International symposium: "Translating Molière's "dirty equivocations" into Italian, from the 17th century to the present day
Colloquium organized by Carine Barbafieri (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France) and Françoise Poulet (Université Bordeaux Montaigne / IUF)
Vaugelas, in his Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647), and following in his footsteps most language theorists, such as Bouhours, condemn equivocations as grammatical faults and stylistic vices on behalf of the clarity and purity of language: "There has never been a language in which one has spoken more purely and more clearly than in ours, which is more hostile to equivocations and all kinds of obscurities, more serious and more gentle all at once, more suitable for every kind of style, more chaste in its locutions, more judicious in its figures, which loves elegance and ornament more, but which fears affectation more [...][1]". In Canto I of the Art poétique ("Votre construction semble un peu s'obscurcir; / Ce terme est équivoque, il le faut éclaircir", v. 205-206), but even more so in the Satire XII, Boileau takes up this condemnation in his own words. In the "Discours de l'auteur" that precedes this satire, the satirist explains that he means équivoque, not "in all the narrow rigor of its grammatical meaning", but "as the common man ordinarily takes it , for all sorts of ambiguities of meaning, of thought, of expression, and finally for all those abuses and misapprehensions of the human mind which make it often take one thing to mean another[2]".
Furetière's Dictionnaire defines equivocation as "a term that has several meanings", and gives two examples of equivocation, one of which corresponds to a fault on the part of the speaker, one is a fault on the part of the speaker, unless it's a weakness of the language itself ("le besoin qu'a notre Langue de relatifs fait plusieurs équivoques"), the other is a beauty peculiar to a literary genre ("Les équivoques font souvent la pointe, la beauté d'une Epigramme"). Hence the conclusion of Furetière's notice: "There are good and bad equivocations".
On the side of bad equivocations are, in particular, "dirty equivocations", those containing a scabrous and sexual double entendre, which Racine, in the "To the Reader" notice at the head of Plaideurs, boasts he never practiced, unlike Molière, who distinguished himself in this type of joke and set the fashion for it, both in the little one-act comedy (Les Précieuses ridicules) and the big five-act comedy in verse (L'École des femmes). Indeed, the preface to Vaugelas's Remarques , which contrasts equivocation with "chaste" style, shows that ambiguity, in linguistic matters, is quickly liable to tip over to the side of more or less shocking sauciness.
It is these sexual equivocations, saucy jokes (which joyfully evoke sexuality) or obscene jokes (which assault by showing what should not be shown), more or less veiled, that this study day proposes to examine, from the angle of translatability, in French's sister language Italian. How do we translate the equivocations of words playing on the sonorities con, ca, vi, "dirty syllables"? How do we translate the equivocations of thought that, while seeming to speak of ribbons, bring to mind the penis? After spotting and classifying sexual equivocations in Molière's texts (using the annotation of Molière's Œuvres complètes in the edition edited by Georges Forestier and Claude Bourqui for the Pléiade), we'll be putting together a series of Italian translations of these double meanings, from Molière's first translations in the 17th century right up to the present day. The history of these micro-translations should provide a first-rate observatory for apprehending Molière's reception in Italy, as much as for reflecting on the evolution of the way things are named and, consequently, on the way the connivance between a text and its audience is created, lost and reconstructed.
[1] Claude Favre de Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue françoise, ed. Zygmunt Marzys, Genève, Droz, 2009, Preface, p. 48. See also the chapter "Des équivoques".
[2] Nicolas Boileau, Satires, Epîtres, Art poétique, ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet, Paris, NRF Poésie / Gallimard, no. 195, 1985, p. 151.