instead caught
just after the act of checking her partner’s penis size with a conspicuous
yellow measuring tape in one hand, and slightly lowering the waistband of
his shorts with the other. The enthusiastic expression on her face tells us
that the man has passed the measuring test and has been deemed, as the
Figure 9.1 Advertisement for FastSize, Men’s Edge , July 2006, p. 109
body copy goes, ‘fit for sex’– meaning that having sex is simply out of the
question for men with smaller penises. The headline is an equally telling
‘Do you measure up?’ – implying that there is a minimum standard penis
size to qualify for sex, and possibly to meet a woman’s expectations in every
other respect (since it is, ‘Do you measure up?’, and not ‘Does your penis
measure up?’). Arguably, the figure of the young woman with the measur-
ing tape (who is in the foreground, more centred, dressed in a warmer and
brighter colour than the man, with her elbow pointing out of the page,
and in all ways the most salient element of the visual) has a high castrating
potential, even conceding that an ironical interpretation of the ad is made
possible by the nonsensical situation and exaggerated surprise and enthu-
siasm on the woman’s face. A much less threatening model of a woman is
depicted in the single ad for penis enlargement found in the Italian corpus
(Andromedical, For Men , December 2006, p. 186), which gives a clear idea
of how advertisements for products falling into this category can be ‘trans-
lated’ outside the United States. Here the woman is depicted as a Lolita:
she is obviously very young, wears girlish pigtails and looks away from the
reader with what looks like a naughty smile. She is licking a tall ice- cream
cone, with a clear visual allusion to oral sex. Overall, she is presented as
the prize for a larger penis rather than a judge giving out marks. The exis-
tential need to satisfy her, which is so recurrent in the American corpus, is
not mentioned or hinted at.
The metonymical substitution of the penis for the man (and all his worth)
is brought to extremes in an ad for the HeadBlade razor where, however,
the woman is no longer the judge, but the agent who makes the metonymi-
cal substitution clear by asking the man, who is portrayed from behind to
highlight the (inevitably phallic) shape of his shaved head, ‘Can I touch
it?’ (Men’s Edge , June 2006, p. 73). The man’s head is the only element of
the visual that receives direct light, but everything else in the ad hints at
an altogether different interpretation of the ‘it’ in the question. The ques-
tion is visualized as a whisper, given its smaller print and closeness to the
man’s ear, which adds to the erotic undertones of the situation depicted:
the scene is dark, the two models are close together, and the woman has
her eyes closed and lips parted. No element of the ad seems to justify an
ironical interpretation.
American readers of Men’s Health and Men’s Edge , then, are constantly
reminded that their essence really comes down to the penis, and their
worth exclusively lies in how good they are in bed. Penis enlargement and
sexual enhancers, in this perspective, are presented as a man’s affirmative
action, a way to make one’s life better and even to become a better person.
To some men (and women), this might appear depressing enough, but in
the same magazines one can also find ads for other kinds of products that
go as far as quenching every hope of improvement with a little help from
chemicals or surgery. An ad for Tabu Toys, for instance, sets the standard
for being a good lover so high that it is beyond human capabilities, by sug-
gesting that no sexual prowess can compete with mechanical vibration.
Its headline reads, ‘You may be a great lover, but can you vibrate at 12,000
rpm?’ (Men’s Edge , July 2006, p. 91). The answer is provided by the ad for
Outrageous Toys, whose headline states, ‘No comparison’ (Men’s Edge ,
April 2006, p. 117). Once again, translators beware: no comparison for
similar ads was found in the British and Italian corpora, which might imply
that ‘translating’ such materials requires an approach that is much more
complex – and cautious – than simple interlinguistic transposition.
It is perhaps worth repeating that these examples are from men’s maga-
zines, therefore they are explicitly targeted at men. It is not women who
are told that they should care about their partners’ penis size or sexual
prowess; it is men who are told that they should boost their penises unless
they want to be precluded from sex and female consideration, and that no
matter how hard they try, they cannot compete with sex toys. The castra-
tion complex has never been made so patent.
Moreover, ads for penis extension, sexual enhancers and sex toys almost
invariably feature pictures with erotic undertones or that can even be
labelled as instances of soft porn. Thus, the male reader is aroused at the
same time as he is told that he can have access to sex only if he is in line
with certain quantitative standards, or even that he had better step aside
and leave the way to vibrating dildos. In this kind of men’s advertising,
then, women are represented simultaneously as alleged subjects (judges)
and real objects (of male desire); this double role will be discussed in the
following section.
Conclusions
It would be naïve on my part to maintain that my interest in the kind of

advertisements we have discussed here lies only in the implications that the
stereotypical traits analysed here may have for translators and translation
scholars. An equally important perspective in this study is connected with
gender studies, and in this perspective, gender identities and their repre-
sentations are objects of study per se. Before discussing the implications
of my work from the point of view of translation studies, then, it may be
appropriate to draw a few conclusions about gender relations. Of course,
I do not try to conceal the inevitable gender bias in my analysis; a male
researcher would most probably interpret my material in a different way
than I do.
From a woman’s perspective, there is a fil rouge that connects some of
the examples shown in the section ‘Beauty and Youth: It’s a (New) Man’s
World’ and those in the section ‘What Makes a Man a Man, or, What It
Takes to Make a Woman Happy’. Whether it is to promote skin revitalizers,
anti-age products or penis enlargement, the ads often refer to an exter-
nal authority whose approval a man must seek about his own body image.
Erasing wrinkles and obtaining a more conspicuous maleness are pre-
sented as something every man should do to be up to his woman, whether
she is his partner for life or a one-night encounter. In today’s advertising,
standards of masculinity tend to be – perhaps for the first time – defined in
terms that are not subjective, but objective. In advertising fiction, the male
becomes the object of the female gaze, thus reversing the paradigm that
has informed decades of feminist criticism. Male readers abruptly become
aware of their new ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (Mulvey, 1975, online), after hav-
ing been socialized into the exclusive role of the gazer by the very media
that are now changing the rules of the game.
The psychological leverage power attributed to women (as a category) and
the pressure allegedly being put on the men who receive such advertising
messages, may result in ‘real’ women being disliked for their unsuspected
role as arbiters of male body image standards. Thus it could be argued
that we go back to our usual role as objects of male consideration (in the
somewhat familiar form of blame) without ever really becoming gazers.
Not to mention that the corpus also includes several instances of more tra-
ditional representations of inter- gender relations in which the male gaze is
not challenged in any way.
There are other ways in which such ads actually reiterate the male gaze
upon women, this time in the form of traditional stereotyping. The ads for
the L’Oréal’s Men’s Expert line point to a kind of woman who is so super-
ficial that she is unable to go beyond the details of a man’s outer appear-
ance, such as the wrinkles on his face or the bags under his eyes. The ads in
the section ‘What Makes a Man a Man, or, What It Takes to Make a Woman
Happy’, on the other hand, seem to limit the common ground between
the two acknowledged genders to sexual intercourse. A man, these ads
maintain, only matters to a woman if he satisfies her sexually, and con-
versely, a woman is only relevant to a man when it comes to sex – even if the
focus is on giving her pleasure rather than obtaining pleasure from her.
Whether meek sex kittens or castrating viragos, women simply do not exist
outside the sex sphere. And although the latter stereotyping of women is
only present in the advertising found in some American men’s magazines,
in these magazines it is so recurrent that their readers would need a huge
rationalizing effort to detach themselves from it.
Shifting to a translator’s point of view, the kind of analysis outlined in
the section ‘Some Results’, has significant practical implications. It is clear
that, when translating and adapting advertisements for men’s fat burn-
ers for the Italian, British or American market, one can effectively exploit
the representations of fat as an enemy that recur in ads for women’s anti-
cellulite and slimming products (actually, in this field male-targeted ads
tend to borrow the very same wordings found in female-targeted ads for
similar products). When it comes to men’s skincare, however, it is important
to suggest that the prospective customer may ‘recover his real self’ through
the product rather than describing the advertised good as an addition that
is necessary to achieve one’s ideal self (which, on the other hand, would be
perfectly acceptable in ads targeting women).
Other elements, however, do not travel well across the cultures or markets
considered here, for a number of different reasons. Certain dietary supple-
ments are illegal in Europe, and classified ads – a favoured collocation for
British ads connected to body modification – do not exist as a genre in Italy
and are much less frequent in US magazines than in the United Kingdom.
As we have seen, it is perfectly sensible for American Men’s Health to publish

ads for penis enlargement surgery or products that equate readers to their
members without thinking they would feel outraged, but this might raise
some eyebrows among the staff of the Italian and British versions of the
same magazine. And perhaps, explicitly being equated to one’s member
would not be taken well by most Italian readers, if only because they are
not used to it (yet).
One might argue that the issues above range from the cultural to the
legal sphere, therefore they should not be a translator’s concern. As I
have had the opportunity to highlight elsewhere, however (Torresi, 2004,
2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2010), the translation process naturally encompasses
the text as a whole, not one component – the verbal – only. In advertising
translation, particularly, commissioners usually require thorough trans-
creation, meaning not only the artistic and creative use of language in
rewriting the copy but also the adaptation of commercial appeal and
motivations to buy as well as the incorporation of relevant cultural, reli-
gious and legal issues (Adab, 2000, 2001; De Mooij, 1998/2005, 2003, 2004;
Fuentes Luque and Kelly, 2000; Guidère, 2000a, 2000b, 2001; Zequan,
2003). Separating the visual from the verbal, legal issues from the rest
of the context, and culture from language, is therefore neither easy nor
recommendable for the functional success of the target text when work-
ing with semiotically complex and highly context- dependent texts such
as advertisements. While translating materials such as those illustrated
in the section ‘What Makes a Man a Man, or, What It Takes to Make a
Woman Happy’, in particular, ignoring the fact that penis enlargement
products are advertised far less frequently in the United Kingdom and in
Italy than in the United States, and that when they are advertised, they
refer to a woman figure entirely different from the one that recurs across
US men’s magazines, would be no less a translation mistake than getting
the grammar wrong.
Turning from general to more practical considerations, translators who
are able to trans- create and adapt rather than ‘ just’ translate advertise-
ments, and who can work in a team with art directors and copywriters,
provide clients with additional services that they should be able to under-
line and monetize accordingly. Thus, collecting and analysing advertising
corpora, or even just keeping a critical eye on advertising circulated in
the countries where one’s working languages are spoken (including one’s
own), can turn out to be a good investment, especially if this is advertised
as an additional ‘cultural research service’, as well as being professionally
and ethically correct and – hopefully – unpredictably interesting.
Note
1. The research presented in this chapter was carried out in the framework of the
two-year project titled ‘Lettura in chiave di genere della comunicazione pub-
blicitaria gender-specific’, tutored by prof. Raffaella Baccolini and funded by the
Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì from August 2005 to July 2007.
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Chapter 10
Translating Place: The Piano from

Screen to Tourist Brochure
Alfio Leotta
Victoria University of Wellington
A rugged Auckland West Coast beach on a gloomy day. Two women walk
along the shore. A young blonde man calls out to them and asks in a broad
German accent: ‘Excuse me . . . I wonder . . . could you tell me: is this way they
made ze film . . . ze Pi . . . ze Piano?’ The opening sequence of Topless Women
Talk about Their Lives (dir. Harry Sinclair, 1997) acknowledges the iconic sta-
tus of Karekare beach that, for more than a decade now, has been the des-
tination of a film-tourist pilgrimage for visitors from all around the world
(Harvey, 1994; Beeton, 2005). The Piano (dir. Jane Campion, 1993) was the
first New Zealand film1 to achieve worldwide popularity. In 1994, one year
after its release, it was estimated that the global takings of the movie had
reached US $140 million (Croft, 2000).2 The extraordinary critical response
to Jane Campion’s masterpiece was sealed by the award of a Palme d’Or, three
Oscars and several other prestigious international prizes. The international
success of The Piano also contributed to putting New Zealand on the global
map for moviegoers who might not have been exposed to any image of the
country. Most of the critical commentaries about The Piano deal with its femi-
nist commitment, post-colonial questions or stylistic issues (Coombs et al.,
1999; Tincknell, 2000; Margolis, 2000). This chapter will draw from some of
these works in order to present a conceptual framework for understanding
the film-tourism generated by The Piano. In particular, I attempt to answer
two major research questions: why has The Piano engendered such a strong
impact on tourism and how have tourism authorities capitalized on the film’s
spinoffs by ‘translating’ the story’s appeal from film to tourist language.
Visions of Landscape in Tourism and Film
According to Michael Cronin, ‘the implication of visual practices in travel

is long established. From romantic landscape painting to the picture
The Piano from Screen to Tourist Brochure 177
postcard and TV holiday programmes, travelling is often primarily pro-

jected as an activity of seeing’ (2000, p. 81). Cronin claims that the cen-
trality of the visual in the tourist experience might be explained by the
necessity to overcome anxieties connected to lack of knowledge of the
locals’ language and culture. The convergence between images and travel
is particularly apparent in the interconnection between the histories of
cinema and tourism, with both cultural activities providing different but
overlapping answers to the modern desire for temporal and spatial mobil-
ity. As forms of modern symbolic production, tourism and cinema are also
responsible for the emergence of new myths and their collective represen-
tations. Recent feature films have represented New Zealand both as an
imaginary fantasyland and as a ‘real’ place. These images have served to
reinforce the myth of a wild, pure and natural New Zealand. This myth, in
turn, has been exploited by the local tourism board, which, during the last
two decades, has been able to create a successful travel brand destination.
Research commissioned by Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) at the begin-
ning of the new millennium identified the country as rich in four assets:
landscape, people, adventure and culture (Morgan et al., 2003, p. 292).
The tourist authorities consequently designed a new promotional strategy
which positioned New Zealand as ‘an adventurous new land and an adven-
turous new culture on the edge of the Pacific Ocean’ (Piggott cited in
Morgan et al., 2003, p. 292). The essence of the New Zealand brand, as
conceived by Tourism New Zealand, is the landscape, and in particular a
landscape imbued with sophisticated, innovative and spirited values which
allow tourists to express themselves through activities and experiences.
In particular, the national tourism board has targeted the ‘interactive
traveller’ who ‘seek[s] out new experiences that involve engagement and
interaction, and demonstrate[s] respect for the natural, social and cultural
environment’ (TNZ, 2004, p. 1). The characteristics of the interactive
traveller are reminiscent of that category of the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’
defined by Pierre Bourdieu (1984) as the ‘intellectuals’. The main features
of Bourdieu’s intellectuals are their preference for ‘aesthetic–asceticism’
expressed by their characteristic leisure activities (mountaineering, hik-
ing, walking) and their fascination with ‘natural, wild nature’. The intellec-
tuals possess a cultural capital that is greater than their actual economical
capital. This could partially explain their predilection for ‘the most cultur-
ally legitimate and economically cheapest practices, for example, museum
going, or in sport, mountain- climbing or walking’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 267).
Another characteristic of the intellectuals is their constant quest for what
Urry defines as the ‘romantic gaze’. The romantic gaze emphasizes a private
and semi- spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze. In Urry’s words:
‘The romantic gaze involves further quests for new objects of the solitary
gaze, the deserted beach, the empty hilltop, the uninhabited forest [. . .]
and so on’ (2002, p. 150).
Landscape plays a crucial role in tourism as a function of commodifi-
cation which orientates space towards the selling of tourist destinations
and experiences. Similarly, landscape has an equally central function in
the cinematic medium. Early films privileged the representation of the
natural world, and the subsequent emergence of narrative cinema relied
on a spatial background to accompany the depiction of actions and events.
Landscape seems to play an even more prominent role in New Zealand
national cinema, to the extent that several critics have stressed its struc-
tural importance as a signifier of national identity in local feature films.
As Bob Harvey, the mayor of Waitakere City, puts it: ‘[F]or many years
New Zealand film production was without major facilities and studios were
unknown. Sets were difficult, so location was everything, both an asset and
a challenge’ (Harvey and Bridge, 2005, p. 17). Roger Horrocks goes even
further, arguing that ‘in almost all New Zealand films the physical land-
scape makes its presence strongly felt not only as scenic background, but
as an influence shaping the lives of the characters. Certain emotions seem
to grow and flourish in this landscape’ (Horrocks, 1989, p. 102). Others
have celebrated the uniqueness of the New Zealand cinematographic land-
scape, allegedly characterized by a dark, gloomy and edgy look (Neill and
Rymer, 1995; Harvey and Bridge, 2005).3
The representation of a ‘sublime’ landscape in local films consistently
draws upon the myth of a wild, pure, natural New Zealand that underpins
the local settler culture. As New Zealand cinema purports to traverse the
nation, and ‘discover’ sites and sights, it places the spectator in the position
of a voy(ag)eur or a modern day explorer. The emphasis on landscape in
New Zealand cinema has provided local and international audiences with
a double ‘discovery’. On the one hand, due to its ability to mobilize the
spectator gaze, it has brought a series of New Zealand ‘scenic gems’ closer.
On the other hand, it has allowed for the discovery of a spirit of nation-
hood which was shaped through the very consumption of the country’s
scenic views. The creation of a New Zealand national community is, there-
fore, strictly intermingled with its translation and promotion as a tourist
destination for foreign audiences.
The global competition between international tourist destinations has
obliged countries to position themselves in order to cover different market
niches. Tourism New Zealand has sought to capitalize on the possibilities
of non- conventional publicity tools, particularly film-induced tourism,

ever since the launch of the ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ campaign in 1999.
As Glenn Croy points out, ‘[T]his image building and promotion process
effectively utilises TNZ’s limited financial resources by using other groups’
resources to provide the images and then creating association to New
Zealand’ (Croy, 2004, p. 7). From this point of view, the production of The
Lord of the Rings (dir. Peter Jackson, 2001–2003), which associated the coun-
try with adventure and other-worldly scenery over a period of three years,
has been a serendipitous development for New Zealand’s tourist author-
ities. Several destination-marketing organizations, such as Tourism New
Zealand and Air New Zealand, have used the film to promote the country
as a tourist destination.
Landscape is an artificial construct, one which cannot be divorced from
the real and imaginary relation human beings entertain with space. This
notion is crucial to the relation between film and tourism in New Zealand.
In order to understand this interaction, it is necessary to investigate the
ways in which space is constructed in both film and tourist texts and how
it is invested with symbolic and ideological meaning. The Piano represents
a very useful case study that can illustrate the functioning of this essen-
tial semiotic process. I begin with the process through which Karekare
beach, the most famous location of the movie, has become a popular New
Zealand icon. I then focus on the analysis of a poster commissioned by
Tourism New Zealand that uses The Piano to promote both Karekare and
the country as a whole. The examination of the semiotic structure of the
advertisement provides the basis for a comparative study of film and tourist
languages and in particular the critical issue of intersemiotic translation
from screen to tourist advertisement.
Travel as Translation
Set in the mid-nineteenth century, The Piano tells the story of Ada, a mute
Scotswoman who is sent along with her daughter and her piano to New
Zealand for an arranged marriage with a wealthy British settler, Alistair
Stewart. Stewart proves to be diffident and insensitive to Ada’s passion for
the piano and decides to abandon the instrument on the beach where the
protagonist landed. In turn, Ada does not make any effort to befriend her
future husband and instead becomes involved in an affair with Baines,
a Scottish settler who lives with the Māori. Baines, who has retrieved the
piano from the beach, offers to sell back Ada’s instrument, one key at a
time, in exchange for piano lessons and kisses. Eventually Ada, who is
attracted to Baines, yields to his advances and has sexual intercourse with
him. Stewart finds out about Ada’s sexual encounters with Baines and, in
retribution, chops off her index finger, thus depriving her of the ability to
play music. At the end of the film Ada, Flora and Baines leave together to
start a new life in another settler community, Nelson, in the South Island.
Although The Piano is in no way a film about tourism or the ‘tourist
experience’, through a narrative of migration and settlement, it explores
mobility and its limits. The film is characterized by a clearly symmetri-
cal configuration of the places visited by Ada. The narration begins in
Scotland, which represents civilization and the familiar. Then, through
the liminal spaces of the sea and the beach, it passes into the exotic and
primitive world of New Zealand. Travel is an act of separation from the
familiar culture and language, and it inevitably necessitates a translation
effort. Ada, who significantly is mute in the film, is able to communicate
in the unfamiliar context of New Zealand through the music of her piano.
At the end of the film, the heroine leaves, once again across the beach
and the sea, for a different civilized place, understood as the settlement of
Nelson. The first sequence of the film opposes two places and establishes
the necessity of a journey. The scene is set in Scotland, where Ada herself
announces that she is about to leave for a ‘distant country’. The actual
destination (New Zealand) is revealed by the text on the packing case of
the piano, an object which will become a symbol of civilization and the
familiar. The film introduces, from the outset, the distance and fracture
between two geographical and psychological places, an opposition which
will be reinforced throughout the rest of the film. In terms of a morphol-
ogy of narrative places, Propp (1968) distinguishes two spaces present in
the folktale: the ‘own space’, where the hero is born and grows up, and the
‘other space’, where he/she has to perform. Similarly, Greimas and Courtes
point out that every narration is divided into a ‘topic space’, where the sub-
ject acts, and a ‘heterotopic space’ (espace hétérotopique) where the subject
stipulates a contract which will ultimately be sanctioned positively or nega-
tively (1982, p. 142). In the case of The Piano, the heroine has to deal with
an actual contract, the wedding agreement arranged by her father, which
obliges her to leave home for an unfamiliar place.
The Piano is the story of both a physical and a psychological journey.
Ada’s character, therefore, could be read as a simulacrum of the travel-
ler. This is particularly significant in light of the fact that The Piano has
contributed to attracting thousands of tourists to West Auckland beaches.
According to Boorstin (1962, p. 107), the modern mass tourist travels in
guided groups, within the ‘environmental bubble’ of the familiar, and is

insulated from the strangeness of the host environment. Similarly, once
Ada is left alone on the beach surrounded by her luggage (Stewart has
not yet arrived to collect her), she creates a simulation of the familiar civi-
lized world: in the surreal scenes of her first night in New Zealand she
plays the piano and, like a Victorian proto-backpacker, camps under her
hooped skirt. The skirt, a true ‘environmental bubble’, will save Ada again
when Stewart attempts to rape her in the woods. In the latter scene, Ada
falls over her skirt and seems defeated, but is eventually saved by her all-
enveloping clothes, the symbol of Victorian femininity.4
Another interesting analogy between the tourist and Ada is provided by
her muteness. One of the most common experiences for tourists overseas
is the impossibility of establishing independent and unmediated commu-
nication with the host environment and the local people. This situation is
perceived as both the greatest appeal and the greatest risk of the tourist
experience: the desire to ‘get off the beaten track’ and to meet the ‘real peo-
ple’ clashes dramatically with the impossibility of communicating with the
locals. This is why tourists need surrogate parents (travel agents, couriers,
hotel managers) to take responsibility and protect them from harsh real-
ity. In a similar way, Ada needs a ‘mediator’, a translator, here represented
by Flora, in order to communicate with the external world. As Tincknell
points out: ‘Flora in her tiny version of Ada’s black bonnet and crinoline
appears as a miniaturised mirror of her mother, mimicking her actions,
moods and responses and giving verbal expression to Ada’s views’ (2000,
p. 111). One of the most significant tropes of the first part of the film is the
protagonist’s inability to communicate with her ‘local hosts’. For instance,
the main problem in the relationship between Ada and Stewart is that the
latter does not understand the importance that the piano has for his new
wife. This is why the marriage between Ada and Stewart cements the bond
between the woman and her daughter. It seems obvious that when Ada is
finally able to communicate with the local hosts, particularly Baines, she
will no longer need Flora’s translation support. The role of Ada’s transla-
tor is occasionally transferred to the little notepad used by the heroine to
write short sentences. The notepad is strangely reminiscent of the pocket
dictionaries that provide tourists with keywords or basic sentences in a for-
eign language. In summary, the heroine is not in control of the narrative,
the communication or the space and, as a consequence, seeks refuge in the
familiar, namely the piano and her clothes.
To fit Ada into the frame of the tourist/traveller is not to ignore the com-
plexity of her character or to preclude other interpretations of the film.
Instead it offers a ‘tourist reading’ of The Piano that is relevant to the extent
to which it can contribute to explaining the tourist spinoffs generated by
the movie. Even though migration and tourism are experiences marked by
profound differences they nonetheless share some basic tropes such as the
notions of travel, mobility and opposition between the new and the famil-
iar. This is particularly true in a postcolonial society such as New Zealand,
where the settler gaze is likely to short- circuit the tourist gaze.
New Zealand, or a Piano Stranded on the Beach
The beauty of the landscape and its importance within the narrative also
played a crucial role in attracting potential film-tourists to Aotearoa/New
Zealand. In the first part of The Piano, nature, and the untamed space in
particular (the sea and the forest), is constructed as an actant, an actual
character of the story. Merleau- Ponty (1964) claims that the relation
between subject and space is inscribed within deep narrative structures;
space could, in fact, actively oppose the project of the subject and, there-
fore, should be considered as an actant: a closed door, for instance, is an
‘opposer’, an antisubject that is an obstacle to the potential programme
of the subject. Referring to the importance of the New Zealand bush in
the story, Jan Chapman, the film’s producer, points out that: ‘it was really
a major player in the film. And now I also feel that it is very much part
of New Zealand, that the relationship to the land is fundamental there’
(Bilborough, 1993, p. 142).
The creation of a filmic landscape that could effectively represent the lush
difference of nineteenth- century New Zealand meant that the producers of
The Piano had to shoot in various distant locations around New Zealand’s
North Island.5 Many scenes were filmed 40 kilometres west of Auckland
at Karekare, the location that features as the beach where Ada first lands
in New Zealand. One of the main differences between The Piano and The
Lord of the Rings tourist spinoffs is that while the latter has been spread
around dozens of film locations in both the North and South Islands, the
tourism induced by The Piano was mainly concentrated on Karekare beach.
But why do tourists visit the beach while ignoring the bush or other film
locations? The most obvious reason for this is that the image of the piano
on the beach was heavily marketed from the outset and quickly became a
powerful icon of the film. Second, Karekare and West Auckland beaches in
general are considered the ideal type of New Zealand beach: empty, wild
and untamed. Some physical features of the beach (the black sand, the
rough waves, the shape of the range that surrounds the beach, the rock
that faces the shore) give tourists the possibility of easily identifying the
location as Karekare or at least as one of the West Auckland beaches. By
contrast, the representation of the bush, a hybrid creation of distant and
neighbouring places jigsawed together, does not provide us with any hint
of the actual location of the settlements in the film. The iconic status and
emptiness of Karekare is precisely one of the appeals for international, par-
ticularly European, tourists seeking escape from crowded, metropolitan
beaches. Third, the relatively easy access to Karekare meant that the beach
was already part of an established tourist circuit, even before the filming of
The Piano began. Subsequently, the beach continued to hold its own iden-
tity as a tourist destination with the added imaginary element provided by
its association with the film. Finally, since the production of The Piano, the
local administrative body, Waitakere City Council, has actively encouraged
film productions and film-induced tourism to West Auckland beaches.
However, as already mentioned, the main reason for the success of
Karekare as a film-tourist destination is to be found in the use of the land-
scape in the film and the significance of the beach in the narrative. The
representation of the landscape, particularly in the landfall scene, reso-
nates with the protagonist’s emotions, namely anxiety and loss of control.
This is expressed through a number of technical devices, such as the use
of grey tones or the long shots that emphasize the power of nature over the
characters. At the visual level, the idea of ‘liminality’ is translated by the
image of the piano stranded on the beach, an image so powerful that it
has become the icon of the movie. The image’s impact derives from the dis-
junction between a sophisticated musical instrument and the wild beach,
invoking a clash between nature and culture, civilization and the primitive
world. At the same time, however, the piano can also be seen as a mediat-
ing object which allows Ada to communicate in this foreign and primitive
environment by translating her inner desires into a pre- symbolic language.
From this perspective, it is not surprising that The Piano’s landscapes, and
the beach in particular, have become such popular icons of New Zealand.
The image of the piano on the beach has in fact become a potent visual
symbol of New Zealand itself, in its original blend of familiar European
culture and ‘exotic’, wild nature. For international spectators/tourists, The
Piano is an imaginative map of the biculturalism of New Zealand society,
a visual national monument that summarizes the essence of a nation, like
the Eiffel Tower for France or the Colosseum for Italy.
A number of agents, from advertisers to the tourist industry, have rein-
forced the iconic status of the piano on the beach as this particular image
of New Zealand offers serendipitous opportunities for cross-marketing.

The landscapes in The Piano have helped position New Zealand as a global
competitor among tourist destinations; the ‘green, clean and wild country’.
In discussing how The Piano has packaged New Zealand locations overseas,
Anna Neill claims that ‘because of the way the film’s luscious footage of
remote bushes trades in the exotic, it brings New Zealand right into the
global arena, offering its hardly touched landscape up to the tourist’s (or
foreign investor’s) eye’ (Neill, 1999, p. 137).
The wild and untameable beach of The Piano is the ideal object of the
romantic gaze of urban dwellers visiting New Zealand, and the sense of
isolation and remoteness conveyed by the film landscape is reinforced
by the significance of the beach in the story. Similarly, the real Karekare
beach somehow matches the expectations of tourists, as there is no direct
commodification of the site. While practically all New Zealand guidebooks
mention Karekare as the beach setting of The Piano, there are no tours
dedicated solely to the movie’s locations; similarly access to the beach is, of
course, free and there is no signage to reveal its connection to The Piano.
The Piano -tourist wishing to visit Karekare will often be able to reach the
destination on his/her own and will, therefore, be able to cast a solitary
gaze on a relatively untouched and uncommodified tourist site, thus expe-
riencing the feeling of an individual, romantic ‘discovery’ of the tourist
destination.
Translating the Beach from the Language of

Film to the Language of Advertising
The New Zealand Film Commission was the first institution to recog-
nize the potential spinoffs of The Piano for New Zealand. According to
film commissioner Lindsay Shelton, even before the triumphal Oscar cer-
emony where The Piano received three Academy Awards, the film was cre-
ating interest in New Zealand, with particular benefits for tourism and
export (NZPA, 1994; Shelton, 2005). Nevertheless, not everybody shared
the same optimism about the film’s capacity to attract more tourism and
foreign investment. Tourist Board chief executive David Beatson, for exam-
ple, was strongly opposed to using the film as a tourist promotional tool
on the grounds that the Karekare beach settings and dense bush images
were too muddy and gloomy to attract holiday-makers (Hill, 1994, p. 48).
Furthermore, the film was considered too ‘arty’ to cash in on, as it was
thought that the very people to whom the film appealed would be put off
by any attempt to capitalize on it. Managers of other destination market-

ing organizations were more long- sighted than Beatson. Saatchi & Saatchi
chief executive Peter Cullinane, for example, referring to the movie’s
potential spinoff, claimed that: ‘Some of the best tourists to this coun-
try are backpackers, who would relate to the scenery. It would appeal to
the environmentally aware tourists’ (Hill, 1994, p. 48). Time has proven
Beatson wrong, as Karekare has since become the site of an international
film-tourism pilgrimage (Harvey, 1994; Thompson, 2000).
In 2001, increasingly aware of the global profile films achieve and create,
Tourism New Zealand used an image inspired by The Piano in its interna-
tional advertising campaign ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ (see Figure 10.1). The
promotional poster created by Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney is not a still from
The Piano, as some have suggested, but a staged picture that features some
elements not present in the original film. Tourism New Zealand and Saatchi
& Saatchi had to face the difficult challenge of translating and adapting the
tourism-inducing potential of The Piano into an actual tourist product. A sem-
iotic analysis of the poster uncovers the complex relationship between film
and tourist languages and dissects the process of intersemiotic translation.
Figure 10.1 ‘100% Pure New Zealand’, Saatchi & Saatchi, Sydney for Tourism
New Zealand, 2001
By dividing the poster into three horizontal sections we note an upper

band that contains the logo of the advertising campaign (100% Pure New
Zealand), a central section that in technical terms is defined as the ‘visual’,
and a lower band that contains both the ‘claim’ of the advertisement and
the logo in smaller font. The central image echoes the visual composi-
tion of the original scene from the movie, dominated by horizontal lines:
clouds, horizon, waves and piano. These lines generate the sense of infin-
ity and untameable power that highlight Ada’s isolation and powerlessness
in the face of nature primitivism in the film. Unlike the movie, however,
the horizontal lines are framed by two vertical black silhouettes: the edge
of the range on the left and the small rocky island on the right. In the
centre of the picture, at the crossover between beach and sky, is the piano.
The latter, a blend of vertical and horizontal lines is in its turn framed
horizontally by the two white bands and vertically by the two black rocks.
The poster emphasizes the position of the piano as the focal point of the
picture. It is worth noting that the piano depicted in the poster is different
from the one represented in the movie in at least two aspects. First of all,
it is a grand piano, even more sophisticated than the original, and second,
the instrument is open and ready to be played: a clear visual invitation to
the viewer (whereas in the film it is boarded up for the long sea journey).
Both characteristics contribute to making the presence of the piano on the
beach even more surreal than it was in the movie. Furthermore, the piano
cannot be separated from its reflection on the water, which is blurred,
almost a dreamlike image or a mirage. Viewers of the poster, aware that no
such piano exists in this location, will probably project onto the real beach
its virtual image. The ghost of the piano will inhabit the beach forever.
The textual analysis of the ‘claim’ in the lower band reveals that the enun-
ciator is directly addressing the enunciatee: ‘A short drive out of Auckland
and you’re staring at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world’. The
first sentence establishes an informal relationship with the ideal reader.
Nevertheless, if we analyse the content of the sentence in relation to the
visual composition of the picture, the enunciation becomes more assertive.
The enunciator is, in fact, not only suggesting a mode of action (staring),
but has already framed the picture, implicitly confirming the right way to
view it.
In the rest of the ‘claim’, the enunciator suggests other activities (‘People
come here for the surf,6 the solitude and the occasional movie’) and rein-
forces the link between The Piano and New Zealand (‘if you haven’t seen
“The Piano” it’s time you did’). Finally, in the left corner of the lower
band, the poster provides the reader with information concerning the
advertisement’s location (‘Kare Kare, Auckland, West Coast’) to accom-

pany those characteristic features of the beach (black sand, ranges, small
rocky island) that make the location recognizable.
To sum up, the visual composition of the poster is marked by the oppo-
sition between horizontal lines (signifying infinity, remoteness and the
power of nature) and vertical lines that frame the picture and, conse-
quently, control this power. The structure of the image works to empha-
size the prominence of the icon of the movie, the piano, which, in turn,
is further reinforced through the use of a grand piano and the simultane-
ous presence of its simulacrum, the reflection of the piano on the water.
Furthermore, the poster, unlike the movie, makes the identity of the loca-
tion explicit through the use of both textual and visual elements. The text
also suggests the right way of experiencing the beach: the enunciator has,
in fact, pre- constructed and pre-packaged a tourist gaze that is now ready
to be replicated by the tourist.
A number of analogies and differences between tourist and film lan-
guage emerge from the analysis of the ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ poster.
Obviously, these differences arise from the vastly different interests and
goals that characterize the film and tourism industries, respectively. The
ultimate aim of the film-makers is twofold: to produce a unique aesthetic
object and to sell this very same object, the movie. By contrast, destination-
marketing organizations mainly deal with selling a location . While land-
scape no doubt played an essential role in the narrative of The Piano, the
filmmakers were not interested in the recognizability of the film landscape.
This is by definition purely functional to the narrative and often comprises
a jigsaw of different places. On the contrary, the priority of tourist adver-
tisements is to facilitate recognition of the potential tourist destination. In
the ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ advertisement, the authors emphasize the
characteristic features of Karekare and the association with the filming of
The Piano. The possibility of clearly identifying this place is, in fact, essen-
tial for any subsequent form of the location’s commodification.
The second main difference between film and tourist texts concerns the
relative emphasis on the narrative and the enunciative structure. In most
movies, the narrative has a prominent role: even within the constraints of
seriality and genre categories, a feature film will usually tell an original
story that involves the action and interaction of one or more fictional char-
acters. Apart from exceptions such as the presence of a narrator, the use
of voiceover or subjective shots, generally the enunciative structure of a
movie is ‘transparent’. The enunciator shows the enunciatee a scene from
an impersonal point of view. Very seldom does a film stress the enunciative
roles: usually the presence of I (enunciator, camera) and you (enunciatee,

virtual spectator) is hidden or disguised.
By contrast, tourist texts often reduce the importance of the narra-
tive. The stories told by tourist brochures or advertisements are inevitably
predictable as they employ standard recurrent tropes: lying on a beach
under the sun, gazing at exotic landscapes, enjoying fine traditional food.
Nothing disturbing or dramatic ever happens, as conflict and pain are
removed from the tourist narratives, hence the calm sea represented in the
Piano poster. Rather, tourist texts play with the visual pleasure generated
by the destination image in anticipating and stimulating the hedonistic
behaviour of the potential tourist. Similarly, tourist texts emphasize the
enunciative roles within the narration: tourist brochures are filled with
representations of narrators (tourist guides) and the narratees (tourists),
with this enunciative strategy creating or reinforcing the bond between
the ideal guide and the ideal tourist.
The ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ poster is a clear example of the tradi-
tional enunciative structure of a tourist text. The narrative is predictable,
as the pattern of activities allowed on the beach is limited by the text of
the ad: tourists can ‘stare’ at the beach, enjoy surfing or solitude. Conflict
is erased and escapist desire enhanced by the appeal of the picture. In the
same way, the enunciator establishes a direct informal relationship with
the enunciate, while explicitly constructing an ideal reader/tourist. The
ideal tourist prefers ‘romantic gazes’, is young and likely to engage with
the landscape: these characteristics obviously recall the social figure of the
‘interactive traveller’ described earlier.
In the case of The Piano, there is, however, an essential analogy between
film and tourism language, an analogy which lies in the similar composi-
tional modes used to frame the landscape. In most of Campion’s film, the
enunciator establishes clear control over the landscape; the film frames
the land in a way that draws upon conventional ways of seeing, namely,
the classic European figurative traditions of the early British settlers.
As Simmons puts it, these similarities are evident in the employment of
devices such as ‘a commanding vantage point; the syntax of the sublime;
the planar logic of foreground, middle distance with an object of interest,
and a light- saturated horizon; its patently staged theatricality’ (Simmons,
1999, p. 126).
Other signs of the collapse of the film gaze into the settler gaze are
present in the depiction of the Māori and the flora. The film’s depiction
of nature inspired by the European canons of the sublime implies a neo-
colonial stand. In his work on early New Zealand landscape painters,
Francis Pound (1983) demystifies the myth of an unmediated representa-

tion of New Zealand nature, claiming that access to the pure and original
land is impossible. Similarly, in The Piano, the Māori are represented as an
integral part of the landscape, a mere accessory to the wild New Zealand
nature. They are a component of the background and signify a potential
threat, which is never realized. According to Māori scholar Leonie Pihama:
‘[T]he perception of Māori people given in The Piano is that our tipuna
(ancestors) were naive, simpleminded, lacked reason, acted impulsively
and spoke only in terms of sexual innuendo’ (2000, p. 128). The very act of
seeing is an act of possession and displays an unequal relationship of power
between the seer and the seen.7 Urry (2002) claims that the tourist gazes
at the visited place and people from a position of power imposing his/her
own ideological norms. The tourist compares what is gazed at with the
familiar and in doing so he/she reproduces his/her expectations. Similarly,
Michael Cronin argues that in contemporary travel settings, tourists gaze
at the natives as objects in the visual landscape (Cronin, 2000).
The analysis of the promotional ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ advertisement
demonstrates that the compositional modes of The Piano are replicated in
the poster. In The Piano, the settler gaze shapes the film gaze, which in
turn provides the tourist gaze of the moviegoer/tourist with an appeal-
ingly exotic, but safe, New Zealand. The film consistently draws upon the
myth of a wild, pure, natural New Zealand, one that vitally underpins New
Zealand settler culture. The same rhetoric appears in the tourist field, par-
ticularly in the ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ brand.
The movie translates the landscape by providing tourists with a con-
trolled image of ‘exoticism’, which they both seek and repossess through
the imaginary frame of the filmic souvenir and the actual frame of the
camera. The ‘hermeneutic circle’ is eventually closed: the settler gaze ini-
tially possessed the land, the film gaze synthesized the settler gaze and the
tourist gaze repossesses the land, looking for the filmic images that were
seen at home.
Conclusions
The panoramic views of Karekare’s cold tides as depicted in The Piano

became the distinctive mark of New Zealand for film viewers all around the
world. According to Lydia Wevers, the landscape in the film functions as
‘an authenticating context for a narrative which encoded “New Zealand” to
foreign audiences’ (1994, p. 1). Viewers were struck by the uniqueness of the
dark West Coast beaches and the dense, subtropical bush. And yet, the film
landscape was constructed according to Western modes of representation.
The distinctiveness that characterized the film locations did not alienate
Western viewers, as it was framed within the familiar canon of the sublime.
Subsequent New Zealand films such as Once Were Warriors (dir. Lee
Tamahori, 1994) and Topless Women Talk about Their Lives (1997) implicitly
or explicitly commented on the role of film in the process of landscape
commodification. These films acknowledge the global resonance of the
image of New Zealand landscape constructed by The Piano and other local
films. The opening sequence of Once Were Warriors, for example, shows an
idyllic New Zealand country landscape which fills the frame. However, as
the camera gradually zooms back, it reveals a gritty urban setting, within
which the rural landscape appears only on an advertising billboard.
The over-representation of the landscape in New Zealand cinema con-
ceived as a manifestation of the ‘uniqueness’ of the country is part of the
attempt to define a clear national identity. This representation of a ‘tamed
otherness’ has been particularly congenial to the tourist industry, which
later exploited the image of the country produced by The Piano, translating
the visual appeal of the film into tourist texts such as brochures and post-
ers. The New Zealand film industry used the uniqueness and exoticism of
the location to position itself in the global market. Similarly, because of
its limited budget, the national tourist board increasingly used film fea-
tures as a marketing tool. The overlaps between film and tourist gaze are
particularly prominent in New Zealand for two reasons. First, early set-
tlers were confronted with an alien environment that they represented and
tamed using European artistic conventions: the New Zealand landscape
was framed by the canons of the sublime and picturesque that in turn fed
the tourism industry of the time. Early New Zealand travel images pro-
duced to promote the country to both tourists and settlers inherited the
traditional canons of visual art. This legacy is also apparent in much later
cultural productions, such as The Piano.
Second, the limited opportunities offered by the New Zealand domes-
tic market implied that most of the country’s cultural products were con-
ceived for export overseas. Tourism has always been a precious asset of
the country, but it has recently gained even more importance, overtaking
dairy production and becoming the first export industry of the country.
The subsistence of New Zealanders relies on the selling of their coun-
try, so that Aotearoa is first and foremost a tourist destination before
being home or whenua . This validates Minette Hillyer’s definition of New
Zealanders as ‘both tourists and themselves proud pioneers’ (1997, p. 18).
The construction of a national identity is inextricably linked to the shared

imagining of the land as a tourist commodity.
The ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ poster is a perfect example of the way in
which a tourist text can re-present and re-mediate film spaces and objects
by generating an imaginative and cognitive activity that may, in turn, inter-
pellate the physical and simulated mobility typical of tourist practice. The
translation of film into tourism language is particularly effective in New
Zealand, due to the colonial history of the country. In New Zealand there
is an affinity between the modes of vision of both the tourist and the set-
tler, an affinity determined by their common need to make sense of an
unfamiliar land by framing it within familiar conventions. The increasing
popularity of film-induced tourism begs further research about the way in
which the complex relation between film and tourism develops in cultural
contexts characterized by a different history of the relation between the
land and its inhabitants. It also points to the scope for further research
into intersemiotic translation between different visual ‘languages’ as mul-
timodal texts are mediated and appropriated for the purposes of market-
ing and international exchange.
Notes
1. Although officially an Australian production, everyone referred to it from the

outset as a New Zealand movie. This was acknowledged by the Australians after
Cannes when Sydney’s Telegraph Mirror recognized that ‘The Piano is as much a
part of New Zealand as the kiwi or the haka’ (Shelton, 2005, p. 129).
2. The takings of The Piano cannot be compared to those of previous internation-
ally successful New Zealand films such as Vincent Ward’s The Navigator (1988)
and Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990), which just recouped their lim-
ited budget (Shelton, 2005).
3. Similarly, some art critics have claimed that the work of local painters is deter-
mined by the distinctive ‘harsh clarity’ of New Zealand light. According to
Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith, in New Zealand painting ‘two patterns
emerge: a general orientation towards landscape [. . .] and a positive response
on the part of a number of more important New Zealand painters to the distinc-
tive qualities of New Zealand light’ (1982, p. 9). Francis Pound later criticized
the thesis of geographic determinism, arguing that an immediate response to
the landscape is impossible, as nature is always seen through the eyes of culture
(Pound, 1982). Landscape is also a crucial theme in much twentieth- century
New Zealand literature. Literary critics have pointed out how the popularity of
the trope of a ‘haunted landscape’ in New Zealand literature reflects the aliena-
tion of European settlers from a land they wanted to possess, but failed to relate
to (McNaughton, 1986; Schafer, 1998).
4. For an analysis of the symbolic significance of the clothes in The Piano, see
Bruzzi (1993, p. 10).
5. Among the locations used by the filmmakers are West Auckland, Matakana,
Waitakere Ranges, Bay of Plenty and Mount Taranaki (Edwards and Martin,
1997, p. 171).
6. It is interesting to notice that the possibility of surfing suggested by the text
contrasts strikingly with the image of a calm sea presented by the ‘visual’. This
inconsistency could be explained by the tourist text’s distaste for disturbing or
dramatic elements, such as waves.
7. As Foucault reveals in his analysis of medical power, the doctor represents the ide-
ological norms and is permitted to gaze from a position of power at the patient,
‘the Other’, who represents the deviation from such norms (Foucault, 1973).
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role of the stakeholders: the case of New Zealand’. Journal of Vacation Marketing,
9, (3), 285–99.
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F. Coombs and S. Gemmell (eds), Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano. Sydney:
John Libbey, pp. 136–47.
Neill, S., and Rymer, J. (1995), BFI Century of Cinema Series – New Zealand Cinema:
Cinema of Unease . British Film Institute. [Video recording].
NZPA (1994), ‘“Piano” gives NZ world springboard’, New Zealand Herald , 24 March,
p. 24.
Pihama, L. (2000), ‘Ebony and ivory: constructions of Māori in The Piano’, in:
H. Margolis (ed.), Jane Campion’s The Piano. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 114–34.
Pound, F. (1982), ‘The real and the unreal in New Zealand painting’. Art New
Zealand , 25, 42–7.
— (1983), Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand . Auckland:
Collins.
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of Texas Press.
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Culture . Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
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Piano’, in F. Coombs and S. Gemmell (eds), Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano.
Sydney: John Libbey, pp. 122–35.
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I. Conrich and D. Woods (eds), New Zealand: A Pastoral Paradise? Nottingham:
Kakapo Books, pp. 107–19.
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Chapter 11
Bad-Talk: Media Piracy and

‘Guerrilla’ Translation
Tessa Dwyer
University of Melbourne
In chronicling a multi- generational family business dealing ilegal drugs

and the tween these Organizations and the men and women on either
side of the battle. The words of Gary W. Poller, Professor of Criminal
Justice and Police Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, in writing
about the savings and loan scandals of the 19810s, can also be used to
illuminate some of the central premises of the show
These garbled lines of text appear on the back cover of a DVD box set
of The Wire: The Complete Season 1–5: ‘No Corner Left Behind’ (HBO, 2002–
2008). Despite its slick, professional- seeming packaging (complete with
HBO’s copyright insignia), this ‘small type’ instantly gives the game away.
Together with the curious background image (see Figure 11.1) featuring
an unmistakable view of Australia’s Sydney Harbour at night (despite the
series being exclusively set and produced in Baltimore, USA), the incom-
prehensible English of this box set’s blurb announces that it is indeed an
illegal, pirated product.
Whether resulting from a process of sloppy English-to-English tran-
scription, text recognition scanning or inter-lingual translation ‘proper’
(Jakobson, 2000 [1959]), these lines of mangled English testify to relations
of language difference, intercultural intervention, and transnational com-
modification and exchange. However, with the exception only recently of
fan practices (Barra, 2009; Díaz Cintas, 2005–2007; Díaz Cintas and Muñoz
Sánchez, 2006; Kayahara, 2005; Nornes, 2007; Pérez- González, 2006, 2007),
the amateur subtitles and voiceovers of pirated media are largely ignored
or dismissed by both Translation Studies (TS) and the broader translation
community.
Media Piracy and ‘Guerrilla’ Translation 195
Figure 11.1 A pirated DVD box set of The Wire , HBO, 2002–2008
In the following discussion, I take a reverse course, focusing on the wider

genre of pirate or, as I term it, ‘guerrilla’, translation, to which the subset
of do-it-yourself fan subtitling (fansubbing) belongs. Taking the ‘bad-talk’
of pirated media seriously, I argue that guerrilla translation practices in
their diversity raise a host of issues relating to the broader social and politi-
cal context of audiovisual translation (AVT) in the era of globalization. In
particular, such ‘bad-talk’ directly transposes TS to the non-Western, non-
English speaking terrain of the ‘Majority World’.1 It is here, where media
piracy is rife, that issues of translation assume a guerrilla-like dimension,
becoming more a matter of everyday, ad hoc survival than choice.
The techniques and practices of translation that proliferate within media
piracy operations are, in fact, the only experience of translation available
to huge populations across the globe. It is my contention that such forms
of unofficial, underground translation effectively map significant routes
by which global power relations intersect with language, pinpointing the
extraordinary power wielded by entertainment media and its translation in
the exercising of cultural capital. By examining, in particular, the different
dynamics of fan and non-fan pirate translation side by side, I aim to draw
out some of the complexities of this varied scene.
As theorists like Yves Gambier (2006–2007) and Maria Tymoczko (2005,
p. 1089) note, the translation of multimodal, audiovisual mediums such as
television, film and computer interfaces is currently experiencing a huge
transition, moving from a once-marginalized area of TS into one of its
central paradigmatic pillars. As Gambier states, ‘AV media [. . .] play a
major linguistic role today, especially in private homes, just as school and
literature did in the past’ (2006–2007, p. 5). As this new area of practice
and research gains momentum, many of the foundational concepts of TS
have come unstuck. Emerging forms of global media are effectively desta-
bilizing notions of the ‘text’, the ‘author’ and the ‘original’, in the process
dismantling many of the seemingly entrenched hierarchies in which such
concepts were nurtured and held sway.
The destabilizing effect of globalization and increasing mediatization
is best explored by examining a subject that in itself is destabilizing these
very processes and products, both feeding off and threatening to destroy
official channels of media production and capitalist consumption. Media
piracy has been characterized as ‘Hollywood’s own digital Frankenstein’
(Lobato, 2008, p. 22), appropriating the digital medium and its associated
regulatory controls to its own ends (Pang, 2004, p. 27). Despite its hav-
ing ‘no political or intellectual calculation’, Laikwan Pang suggests that
traditional media piracy, so prolific within Asia, ‘may help to reveal the
hidden patterns of our ideologically-infused entertainment technology’

(2004, p. 28). Along the way, its ‘ridiculous subtitles’ (Pang, 2005, p. 147)
shed light on the changing technologies and politics of translation in the
global era.
‘Revolutionary’ Fans
As mentioned, fansubbing stands out from other forms of guerrilla trans-

lation due to the respect in which many in the growing field of AVT hold
it. Within TS, fansubbing has recently garnered considerable scholarly
attention and been hailed for its ‘revolutionary’ approach (Díaz Cintas,
2005–2007), ‘abusive’ break with industry conventions (Nornes, 2007,
p. 155), and innovative use of new technologies and multimodality (Pérez-
González, 2006, 2007; Díaz Cintas Muñoz Sánchez, 2006; Kayahara, 2005).
For Abe Mark Nornes, for instance, fansubbing ‘strives to translate from
and within the place of the other by an inventive approach to language use
and a willingness to bend the rules’, and, hence, represents ‘one group of
translators from whom we may learn much’ (2007, pp. 179, 182).
This flourishing of interest in fansubbing tends to share a common
focus on its practicalities and formal make-up, ultimately seeking to
assess whether this somewhat mutant form of AVT might present a poten-
tial model for adoption by practising translators. With this goal in mind,
commentators seek to engage with the very different look and feel of fan
translation compared to mainstream professional AVT. Such studies are
perhaps exemplified by Pérez- González’s article referencing Hartmut
Stöckl’s multimodal theory, which seeks to systematically analyse the new
ways in which fan translators interact with their source material through
setting out a series of distinctions between core modes (like language), sen-
sory channels (auditory and visual), sensory channel medial variants (static
or dynamic) and the ‘sub-modes attached to written language, mainly font
and colour variation’ (2007, p. 74).
Pérez- González (2007, pp. 74–5) writes, ‘Whilst mainstream subtitlers
are advised to rely on typefaces with no serifs and “pale white” fonts to
enhance legibility [. . .] fansubbers subordinate optimum visibility to
aesthetics’.2 Indeed, one of the first things one notices about fansubbing
is its unconventionality. As a much discussed and avidly guarded aspect
of ‘anime’ subculture,3 it tends to be loud, irreverent and in-your-face.
Characters might speak with differently coloured subtitles (a conven-
tion borrowed from subtitling for the deaf and hard- of-hearing) (Díaz
Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez, 2006, p. 51), or different font styles might be
used to indicate aspects of their personality (Hatcher, 2005, Appendix).
Through exploiting such core and sub-mode variants, fansubbers are able
to emphasize material aspects of language, such as its mode of delivery
(volume, tenor).
Moreover, fan subtitles don’t just stick to the bottom of the screen but are
allowed to roam freely across it (Nornes, 2007, p. 183), sometimes respond-
ing creatively to the image. Pérez- González (2007, p. 77) notes a tendency
to emphasize the ‘pictorial dimension of written signs’ through sub-modes
such as ‘perspective, depth, angle, composition’ and the introduction of
new spatio-temporal relations produced through this non- conventional
positioning of the subtitles. In addition, fansubbers also employ a mix of
static and dynamic karaoke- style subtitles for background music and title/
credit sequences.
Most groundbreaking of all is fansubbing’s use of translator notes or
glosses, which Nornes likens to literary footnotes (2007, p. 182). Here text
is introduced that has no equivalence in the source material. According to
Pérez- González (2007), the introduction of non- diegetic text, often in the
form of a headnote defining ‘untranslatable’ words or explaining dense
cultural references, is particularly significant, epitomizing the way in which
the fansubbers’ experimental approach to modes demonstrates a type of
interactivity that is as much about attitude and ideology as technology. This
innovative exploration of semiotic resources highlights the creative, inter-
ventionist manner in which fan translators engage with their source mate-
rial. It ‘opens up a new space of interaction between the translator and the
viewer of the audiovisual text in question’, maximizing the fansubber’s ‘co-
creational’ (Barra, 2009) role and visibility (Pérez- González, 2007, p. 76).
Imitative Modes
Returning to The Wire, we notice that the intralingual English-language sub-

titles available on this pirated DVD box set are of a uniform white font, that
they are conventionally placed at the bottom of the screen and that they do
not seem to involve any noticeable points of intervention with the source
material – there are no translator notes and no attempts to emphasize the
graphic or material dimension of its spoken and written language. Similar
observations can be made through perusing a number of other pirated
DVDs. The Vietnamese subtitle track found on a pirated copy of Iron Man
(dir. Favreau, 2008, see Figure 11.2) sourced in Ho Chi Minh City displays
Figure 11.2 Cover packaging of a pirated DVD of Iron Man (dir. Favreau, 2008)
from Vietnam
an unvarying yellow font and is again positioned at the bottom of the screen.
The single voiceover provided is spoken impassively over the top of the exist-
ing audio track, which remains faintly audible in the background.
In respect to multimodality, a formal breakdown of such instances of
non-fan guerrilla translation diverges radically from that of fansubbing.
In multimodal terms, the subtitles employed in commercial bootlegging
operations tend to imitate the conventions of mainstream AVT. Bootlegged
guerrilla translation tends to display a conservative approach to multimo-
dality, replicating the way in which ‘commercial subtitling aims to achieve
a one-to- one correspondence between [. . .] two different medial varieties
of the same linguistic stimulus: subtitles only convey an edited version of
the character’s speech’ (Pérez- González, 2007, p. 75).
This is hardly surprising, as such products are attempting to pass as legiti-
mate merchandise belonging to the world of mainstream production and
professional translation. The appeal lies largely in their ability to mimic, as
closely as possible, the conventions and production quality of official, legally
sanctioned media, replicating (at least superficially) its audio, visual and trans-
lation quality. Here, in its imitative mode, guerrilla translation aims foremost
to achieve a level of invisibility. Instead, however, as I go on to demonstrate,
the act of translation becomes, ironically, doubly visible and opaque.
Despite aiming to ‘pass’ as mainstream, such translation practices tend
to announce themselves via their overt ‘badness’ thereby bringing the very
fact of translation into the open and unwittingly destabilizing the institu-
tionalized invisibility of mainstream translation practices (Venuti, 1995).
Consequently, the imitative nature of this conservative formal approach
ultimately exposes the hidden agendas of professional AVT (Nornes, 2007,
p. 155).4 This dynamic is noted by Pang (2005, p. 147), who transcribes
some English subtitles accompanying a pirated DVD of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (dir.
Tarantino, 2003) purchased from ‘an obscure shopping mall in Hong
Kong’. Noting the way in which ‘this set of subtitles [. . .] corresponds little
to the real dialogue, and even suggests incorrect information’, Pang states
that it is these ‘ridiculous subtitles’ that stand out as ‘the one major ele-
ment defining the unique pirated-Hollywood-movie-watching experience’
(2005, pp. 147–8).
Good Piracy?
In contradistinction to the image of the lo-tech bootlegger, the more tech-

nologically resourced, online nature of fan piracy and fansubbing tends
to be associated with egalitarianism, camaraderie and political resistance,

especially by anti- copyright advocates like Lawrence Lessig (Pang, 2004,
p. 26). Part of the reason for this enthusiastic championing of fansubbing
practices, despite their questionable legality (Hatcher, 2005; Tushnet,
2007), is that this particular form of pirate intervention is hailed by many
in the wider community as an example of creative free speech rather than
aggressive capitalism gone wrong. Lessig, for instance, is a particularly vocal
supporter of the proliferation of ‘transformative uses of creative work’ that
in many ways characterizes the digital age and argues that current laws
are not up-to- date with the developments of new technology (Lessig, 2004,
p. 185). As Kavita Philip explains, for Lessig, the ‘generation of youth that
have grown up with the internet are most severely affected, since all their
modes of knowledge and entertainment are already interpellated by dig-
ital systems of production, distribution, and consumption’ (Philip, 2005,
p. 211).
As well as fitting neatly into this youthful, technologically savvy demo-
graphic, fansubbing also tends to be non- commercial.5 In fact, fansubbing
communities have created honour systems and codes of ethics designed to
minimize any potentially harmful impact upon commercial entertainment
industries (Hatcher, 2005). For these reasons, many legal commentators
conclude that much fan-based production falls into the US copyright law
category of ‘fair use’ (Tushnet, 2007, p. 60). In short, the interest in fansub-
bing within TS tends to follow the line of thought that identifies it a form
of ‘good’ piracy, the implication being that more traditional, commercially
driven bootlegging is, conversely, ‘bad’.
It is my aim to problematize such fi xed notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’,
engaging instead with the messy diversity of the media piracy landscape,
acknowledging that the ‘thing we call “piracy” is not a homogenous
[sic] concept. It’s defined differently in different locales’ (Larkin, 2005,
p. 112). In communist Romania in the 1980s, for instance, profitable
blackmarket piracy was anti- censorship, anti- government and, hence,
overtly political (Dwyer and Uricaru, 2009). Conversely, the govern-
ment’s own form of piracy (when, for instance, preview tapes were aired
illegally on Televiziunea Romana) was mainstream yet non- profit (Dwyer
and Uricaru, 2009, p. 53, note 1). In the Philippines, another form of
‘official’ piracy was common during the Marcos dictatorship years when
‘American textbooks were reprinted locally and without paying royalties
to the original publishers’ (Baumgärtel, 2006b). Known as the ‘Asian
Editions’, this form of piracy was permitted via the Presidential Decree
1203 (Baumgärtel, 2006b).
In such contexts, the quality of guerrilla translation becomes difficult

to judge. For instance, consider the illegal screenings of foreign film pre-
view tapes by communist Romania’s state- owned television station. Here,
subtitling of a high professional standard nevertheless stood for ideologic-
ally ‘cleansed’ content, where references to religion, sex and even scenes
involving elderly characters were routinely cut. Alternatively, the blackmar-
ket translation of films was usually made with a single voiceover, typically
in a rush and without prior viewing. ‘In this context, the “bad” translation
and degraded sound and picture typical of pirate media came to signify a
different kind of quality: that of uncensored content’ (Dwyer and Uricaru,
2009, p. 49).
The problem with Lessig’s advocacy of so- called ‘good’ piracy is that it
relies on positioning Asian bootlegging as bad (2004, p. 63). According to
Liang (2005b, p. 81), Lessig ‘denounces the figure of the “Asian pirate”,
the non- creative “copier”’. Rather, I argue that the diversity and uncontrol-
lability of pirate ‘bad-talk’ has much to offer, unravelling the complicated
spatial coordinates and everyday workings of piracy while also unscram-
bling some of its messy politics.
User-Friendly Translation?
According to Kayahara, ‘the advances presented by DVD imply that

the face of audiovisual translation studies will never be the same again’
(2005). Among the changes he envisions are increased job opportunities
(with DVDs offering up to eight different dubbing tracks and 32 subti-
tling tracks), practical benefits (such as durability and no longer having to
rewind), growing awareness, interest and analysis of language difference
and translation options by scholars and the general public, and finally,
bringing the technological means of AVT to the masses enabling consum-
ers and amateurs, like fans, to take matters into their own hands. As he
observes, ‘DVD technology makes it very easy for fans to produce their
own language versions of films’ (Kayahara, 2005). The low cost, high speed
and easily transportable nature of DVDs and other digital formats makes
this technology particularly user-friendly and accessible. In combination
with the networking capabilities of the internet, the possibilities seem
limitless.
For Pérez- González, the changes exemplified by fansubbing are cur-
rently transforming the entire audiovisual scene beyond issues of transla-
tion alone. He states, ‘the interventionist agenda of anime fandom is only
the tip of the iceberg which subsumes all current and future initiatives
taken by the viewers to assume more power following the decentralisation
of the media establishment’. Fansubbing processes demonstrate a new age
of ‘interconnectedness between the emerging non-linear communication
networks [. . .] shaped by “cultural chaos” [. . .]’ (2006, p. 275). He refers,
for example, to the phenomenon of viral videos and ‘broadcast yourself’
internet sites such as YouTube and MySpace, and notes the unprecedented
fan-led interventions into the production of the Hollywood feature Snakes
on a Plane (dir. Ellis, 2006).
Tymockzo (2005, p. 1089), on the other hand, considers the broader
implications of ‘new technologies’ for TS as a whole, beyond the audio-
visual sphere alone, noting in particular the way in which technological
development has enabled the processes of decentralization that have come
to characterize the global era. She notes how these new conditions ‘have
increasingly begun to shift the nature of the agent of translation away from
the individualistic model that has dominated Western conceptualisations
of the translator’ (Tymockzo, 2005, p.1089). According to Tymoczko, such
changes typify the current challenges facing media outfits like CNN that
broadcast in more than 40 languages and, thus, require the coordination
of extremely high- speed, multilingual translation. She predicts that future
research in the field of TS will necessarily follow practice and adapt accord-
ingly (Tymockzo, 2005, p. 1088).
Certainly, the way in which technological development affects both AVT
and TS in general is well worth exploring in depth. As Pérez- González
(2006, 2007) notes, fansubbing positions itself at the forefront of such
changes, representing both the accessibility of the digital and the decen-
tralizing dynamic enabled via online networking. Through this fansub-
bing focus, Pérez- González (2006, p. 275) presents quite a positive spin
on these changing technological conditions, underscoring their empower-
ing democratic potential and the promise they hold in terms of minority
and niche communities. Quoting media sociologist Brian McNair, he notes
how ‘top- down, elite- controlled media [. . .] is [. . .] being replaced by a
decentralised global “infosphere” of unprecedented accessibility and diver-
sity’ (my emphasis). In particular, he highlights the way in which fansub-
bing practices epitomize a new mode of active consumption while similarly
highlighting the role of translation, fostering a new space of productive
interaction between viewer and translator (Pérez- González, 2007, p. 76).
Although Tymoczko’s outlook and objectives are different to those of
Pérez- González, her commentary on the effects of emerging technolo-
gies and globalization similarly refrains from discussing any negative
implications whatsoever. Despite this, it is not difficult to see how the

accessibility and decentralization enabled via the digital and the internet
present as many threats to AVT as opportunities. These are described in
some detail by Nornes, who disparages the widespread lowering of stand-
ards that has resulted from new expectations in regard to cost- effectiveness
and turnaround times driven by online and digital technologies like email
(2007, p. 235). ‘Like manufacturers of tennis shoes’, he writes, ‘the transla-
tion house has come to transcend national borders, crisscrossing the planet
through cheap shipping and computerized communication networks to
exploit cheap labour and develop new markets for its services’ (p. 236).
For Nornes, these sins are epitomized by the ‘genesis file’ (‘invariably an
English-language dialogue list, no matter the source language of the film
itself’), which allows a translation house to act as ‘one- stop shop’ where
translators ‘work blind’, forced to rely upon English as a pivot language
(p. 235).
Additionally, as the tools of AVT are delivered to the masses, it is equally
easy to surmise how they might get into the ‘wrong’ hands, so to speak. It
is here that traditional, non-fan piracy and its various forms of guerrilla
translation enter the scene. Do these profit- driven pirates epitomize exactly
the type of people who are unfit to take translation into their own hands?
And can the decreasing quality of much profit- driven ‘professional’ AVT
be attributed to their wrongdoing? While it is tempting in some respects
to pit fan and non-fan guerrilla translation against one another, as repre-
senting the two ends of the scale in regard to implementing changing AV
technologies, such an approach ultimately proves somewhat simplistic.
For instance, the argument that non-fans exploit where fans experiment
fails to take into account the importance of the digital divide in assess-
ing issues of accessibility (Gambier, 2006–2007, p. 4), ignoring the cul-
tural disparities that structure the global moment in relation to First and
Third (or Majority) World politics. Rather, a more complex and nuanced
picture emerges when these two diverse forms of guerrilla translation are
considered in conjunction and appreciated for their similarities as well as
differences. Just as fansubbing can provide a useful demonstration of the
cooperative, co- creational possibilities of new media, the conflict-ridden
scene of more traditional media bootlegging provides an equally illuminat-
ing response to the changing technologies of AVT, going some way towards
outlining a much-needed non-Western perspective. Below, I consider the
technological underpinning of pirate translation in order to interrogate
the politics of access and global empowerment embroiled within the wider
AVT landscape.
The Digital Sub-Modern
First, we can note that non-fan piracy, perhaps even more than fansubbing,
fully explores the promise of digital reproduction, taking this concept and
practice to the extreme. For Lobato (2008, p. 22), digital piracy is ‘[n]ot only
[. . .] a side- effect of technology developed by the major studios, but it is also
made possible in many cases by DVD preview discs secretly copied by U.S.
technicians during postproduction’.6 To a degree, this illegal activity simply
realizes the inbuilt potential of the technology, exploring in full its logical
repercussions. Similar arguments have been posed in economic terms, lik-
ening piracy to a form of cockroach capitalism or ‘globalization from below’
(Baumgärtel, 2006a, p. 377) that takes the decentralization and deregula-
tion of transnational capitalism to the extreme, in the process uncovering
some of its legal loopholes and power inequalities. Tilman Baumgärtel won-
ders, for instance, if media piracy ‘might be the most aggressive and most
developed – illegal – version of capitalism’ (2006b, p. 6).
Additionally, many of the claims that Pérez- González makes in regard to
fansubbing also apply to non-fan guerrilla translation. For instance, non-
fan piracy and, by extension, its translation practices have been equally
‘facilitated by the availability and affordability of digital technologies’ as
those of fansubbing (2006, p. 275). In fact, in many ways traditional media
piracy constitutes an inevitable by-product of the separation that digitiza-
tion has forced between content and medium (Wang, 2003, p.31). The end-
lessly reproducible nature of the digital means, for instance, that films can
be effortlessly copied onto cheap, disposable formats such as CDs, DVDs
and VCDs, which themselves hold little value. As legal scholar and activist
Lawrence Liang states, ‘the ordered flow of cinema is constantly frustrated
by technologies that enable the reproduction of a 20 million dollar fi lm on
a 20 rupee CD’ (2008).
Shujen Wang states, ‘Global audiences, more and better informed about
new releases in the U.S. by instantaneous Webcasting, have become less
willing to wait for local theatrical releases, creating an instant market for
pirated products’ (2003, p. 32). For this reason, media piracy and its guer-
rilla translations can in part be seen as responding to a desire created by
the speed of digital technologies and networking. In part, this amounts
to a trickle- down effect. For many in the Majority World, experiences
with technology do not so much speed up everyday life as punctuate it
with extended moments of delay and breakdown (Larkin, 2004, p. 305).
Nevertheless, an expectation of both speed and access sets in. According to
Nitin Govil, ‘[T]he argument within the industry for simultaneous global
release has to do with narrowing the time during which piracy can take
root in spaces waiting for legal distribution; today, that window is down to
less than one day, including subtitling, etc.’ (2005, p. 43).
Where fan and non-fan piracy differ in relation to their use of new tech-
nologies, more than in terms of degree, is in relation to the internet and
online technologies. Although media bootlegging practices have fully
embraced digital formats such as DVD and VCD, and make use of digital
technologies to add or ‘encode’ subtitle and voiceover tracks, this deploy-
ment remains largely ‘off-line’ (Pang, 2004, p. 25), thereby bypassing many
of their more virtual and interactive capabilities. For instance, the online
labour and distribution networks so central to fansubbing practices are
almost entirely absent. Instead, bootlegging operations tend to be wed-
ded to tangible objects that require actual distribution and transportation
(p. 25). As Baumgärtel notes, ‘[P]irates in the Philippines seem to make
little use of the means of digital distribution that are available to them, but
seem to rely on more “traditional” methods, that include messengers and
personal delivery, and using long distance busses [sic] and fishing boats for
the delivery of illegal DVDs’ (2006a, p. 383). He continues, ‘[w]hen [. . .]
fishermen smuggle illicit movies into the country [. . .] disks are hidden in
the belly of tuna fish or in barrels of shrimp’ (p. 386).
According to Baumgärtel and Rolando Tolentino, these age- old methods
underscore the long and complicated history of piracy in the Philippines.
Here, on street corners, in parking lots and in various mainstream shop-
ping malls, the term ‘DVD’ is ‘pronounced in a low almost sinister-like
whisper’ as ‘Dividi’ and has come to signify both a national type (the
Moro) and an entire way of life rather than any mere technological format
(Tolentino, 2006, p. 6). Referring to the phenomenon of pirates ‘hand-
delivering the master Dividi copy’, Tolentino highlights the ‘anachronis-
tic use of technology’ that tends to characterize piracy in the Philippines,
where the ‘new’ of the digital tends to proceed hand in hand with more
primitive technologies, methods and networks (p. 11). According to Pang,
this ‘sub-modern’ dimension, often likened to ‘guerrilla tactics’, encour-
ages the ‘Western stigmatisation of Asian movie piracy’, linking it to the
lo-tech criminal worlds of drugs, theft, porn and terrorism (2004, p. 26).7
The reasons behind this anachronistic approach are largely practical.
The offline nature of piracy in South East Asia means that pirated discs
‘require almost no technological knowledge’ and are, thus, accessible to
a very broad demographic ‘in terms of class, age, culture and geography’
(Pang, 2004, p. 25). Pirated discs can be played on pirated region-free DVD
players (‘the buyer will be asked [. . .] what brand name he or she prefers
to have glued on the generic player’) (Tolentino, 2006, p. 6), whereas the
even cheaper, ‘everyday and user-friendly’ VCDs (considered a primitive
alternative to the DVD), are particularly prominent within East Asian and
Third World contexts (Davis, 2003, p. 166; Hu, 2004, p. 208).
Spatial Pathologies
The anachronistic use of technology displayed by media pirates and guer-

rilla translators underscores the situated nature of technology. Far from
representing a physically liberating, de-territorializing tool, as is often sug-
gested in the rhetoric of progress, technology use is always geographically
embedded. While VCDs can be said to represent a specifically ‘Asian’ tech-
nology that is particularly suited to piracy (Davis, 2003), the politics of
space and place also play out in relation to DVDs. Through the system of
region coding, for instance, ‘the world’s markets are carved into six geo-
graphic zones’ and DVDs from one region cannot be played in another
region (Hu, 2006, p. 1). According to Brian Hu, the entire region coding
system is implicated in ‘enforcing economic and political censorship by
denying the option to see alternative films or alternate versions with alter-
native languages’ (2006, p. 4).
For Hu, region coding is primarily designed to protect geographic win-
dowing strategies whereby ‘Hollywood films are typically released in the
United States first, and then gradually in other markets’. Linking this prac-
tice to both ‘territorial price-fixing’ and censorship, Hu argues that it also
directly encourages media piracy (2006, pp. 1–4). Furthermore, he impli-
cates mainstream AVT practices in these processes of ‘regional lockout’,
stating:
Another way territorial rights and geographic windows are maintained

via DVD is through subtitles and audio channels. When films are sold
for territorial distribution, they are typically sold not simply by country,
but by language. [. . .] Region coding can also help enforce these linguis-
tic territorial rights since Chinese-language DVDs (Region 3 and 6) are
incompatible with French DVD players (Region 2) (Hu, 2006, p. 2)
Although piracy has been likened to a form of ‘spatial pathology’ (Govil,

2005, p. 43) for the manner in which it traverses vast areas of land at
surprising speed through a series of underground routes (Liang, 2008),
it remains, nevertheless, geographically determined. While commercial
subtitling and dubbing processes are implicated in the economics of geo-

graphic windowing and region coding, helping to mark territorial bor-
ders and control (and cost) aspects of space and time, guerrilla- style AVT
practices carve out an alternate, subterranean cartography. Their amateur
subtitles and garbled mistranslations become telling clues left behind in
an otherwise close-to- seamless digital operation. They function as a map-
ping device, revealing the ‘persistence of the geographic’ (Govil, 2005,
p. 42) within the pirate’s shadowy, elusive and decentralized operations.
In the Philippines, for instance, pirated films tend to enter the country
through one of two routes that become inscribed in their translation. Those
films displaying Malay and Bahasa Indonesian subtitles will usually have
arrived via ‘the [. . .] island of Mindanao characterised by its Muslim popu-
lation and close connection to [. . .] Malaysia and Indonesia’ (Baumgärtel,
2006a, p. 386). Those displaying characteristically Chinese inflected English
subtitles come from Hong Kong or Singapore (Baumgärtel, 2006a, p. 389).
Alternatively, in Nigeria, as Larkin (2004) discusses, Indian films are
very popular amongst the predominantly Muslim Hausa population. These
films used to arrive through Lebanese and Indian traders via the Persian
Gulf. Consequently, they tended to have Arabic and English subtitles that
were sometimes obscured by scrolling advertisements for video shops in the
Gulf. Hollywood films also tend to arrive in Nigeria via the Middle East.
Larkin states: ‘One Jean- Claude Van Damme film I watched had Chinese
subtitles superimposed over Arabic ones, providing a visible inscription of
the routes of media piracy’ (2004, pp. 295–6).
DIY Interactivity
As discussed, Tymoczko refers to the decentralized organization of labour

(perhaps typified by fan translation practices) as one of the most significant
changes affecting AVT today (2005, p. 1089). This is seen as part of the inno-
vation, or at least change, brought about by the networking opportunities
provided by the internet. In this context, what is the relevance of the lo-tech,
‘offline’ nature of non-fan pirate translation? Such practices do not conform
to Tymoczko’s notion of technological development, yet significantly, they do
answer her calls for the ‘internationalisation’ of TS (2005, p. 1086).
By bringing the politics of the Majority World into view, non-fan forms
of guerrilla translation enable us to interrogate notions of access and self-
empowerment enmeshed within ideas of technological development. They
remind us that within the parameters of the Majority World, fansubbing and
online technologies are only available to elite (though ever-broadening)

sectors of society. The rest rely on other, older forms of networking and
community interaction. According to Larkin, there is ‘a fundamental
political question of access embedded in the issue of piracy’ as ‘there’s a
massive realm of the world’s cultural production that is made off limits to
whole categories of society’ (2005, p. 114). He states: ‘All the people watch-
ing pirated DVDs would never be able to afford [legal DVDs]. Some 1% at
the top might, but for the vast majority of Nigerians, 120 million people,
as probably for the vast majority of Indians, the stable commodity price of
[. . .] a CD is just not feasible’.
Liang argues that in the age of globalization and transnational dialogue
there is an urgent need to think ‘through the problem of understanding
the publics which lie outside the assumptions of the liberal public sphere’
(2005a, p. 12). He states:
The impulse behind copying in Asia and other parts of the non-Western
world may not arise from [. . .] self- conscious acts of resistance, but may
instead be understood in terms of ways through which people ordinar-
ily left out of the imagination of modernity, technology and the global
economy [find] ways of inserting themselves into these networks (Liang,
2005a, p. 12).
By and large, in this non-Western terrain made up of ‘illegal cities’, the

‘avenues of participation’ tend to be non-legal, unprofessional and uncon-
ventional. Ravi Sundaram terms this type of intervention ‘recycling’. He
writes, ‘This is a world of those dispossessed by the elite domains of elec-
tronic capital, a world which possesses a hunter- gatherer cunning and
practical intelligence’ (2001, p. 96). Here interactivity plays a crucial role –
not the predestined interactivity of digital and online media, but rather a
do-it-yourself (DIY) interactivity that manifests in people’s irreverent atti-
tudes towards media.
The interactivity that defines non-fan guerrilla translation diverges substan-
tially from the types of technological interactivity described by Pérez- González
(2006, 2007). Whereas fans utilize the technological capabilities of digital soft-
ware programs and online networking, non-fan media pirates ‘interact’ with
technology in a lo-tech and un-prescribed manner. This is not an inbuilt (and
therefore, to a degree, controlled) form of interactivity but an altogether out-
sider approach that intervenes with, repurposes and recycles technology, DIY
fashion. It is exactly this type of outsider interactivity that tends to be left out
of the equation in current research on guerrilla-style AVT.
While the technological experimentation and online networking so cru-

cial to fansubbing communities is available to certain sectors of society only
(youth, the educated and the upwardly mobile), the cultures of recycling
and DIY are age- old and cross- generational. Sundaram notes how ‘software
pirates, spare parts dealers, electronic smugglers, and wheeler- dealers of
every kind in the computer world’ are accommodated by Delhi’s ‘history
of single- commodity markets’ that dates back to the Mughal Empire which
lasted until the mid nineteenth century (2001, p. 95). Sundaram goes on to
detail the way in which second-hand modems and computer manuals, late
night internet connections and out- of- date software provide an informal
technological training to ‘those excluded from the upper- caste, English-
speaking bastions of the cyber- elite’ (p. 95).
According to Liang, ‘new media challenges the one-way, monopolistic,
homogenising tendencies of old media, as it tends to be decentralised in own-
ership, control and consumption patterns and, hence, offer greater potential
for consumer input and interaction’ (2005a, p. 8). This seems a particularly
useful way of framing the type of technological interaction effected via non-fan
media piracy and its translation. Whereas fansubbing exploits the interactiv-
ity of online networks to obtain (rip), translate and distribute (or file share)
material, exemplifying the global trend towards decentralized working con-
ditions and distribution/reception modes, traditional bootlegging employs
an entirely different type of ‘interactivity’ that although technologically con-
servative could potentially prove more subversive and interventionist.
According to Pang, ‘[p]irated movies provide us with a different per-
ception of Hollywood films that is beyond the producers’ control’ (2004,
p. 30). She suggests that ‘one of the most effective ways to interrogate the
power concentrated in the hands of technology producers and informa-
tion distributors [. . .] is to actively participate in technological processes
that reshape the products’, thereby challenging the subservience of con-
sumption. While fans tend to hold the authority of the ‘original’ in high
esteem, profit- driven pirate translators unwittingly encourage viewers to
‘see through’ the very workings and illusions woven by ‘originals’.
Audience Haggling
Yet another form of interactivity is suggested by Hamid Naficy’s (1996,

2005) postcolonial take on ‘bad’ dubbing. Writing eloquently on transla-
tion, postcolonial politics and migrant experiences, Naficy describes the
interaction between Iranian audiences and imported 1950s American
films in terms of ‘haggling’ rather than ‘hailing’ (1996, pp. 8–13). Despite
the cultural imperialist agenda behind America’s Truman- era policy of
exporting films to Third World countries, Naficy suggests that Iranian
modes of film translation and consumption were anything but passive or
respectful (1996, p. 17). Instead, drawing on their strong oral tradition,
Iranian audiences were noisy and highly interventionist, as was Iranian
dubbing, which typically took many liberties with ‘originals’, imbuing nar-
ratives and characters with lively local flavour. Jerry Lewis, for instance, was
dubbed by beloved local radio personality Hamid Qanbari, who ‘spewed
specifically Persian expressions or even jokes that were then current in
Iran and on the radio’ (Naficy, 2005, n.p.). For Naficy, the ‘drastic manipu-
lation’ characteristic of this dubbing industry (which saw around two to
three dozen voice- actors dubbing almost all the foreign and domestic films
shown in the country) created an overt ‘clash of cultures’, which he sug-
gests ‘enriched the experience of watching films and doubly endeared the
indigenised diegetic characters to audiences’ (1996, p. 13).
In this way, Iran’s thriving dubbing business transformed foreign films
into more familiar territory and yet, at times, they also created moments
of rupture, producing noticeable tensions with the source text, turning a
tragedy into a comedy, for instance (Naficy, 1996, p. 13). Naficy reports
that John Wayne was made to speak like an Iranian tough guy and that
Burt Lancaster was dubbed into a Persian Turkish accent that carried ‘very
specific cultural baggage not in the original’ (2005, n.p.). In fact, Naficy
positions dubbing at the centre of what he terms Iran’s ‘hybrid produc-
tion mode’ where ‘apparent losses’ could transform into ‘surprising gains’
and where audiences had to adjudicate between the translation and the
film, deciding whether to take either, or neither, on face value. Here, he
recounts first-hand the way in which audiences can experience a degree
of distance in relation to noticeably translated media, with the translation
coming to function almost like a character in itself – a third party in an
open- ended, noisy conference between film and audience.
For Naficy, instances of typically low- quality or ‘unfaithful’ dubbing pro-
vide AVT practices with a whole a new level of visibility, alerting audiences
to the way in which mediation processes destabilize ‘originals’, engendering
multiple layers of meaning. In a similar fashion, those who buy and watch
pirated media may be aware of the fact that the translations on offer are far
from reliable. Just as their packaging tends to announce that they are not
the ‘real deal’, so, too, do the errors of their translation, which are not nec-
essarily taken on face value. As Naficy recalls, AVT ‘hiccups’ tend to pro-
duce an effect of distanciation. Although bootlegged guerrilla translation
generally attempts to mimic professional ‘standards’, unintentional local

flavouring often creeps through the cracks, producing ‘Chinese-flavoured’
English subtitles, for example, of the type encountered by Baumgärtel in
the Philippines (2006a, p. 389). Despite typically lacking the overt playful-
ness or interventionist agenda of Iranian dubbing, the translation errors
common to bootlegged media register (and potentially subvert) contempo-
rary socio-political power dynamics.
Bad-Talk
Pérez- González positions fansubbing as exemplifying a new age of con-

sumer intervention mobilized through acts of translation (2006, 2007).
Along with Kayahara (2005) and others, he applauds this democratizing of
AVT, emphasizing the cooperative, grass-roots nature of fan-based guer-
rilla translation. As Nornes (2007) reminds us, however, negative effects
are also noticeable from the technologically led decentralization of trans-
lation: not least, a dramatic lowering of standards. The ‘bad-talk’ of non-
fan pirate translation, however, presents a different take on the changing
conditions and technologies of translation in the global era, reminding us
that technology use is always geographically located and that it does not
necessarily play by the rules.
Though not as innovative in terms of look, feel or functionality as fansub-
bing, non-fan guerrilla translation is equally telling in terms of the ‘ontological
nature of digital data’ (Baumgärtel, 2006b), making manifest its capacity for
endless reproducibility. Additionally, it partakes in a non-technological form
of interactivity that potentially challenges the global power relations and cap-
italist systems of territorial control in which AVT is unavoidably implicated.
The shoddy translation or ‘bad-talk’ that tends to accompany traditionally
pirated media constitutes a particularly everyday reality in the non-Western,
Majority World where it is readily available to a broad cross-section of society.
It might be time for the broader AVT community to tune in.
Notes
1. Purportedly coined by Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam, the term

‘Majority World’ intends to override the negative connotations of ‘Third World’
or ‘Developing Nation’, by describing countries and communities in terms of
what they have rather than what they lack . As its name suggests, the Majority
World contains the vast bulk of the global population. See www.appropedia.
org/Majority_world.
2. Here, Pérez- González (2007, p. 74) quotes an article by Fotios Karamitrouglou
from 1998.
3. The term anime is used in Western contexts to refer to Japanese-produced ani-
mation largely intended for Japanese- speaking audiences.
4. Nornes writes: ‘Ever since the subtitle’s invention in that chaotic babel of the
talkies era, translators confronted the violent reduction demanded by the appa-
ratus by developing and maintaining a method of translation that conspires to
hide its work – along with its ideological assumptions – from its own reader-
spectators’ (2007, p. 155).
5. However, it is worth noting that the non- commercial nature of fansubbing is
not a given. According to Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez, ‘some people try to
sell fansubs on the Internet and even during prominent anime events’ (2006,
p. 44).
6. Ironically, another source for pirated Hollywood movies within South East
Asia is the censorship board of Mainland China. Having spoken directly to a
number of piracy informants from the Philippines, Baumgärtel explains, ‘Most
American film companies submit digital copies of their latest releases way ahead
of their official opening in the US to the Chinese authorities, because they want
to distribute their productions on the huge Chinese market’ (2006a, p. 391).
Film director Benny Chan confirmed this information (Davis, 2003, p. 171).
7. The association with criminality and terrorism is also noted by Govil (2005) and
Davis (2003, p. 166).
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Index
adjustment, in translation 41, 111 contos (Espanca) 30, 34, 40, 42n6
Amid the Clouds 72 critical discourse analysis 147, 152
The Arrival 124–5 Cross, John 103
Arshavin, Andrei 106 cultural cosmopolitanism 59
audience haggling 210–12 cultural stereotypes 158, 159, 160
audiovisual translation (AVT) 139–42, Custis, Shaun 108
196
accessibility vs affordability 153–5 de Peyrebrune, George
DIY interactivity 208–10 Doña Quichotta (Dona Quichotta) 30,
see also Viva Zapatero! 31, 34, 36, 40
divided loyalties 63
Baldry-Thibault framework 145–6, 148 Dodgson, Elyse 71
Bendtner, Nicklas 103–5 do-it-yourself (DIY)
Benoit, Pierre interactivity 208–10
Mademoiselle de la Ferté (Mademoiselle double palimpsest 48, 49
de la Ferté: um Romance da ‘double’ text 46, 48, 54
Actualidade) 30, 32, 34, 38 DVD piracy 194, 195, 198, 200, 202,
Biagi, Enzo 140, 147, 151 205–7, 209
Biblioteca do Lar 42n3
Blood Wedding 66 economic power, and
bootlegging 200, 201, 204, 206, 210–12 manipulations 112
Bradley, Jack 65 Edin 124, 130, 131
Bremner, Rory 140 electronic media 1
Brossard, Nicole 97 Emira 124
Emmert, Richard 88
Catacutan, Alvin 92 Espanca, Florbela 26
censorship 140, 145, 153–4 mental state of 39–41
Chapman, Jan 182 original texts of 30–3
chroniclers, writers as 47 proto-feminism of 34–7
Colecção de Hoje 42n3 sexuality of 37–9
comics journalism 119–23 translations of 28–30
agendas mediation 131–3 biographical resonances 33–41
ironic potential 129–31 figurative echoes 33
media attention and cultural view of marriage 35–6
exchange 133–4 Extralinguistic Cultural References
multimodality and meaning- (ECR) 142, 145, 148, 150
making 123–5
visual nature 125–9 fansubbing 197–8, 200–6, 208, 210, 212
218 Index
film-tourism 176 interlingual mediation 113

landscape visions 176–9 interlingual translation 8
see also The Piano intermodal self-representation 9, 10,
The Fixer 121, 131 12, 19
For Men 162, 164, 168, 169 intermodal translation 49
Found in Translation 63 international conflicts 134
Fujino, David 92 intersemiotic translation 124, 146
intertextual self-representation 9, 10,
gender stereotypes 158, 160, 162 11, 12, 13, 19
geographic windowing 207, 208 intratextual translation 46
global communications system 102
globalization 100, 114–15 jobbing translators 28
and news translation 101–3 Johnston, David 69–76
good piracy 200–2 Joorabchian, Kia 108
GQ 162, 166, 168
group stereotypes 158, 160 Kazan, Elia 139
The Guardian 109 Kiyooka, Roy 96
guerrilla translation 196 Kogawa, Joy 86
fansubbing 197–8, 200–6, 208–10, Koizumi, Maya 86
212 Koohestani, Reza 72
good piracy 200–2 Kubo, Hakuzan 89
and imitation 198–200
see also media piracy Lakhous, Amara 47–54, 56–9
The Gull 83–91 How to Be Suckled by the She-Wolf
as translation and performance 97–8 Without Getting Bitten 48–9
as webwork 92–4 Le cimici e il pirata 48
webwork of languages 94–7 Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a
Guzzanti, Sabina 139–55 Piazza Vittorio 48–9, 57, 59
see also Viva Zapatero! Leggio, Francesco 48
linguistic error 52–3
Hare, David 64–9, 74 literal translator 64, 67, 77
Hayama, Simon 92 Lorca, Federico García 64–9
Health&Fitness 162 The Lord of the Rings 182
hermeneutic purpose, of ‘A love from times long past’ 43n10
translation 11–13 Luttazzi, Daniele 140, 147, 153
Himmelweg 72, 74, 75, 78 Lyttleton Theatre 66
homeworker 42n2
The House of Bernarda Alba 64–9, 77, 78 magazines 160–1
‘hybridized’ language 45, 53 beauty and youth 163–8
Hytner, Nicholas 66, 69 sex-related ads 168–71
Marlatt, Daphne 83–5
imagetext 9, 20–2 Maryan, M.
imitation 198–200 Le Secret de Solange (O Segredo de
The Independent 107 Solange) 31, 35, 36, 39–40
inscription, in Whiteley’s self- The Masks of Destiny 40
portraits 9, 15–16, 18, 21 Matsui Akira 88
interartistic self-representation 9, 12, 19 Mayorga, Juan 69–70, 72–6
Index 219
McKea, Margaret 94 oblique censorship 145, 153, 155

meaning making 113, 115 Once Were Warriors 190
media piracy 196, 201, 205 ontological narratives 127
audience haggling 210–12
spatial pathology 207–8 Palestine 120, 125–7, 128
see also guerrilla translation Pandolfi, Gwenda 66
mediators, translators as 54–7 The Piano 176
Mehrez, Samia 46 as language of advertising 184–9
Men’s Edge 162–4, 167–70 and New Zealand tourism 182–4
Men’s Health 162–6, 168, 170, 173 and travel 179–82
migration 57–8, 59 pirate translation
Miki, Roy 84, 95, 96 see guerrilla translation
Minden, Robert 87 promotional/advertising text 159–60
‘minorization’ process 48 see also magazines
The Mirror 107
misrepresentation, in sports news 100, Radio del Plata 106–8
104–10, 111, 115 RaiOt 139, 140, 147
mistranslation, in sports news 100, Rameau, Jean
104–10, 115 Le Roman du Bonheur (O Romance de
Moore, Michael 153 Felicidade) 31, 34, 36–8
multimodal transcription framework Ramos, Juande 109–10
see Baldry-Thibault framework reading circle (dokusho sa-kuru) 83
region coding 207, 208
narrative voice 141, 144, 152, 154 register, of narration 141, 152
National Theatre relational approach 152
The House of Bernarda Alba 64–9, 77, 78 Remembering Lao-Tse 7–24
Neven 121, 124, 131, 132–3 resemiotization 113
New Woman 162 rewriting 57–8
New Zealand, and film-tourism romantic gaze 177–8, 184, 188
see The Piano Royal Court Production
news translation, misrepresentation/ International Department 71
mistranslation in 101–3 Wall 68
case studies 103–10 Way to Heaven 69–77, 78
Noh play 82, 84–5, 87–9
fundamental principle 90 Sacco, Joe
traditionalism 90–2 comics journalism see comics
see also The Gull journalism
non-fan piracy 196, 200, 204, 205, 206, self-mockery 129–30
209, 210, 212 Safe Area Gorazde 121, 131
bad-talk of 212 Sameh 124, 126–9, 130
see also guerrilla translation; ‘Sansei Poem’ 95
media piracy Santoro, Michele 140, 147, 151, 153
non-textual factors, of stage Scardifield, Simon 65, 67
performance 64, 77, 78 Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza
normalized stereotypes 160, 161, 163 Vittorio 48–9, 57, 59
selective appropriation of textual
Obasan 86 material 104
220 Index
self-representation translational studies (TS) 194, 196,

of Sacco 130 197, 201, 203, 208
of Whiteley 7-24 translators as mediators 54–7
settler gaze 182, 188, 189 transnational narratives 46
Shelton, Lindsay 184 features 47–8
Silhouette 162 translators as mediators 54–7
‘The siren’ 43n10 truth in 50–4
social practices 152 see also Amara Lakhous
Specht, Heidi 85, 86, 88, 92 transtextuality 10–11
spotting 145, 148, 150
stereotypes 158–9, 160 user-friendly translation 202–4
cultural stereotypes 158, 159, 160
gender stereotypes 158, 160, 162 visual theory 9
group stereotypes 158, 160 Viva Zapata! 139
normalized stereotypes 160, 161, Viva Zapatero! 139–55
163 censoring 150–3
Steveston 87 genre 142–5
Steveston migrations, play on 85–7 subtitles/subtitling 145, 147–50
subtitles/subtitling 145, 147–50, 197–8,
200, 206, 208 waka 23n14, 89
The Sun 108 Waley, Arthur 82
Wall 68
Tan, Shaun 124–5 Way to Heaven 69–77
Tévez, Carlos 106–7 webwork 84
theatre translations The Gull as 92–7
conflict of cultures 68, 75 Wenger, Arsène 106
see also The House of Bernarda Alba; Whiteley, Brett
Way to Heaven Remembering Lao-Tse 7–24
confl ict of interests 63, 64 , 67–8 , 78 see also self-representation
theatre translators 63 The Wire 198
think-aloud protocols (TAP) 12 women translators 27–8
Tidd, Phillip 94 see also Espanca, Florbela
Topless Women Talk about Their Women’s Health & Fitness 162
Lives 190 words and images, in Remembering
tourist gaze 182, 187, 189–90 Lao-Tse 7–24
Toyoichirô, Nogami 83 world literature 59
Toyoshi, Yoshihara 83, 89
transculture 47–8 Zelizer, Barbie 122

Jeremy Munday - Brigid Maher - Words, Images and Performances in Translation-Continuum (2011)

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Words, Images and

Published in association with the International Association for Translation

Cognitive Explorations of Translation: Eyes, Keys, Taps

Series: Continuum Studies in Translation

© Rita Wilson and Brigid Maher and contributors 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data

EISBN: 978-1- 4411-7261-7

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

General Editor’s Comment vii

Introduction: Transforming Image and Text, Performing Translation 1

Chapter 8: Silenced Images: The Case of Viva Zapatero! 139

The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies

Full-colour versions of these figures can be viewed online at

Figure 1.1 Brett Whiteley, Remembering Lao-Tse (Shaving off a Second),

Table 2.1 Four novels translated by Florbela Espanca:

Roger Baines is currently Head of the School of Language and

his interests to literary translation. His English translation of Florbela

Rita Wilson is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Languages,

The cultural experiences of globalization have contributed to increased

and so on, but do so in the context of intercultural communication, and

Another rich locus of interacting semiotic systems is to be found in the

rely on cultural stereotypes, contributing to the propagation and continu-

Translating an Artwork: Words and Images

For Australian artist Brett Whiteley (1939–1992), words were an import-

synergy of visual and verbal elements informing this artwork is discussed

Whiteley’s Self-Representation as Interartistic,

The noteworthy aspect, however, is not so much the quantity of Whiteley’s

in Remembering Lao-Tse implies not only decoding their literal meaning,

The image/text problem is not just something constructed ‘between’ the

In agreement with Mitchell, I deem it necessary to account for the image-

Translation as a Hermeneutic Tool

Why do I translate Whiteley’s words? Obviously, translation allows me to

understanding of Whiteley’s interartistic, intermodal and intertextual self-

underpinning my discussion can at times render the results unusual or dis-

From Theory to Practice: Remembering Lao-Tse

The inscription in ink, located in the upper left corner, consists of 15

I suppose we would have to begin with Brett’s interest in people like

The reference to pop stars reflects the widespread phenomenon of art-

Deve prima essere rafforzato

The expressions that must be examined as crucial to an understanding

defeat/victory (also implicit in the expression portato via [deprivato – pri-

and a form of derangement from common sense; an expression of freedom

of verbal-visual repetitions, he intends to represent himself not only as a

From Textual to Imagetextual

The translation process displayed has facilitated identifying and highlight-

1. Whiteley’s earliest paintings, produced in Europe (1960–1965), were par-

Kristeva, J. (1969), Séméiôtiké: Recherches pour une Sémanalyse . Paris: Edition du

philosophical tracts or scientific texts for an elite readership have only

What is at stake, the enjeu , is the possible achievement of a mutual, last-

Tracking Down the Original Texts and Translations

While an extensive literature exists on Espanca’s poetry, critics have largely

Author Biographical Notes Original (and Original (and Synopsis

Biographical Resonances in Translation Work

Words, Images and Performances in Translation

had translated; (2) identified the French publishers of popular romantic

Biographical Resonances in Espanca’s Translations

Initial reading of individual texts was followed by more systematic paral-

(1) Biographical resonances corresponding to events in her own life or to

Biographical resonances appear to have asserted themselves in Espanca’s

Espanca’s Translation Strategy as Mediated by Her Proto- Feminism