The thirty years Carlo Goldoni spent in Paris hold an ambiguous place in his career. The preface to his autobiography explicitly draws attention to France as the site of his authorial glory, but elsewhere he dismisses his work for the Parisian Comédie-Italienne as a failure, and this view has come to dominate modern readings of his French experience. This study sets out to explore this apparent contradiction. By reading Goldoni's own contemporary and subsequent accounts through the lens of his context as a dramatic author in 1760s Paris, Jessica Goodman sheds new light on both his experience and critical reactions to that experience. A key part of this contextualisation is an examination of contemporary Comédie-Italienne archives, resulting in the most comprehensive existing account of this oft-neglected theatre and its authorial relations in the period. When material and artistic conditions at the Comédie-Italienne thwarted the self-fashioning strategies Goldoni had developed in Italy, he turned his attention to other areas of French life; notably the court and the Comédie-Française. Yet despite relative success in this regard, his career as an eclectic homme de lettres was lost in translation to posterity. In his French Mémoires, he constructed the claim of Parisian glory according to an out-dated understanding of what it meant to succeed in the French literary field, focusing predominantly on the power of Comédie-Française success. Ultimately, this construction was a failure: in modern France, Goldoni is remembered as a famous foreigner, not the consecrated French littérateur he believed he had become.

A collection of 18 essays on musical theatre in the eighteenth century, written between 1967 and 2001

Publisher description

For centuries, the art of translation has been misconstrued as a solitary affair. Yet, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, groups of translators comprised of specialists of different languages formed in order to transport texts from one language and culture to another. Collaborative Translation uncovers the collaborative practices occluded in Renaissance theorizing of translation to which our individualist notions of translation are indebted. Leading translation scholars as well as professional translators have been invited here to detail their experiences of collaborative translation, as well as the fruits of their research into this neglected form of translation. This volume offers in-depth analysis of rich, sometimes explosive, relationships between authors and their translators. Their negotiations of cooperation and control, assistance and interference, are shown here to shape the translation of prominent modern authors such as Günter Grass, Vladimir Nabokov and Haruki Murakami. The advent of printing, the cultural institutions and the legal and political environment that regulate the production of translated texts have each formalized many of the inherently social and communicative practices of translation. Yet this publishing regime has been profoundly disrupted by the technologies that are currently revolutionizing collaborative translation techniques. This volume details the impact that this technological and environmental evolution is having upon the translator, proliferating sites and communities of collaboration, transforming traditional relationships with authors and editors, revisers, stage directors, actors and readers.