Abstract
This essay deals with the methodological and linguistic aspects of the translation into Chinese of the original libretto of Verdi’s La Traviata written in 1853 by Francesco Maria Piave. The translation is performance-oriented, so it is part of a field of study that is still scarcely investigated today, and requires careful reflection and accurate guidelines (Desblache in A tool for social integration? audiovisual translation from different angles, pp. 155–170, 2007; Golomb in Songs and significance: Virtues and Vices of vocal translation. Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, pp. 121–161, 2005; Mateo 2012). Starting from a reflection on the tradition of translating opera librettos in China, the author highlights the historical and social significance of Verdi’s opera. La Traviata, key access-point of Italian melodrama onto the Chinese cultural scene, becomes here the field in which specific trans-cultural elements of an artistic language are expressed, a language that, despite having defined rules, remains open to numerous semantic variations. After a historical excursus on the translation of the work, the study focuses on the linguistic analysis of the criticalities in the Chinese translation of the text when aimed at stage performance. The aim is to update a translation dating back to the last century already reviewed by Chinese conductor Zheng Xiaoying, but with special attention to the transcoding of sociolinguistic and cultural elements in a diachronic and diamesic key.
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Notes
- 1.
An earlier version of this article first appeared in Italian in
Lingue e Linguaggi
Lingue Linguaggi 35 (2020), 247–271
ISSN 2239-0367, e-ISSN 2239-0359
https://doi.org/10.1285/i22390359v35p247
http://siba-ese.unisalento.it, © 2020 Università del Salento.
- 2.
Following the guidelines of Culture Secretary Mao Dun 茅盾 (1896–1981), several Italian literary works were translated in the Fifties of the twentieth century, but from intermediate languages (English or Russian). Wen (2008, 215–216) quotes Zhu Weiji’s translations from the English of the librettos of Madama Butterfly (1958) and La Traviata (1959). In 1962 he also translated the Divina Commedia and the Decameron. But his translations of the librettos have never been staged.
- 3.
zhōngtǐ xīyòng 中体西用.
- 4.
.Yan Fu introduced these cardinal principles in the foreword to his translation of T.H. Huxley’s, Evolution and Ethics (1898). See Elizabeth Sinn, 1995 “Yan Fu” in Chan, Pollard 2001 (1995) An Encyclopedia of Translation, 429–447. Also Brezzi (ed.) 2008.
- 5.
The drive for the adoption of báihuà became one of the banners of the New Culture Movement, but it had already begun in the second half of the nineteenth century. This variant of vernacular language derives from Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) operas (huàběn 话本), and had been used in novels written in the Ming (1368–1644 CE) and Qing (1644–1911 CE) periods.
- 6.
After his return from Japan, where he had studied from 1902 to 1909, Lu Xun dedicated himself mainly to a literary production for the spiritual betterment of the Chinese people. He developed a narrative style of his own and a straightforward literary language close to the common speech, thereby influencing the whole literary framework of the Chinese twentieth century. Please refer to Nicoletta Pesaro’s contribution in this book.
- 7.
Men, for the most part; but during this period, the translation of foreign texts and the linguistic innovations in baihua also influenced the development of a literary production by female authors, among whom we may mention Ding Ling, Bing Xing, and Huang Luyin. (Goldman 1977; Biasco 1983; Hu 2000).
- 8.
We will not take into consideration here the earlier forms of melodrama, which had different stylistic features and social purposes.
- 9.
This observation is shared with other analyzes of translations from the 1950s, among which Wen in Brezzi 2008.
- 10.
I refer here to Eco 2003.
- 11.
- 12.
This form of address is mainly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South China, and in the North it is increasingly frequent.
- 13.
This is the term used in the translation of Pushkin’s 1824 narrative poem The Gipsies. The work gained the interest of Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, who had studied in the Moscow, at the Institute for Foreign Languages. Qu published a partial translation in the poetry journal Wǔyuè in 1937, and then again in a pamphlet, Shanghai, 1939. The complete version was published in 1939 by the People’s Publishing House (Rénmín wénxué Chūbǎnshè) in Beijing.
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Ardizzoni, S. (2021). Revising the Chinese Translation of Verdi’s Opera “La Traviata” Linguistic and Methodological Issues. In: Moratto, R., Woesler, M. (eds) Diverse Voices in Chinese Translation and Interpreting. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4283-5_13
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