Traduccion

translation of Eduardo De
Filippo’s Sabato, Domenica e
Lunedì
by Beatrice Basso
My involvement with a
new translation of
Sabato, Domenica e
Lunedì (Saturday, Sunday,
Monday) began fortuitously.
The play was written, directed
and performed by Eduardo De
Filippo in 1959. The Oregon
Shakespeare Festival (OSF) was
going to produce it in the
Summer of 20021. More than a
year earlier,while I was interviewing
Artistic Director Libby
Appel for Italian publications,
she told me that she was not
particularly satisfied with existing
translations. Before I knew
it, I was included in the process
of translating a new version of
the play with Linda Alper, an
actress and writer at OSF, who
was going to play the lead in the
show directed by Ms. Appel.
The only published Englishtranslation of Sabato,
13
November 2002
Domenica e Lunedì is the 1973
British adaptation by
Waterhouse and Hall2, which
contains many British idioms
and sets the play in the 1970s.
The interest in a new version
came from a desire to go back
to the late 1950s setting and to
create a text more accessible to
American audiences. Ms. Alper
and I restored the original time
frame, so thatthe tone of the
family debates as well as gender
and parent/children interactions
were truer to the original
milieu. The Priores, the central
characters of the play, are a
Neapolitan middle class family
of trades-people who live
amidst a crowd of relatives and
neighbors. The action of the
play revolves around their kitchen.
Peppino and Rosa,
husband and wife, are in the
middle of acrisis when the play
begins, with Rosa patiently preparing
ragù for the Sunday
meal. The play continues
towards the explosion of
Peppino’s jealousy during
Sunday lunch in Act II, which
gradually dissolves on Monday
morning, with cold leftovers on
the table.
The literal translation was
the first step in the translation
process. As I wrote it, I slowly
realized how little objectivitylay in the elusive balance between
being as close as possible
to the original, and making
sense in English. Although the
point of a literal translation was
not to be interpretive, any choice
of a nuance in meaning and
tone over another option was
going to influence, help or mislead
my co-translator. I found
that a supposedly literal translation
could only be effective if it
was supportedand followed
through by collaboration between
the translators. So much
could be misunderstood or lost.
Ms. Alper had a good knowledge
of Italian, so we could refer
to the original together. Before
this experience, I had assisted
in rehearsals of literal translations
from the Italian where the
translator’s effort had been a
solitary one. That process can
take translators on tangents,no
matter how brilliant they are as
writers. I came to really value
collaboration. Each collaborator’s
strength must be the mastery
of their native language, while
being as familiar as possible
with that of the others, in a concerted
effort to maintain the spirit
of the original and to make
choices that will work for the
new audience.
One of the first things that
Ms. Alper worked onwas
streamlining. Italian style in
general and De Filippo’s in particular
are sometimes repetitious
and tend to express the
same concept in multiple ways.
This means of expression does
not work in a more concise and
logical language like English.
During the first stages of writing
we also decided, together
with the director, to intersperse
some Italian in the translation.
It was one ofthe ways we
found to convey at least a taste
of the original in the English
version. Of course, this is a
device that has been used many
times before and that has
always had detractors. Initially,
I also feared that it would seem
too forced or lean towards a cliché
use of the Italian. Since the
text had to be understood in its
entirety by American audiences,
our choices were limited....