Ben Jonson Across Cultures: Bartholomew Fair’s Italian Adaptation

VIRDIS, DANIELA FRANCESCA

2008-01-01

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Abstract

Bartholomew Fair, the Jacobean comedy by Ben Jonson (1614), was recently adapted and translated into Italian, in particular into Genoese dialect, by the Italian playwrights Mario Bagnara and Bartolomeo Rottondo. In this article, the author discusses their project by comparing the English source text (ST) and the Italian target text (TT), and by analysing Bagnara and Rottondo’s translational choices. In particular, the author applies the new methodology of translational stylistics, together with translation studies, stylistics and pragmatics, in order to examine the figure of and the very first lines uttered by Ursula, the “pig-woman” (BF, The Persons of the Play), and in order to study Jonson’s presentation of a Jacobean working woman and Bagnara and Rottondo’s linguistic and cultural translation of this figure.