“We're Not Rated X for Nothin', Baby!”
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CORSO DI DOTTORATO IN “LE FORME DEL TESTO” Curriculum: Linguistica, Filologia e Critica Ciclo XXXI Coordinatore: prof. Luca Crescenzi “We’re not rated X for nothin’, baby!” Satire and Censorship in the Translation of Underground Comix Dottoranda: Chiara Polli Settore scientifico-disciplinare L-LIN/12 Relatore: Prof. Andrea Binelli Anno accademico 2017/2018 CONTENTS CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................................................................ 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................................. 3 SECTION 1: FROM X-MEN TO X-RATED ............................................................................................................ 11 Chapter 1. “DEPRAVITY FOR CHILDREN – TEN CENTS A COPY!” ......................................................... 12 1.1. A Nation of Stars and Comic Strips ................................................................................................................... 12 1.2. Comic Books: Shades of a Golden Age ............................................................................................................ 24 1.3. Comics Scare: (Self-)Censorship and Hysteria ................................................................................................. 41 Chapter 2. “HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE RAIN?”: RISE AND FALL OF A COUNTERCULTURAL REVOLUTION ................................................................................................................................................................. 66 2.1. Underground and Counterculture: A Definition ............................................................................................. 66 2.2. How the 1950s fed Counterculture .................................................................................................................... 83 2.3. Home-Made Sputniks: The Beats, the Civil Right Movement and the Boom of Counterculture .......... 88 2.4. Visualising Counterculture: Underground Comix ......................................................................................... 108 SECTION 2: METHODOLOGY OF ANALYSIS ................................................................................................. 141 Chapter 3. TRANSLATING COMICS: SEMIOTIC AND MULTIMODAL TOOLS ................................... 142 3.1 Comics Studies and Translation ......................................................................................................................... 142 3.2. Visual Semiotics: Greimas and Groupe μ ....................................................................................................... 148 3.3. On Multimodality and Translation ................................................................................................................... 153 3.3.1. Recent Developments of Multimodal Analysis ...................................................................................... 166 3.4. Elements of Comics Enunciation and Narratology ...................................................................................... 176 3.5. Semiotics of Passions and Rhythm................................................................................................................... 198 3.6. Isotopy as a Tool of Analysis ............................................................................................................................ 208 SECTION 3: CORPUS AND CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS ............................................................................... 221 Chapter 4. COMIX AMID MYTHOLOGIES .......................................................................................................... 222 4.1. Corpus Design ..................................................................................................................................................... 222 4.2. Framework of Analysis ....................................................................................................................................... 234 Chapter 5. SEX, SATIRE AND SEDITION ............................................................................................................ 238 5.1. A Carousel of Sexy Stereotypes ......................................................................................................................... 238 5.2. Cupidity killed the Cat ........................................................................................................................................ 244 5.3. Delightful Disgust and Smugly Smut ............................................................................................................... 247 5.4 Blankening “Whiteman”: Censorship and Trivialisation of Comix............................................................. 281 5.5. “The Personal is Political”: Women’s Comix in Italy ................................................................................... 313 5.6. Sex, Satire and Shelton ........................................................................................................................................ 331 5.7. Conditio Erotica sine qua non: Translating Bodè ........................................................................................... 339 Chapter 6. SMOKE SIGNALS: DRUG-CULTURE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE MIND .......... 343 6.1. When “The Only Hope [was] Dope” .............................................................................................................. 343 1 6.2. A Trip into Gilbert Shelton’s Freak World ..................................................................................................... 350 6.3. Robert Crumb’s High Times .............................................................................................................................. 402 6.4. Greg Irons and Tom Veitch: Cannibali against Smack .................................................................................. 415 Chapter 7. BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND: TRANSLATING POLITICAL DISSENT ....................................... 423 7.1. On Violence, Satire and War Comix ................................................................................................................ 423 7.3. ‘F*ck the Pigs’: Italian Adaptations of the Freak Brothers’ Political Satire .................................................. 436 7.4. A Rebel Cat, a Repressed White Man and a Ranting Cartoonist ................................................................ 453 Chapter 8. COMIX AND “COSMIK DEBRIS”: INSIGHTS ON RELIGION AND SPIRITUALISM ... 477 8.1. The Mystic Revolution: Enlightment and Dark Sides .................................................................................. 477 8.2. Hard-Knocking Crumb: Violence and Religion ............................................................................................. 484 8.3. “Hung Up On A Dream”: Translating Richard Corben .............................................................................. 499 8.4. Taking His Name in Vain: Blasphemous Translations ................................................................................. 502 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................................... 518 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................................................ 526 Source Texts ................................................................................................................................................................. 526 Secondary Texts .......................................................................................................................................................... 532 Websites ........................................................................................................................................................................ 555 2 INTRODUCTION On the morning of 7 January 2015, two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, armed with rifles, forced their way into an unmarked office at 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. That morning twelve people were shot dead and other eleven were injured. Militant Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen took responsibility for the shooting, while the office besieged by their attack was the headquarters where, following a 2011 firebombing, the members of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo used to hold their meetings. Charlie Hebdo’s director Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier) together with Cabu (Jean Cabut), Philippe Honoré, Tignous (Bernard Verlhac) and Georges Wolinski were all cartoonists who died that day. In the wake of the shocking event, pencils became symbols of resistance to armed threats of censorship and the phrase “Je suis Charlie” turned into the (often abused) slogan of those who (at least formally) supported freedom of expression. Among the first who paid their homage to Charlie Hebdo – not surprisingly – there is the American underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, who has lived in a small village near Sauve in southern France since 1991. Crumb showed his support to the cause of freedom of expression with two cartoons published on the newspaper Liberation on 10 January 2015. The former, entitled “A Cowardly Cartoonist”, shows the author’s