Jerry Lee Lewis or Claudio Villa? Textual Pragmatics and the Translation of Python Humour

Monty Python’s parodic, quotational, linguistically multi-layered humour represents as big a challenge for translation as any high modernist poem. The forty-five episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, as well as the feature films produced by the group (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life), display a seemingly unlimited potential for cultural and linguistic inclusion: the schemata and languages of literary and cinematic genres, tv programmes, arts and sciences, and most kinds of human interaction are grist to the mill of Python’s subverting, at times reversing machine. Before performing his/her task, the translator of Python must ask him/herself a number of preliminary questions about the interrelation of sketches and scenes with the contexts they refer to. The Italian translator, in particular, will have to ask him/herself how meaningful the original contexts will be to an Italian audience, and to what extent they can be recreated in the language or languages of Italy. The existing Italian dubbed versions of Python sketches and films witness to a ‘domesticating’ anxiety which prompts such intercultural adaptations as ‘Atalanta’ for ‘Coventry City’, and above all, the use of Italian regional dialects (and/or accents) to render the social/regional varieties of English employed by the comic group. While such substitutions can be quite successful for certain kinds of humour, it is my conviction that in the case of Python, interlinguistic domestication often ends up blurring the point of a sketch or alienating the ‘natural’ audience of the comic group. By drawing on my recently outlined ‘pragmatic’ theory of translation (‘A New Linguistic Theory of Translation’, forthcoming), I aim to show how an understanding of interlinguistic ‘textual pragmatics’ can help the translator make informed, contextually-minded choices. Once the original ‘textual act’ (what the text does) is understood in its locative and interpersonal dimensions, that act and those dimensions can be knowingly reproduced or recreated.