Pianure Blues: From the Dialect of the Plains to the English of the Blues

Abstract

In this article the authors describe a joint performance project called Pianure Blues, in which poems in Romagnolo dialect are transposed into English and performed as blues songs, and in which songs from the Anglo-American blues/roots/folk tradition are transposed and performed as poems in Romagnolo dialect – a process they have called ‘trans-staging’. A process in which they are writers and performers and, especially, translators; translators of each other’s voices, stories, landscapes, rhythms and sounds as they look for the bond between places, languages and traditions that seem very distant from each other but which find a common mood and poetic language, a common aesthetic, in their performances. The authors reflect on the creative process involved and on the significance of establishing an intersemiotic dialogue between a ‘minority’ dialect such as Romagnolo and a ‘global’ language such as English, and the blues, have become.