Translation, Humour, and Literature. Translation and Humour, Volume 1 edited by Delia Chiaro, and: Translation, Humour, and the Media. Translation and Humour, Volume 2 edited by Delia Chiaro (review)

Humor, as several of the contributors to these two volumes observe, is a universal human activity found among all cultures and throughout all of recorded history. No cultural group has ever been discovered that was devoid of a sense of humor, and evidence of humor has been discovered even among apes. Humor is also notoriously difficult to translate (1:35). In many cases, it would initially seem impossible to do so—but professional translators, literary and otherwise, are regularly called upon to try. Building on a significant growth of interest since the mid-1990s in the challenges of translating humor, the present two-volume compendium “attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of all areas, past and present, in which humour has been, and is, translated” (1:1). The first volume deals with more familiar areas of endeavor, literary translation and the frequently discussed area of jokes, while the second covers more contemporary challenges associated with globalization and rapidly developing technologies involving the translation of humorous elements in films, television, comic books, video games, global advertising, and live interpretation. Care has been taken to incorporate translations from and into English, while other languages include Arabic, Danish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, as well as Latin and ancient Greek. While either volume may be read independently of the other, the two are conceived of as a complementary pair.

Translation, Humour, and Literature opens with an introductory chapter by the editor of both volumes, Delia Chiaro of the University of Bologna at Forlì, Italy, in which she discusses translatability in general, the essential indefinability of humor, the kinds of receptive processes by which humor of various kinds is recognized as such, and the intercultural differences that potentially affect that recognition in the case of translations of humor in globalized contexts (1:1-29). The introduction, unfortunately marred by poor proof-reading, does a creditable job of situating the succeeding twenty-plus chapters of the two volumes in the context of this discussion. The remainder of the first volume is then divided into three parts.

“Translating Humour in Society” consists of two chapters in two quite different keys. Graeme Ritchie’s “Linguistic Factors in Humour” is a succinctly presented account of the role of linguistic mechanisms of various kinds in creating humorous texts (1:33-48), while Christie Davies’s “Translating English into English in Jokes and Humour,” by contrast, is a comfortably expansive and entertainingly opinionated discussion of humorous effects generated by the use of dialect forms of English by joke-tellers and story-tellers and the varying degrees to which these effects can or cannot be retained or recreated in international standard English (1:49-73).

“Translating Humour in Antiquity” similarly consists of two chapters, also quite different: Michael Ewans discusses “Translating Aristophanes into English” (1:77-90), and I. A. Ruffell focuses on “Translating Greece to Rome: Humour and the Re-invention of Popular Culture” (1:91-118). Ewans, a literary translator, writes on the importance of translating Aristophanes for twenty-first-century actors and audiences. Ruffell, a professional classicist, contributes, by contrast, a detailed piece of literary history examining the ways in which Greek New Comedy of the third century B.C. was translated and adapted by Roman comic playwrights such as Plautus to suit a different performance context.

“Translating the Humour of the Great Literary Tradition” deals with five rather oddly assorted writers: Boccaccio, Inoue Hisashi, James Joyce, Tobias Smollett, and Ziad Rahbani. Charmaine Lee’s “Rewriting the French Tradition: Boccaccio and the Making of the Novella” is a competent exercise in comparative literary history, focusing on the ways in which Boccaccio drew, in the Decameron, on the courtly...