Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219
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Item The Hugos and the Translation of Shakespeare into French, Texts and Cultural and Historical Contexts(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Jonathan Locke HartShakespeare did not go easily into French. Voltaire was ambivalent about him as he helped to introduce him into France, especially when he was in exile in England, but he also had reservations about Shakespeare not being neo-classical or, to put it another way, "barbaric." This neo-classical ambivalence also occurred among the English during the Restoration, after 1660, when Charles II returned from France to England and was restored to the throne. John Dryden and Alexander Pope, for instance, were ambivalent about Shakespeare. With Romanticism, Shakespeare became more popular in France, and Victor Hugo and his son, François-Victor Hugo, were instrumental in establishing Shakespeare in France, with the father, the great writer, lending a preface to his son's work and the son undertaking the work of translating Shakespeare systematically in 18 volumes. This article will focus most on the father's preface in the first volume and on the son's translations of the Sonnets in volume 15. The reason for this choice and method is that the pioneering work in the first phases of literary translation needs close examination, what I call the establishment of translation or reputation.Item Issues of Transcultural Mobility in Three Recent French Balcony Scenes(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Stephanie MercierRomeo and Juliet's translation and staging by Olivier Py (2011), Pascal and Antoine Collin and David Bobee (2012), and Éric Ruf, who staged FrançoisVictor Hugo's 1868 version of the play (2016-17), provide a stimulating illustration of recent French translations/adaptations of the Balcony Scene in particular. I examine instances of verbal and non-verbal translation of the canonical texts through such elements such as props, costume, gesture, posture, and the body. They all bring to mind Stephen Greenblatt's concept of "cultural mobility"—first formulated as "cultural transfer" by historians Michel Espagne and Michael Werner in the late 1980s to account for interaction and relations between France and Germany. The scenes particularly seemed to defy previous notions of foreignization or domestication, where the source culture is seen as the "self" and the target culture as the "other," and where the process of domestication tends to erase all "foreignness" from the former. Here, I explorehow just three instances of one of the most iconic scenes in Shakespeare is emblematic of a more general cultural mobility in French theatre, thanks to the choice (or choice not) to incorporate French contextual elements in Gallic productions of Shakespeare. I discuss, through the lens of cultural transfer, how the translations repeat or redefine canonical material, and how they show FrancoBritish stages in contact with one another within the context of contemporary French theatre.