Chapter 8 - Beckett Resonating in Italy: Which Text, Whose Voice?

Summary

Abstract

This paper deals with the issue of translating a self-translated text, focusing on the Italian version of Waiting for Godot by Carlo Fruttero published by Einaudi. In the 1950s, the status of self-translator was still unclear both for the author, who was developing the habit after the success of his first play, and for Fruttero. This produced a situation somewhat confusing: Fruttero translated originally the French play, but several modifications were later introduced starting from the English version in new issues in collected volumes. This was never disclosed in the paratext. The result is that two different Einaudi versions of the Italian Godot are available in the market today, one strictly from the very first French edition by Minuit, the other occasionally integrating or modifying from the English version by Beckett, which had in the meantime come out.

Keywords: Beckett drama translation; self-translation; Italian translations; Waiting for Godot Italian translations

The aim of this chapter is to draw a picture of the translation of Beckett's drama into Italian. The working hypothesis is: is it time for new translations?

Before delving into the subject matter, it may be useful to mention that Beckett's studies in Italy are, so far, still quite fanned out in three relatively independent branches: English Studies since the late 1960s, French Studies and Comparative Literature Studies. In this maze of independent and largely self-referring scholarly debate was Beckett made known to the Italian public. It is relevant to keep this in mind because it bears on the kind of approach scholars, editors and publishers have had towards the epiphenomenon of Beckett's bilingual and self-translated drama.

This contribution will consider the translation of Beckett's drama in Italy, focusing in particular on En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot, but before attempting any description of the situation in its context, it is perhaps useful to outline a minimal theoretical framework in which to place the observation of the actual facts.

Although several scholars, among which myself, have written on the topic of Beckett's bilingualism and self-translation, and from multiple approaches, in relatively recent years, Chiara Montini has very effectively posed the problem of how to translate a self-translator. She deals with this in several studies, but I refer here to one article that appeared in Italy in 2013: ‘Tradurre un testo autotradotto: Mercier et/and/e Camier’.