Accidental Death Of An Anarchist by Mahek Arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1 class notes and IOC topics en-us 2018-03-26 05:38:30 UTC 2018-04-01 08:30:49 UTC hello@padlet.com https://padlet-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/icons/Balance.png About the Author- Dario Fo mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/245966469 political ideology
education
general context ]]> 2018-03-26 07:35:33 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/245966469 Essay by Translator mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/245967357 (shared by Matthew on managebac : He speaks about why it is such a popular translated play and about how critical Fo could be about translations of his oeuvre.)

Joseph Farrell


In the following essay excerpt, Farrell examines issues associated with translating Fo's works. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, in particular, presents a challenge because of its roots in contemporary social criticism, but it nonetheless has been Fo's most successfully translated play.


A translator is conventionally expected to content himself with a condition of self-effacing invisibility, which surpasses anything even Victorian parents once imposed on their offspring. The good translator should be neither seen nor heard. He should fade into the background, and should expect that if his presence is noted, it is as a prelude to some censure or reproach. A translator will receive attention only when responsible for some gaffe, transgression or solecism which will require discussion and correction at a later date, once the guests have withdrawn.


The way Dario Fo's translators have come to be viewed confirms this rule. Their sin is to have made themselves noticed. Fo, as is endlessly repeated, is the most frequently performed living playwright in the world today, which is another way of saying that he has more translators than any other playwright in the world today. The nature of the performed versions of Fo's work has aroused a high level of controversy, and it appears that there has been greater interest in the process of transposing a Fo text from its original Italian into other languages than has been accorded the same process with any other writer. The nature of the translated text employed for production, principally the perceived confusion of roles between translator and adapter, has puzzled and enraged critics. Fo himself has contributed to the general air of disapproval. As he told an interviewer, in reply to a question about the productions he had seen:


I have seen few good works. Some were respectable, others appalling, either on account of the actors, the director or the text itself, which had been supposedly corrected but often cheapened.

Fo has himself protested vociferously about specific productions, and specific published versions of his work. Although neither Dario Fo nor Franca Rame speak English, they subject translations identified as suspect to rigid, if idiosyncratic, scrutiny by having the debated translation re-translated into Italian. This process creates difficulties of its own, as the resemblance between an original text and a retranslation is comparable to that between a bullet in the barrel of a gun and a bullet which has ricocheted off a steel plate. A further level of difficulty is added by the nature of Fo's scripts. When they deal with contemporary political topics, as was the case with Accidental Death of an Anarchist, they are subject to regular rewrites in the light of changing circumstances and new developments. And in all cases, his plays are subject to reshaping in the light of audience response or of reconsideration by Fo or Rame. On at least one occasion, a translator was censured because his translation was based on a fifth draft, but once re-translated, the comparison was made to the fourth draft. Various cuts and additions which were put down to the translator's intrusive, slapdash or high-handed disregard for the original were actually the result of rewrites undertaken by the author.


Obscenity or vulgarity are especially delicate areas. Personal relations scarcely ever feature in Fo's work. Both Fo and Rame are scrupulous about the language they employ on stage, and in none of Fo's works is there any material which could, in the linguistic register employed, offend the most demanding Calvinist or Carmelite conscience. Even the recent Zen and the Art of Screwing conforms to this rule. It was written not by Dario Fo but by his son Jacopo, and Franca Rame performed it because she viewed it as a work which would further the sexual education of the young. On the other hand, in his own play An Ordinary Day, Fo features the case of a woman who receives phone calls from other women who believe they are calling some outre analyst. One of the callers is a prostitute who reports that, in an excess of professional pruderie, she has bitten off the 🤬 and related attachment of one of her clients. For the attachment in question, Fo employed the term coso, an imprecise, colloquial term which translates as "thingummy." In my translation I set aside such nicety and opted for the candid form "🤬." This was retranslated in Milan as cazzo and did not pass inspection. It was excised at Franca Rame's insistence with the same ruthlessness the fictional prostitute had demonstrated towards the original offending member….


The central problem with translating and staging Fo is to find a means of expressing and conveying the political fire while respecting the framework of farce. Fo has in various occasions defined his own theatre as combining "riso con rabbia" (laughter with anger) and both elements are of importance. The balancing act requires sensitivity, but the failure even to aim for it has meant that there sometimes seems to be an Italian Fo who walks on lines parallel to, but never quite coinciding with, the tracks on which British Fo, German Fo and French Fo walk.


The need to find such a synthesis of the laughter and the anger in the target language will often require a transcending of the limits normally allowed to translation. It is here that one collides with Fo's supposed supporters. No one has been so crass as to propose outright literalism, but the objection to the standard renderings of his work outside Italy takes the form of bewilderment over the (omni) presence of the adapter. One could note, in parenthesis, the curious fact that none of the exponents of translation studies have been able to incorporate the adapter into any theoretical framework. "It hardly seems useful to debate whether or not adaptation is still translation," write Basil Hatim and Ian Mason in their useful work on translation. It may not be useful in general, but it is indispensable in the case of Dario Fo.


There can be no dispute over the facts. However they have been presented in programme notes or in published editions, few of the works that have been staged, most especially in English, have been translations. The problem is to establish whether an adaptation is as welcome as a virus infecting a healthy organism, or whether it can function as a tonic restoring a waning life. Some definitions are in order. A translation is a process of reproduction, replication or transference in which the changes are purely linguistic and do not involve wider redirection of the plot or switches of setting, epoch or culture. To be such, a translation must eschew alterations to structure and characterisation, and must respect the more intangible system of values underlying the source text. This does not involve literalism but it does involve a rehabilitation of the much-maligned concept of fidelity, in the sense given to that term by George Steiner in what remains the most profound analysis of the nature and aims of translation:


The translator, the exegetist, the reader is faithful to his text, makes his response responsible, only when he endeavours to restore the balance of forces, of integral presence, which his appropriative comprehension has disrupted. Fidelity is ethical, but also, in the full sense, economic. By virtue of tact, and tact intensified is moral vision, the translator-interpreter creates a condition of significant exchange.

The distorting presence of the translator cannot be avoided, but of itself that does not negate the validity of an aspiration to fidelity founded on an awareness of, and an attempt to maintain or restore, a previously existing balance. The nature of that balance in Fo will be discussed later.


An adaptation, on the other hand, is free of the restraints of fidelity, however it is defined. The adapter may aspire to be a co-creater, and perhaps it is helpful to view his work as the equivalent of the musical variation on a theme rather than as an operation of finding linguistic equivalences. There may be, for instance, parallels between various cults in the society described by Petronius in his Satyricon and the "New Age" beliefs held by certain sections of society as the Millennium approaches, but any writer who published a modern Satyricon updated to focus on such sects in New York or London would not be considered, and would not consider himself, to be producing a translation, any more than did James Joyce when he wrote Ulysses. At times, this process may have gone so far that the adaptation is a new work, in direct conflict with the original. The playwright David Hare expressed his distaste for Arthur Miller's adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People on the grounds that Miller had been so shocked by the anti-democratic stance adopted by the protagonist that he had in consequence arrogated to himself the right to soften that position. Miller could reply that his operation had been transparent.


The suggestion has been made that Fo has suffered from similar distortions without the benefit of transparency. "The problem in Fo's case," writes David L. Hirst, for whom it is indeed a problem, "is that the translations made in Britain have—with one exception—been effected by a combination of translator and adapter." Tony Mitchell similarly entitles his consideration of English language versions "Adapting Fo," and while he and Hirst agree that only one work escapes general censorship, they disagree over which work that is. For Mitchell that play is We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay!, a view Hirst dismisses with a polemical spleen others would find appropriate only when describing the activities of neo-fascist pederasts. Hirst puts forward the case in favour of Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which he regards as being "a playing script of immense vitality which exploits to the full the potential of both farce and of witty comedy of manners," even if he is compelled to add that "the adaptation is obliged to follow the implications of its inexorable movement away from its source to a radically different target."


In both intellectual and practical terms, the problems are complex. Certain recent critics have gone so far as to view "subversive intent" as a quality to be prized in a translator and to extol translation as "production" rather than "reproduction," but this is hardly satisfactory. The majority of readers expect to make contact with Dostoevsky and not with his translator when they pick up Crime and Punishment. But if fidelity is a goal, fidelity to what? Vladimir Nabokov was forthright. "When the translator sets out to render the 'spirit' and not the mere sense of the text,… he begins to traduce his author." Nabokov's views appeared as a foreword to his translation of Pushkin, but the situation of a playwright is more difficult. Fo himself makes a distinction between "theatre" and "dramatic literature." He consigned Pier Paolo Pasolini to the domain of "dramatic literature" on the grounds that he had no feeling for the rhythms of theatre, no sense of dramatic tension, no understanding of the primacy of the actor, no grasp of the demands of immediate communication with an audience in real time. If all theatrical texts occupy an indeterminate, intermediate space between literature and performance, not all lie on the same meridian between those two poles. Fo's preference is for those plays that incline towards performance and away from literature, as his own do. Put differently, Fo's scripts have much in common with the canovaccio of commedia dell'arte: they are, of course, more than outline plots intended as a prompt for improvisation, but they are less than the finished, polished scripts produced by such other Nobel Prize-winning dramatists as Bernard Shaw or Eugene O'Neill. The "mere sense" Nabokov referred to could not be, for Fo, something that can find expression solely on the printed page. Their "interpretation" requires a subsequent act of enhancement. Where Shaw insisted that his printed plays be furnished by the full apparatus of stage directions to assist readers who would, he wrote, be always more numerous than spectators, Fo tended towards a view he attributed to Brecht:


Brecht once said, rightly, of Shakespeare: "A pity it reads so beautifully. It is its only defect, but a great one." And he was right. However paradoxical it may seem, a genuine work of theatre should not at all appear a pleasure when read: its worth should only become apparent on the stage.

The achievement of that pleasure requires the collaboration of those equipped to detect and convey it in its fullness. Neither a translator nor a director can claim to be faithful to Fo if they limit themselves to the beauty of the words on the page. Works so deeply theatrical by nature as are Fo's only reach ripeness when they are "interpreted," or "translated" into production by other hands. Those involved in bringing a play to stage are, as has been often remarked, involved in a work of translation, or adaptation, in the prime sense. Theatre is essentially ensemble creativity, with the writer primus inter pares, and perhaps not even primus. As was noted by George Steiner, the Italian and French word interprete can be used to denote either an actor or an interpreter. The poet or novelist has to contend with no comparable intermediaries. The ensemble creative process, with its concomitant legitimisation of intervention by other minds into the communication between writer and audience, has been a source of some resentment to certain Italian dramatists, even of the highest stature. Leonardo Sciascia wrote three plays and claimed he would have continued writing plays had he not "clashed with the figure of the director." The director was an obstacle….


Pirandello considered theatre a bastard genre, which dethroned the writer's text. No one could say anything comparable about Dario Fo, who if not a figlio d'arte by birth, is the all-round man of theatre, for whom the script occupies no royal position. He belongs to the quintessentially Italian tradition of the actor-author, and part of the reason that the conferring of the Nobel Prize aroused so much controversy in Italy may be that in his own country Fo is considered primarily an actor, whereas abroad he is viewed primarily as an author. In principle he accepts a view which makes the script the written equivalent of a stage prop, to be reworked as needed—or at least when another writer is involved. If it is granted that theatre requires a variety of acts of translation, from a number of sources, there remains the fundamental question of whose act of interpretation can be accorded legitimacy….


In 1981, an English-language version of Fo's own Accidental Death of an Anarchist had its premiere at Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End. The company was a left-wing fringe company, Belt and Braces, and although the translation was done by Gillian Hanna, the main influence was that of Gavin Richards, who was adapter, director and lead actor. Fo was present on the opening night and was enraged at what he regarded as a misinterpretation of his work. Several people tried to explain to him the differences between British and Italian traditions of comic writing and performance, attempting to placate him—for he needed placating—by talking of the vibrancy of a music hall tradition which had provided the inspiration of the British production. Was Fo, of all authors, entitled to his annoyance?


In the same year, 1981, the Teatro stabile in Turin put on a work by Dario Fo entitled L'opera dello sghignazzo (The Raucous Opera). In the programme and in the subsequent published version, it was described as being based on "John Gay's Beggar's Opera, and on some ideas from my son Jacopo." Acknowledgement was also made of the contribution of poets and rock singers including Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Frank Zappa and Donovan. There was no reference to Bertolt Brecht or to his work, known in English as The Three-penny Opera.


In reality, the Berliner Ensemble, who invited Fo to direct a new production of Brecht's Three-penny Opera, initiated the project. When they saw what Fo intended doing, and the modification he intended introducing into Brecht's text, they withdrew in horror and refused him permission to make any use of Brechtian material for any production anywhere. Fo professed himself mystified and outraged by this elevation of Brecht's play into an untouchable sacred text. He devised a strategy to circumvent the legal veto imposed by Brecht's heirs. As is well known, Brecht's play was itself a reworking of John Gay's original, but John Gay is dead and gone and has no heirs to threaten recourse to law. When he was invited by the theatre directors in Turin to stage his work there, Dario Fo did what Brecht had done: he went back to Gay's The Beggar's Opera and recast it in his own way. Or so he said, and no one could challenge him.


In his introduction to the published version of L'opera dello sghignazzo, Fo justified his original script by reference to Brecht's own theories and went on to provide what appears a manifesto for translators, at least translators of Fo….


Of course Fo is a creative genius who operates within a tradition and reshapes the tradition by virtue of his intervention. He plunders the work of his predecessors, as artists have always done. "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal," was T. S. Eliot's formulation. Manet reshaped, or stole from, Poussin, as did Picasso with Velazquez, Dante with Virgil, Eliot with Dante and Fo with everyone. Nevertheless, as regards the views he has expressed on responsibilities towards authors, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is some form of inconsistency involved. As director or interpreter, Fo takes to himself the role of inspired and liberating contributor to the creative process, but wants his own directors and translators to be artisans, to be hewers of his wood and drawers of his water. It is not just a question of the superior claims of "genius." The paradox is that it is anything but clear that his translators would be doing his theatre justice by assuming the workaday role he confers on them. Fo the actor is the best translator of Fo the author, but in his absence the job has to be done by someone else. Translation of Fo requires audience-centred techniques, which do not necessarily coincide with the author-centred translation he himself prefers….


To say that some modification or enrichment of the sort which Fo himself routinely brings to his own work by his on-stage presence is not to say that all existing translations or adaptations can be sanctioned. If it is agreed that the adaptation of Fo's Il ratto della Francesca into Abducting Diana was a work of unredeemed crassness, that the attribution of those moronic names to the Cardinals in The Pope and the Witch was a symptom of a profound misunderstanding which was made manifest in the resultant production, it has also to be conceded that the "faithful" translation of An Ordinary Day did Fo's theatre no favours. One of the problems with the latter was that it provided no guidance to directors who have now a stereotyped image of Fo and his theatre, and who, being unwilling to respect the darker tone which emerged in that play, insisted on presenting it in the style of the slapstick of his earlier years.


No matter whether the starting point is the farce or the politics, there is the same need with Fo as with other, more obviously "serious" playwrights, to identify the inner vision and to respect that vision as well as the quirks, oddities, idiosyncrasies and comic predilections of the surface. However paradoxical it may appear, this has been best done by such works as the translation-adaptation that is Accidental Death of an Anarchist, now become the all-purpose protest play from Tokyo to London. In that work, the cultural references have been altered to allow it to refer to the plight of airport protesters in Japan or spy-scandals in Britain, but this has prevented it suffering the fate of 🤬's Cabin or Gulliver's Travels, both works that began life as political satires. The international success of that play is a testimony to the theatrical mastery of Fo, to his skill in imagining original theatrical situations and to his expertise in devising structures marrying the extra-theatrical passion to appropriate theatrical techniques, but also to the value of a process which, combining translation and adaptation, conveys all these qualities to other cultures. The result might be, for purists, a variation on a theme, but the music is Fo's.


Source: Joseph Farrell, "Variations on a Theme: Respecting Dario Fo," in Modern Drama, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 1998, pp. 19-29.

 
]]> 2018-03-26 07:39:56 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/245967357 Fo's theatrical vision ~ Nuova Scena (new scene mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/245968745 where and how did they perform, response to his work specifically ADA snd recognition they received including the Nobel prize.]]> 2018-03-26 07:46:24 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/245968745 study guide mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/245969891 2018-03-26 07:51:43 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/245969891 historical context mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246036057 2018-03-26 12:27:24 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246036057 In Italian, starring Dario Fo as the Maniac: (Morte accidentale di un anarchico) mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246046078 2018-03-26 12:49:30 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246046078 hindi version mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246345732 2018-03-27 03:25:15 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246345732 theatre mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246346069 2018-03-27 03:27:18 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246346069 John Berger on translations mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246346409 ideas to words]]> 2018-03-27 03:29:07 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246346409 Franca Rame mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246347274 founder of La Comune her theatre collective]]> 2018-03-27 03:34:57 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246347274 Genre~Satire mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246347630 -when was it first developed
-horation V juvenalian
-contemporary Italian theater]]> 2018-03-27 03:37:46 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246347630 criticism of religion more specifically role of the catholic church mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246347819 2018-03-27 03:39:20 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246347819 commedia dell'arte (theater style mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246348071 2018-03-27 03:40:58 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246348071 Real Life Incidents that ADA is based off of mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246348382 piazza fontata bombing in milan (evaluate role of media, response of public, role of judiciary, real characters)

]]> 2018-03-27 03:43:03 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246348382 Role Of Manic mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246348917 trickster, harlequin, portrayal of mania]]> 2018-03-27 03:47:04 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246348917 works in translation and adaptations - evaluate its success in different places mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246349838 specifically British context ]]> 2018-03-27 03:53:08 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246349838 hot autumn mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246350272 The Hot Autumn (Italian: Autunno caldo) of 1969–70 is a term used for a series of large strikes in factories and industrial centers of northern Italy, in which workers demanded better pay and better conditions. In 1969 and 1970 there were over 440 hours of strikes in the region. The decrease in the flow of labour migration from southern Italy had resulted in nearly full employment levels in the northern part of the country, meaning that the workforce there now had the leverage to start flexing its muscles.]]> 2018-03-27 03:56:22 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246350272 Years of Lead mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246350641 The Years of Lead (Italian: Anni di piombo) is a term used for a period of social and political turmoil in Italy that lasted from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, marked by a wave of both left-wing and right-wing incidents of political terrorism.]]> 2018-03-27 03:59:34 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246350641 Political Scenario, Anarchism, Fascism (police brutality and corruption scandals) and Socialism in Europe mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246350771 Antonio Gramsci- cultural hegemony]]> 2018-03-27 04:00:59 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246350771 How does Dario Fo use comedy (comedic technique) for effect in ADA mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246374397 purpose? techniques? explain w examples.

hyperbole
colloquialism
juxtaposition
sarcasm
puns
mocking, ridicule
draw a caricature of
roasting (?)
physical humour(slapstick)
characterization
subverting our expectations
absurd, states things that aren't very realistic, satire criticises the system and gives really strange justifications which are abnormal

ex pg 52-53
There wasn’t one of those mini trampolines lying around? Was the anarchist wearing bouncy rubber shoes by any chance?

Hang on though…somethings not right here. Had the 🤬 victim been wearing three shoes

Idk what happened
Nor do I! Unless the policeman here had rushed down the stairs to a second-floor landing, got to a window just as the anarchist was plummeting, put his shoe back on in flight, then hared back upstairs, reaching the fourth floor just as the body hit the ground
]]> 2018-03-27 07:06:09 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246374397 The Wire mahek1arora https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246760633 2018-03-28 04:20:08 UTC https://padlet.com/mahek1arora/adoaa1/wish/246760633