Mondadori and Rizzoli, split their investments between books and illustrated magazines and other media. New titles were reviewed and launched by articles and advertisements on weekly magazines and in radio and television programmes.
Books, mainly cheap weekly or monthly series, such as A. In these years Wodehouse was widely published in Italy: editions appeared between and on average, more than 10 per year, a figure never to be reached again.
Bietti and Elmo were still the main contributors, but other companies also started to draw from his huge output: A. However, given the uncertain political situation in the late s, no books by Wodehouse appeared on the Italian market, already stagnant, between and Quattrini in banca was released in the same translation Elmo had previously commissioned from Sirio Agnati.
and consisted of three series: blue, yellow and pink. Love Among the Chickens ; GV. The anonymous preface to this edition offers a brief and not completely accurate 52 50 Corresponding to just under 1. Wodehouse had formally adopted her McCrum, , p. In these years, Wodehouse was very well received in Italy and his books were bought by public and private libraries.
General unrest was triggered by recession and inflation. Plans for the economic development of Southern Italy and major reforms were continuously postponed Mack Smith, Earthquakes in Sicily and Campania and floods throughout Italy devastated the country and aggravated its economic conditions, further exacerbated by the oil crisis.
Lanaro, The eleven governments that followed one another did not succeed in solving the conflicts or in forging new coalitions able to tackle the stagnant domestic situation and crucial issues, the chaotic urban development in large cities, corruption in public administration and the elevated concentration of arbitrary power in key institutions such as universities Santarelli, The results of the elections expressed public alarm Mack Smith, Factories, schools, and universities were in turmoil.
A terrorist war against the state culminated in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in The consequences were high social tension and a general feeling of mistrust and uncertainty.
Life in big cities, such as Rome, Milan and Turin had become dangerous: there were fights in the streets, magistrates, journalists, and politicians were shot on their doorsteps, ordinary people felt insecure and threatened.
The air Italians were breathing was motionless. Publishing was stagnant, too. The trend had already been started in the late s and production slowed down significantly at the beginning on the s Panetta, Initiatives such as new book series were prerogatives of large companies, namely Mondadori and Rizzoli, who were also steadily absorbing smaller ones.
Not many Wodehouses were published in these years, a trend that had already started in the late s, as Figure 1 shows. Bietti was still in activity but did not issue any new edition, simply reprinting their old translations several times.
Nine were on the contrary translated and published by Mondadori. They were: A Pelican at Blandings ; GV. The translation of the last one was commissioned from Adriana Motti, while one of the others was translated by Caterina Longanesi and the remaining ones by Elena Spagnol.
In Rizzoli republished Love Among the Chickens ; GV. Longanesi GV. The focus of the economy shifted from industry to services and Milan became the symbol of this change, having become the centre for fashion, architecture and design.
Middle- class citizens gained a prominent role in influencing policies, being more sensitive to issue-oriented politics than the previous generations. Both the Christian Democrats and the Communist party had lost consensus and coalition governments were led by the secretary of the Socialist party, Bettino Craxi, starting from He was praised for cutting inflation and for his foreign politics.
He was born in Milan and had tight links with it. He was a close friend of Silvio Berlusconi, then a Milanese entrepreneur on his way up. At the same time, the company had lost interest in books, a sector in which it did not invest much.
One must not be surprised, therefore, to learn that no Wodehouses were published by Mondadori or any other big company Rizzoli had to face a major crisis in these years. Most of the sales proceeds derived from bestsellers and instant books Panetta, However, two companies, Mursia and Guanda, founded by book enthusiasts started to publish Wodehouse in this period.
Ugo Mursia was born in Sicily but grew up in Rome and Padua. com ,53 first as a publicist, later as an agent, then taking over A. Azienda Padana Editrice , a small company specializing in school books.
Altogether Mursia published 25 titles in this period, as the table below shows. Between and Guanda published 5 titles by Wodehouse: some in a new translation by Stefania Bertola Psmith, Journalist ; GV.
According to Pensato , the year marks an important date in the history of Wodehouse in Italy for two reasons. The data I collected reveal that this plan was only partly fulfilled. No early stories, namely the School Stories, originally published between and , were published in Italy in this period.
The oldest Wodehouse published by Mursia was GV. He also complains about the lack of critical bibliographies on Wodehouse and relates that, when he once suggested Wodehouse as a subject in one of his courses at an English university not mentioned , colleagues had made fun of him.
It is worth underlining that reviews and prefaces never explicitly mention the original works in English. Political corruption was found to be closely linked to organized criminal organizations, i.
and e. The investigation rapidly grew and most political leaders, including previous Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, were committed for trial. Citizens felt outraged and indignant. The whole political system was discredited and the effects on society were devastating. Television was the most efficient medium to get updated information.
Newspapers — owned by corporations that had been long been backed by political parties — were seen as no longer reliable. Publishing companies reacted by launching extremely inexpensive series. However, no Wodehouses were published in them. From to , 40 titles were reprinted, mostly by Mursia 8 titles, all of them in extant translations.
Rizzoli twice and republished Love Among the Chickens ; GV. For the first, the translation of three Wodehouses GV. Now retired, he worked as a professor at Università della Tuscia and Università di Firenze.
The only new company to publish Wodehouse was TEA Tascabili degli Editori Associati. A joint venture between Mario Spagnol Longanesi , Gianni Merlini UTET, a long-established Turinese publishing company , and Luciano Mauri Messaggerie italiane, a book-distributor since , it was born in The main characters of the saga were listed at the back of the book, each with a conscientious and well-designed description.
This matter is more systematically treated later in this chapter, in the section on paratexts. Citizens asked for reforms and as voters they expressed their opinion through a number of referendums held in The new party won the general elections and Berlusconi, appointed Prime Minister, led a right-wing government Frei, He was already a media tycoon.
His bird's-eye view of Blanding castle was drawn in In this period, Mondadori did not republish any Wodehouse, while Mursia, Guanda and TEA did, with 8, 15, and 17 titles each. A few new translators appeared,64 together with a new publisher, Marco Polillo Editore or Polillo Editore , who is gradually publishing all books in the Jeeves and Wooster cycle, mostly with new translations, starting from Marco Polillo founded his company in after having worked for Mondadori and Rizzoli.
He launched a number of series, mostly thrillers. All of them, except two, were translated by Tracy Lord. Since , she has been publishing under her true name. By physically checking books during the research I could highlight some features that characterize the different editions, in terms of covers, spines, layout and the presence of prefaces, introductions, pre- and after-words, and, most importantly, to note if the translator was named.
A chronological survey shows that at first, from to the s, paratexts were scant, normally consisting of the front cover, a frontispiece and, if present in the original book, the table of contents.
This was usually printed, according to the Italian usage, at the back of the book. Gradually, after publishers had started to launch their series, both front and back covers acquired a character of their own, designed to enable readers to spot promptly a new title and to support collectors.
Elmo and Bietti were the first to devise a very personal cover layout for their Wodehouses. Bietti, in particular, experimented with photographs, with covers that today look incongruous, if not frankly hideous two examples are reproduced in Appendix 8.
Not much room was allowed to the author, apart from a list of other titles published in the same series. Much more was introduced in the s: in most series, the front and back endpapers or the flap, in more expensive editions, contained, respectively, a summary of the book and a biography of Wodehouse.
Prefaces also started to be published, some 67 Genette, G. The Oscar Mondadori series68 contained a six-page preface signed F. It opens with a brief remark, stating that Wodehouse is commonly considered one of the few great humourists of our century.
One is making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn Franco Cavallone, Italian, an intellectual and bibliophile, was the translator of the Peanuts cartoons into Italian between and Gandini, , p.
Jeeves e la cavalleria GV. Zucconi draws a lot from the GUM standard preface, raising a suspicion of having been its anonymous writer. Zucconi asserts that in creating Jeeves, Wodehouse was catching the first signs of the drastic social change that would bring Labour to power.
Starting from the mids, prefaces were written by the editors or by the directors of the series. The use of footnotes, one of the translation techniques translators can employ, will be treated in greater detail in Chapter 4.
Sandro Melani, too, in translating Eggs, Beans and Crumpets ; GV. From to he was director of Il Corriere dei Piccoli, founded by Luigi Spaventa Filippi. Alberto Tedeschi used a footnote to explain that Eggy is a nickname for Egremont Laughing Gas, ; GV.
This allowed me to evaluate how Wodehouse and his works were presented and received in Italy. However, in the light of the model of text activation that I propose, it is significant to note that Wodehouse speaks only from the fictional text, since his own prefaces were rarely reproduced.
In his preface pp. The previous translation of Joy in the Morning, by Giorgio Monicelli published by Elmo in , on the contrary, did not contain any preface. Then, I saw this nice cover and, out of curiosity, I decided to give Wodehouse another chance. What a pleasant surprise!
The same translation of Bill the Conqueror by Brioschi had been published in a soberer edition by Mursia in and had never been reprinted. Indeed, cover art is an element that can contribute to the sales of a book and that, as Jerome McGann , p. From 87 source tests, the collection yielded translations issued from to , with 62 translators working on them.
In total, editions were on the Italian market from to the present day , published by a total of 16 publishers. These figures and this span of time allow for analyses aimed at addressing key issues in Translation Studies, such as the relationship between languages and culture.
Besides, since most of the 87 works considered in this study were translated more than once, the material permits research in the remit of retranslation, hence, to address issues such as modernisation and, possibly, domestication versus foreignization.
In addition, as we will see in detail later, being instances of translation of humour, an investigation performed on these editions can shed light on the various translation strategies employed, for example, to compensate for the loss of humour in a translated text. They do, hence, supply information as to what features translators should render.
In line with the approach taken by Sharon Deane-Cox , p. We get our effects differently. Take the familiar farcical situation of the man who suddenly discovers that something unpleasant is standing behind him.
Here is how Shakespeare handles it. The Winter's Tale, Act Three, Scene three The day frowns more and more: thou art like to have A lullaby too rough. I never saw The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever. Exit pursued by a bear.
I should have adopted a somewhat different approach. I gave my man one of my looks. What animal? If you will turn your head, you will observe that a bear is standing in your immediate rear inspecting you in a somewhat menacing manner.
The honest fellow was perfectly correct. It was a bear. And not a small bear, either. One of the large economy size. Its eye was bleak and it gnashed a tooth or two, and I could see at a g. that it was going to be difficult for me to find a formula. than d.
I streaked for the horizon, closely followed across country by the dumb chum. And that, boys and girls, is how your grandfather clipped six seconds off Roger Bannister's mile.
Who can say which method is the superior? Wodehouse, Over Seventy, , pp. The first section of this chapter is therefore an overview of some of the definitions of style that have been proposed, aimed at finding the one most suitable to the objective declared above. A Definition of Style There is no single definition of literary style which could satisfy all scholars in the fields of stylistics and linguistics.
Reviews of this debate can be found, for example, in Uitti , who examines the concept style from Plato to Jakobson, and in Simpson and Crystal , mostly treating in detail Anglo-American traditions, while Herrmann et al.
Since their beginnings as separate disciplines in the s, Stylistics and Translation Studies have engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Stylistician Riffaterre, as an example, was also concerned with translation, as shown by his writings in the s and s Boase-Beier, and later overtly researched the translation of style Riffaterre, By the same token, the father of modern Translation Studies, Roman Jakobson, showed his interest in stylistics see, for example, Jakobson, This aspect is relevant in applying the Epistemic Approach to the translation process.
A tool that has been employed to prove or disprove authorship, even in legal proceedings Olohan, , is stylometry or stylometrics. Stylometry, hence, is concerned with style as an idiolect Wales, , p.
The focus of their definition is on empirical research and the novelty of their proposal lies in its applicability to both literary studies and computational stylistics and linguistics.
I think that this definition is the most appropriate to be applied also within the field of Translation Studies and its relevance within the scope of this dissertation will become apparent when it will be applied in Chapter 4: Style is a property of texts constituted by an ensemble of formal features which can be observed quantitatively or qualitatively Herrmann et al.
These features are those that Hall , drawing from Riffaterre , termed Stylistic Devices SDs. Examples of Stylistic Devices in Riffaterre are: metaphor, expressive word-order unit, rhythm etc.
Similar examples will be treated in greater detail in the chapters specifically devoted to translations and their comparisons, i. Chapters 4 and 5. In the light of the Epistemic Approach, it is appropriate to note how distant this input was from the one his foreign readers, particularly Italian ones, received in their formative years.
At Dulwich, the public school for middle-class children he attended from to , his parents made him take the Classical side Green, so he studied Latin and Greek, together with English literature and French. There are numberless instances of these reminiscences in his later work, treated in a variety of different ways, from the literal to the garbled.
For example, in The Code of the Wooster ; GV. Good opportunity for a chap to go for a stroll if he wanted to. Shall we, by the way?
I'm in the middle of a rather special book. Always rather funk starting on a classic, somehow. Exit Livy, then.
And a good job, too. You might pass us the great Sherlock. Taking advantage of the lack of staff on the premises, textbooks are dropped exit Livy and, instead of going for a stroll, the boys prefer reading their novels.
Similarly, The Pickwick Papers are mentioned in the school story, Tales of St. he said. Oh, you mean for the Thucydides. Mellish never sets the bits any decent ordinary individual would set. I thought so too. At least with Bradshaw, Dickens wins the contest. Luckily for the Italian translator of The Tales of St.
In the passage above, both boys show their high opinion of Dickens. The following passage ibid. It is maddening to listen to a person laughing and not to know the joke. There is no evidence that young Wodehouse was one of its early readers. Yet, episodes from the book are alluded to in his work.
Already in , in Psmith in the City GV. Barely revealing the actual source, the narrator mocks pompous Bickersdyke and his credulous and, clearly, not so widely read audience. In a volume entitled 'Three Men in a Boat' there is a story of how the author and a friend go into a riverside inn and see a very large trout in a glass case.
They make inquiries about it. Five men assure them, one by one, that the trout was caught by themselves. In the end the trout turns out to be made of plaster of Paris. Mr Bickersdyke told that story as an experience of his own while fishing one summer in the Lake District.
It went well. The meeting was amused. Mr Bickersdyke went on to draw a trenchant comparison between the lack of genuine merit in the trout and the lack of genuine merit in the achievements of His Majesty's Government. The same anecdote is referred to in The Gold Bat GV. A completely different treatment was given to another very popular author of the time, G.
One example is this simile, taken from Mr Mulliner Speaking ; GV. The meaning of the simile can be grasped only if one knows that Chesterton was a large man and his physique was the object of many satirical comments and caricatures. Another reference to Chesterton is found in The Clicking of Cuthbert ; GV.
Jane Jukes Jopp triumphantly. I saw about it one of the papers. The advertisements speak most highly of it. You take it before breakfast and again before retiring, and they guarantee it to produce firm, healthy flesh on the most sparsely-covered limbs in next to no time.
Now, will you remember to get a bottle tonight? It comes in two sizes, the five-shilling or large size and the smaller at half-a-crown. Chesterton writes that he used it regularly for years. Mario Malatesta, who translated The Clicking of Cuthbert ; GV.
The Strand, a richly illustrated monthly magazine containing factual articles and fictional stories, and of which Arthur Conan Doyle was a regular contributor, had started publication in During the years in which Wodehouse attended Dulwich, it was extremely popular. A glance at the archives of the Strand published in those years enables one to grasp the rich suggestions young readers of that age received: articles and stories were illustrated throughout, not only with drawings but with photographs too.
General articles covered topics such as geography, inventions, ancient history, artists and the arts, actors and the theatre but also criminals. I believe that the exposure to visual materials contributes to the creation of an imaginative world from which an author will draw when writing and describing their fictional world.
One can also assume that this design is shared by other readers and viewers of the original works and images within them. However, this cannot be taken for granted when a work is translated. However, the appreciation of these gaps between visual cultures is highly conjectural.
The examples taken from Italian translations in the following chapters will help to substantiate these contentions. In The White Feather ; GV. It is clear that he was well aware that the conventional school stories so popular at that time were stuffed with stereotyped characters.
The capital letters emphasise that all of them were common character tropes in the genre to which Wodehouse was derisively contributing. In his school stories, Wodehouse did use themes from conventional novels. However, as some examples have already shown, he enhanced his stories by means of literary allusions and quotations.
The story is based on a magical swap between a father and his son, with the result that the father goes through the agonies of being at boarding school while the boy is running the family business.
He was still remembering it in , when, as Donaldson , p. Priestley , pp. He was of course no ordinary schoolboy, but a brilliant super- de-luxe schoolboy. This explains what he wrote, why he succeeded, how he behaved.
So do his eccentric or quite dotty dukes and earls. His behaviour was mostly that of an elderly schoolboy: […] there is no sign of a mature man here.
Together with his talent for the absurd, this explains his success. Most of us who enjoy him still have a schoolboy somewhere in us, and to reach that schoolboy aged about fifteen or sixteen , to let him enjoy himself, is a perfect escape from our adult problems and trials.
However, school was just the first environment that was to influence his style. After leaving Dulwich, Wodehouse was employed for about two years at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in London.
Life in the City gave him the semi-autobiographical background for his novels Mike ; GV. In this novel, published in , the German invasion of Britain was predicted in It was a satirical short story about England invaded not only by the Germans, but by nine foreign armies simultaneously and tells how the country is saved by a boy scout.
It was highly farcical and did not just deride the genre but also targeted politicians, generals, judges, the founder of the scouting movement, Lord Baden Powell, and even the Albert Hall and the London statues.
In the years in which Wodehouse was taking his first steps in the writing profession, the most fashionable form of entertainment was light comedy and he was a regular theatre-goer Donaldson, In his Louder and Funnier, published in , Wodehouse wrote: Even at the tender age of twelve, the music hall appealed to the artist in me […] it was my earliest ambition to become a comedian on the halls…It was because a music-hall comedian required vim, pep, espièglerie, a good singing voice, and a sort of indefinable je-ne-sais-quoi - none of which qualities I appeared to possess - that I abandoned my ambition and became a writer cited in McCrum, , p.
On the contrary, Wodehouse unexpectedly states that all the qualities he lists did not belong to him. Moreover, one would not expect Wodehouse to affirm that becoming an author was a fall-back. This refers to Gilbert's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in an amateur performance of which Wodehouse had played Guilderstern in McCrum, , p.
Similarly, his first school story, The Pothunters ; GV. His rendering of extracts from the works of Messrs. Citations have also been traced in all his school stories see, for example, Green, , pp. These all formed the basis for the craftsmanship he showed in his later production.
The following sections reveal how these roots developed and what Stylistic Devices Wodehouse employed both at macro and micro level, while in Chapter 4 I show the relevance of this understanding in the perspective opened up by the Epistemic Approach to Translation Studies that I am proposing.
In the Western world, comedy traces its origin back to ancient Greek theatre, where it was opposed to tragedy.
Tragedy and comedy are easily — and quite superficially — differentiated in terms of the way they end for the protagonist: unhappily in tragedy and happily in comedy.
Scholars have attempted more sophisticated ways to explain this difference. Tragedy and comedy apparently share the same structure, meaning the way their sections are organized.
For example, according to Freytag , the structure of drama consists of five parts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and dénouement. Therefore, because of the dominance of the comic humorous mood, comedy always ends in expected, archetypal, happy ways, restores a lost balance and implies a new future Langer, In Wodehouse, the accumulation of tension is perceived by the reader as anxiety caused by the building up of misunderstandings, impersonations, and tricks.
Its release in the dénouement provokes mirth, ascribable to the theory of relief, as we will see in Chapter 3. Plots, characters and language The comic mood Rozik posits as the basis of comedy was expressed by Wodehouse by means of comic complications, witty dialogues and the whole range of the Stylistic Devices he employed, especially bathos, original and surprising similes, and repetitions of the same phrases and quotations.
As Stephen Fry rightly observes in his introduction to What Ho! The Best of P. Wodehouse , p. It would seem obvious that language should be the primary focus of an investigation of his texts translated into another language. However, in analysing the Italian translations I realised that a lot of his Stylistic Devices on sentence, phrase and word level were not given justice, as I show later in this dissertation.
Hence, if so much of his style on a strictly linguistic level was mangled or, at best overlooked, by his Italian translators, then plots retain their importance also in translations and therefore deserve close observation.
This fact assumes relevance in the light of the model of text activation, since it takes into account in what way, for example, editorial policies may influence it. Potty plots Wodehouse made no secret of the fact that plotting did not come easily to him.
As he wrote in How I Write My Books reproduced in Heineman and Bensen, , p. Eventually, however, an intervention, usually by one of the most cunning characters, puts everything right and everything falls into place. The Jeeves and Bertie stories are an obvious instance of this formula: Bertie is enjoying his idle, quiet life when something typically, an intervention by one of his aunts occurs and perturbs it.
The same formula is repeated in other stories, e. those told by the Oldest Member or by Mr Mulliner, with slight variations. In several novels, the main plot intertwines with a second one, that follows the classical outline of romantic comedy Hall, : boys meets girl — boy has difficulties with girl — boy gets girl.
He is prone to fall in love with the most diverse girls and does so six times in The Inimitable Jeeves ; GV. Bingo is far from being reluctant to let others know about his love affairs. This citation shows how close to Wodehouse musical comedy was. The same would probably apply to his contemporary readers but not necessarily to the readers of his translated works.
Wodehouse was extremely flexible and versatile as far as his plots were concerned. For instance, as Phelps , p. What is changed is just the setting the former, in England, specifically in a stately home in Sussex, and the latter in California, in a Hollywoodian villa.
There is nevertheless a lot of variation in this repetition. For example, as we will see later, the same cliché can be uttered by different characters in different situations or the same difficulty e.
This is how Wodehouse himself explains this characteristic of his in the Introduction to his Summer Lightning ; GV. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning.
With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy. He dexterously resorted to plot devices that enabled him to both complicate matters for his characters and help them solve them.
These include misunderstandings see Something Fresh, ; GV. Wodehouse A Centenary Celebration, Impersonation is a device he often deployed. For example, in The Mating Season ; GV. Their valets swap identities too and Jeeves must come to the rescue and extricate the characters.
This story is similar to many others and contains the usual array of bossy aunts, formidable girls, unlucky young men, misunderstandings and romantic accidents. It is however more complicated by double impersonations.
False identities and impersonations are also used to deceive bossy chatelaines and prevent them from refusing hospitality to guests who desperately need to be included in the guest list, since they want to re- establish relations with one of the guests, usually a girlfriend.
This plot device is, for example, employed in Leave it to Psmith ; GV. Lord Ickenham Uncle Fred is the master of impersonation: in his first appearance in Uncle Fred Flits By, a short story published in Young Men in Spats ; GV. The exceptions he mentions, instead of being perceived as logical and obvious, sound exaggerated and hence comic.
We will see in Chapter 3 that exaggeration is in fact one of the mechanisms deployed to trigger humour. A lot of them are members of categories that belong uniquely to English society, e.
This aspect of Wodehouse's style also deserves close attention in the light of the Epistemic Approach since, as said, not the same degree of familiarity, hence of KnoW, can be assumed of the readers of the original and the translated text.
To create some of his characters, Wodehouse was inspired by people he or his friends had met in real life. The friendship between Wodehouse and Bolton was to last more than sixty years. The story typically develops as such: the hero, a young man the adulescens , wants to marry a young woman the virgo but their wish is opposed by a blocking character the senex.
The action of the comedy revolves around the obstacles, usually parental Frye, raised by the blocking character and the resolution is due to a twist in the plot, named περιπέτεια peripeteia , manipulated by the ingenious and tricky servus Stott, It was shared by Shakespearean and Elizabethan comedy Frye, and was eventually inherited by the American musical that started to develop at the beginning of the 20th century and to which Wodehouse significantly contributed McCrum, ; Dugan, This state is aroused not so much by the obstacles in themselves but rather by the intricate sequence of incidents caused by the - often clumsy - attempts at overcoming them.
As previously noted, the component of anxiety in comedy is one that deserves close attention since, as I show later in the light of one of the theories of humour, however revised, it is one of the factors that may elicit humour.
Characterization, i. All six named characters are deeply rooted in the age and society Wodehouse described and are, at the same time, archetypical and functional to the development of the plot. Translations may have had the merit of exposing these roles to the attention of foreign readers, thus enhancing their understanding of the source culture, hence their KnoW.
Most of his characters show both positive and negative attitudes, vices and virtues, and Wodehouse is very good at showing human weakness. This is a peculiarity of his humour and a feature I will analyse in Chapter 3.
The description of pompous barrister Sir Raymond Bastable in Cocktail Time ; GV. He stood on the pavement looking about him for a taxi-cab — with a sort of haughty impatience, as though he had thought that, when he wanted a taxi-cab, ten thousand must have sprung from their ranks to serve him.
As this example shows, Wodehouse does not simply offer the physical attributes of his characters but also suggests their psychological traits. Such examples could be multiplied. Descriptive passages are in fact those in which Wodehouse produced some of his best similes.
Bertie Wooster feels his aunts haunt him and boss him about. In Much Obliged, Jeeves ; GV. In Joy in the Morning ; GV. This may therefore be a familiar stock character to the foreign readers who read Wodehouse in translation. Supported by the documents we possess, i. A stylistic stimulus, as stated by Riffaterre , p.
his Stylistic Devices, that we can assume he employed to exert his control over the process of text activation in order to achieve his humorous intention amusement and entertainment , and to do so by means of the reactions supplied by informants critics, reviewers, biographers, and readers, including myself.
Each device will be identified through the contributions supplied by the various informants, above all Hall In the rest of this chapter, some aspects that might pose some difficulty for translation will be highlighted, although the systematic presentation of all Stylistic Devices in connection to their translation into Italian will be found in Chapter 4.
Donaldson, ; Phelps, ; Mooneyham, Wodehouse used personification a good deal, with the effect of enlivening his prose and, specifically, his descriptions.
He also emphasised the traits of his personifications by explicitly paralleling the object he was describing to human feelings, as in this passage from Something Fresh ; GV.
The hall had that Sunday-morning air of wanting to be left to itself, and disapproving of the entry of anything human until lunch time, which can be felt only by a guest in a large house who remains at home when his fellows have gone to church.
Wodehouse even goes so far as to have inanimate objects, such as the weather, speak. This figure of speech, technically known as prosopopeia and an extension or variation of personification Wales, , p.
This kind or originality is ascribable to one of the factors that may explain humour, as the incongruity theories of humour, presented here in Chapter 3, will highlight. They are constituted by three elements: the tenor or topic , i.
the subject under discussion, the vehicle, meant as what the subject is compared to and the ground, defined as what the author believes the tenor and the vehicle have in common Richards, The more salient a property of the tenor, the more incongruous, and, hence potentially humorous, the simile is.
Such distance, as I demonstrate in the next chapter, is computable and, hence, reproducible in translation. Wodehouse took full advantage of this potentiality, bringing together two objects that belong to very dissimilar fields of human experience and thus playing with the element of incongruity that current mainstream research posits as the basis of humour see Chapter 3.
In this quotation, from Summer Moonshine ; GV. Miller , p. See, for example, this quotation from Jeeves in the Offing, ; GV. As highlighted by Waugh quoted in Donaldson, , p.
What follows is my attempt of classifying some of them a reliable complete inventory could only be compiled with the help of digital tools to process the whole digitalized corpus, that has not yet been collected according to the semantic sources of the images he used.
To my knowledge, this is the first time such a classification has been attempted. This range helps to shed light on epistemic factors that translators of Wodehouse must heed, in the light of the approach to translation that I propose. He groaned slightly and winced like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping Ancient myth in for lunch.
Jeeves coughed that soft couch of his, the one that sounds like a sheep clearing its Animals throat on a distant mountainside. You get as much the chance to talk in this house as a parrot living with Tallulah Celebrities Bankhead. She looked more like Marilyn Monroe than anything human He was loosely and comfortably dressed in a tweed suit which might have been Fashion built by Omar the Tent Maker.
Food Some minds are like soups in a poor restaurant — better left unstirred. She looked like something that might have occurred in Ibsen in one of his less Literature frivolous moments. He said Politics nothing, merely looking at me as if he were measuring me for my lamp-post.
He was built on large lines and seemed to fill the room to overflowing. In Sports and physique, indeed, he was not unlike what Primo Carnera would have been, if sportsmen Carnera had not stunted his growth by smoking cigarettes as a boy.
The visual arts […] he looked like something thrown off by Epstein. Theatre and ballet Smedley leaped like an Ouled Nail dancer who has trotted on a tin-tack. Wilfred Allsop was sitting up, his face pale, his eyes glassy, his hair disordered.
He Writers looked like the poet Shelley after a big night out with Lord Byron. Table 2. This observation fits in with the tenets of one of the mainstream theories of verbal humour. The examples above are also an indication of how similes were for Wodehouse a means to enhance his descriptions.
What follows is a list of examples of his similes, according to the tenor described. Aunts: She [Aunt Dahlia] looked like a tomato struggling for expression. Girlfriends: I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.
He did, however, rise slowly like a hippopotamus emerging from a river bank. The clergy: The Rev. looked as disturbed as if he had suddenly detected Pelagianism in a member of his Sunday-School class. Dogs: It looked like a pen-wiper and something like a piece of hearth-rug.
A second and keener inspection revealed it as a Pekinese puppy. They are one of the sources upon which I draw for my analyses in Chapter 3. It is not hard to find an example for each of the other six sensory kinds of imagery.
Auditory sound : […] she said in a voice like beer trickling out of a jug. Olfactory smell : Joe Beamish was knitting a sock […] that smelled in equal proportion of mice, ex-burglars and shag tobacco. Gustatory taste : The medicine had a slightly pungent flavour, rather like old boot-soles beaten up in sherry.
Tactile feel : Mr. Pott said that lending money always made him feel as if he were rubbing velvet the wrong way. Kinetic movement : Pongo had the illusion that his interior organs were being scooped out with a spade or trowel.
Organic emotion : He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him on his leg. It is therefore arguable that all the similes in the list above possess a further element of surprise, since a sense different from vision is involved, that might account for their humorous value.
Sometimes Wodehouse combined a simile with personification, such as in this quotation from Leave It to Psmith ; GV. It will be shown and defined in Chapter 3, where its connections to incongruity for humorous effect will be highlighted. He engaged in a recurring dialogue with certain sources the pretexts with comic effects.
There are frequent allusions to figures taken from the Bible, evidence of which is found in the extensive research published on the Biblia Wodehusiana web site see Appendix 3. For example, hero George Bevan joins a party of aristocrats who are very unlikely to welcome him.
A cloud seemed to have cleared from his brain. He found himself looking on his fellow-diners as individuals rather than as a confused mass.
The prophet Daniel, after the initial embarrassment of finding himself in the society of the lions had passed away, must have experienced a somewhat similar sensation A Damsel in Distress, ; GV.
In The Code of the Woosters ; GV. The tone of the two quotations is quite different. Sometimes Wodehouse increases the comic effect by means of a faulty or not so accurate quotation a character uses, as Lord Ickenham in Uncle Dynamite ; GV. He bestrides the world like a Colossus. In Wodehouse, it usually yields a bathetic effect.
Latin aphorisms and phrases are frequently quoted. It is good. It is part of the destiny of the universe ordained for you from the beginning. Jeeves often quotes wise aphorisms to help Bertie ease his concerns.
No two males behave in the same way under the spur of female fickleness. Archilocum, for instance, according to the Roman writer, proprio rabies armavit iambo. It is no good pretending out of politeness that you know what it means, so I will translate.
Rabies — his grouch — armavit — armed — Archilochum — Archilocus — iambo — with the iambic — proprio — his own invention. In other words, when the poet Archilocus was handed his hat by the lady of his affections, he consoled himself by going off and writing satirical verse about her in a new metre which he had thought up immediately after leaving the house.
That was the way the thing affected him. He tells his readers that it is an event so common that we have written evidence since ancient times. The comic elements here are the use of the theatrical expedient of directly addressing the audience, here condescendingly and disparagingly, and the bathetic combination of registers 81 in the translation he supplies.
Although nobody who had met him was likely to get George Cyril Wellbeloved confused with the poet Keats, it was extraordinary on what similar lines the two men's minds worked. What creates humour here is a clash of registers in the paraphrase, masterfully devised to have each magniloquent expression correspond to a vernacular one, at the same keeping the structure and the rhythm of the invocation.
We will see in Chapter 3 why such technique yields humour. It is already worth noting here that literal quotations are more easily dealt with by translators who can refer to an authoritative translated edition of the classic, while those merely suggested may go unnoticed and, therefore, be translated shabbily.
In a section of Chapter 5 Intertextuality in A Damsel in Distress I compare five different Italian translations of the same fifty instances of intertextuality in Wodehouse and analyse their differences in the light of the Epistemic Approach. In our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, and variable as the shade by the light of the quivering aspen made; When pain and anguish rack the brow, A ministering angel thou!
Unless set in an explanatory context, these quotations are not easily recognizable. In these, references, allusions and mis quotations are part of the play between the learned servant and the idiotic master.
Predictably, wordplay and puns challenge translators. In Chapter 4 I elaborate on the scheme Delabastita , p. Bertie sometimes does not acknowledge the source here: Macbeth and Julius Caesar and attributes the wise words to Jeeves. No sense in standing humming and hawing.
There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. We have here two typical features of the exchanges between Bertie and Jeeves: clash of registers and of knowledge. Both possess a humorous property, since, with respect to social expectations, the roles are inverted.
This consideration will further be examined in the next chapters in the light of its connections to comedy within the framework of the theories of humour. Shakespeare is often a source of inspiration for Bertie and, as said, a mine of sagacious words for Jeeves.
Just taking one book, The Code of the Woosters ; GV. The same allusion is found a few pages later p. Not only the classics, though. Uncle Dynamite, ; GV. In Jeeves in the Offing ; GV. A Scandal in Bohemia is also quoted literally in The Code of the Woosters ; GV.
Songs and other instances of popular culture did not go unexploited. Intertextuality in Wodehouse is no showing-off or affectation. It is a formidable weapon in the hands of a skilful master of language.
It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. Most of his leitmotivs were not original but drew from clichés.
His originality lies in the way he handled them. He used and reused clichés and idioms, thus exploiting the nature of automatization they possess, but his phrases have a quality of novelty due to the unexpected twist he added to them.
He could cut one cliché into two and play with it, as in this dialogue between Bertie and Jeeves from the short story Indian Summer of an Uncle from p.
Bertie, misunderstanding its metaphorical use, doubts that such an expensive postage stamp may exist. It appears, for example, in the golf story The Clicking of Cuthbert ; GV. I feared as much when I saw you go out with Pobsley.
How many a young man have I seen go out with Herbert Pobsley exulting in his youth, and crawl back at eventide looking like a toad under the harrow!
He reached out and pressed Sam's hand. And once again in The Inimitable Jeeves, GV. Their function as humorous devices, therefore, deserves to be investigated throughout the canon. Such an intriguing task could be easily performed using the tools provided by the digital treatment of texts.
The list that follows supplies some examples and discloses their function in Wodehouse. absolute loyalty. It is so representative of Wodehouse that it is even found in the title of one book, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit ; GV. Found, for example, in Ring for Jeeves ; GV. Early upbringing no doubt has a lot to with it.
Wodehouse used it to highlight the optimistic attitudes of some of his characters. The phrase was borrowed by Voltaire in his Candide and Wodehouse used it, almost always ironically, in A Damsel in Distress ; GV. It is found in A Damsel in Distress ; GV. It can found in: Love Among the Chickens ; GV.
Essentially, in fact, Monty needs to hold a job for one year in order to comply with blocking character John G. This is a task he fails to fulfil in any of the three novels. He states that, in humorous writing in general, Stylistic Rhythm is much more rapid than in serious literature.
What is particularly striking and challenging for his translators, though, is the way he managed to combine all these varieties in an extremely creative way and to coin new words.
Affixes can be added before the root prefixes or after the root suffixes. Each affix has a specific function. Wodehouse exploited this characteristic of English especially with hyphenated phrases, such as in this quotation from Much Obliged, Jeeves ; GV.
This characteristic is not specific to English. Italian, for example, possesses the same function, so a creative word shaped according to this rule can very likely be also formed in Italian. used as a noun and Wodehouse often exploited this potentiality.
The Jeeves and Bertie stories are particularly filled with word-formations of this kind, especially with hyphenated phrases. Since Italian possesses this potentiality to a much lesser extent, more examples will be presented in the next chapters to highlight their difficulties in translation.
Invented words Wodehouse was inventive in his usage of the English language and is renowned for having coined new words. Use of synonyms Wodehouse was also particularly gifted at finding synonyms.
Since absolute synonyms, i. Wodehouse was aware of this stylistic potentiality and played with it, such as, for example in Jill the Reckless ; GV. military slang. This aspect is well epitomized by the following quotation from p.
Mulliner ; GV. The word did not express it by a mile. This device can be assimilated to the one used by Wodehouse to produce some of his most effective similes. Bertie, the Drones, and especially Psmith, are particularly given to producing what Hall , p.
Varieties of language Except for his dialogues, the diction Wodehouse employed was standard British English, with some incursions into American, more often in morphology and more rarely in syntax Hall, His colloquialisms were mostly British, drawn not only from the Edwardian upper-class standard variety but also from public school slang and from the jargon of suburban clerks, with some phonetic reproductions of non-standard varieties, such as those of the less literate.
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