Shakespeare Translated by a Woman: Giustina Renier Michiel’s Othello

Abstract

The same metaphors are employed to describe translation and women: they are defined, as John Florio did, in terms of imperfection and inferiority, both deprived of creativity and of writing talent. Women’s translation has been discussed by gender studies and translation studies: the analysis of women’s translation helps to determine their motives, interests and strategies, and it is essential to balance the marginal position of women’s writing in the history of literature. There is a vast body of literature analyzing the way William Shakespeare interpreted and described women, but studies dealing explicitly with women translating Shakespeare are scarce. In Italy, women’s translation played a crucial but overlooked role in Shakespeare’s reception. Thus, this paper intends to focus on the first Italian translation of Othello by Giustina Renier Michiel, who was also the first and only woman translator of Shakespeare in Italy until the Fascist era. An exploration of Shakespeare’s reception and an overview of female writing in Italy will introduce a contrastive analysis which aims at understanding Renier Michiel’s translating approach and strategies. The goal is to highlight her personal input and to prove that her work, stained by a gender-biased judgment and critically downplayed as a mere indirect translation of Shakespeare’s plays through Pierre Le Tourneur’s French edition, was far more independent than believed.