This synopsis is based on the full paper available here: paper.
This article examines the creative partnership of actors and playwrights Franca Rame and Dario Fo. While Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997, his co-author and collaborator Rame remained excluded from international consecration. Recent scholarly efforts have highlighted her key contribution, not only to feminist theatre across the globe, but also as writer, editor and publisher of her and Fo’s work. This article joins this debate by bringing to the fore her key role as agent and practitioner of translation.
Methodologically, the article draws on recent appeals to develop a “‘performance-sensitive” approach to translation analysis and to combine it with archival research in theatre translation, so far an under-used approach (Marinetti & De Francisci, 2022). Building on Marinetti (2013), this contribution looks at the linguistic, dramaturgical, and performative aspects of theatre translation under a unified lens, striving to avoid a distinction into discrete phases but rather focusing on their compresence and mutual influence on stage.
The article argues that Fo’s international success was possible because of Rame’s innovative translation techniques, which allowed them both to perform their works abroad, thus gaining recognition beyond Italy and the italophone world. A first strategy was that of on-stage translation: when traveling with one (wo)man shows such as Comic Mystery Play and All Bed, Board, and Church, Rame and Fo would perform part of the shows in Italian, with an actor on-stage next to them, who would translate consecutively what they were saying into the language of the audience. In these moments, the happening of translation on stage would welcome in improvisation, where mistakes and differences offered Rame and Fo new comic opportunities.
Secondly, and most importantly, Rame devised a way to use transparencies as theatrical surtitles. Adopting this technology allowed her and Fo to perform their pseudo-dialect sketches on stage, with no accompanying translators. This is a particularly important moment in translation history as, by that point, theatrical surtitles had not been widely adopted, and because Rame’s technical innovation predates the diffusion of opera surtitling. By stressing Rame’s role in preparing translated surtitles for her and Fo’s shows abroad, this article not only highlights her key contribution to Fo’s fame but most importantly recentres her as a key agent in the history of theatrical translation.
My case-study is the 1986 New York performance of All Bed, Board and Church, where Rame was accompanied on stage by Maria Consagra. The closing performance of that American tour is here discussed thanks to the taped recordings I have been able to locate and identify. Moreover, the analysis of the recordings is combined with research on the surviving surtitles reels, preserved at the Rame-Fo Archive (Verona). The combined analysis of visual and written archival sources allows me to reconstruct the layered dynamics of translation on stage, and of its genesis.
In the latter part of the article, Rame’s choices and preferences as a translator off stage are discussed more closely. In particular, Rame was the one translating her and Fo’s pseudo-dialect sketches into Italian for the print editions of their works. Notably, she also did this in order to provide future translators of their works with an Italian version that could be used as source text. As the selected examples illustrate, Rame is a conservative translator, who tried to adhere, lexically, as much as possible to the pseudo-dialect text. This aligns with her preferences for on-stage translation: both strategies, as a matter of fact, serve Rame and Fo as they allow them to preserve authorial control over their works even when they travel beyond Italian.
More broadly, the article also refers to the gendered roles performed by the couple when it came to authorship and translation. As becomes evident, Fo was taking on a predominantly authorial role, and was not involved in the editing, publishing, translating and archiving of the works. Rame, on the other hand, while also being co-author and writer, took care of all the other phases, and she was the one deciding to preserve and store drafts and materials, thus creating a shared archive of her and Fo’s works. Ultimately, however, her work as editor, archivist, and, as I show, translator, predominantly benefitted Fo.
