Una revisione della traduzione de “La traviata” di Verdi in cinese. Questioni linguistiche e metodologiche

Abstract

This paper deals with the methodological and linguistic aspects of the translation into Chinese of the original 1853 libretto of Verdi's La Traviata by Francesco Maria Piave. The translation is performance-oriented, so it is part of a field of study that is still little investigated today, and requires careful consideration and accurate guidelines (Desblache 2007; Golomb 2005; Mateo 2013). Starting from a reflection on the tradition of translating opera librettos in China, the author highlights the historical and social significance of Verdi's opera. La Traviata, key access-point of Italian melodrama onto the Chinese cultural scene, becomes here the field in which specific trans-cultural elements of an artistic language are expressed, a language that, despite having defined rules, remains open to numerous semantic variations. After a historical excursus on the translation of the work, the present study focuses on the linguistic analysis of the criticalities in the Chinese translation of the text, aimed at rendering it on stage. The aim is to update a translation dating back to the last century, already reviewed by Chinese conductor Zheng Xiaoying, while paying more attention to the transcoding of sociolinguistic and cultural elements in a diachronic and diamesic key