Sogni di una notte di mezza estate: an experiment with surtitles

4 Introduction The 2013 season of the Macerata Opera Festival included, among other operas, a new, experimental show, called Sogni di una notte di mezza estate. This performance was experimental in that it blended together music from two different authors, Felix Mendelssohn and Benjamin Britten, with acting, to retell Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. A new score was created, and plot and characters sensibly modified. The performance was also experimental on a linguistic level: Sogni di una notte di mezza estate was bilingual (English and Italian) and complemented with surtitles, that required a brand new translation, which was carried out by the author and the supervisor of this thesis. These surtitles were considered part of the artistic performance, and not a "service" of minor importance. The object of investigation of this work is the experimental nature of the surtitles of this performance, both on the translation and technical level. The translation from English into Italian will be analysed and discussed, showing the translation strategies used and the reasons behind such strategies. Object of analysis will also be the context of translation: the time constraints, the practices and limitations of surtitling, the cooperation with music, acting, scenery and other visual elements, the technical means and the graphic layout used. The present work aims at demonstrating that the experiment was successful, and it does so through the means of a statistic survey, which we administered to the audience of Sogni di una notte di mezza estate. It also intends to show how surtitles can become part of an artistic performance; linguistically, they are capable of translating part of the beauty of the original text, or to adapt to the ideological or practical needs of a performance; visually, they can cooperate with stage scenery. The work consists of seven chapters, each one dealing with a specific theme. Chapter 1 is a description of Sogni di una notte di mezza estate: what it was, what were its new and experimental aspects. It also deals briefly with the sources of the show and their authors (Shakespeare, Mendelssohn, Britten). Chapter 2 focuses on the theory of translation: it explores some of the main concepts of translation studies, trying to apply them to the translation of Sogni. This chapter builds up a theoretical framework for analysis, and also deals with the shortcomings of