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“Ink and Paper”: A Study on the English Editions and the Italian Translations of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra • Valentina Rossi
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2. The Italian Translations of the Tragedy

2. The Italian Translations of the Tragedy

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In Italy, various intellectuals approached the Shakespearean repertoire during the eighteenth century (see Nulli, 1918: 3–63; Ferrando, 1930: 157–168; Praz, 1944; Praz, 1956; Praz, 1969; Crinò, 1950; Lombardo, 1964: 2–13). For instance, Domenico Valentini1 translated Julius Caesar in 1756; Alessandro Verri2 translated Hamlet between 1769 and 1777, and Othello in 1777; Giustina Renier Michiel3 translated Othello, Macbeth and Coriolanus between 1797 and 1801. Although their mediatory operation was indeed remarkable, it is worth remembering that some of them did not base their translations on the English editions of the Shakespearean plays; instead, they drew from the French translations of the Bard (see Delisle & Woodsworth, 2012: 68–70; Bianco, 2017).

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Nevertheless, French was not selected as an intermediary language by those who decided to translate Antony and Cleopatra, although this did not happen until the 1800s. Michele Leoni4 was the first translator of the above-mentioned Roman play in 1819, drawing from Rowe’s edition with significant effort, as he remarked in the introduction:
 

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In Antonio e Cleopatra, the action moves from one place to another and travels – so to speak – through the Roman Empire. However, in defence of the negligence [Shakespeare] showed concerning such a matter, when […] the author deals with the manners, the characterisation of the interlocutors, and lets them act or speak appropriately, […] he behaves well, and for the most part, he deserves huge praise (Leoni, 1819: 23; my translation).
 

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The second translation of the tragedy was published in 1837 by Carlo Rusconi, in a collection entitled Teatro Completo di Shakspear. The sub-title informed the reader that the plays were “translated from the original English version into Italian prose” (my translation) – although the source text is still unknown. Furthermore, between the 1840s and 1880s, Giulio Carcano published Opere di Shakespeare: “his translation-interpretation is the best that the nineteenth century has delivered,” Duranti claims,
 

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as it legitimised the literary dignity of a playwright whose poetic and dramatic power was recognised yet feared at the same time in Italy because of the ethical, cognitive and political dimension that is typical of his works. […] Carcano sensed this tension and tried to rouse it in his own time, to provide his contemporaries with a model of theatre in which civil commitment and moral teaching could merge in an aesthetical and valid form (Duranti, 1979: 96, my translation).
 

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With regards to the twentieth-century editions, most translations of Antony and Cleopatra were published from the 1950s onwards, except for the one edited by Diego Angeli, published between 1911 and 1913, and the one edited by Augusta Grosso Guidetti, in 1942, as shown by Table 1:
 

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Table 1. The Italian translations of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Time of Publication
Italian Translator
1800s
Michele Leoni (1819)
Carlo Rusconi (1837)
Giulio Carcano (1840–1880)
1900s
–
1910s
Diego Angeli (1911–1913)
1920s
–
1930s
–
1940s
Augusta Grosso Guidetti (1942)
1950s
Aurelio Zanco (1954)
Cesare Vico Lodovici (1955)
Alfredo Obertello (1957)
1960s
Gabriele Baldini (1962)
Salvatore Quasimodo (1966)
1970s
–
1980s
Elio Chinol (1985)
Sergio Perosa (1985)
1990s
Agostino Lombardo (1992)
2000s
Goffredo Raponi (2001)
Guido Bulla (2009)
2010s
Gilberto Sacedoti (2015)
 

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Altogether, 16 Italian translations were published between 1819 and the present time, the collation of which sheds light on different issues the translators had to face. For instance, it is worth mentioning the rendering of the mix of prose and verses that is typical of this tragedy: a challenge within the challenge, given that “there is no Italian correspondent of Elizabethan blank verse,” as Agostino Lombardo (1992: 166; my translation) claims. Table 2 groups the Italian editions into three categories, that is the versions in prose; those in verses; and the ones that mirror the alternation of verses and prose:
 

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Table 2. The form of the Italian editions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra5
Prose
Verses
Prose and verses
Carlo Rusconi (1837)
Michele Leoni (1819)
Salvatore Quasimodo (1966)
Aurelio Zanco (1954)
Giulio Carcano (1840–1880)
Elio Chinol (1985)
Cesare Vico Lodovici (1955)
Diego Angeli (1911–1913)
Sergio Perosa (1985)
Gabriele Baldini (1962)
Goffredo Raponi (2001)
Agostino Lombardo (1992l)
Guido Bulla (2009)
Gilberto Sacerdoti (2015)
1 A professor of theology and church history at the University of Siena, Domenico Valentini (1690–1762) was the first literatus to complete a full-length Italian translation of a Shakespearian play. As Crinò claims (1949: 330), he decided to approach the Bard’s canon after listening to some English friends praising his works.
2 Alessandro Verri (1741–1816) was a poliedric Italian author. His repertoire included novels, tragedies and essays; he was also the co-founder of Il Caffé, a magazine. He spent two years in London (1766–1767) and was “fascinated by British culture, especially playwriting; once in Rome, he translated some of Shakespeare’s plays into Italian prose” (Orlandi Balzari, 2016: 11).
3 Giustina Renier Michiel (1755-1832) was the first woman of letters to translate Shakespeare in Italy. The results of her efforts culminated in Opere drammatiche di Shakespeare volgarizzare da una Donna Veneta ([1798] 1801). On the volume see, among others, Bianco (2017).
4 Michele Leoni (1776–1858) was a writer and a committed translator of English literary works (see Vanden Berghe, 2019). Concerning the Bard, he rendered a selection of tragedies into Italian during the first half of the nineteenth century (see, among others, Bianco, 2019).
5 The present table does not include Guidetti’s and Obertello’s choices, as their translations were not available at the moment this research was pursued.
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