Culture-bound Shifts in the First French and Italian Translations of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

The aim of this research is to compare Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (1604, 1616) with the first French translation by Jean-Pierre Antoine Bazy (1850) and the first Italian translation by Eugenio Turiello (1898) in search of the changes that are symptomatic of the cultural and ideological context of translation production. The case of Doctor Faustus represents the epitome of the instability of a dramatic source text. Two main versions of the play (the so-called A-text and the B-text) differ in structural, thematic and doctrinal terms. At the same time, neither version delivers a coherent vision. The research seeks to examine whether Bazy’s and Turiello’s translation, emerging at 50-year intervals and belonging to different yet related geographical, historical and literary traditions, further multiply the potential readings of the original or whether they display a more consistent framework. In addition, we will analyse the causes of textual variation. The regularities of the translators’ behaviour and their intervention in translation are manifested across a consistent trend of changes, technically labelled as shifts. First, we will apply a comparative model of translation analysis in order to identify the shifts that occur in the process of linguistic rendering. Then, we will discuss the ways in which the identified patterns of shifts affect the general meaning and the structure of the target texts in question. Finally, adopting a socio-cultural approach, we will show how certain shifts are conditioned by different cultural and ideological factors operating in the recipient systems. This will confirm or reveal the translators’ own ideology and the interpretation of the original, which is in turn indicative of their positions within the complex political and ideological space that surrounds them. The results demonstrate that the two translations represent the ideological extremes in the general reception of the Faust myth and that they mirror a different point in the cultural and political evolution of nineteenth-century Europe.