Over the past decade, Shakespeare’s alertness to the socio-cultural constraints of an emerging capitalist society and his role in voicing such constraints through a new language has been extensively investigated especially from the perspective of new economic criticism. His role in giving new resonance to words which were still bearing moral and ethical significance in his times but were undergoing a powerful semantic shift taking on new specialized meanings related to the legal-economic domain cannot indeed be underestimated. A case in point in this respect are the words good, credit, venture and especially the word bond, as used in particular in The Mercant of Venice. Previous research carried out using corpus stylistics methods has discussed the significance of “bond” both as a key word in the play, as repeatedly stressed in the literature, and as a keyword in the corpus linguistics sense of the word. Focusing on the foregrouding effect enjoyed by the word in terms of frequency, salience and literary relevance, the present study investigates the reception of such key role of “bond” in The Merchant of Venice when the play was first translated into italian by Carlo Rusconi in 1838. A preliminary comparative analysis carried out on the two texts suggests that in translating the world “bond” Rusconi mostly opted for lexical variation. While exploding the rich semantic value of the world “bond”, especially as an economic term, this choice actually modified the inner coherence and lexical cohesion in the play, possibly preventing “bond”, and its very ambivalent meaning, to display its powerful resonance to the full.
Translating the "bond". A Corpus Stylistics Analysis of Lexical Variation in the first Italian Translation of The Merchant of Venice
Maristella Gatto
2022-01-01
Abstract
Over the past decade, Shakespeare’s alertness to the socio-cultural constraints of an emerging capitalist society and his role in voicing such constraints through a new language has been extensively investigated especially from the perspective of new economic criticism. His role in giving new resonance to words which were still bearing moral and ethical significance in his times but were undergoing a powerful semantic shift taking on new specialized meanings related to the legal-economic domain cannot indeed be underestimated. A case in point in this respect are the words good, credit, venture and especially the word bond, as used in particular in The Mercant of Venice. Previous research carried out using corpus stylistics methods has discussed the significance of “bond” both as a key word in the play, as repeatedly stressed in the literature, and as a keyword in the corpus linguistics sense of the word. Focusing on the foregrouding effect enjoyed by the word in terms of frequency, salience and literary relevance, the present study investigates the reception of such key role of “bond” in The Merchant of Venice when the play was first translated into italian by Carlo Rusconi in 1838. A preliminary comparative analysis carried out on the two texts suggests that in translating the world “bond” Rusconi mostly opted for lexical variation. While exploding the rich semantic value of the world “bond”, especially as an economic term, this choice actually modified the inner coherence and lexical cohesion in the play, possibly preventing “bond”, and its very ambivalent meaning, to display its powerful resonance to the full.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
