Alessandro Portelli wrote in 1978: «American music fell on us all at once, without warning and without discrimination. Not only was it completely foreign to our cultural background (and for this reason it attracted us), but it reached us already mixed and packaged, preventing us from reconstructing its evolution and historical event.”
Among the stratagems for packaging new Anglo-Saxon music by adapting it to the Italian context, that of translation proves to be the most effective and profitable. Already in October 1956 the magazine «Musica e disco» had sixteen versions per The crazy clockparody of Rock Around The Clock (1955) edited by Tata Giacobetti of the Cetra Quartet who defuses the subversive charge of Bill Haley’s piece by diluting it in Forties vocal harmonies and habanera rhythms. An expedient already implemented for cha cha cha, calypso and bajon, starting – observes Jacopo Tomatis in Cultural history of Italian song – “from the weakening of the sexual and transgressive connotations implicit in the original versions”.
THE MECHANISM it will also be replicated for the folk, beat and pop-rock of the following decade, so much so that even in August 1968 the same «Music and records» headline: Does the Italian song exist? Why is there so much copying from abroad? Antonio Ansoldi, artistic director of Ri-Fi, replies: «We turn to foreign production as, being more numerous, it offers greater possibility of selection». In fact, the astonishing growth in demand for “new” music does not seem to be matched by an adequate domestic supply: covers and translations are welcome, then, to give a touch of color to the national repertoire and open a peephole pointing beyond the border. Except that those same practices betray the fascist cultural heritage and its clumsy translation vocation.
Let’s not forget that, while waiting for free radio, the market is entirely at the mercy of the Rai control commission and that the lack of knowledge of English offers an iron alibi to record companies who push artists of the caliber of Stevie Wonder, Rolling to sing in Italian Stones and David Bowie. Lonely boy alone girlruthless rewriting of Space Oddity signed Mogol, wins the black jersey hands down, but no less atrocious are the Superstar of Flora Fauna and Cement, I will pray former Stand By Me And Give me a hammer, with which Rita Pavone eliminates any social value from Pete Seeger’s original.
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Omnipresent soundtracks for today’s silence phobiaIF IT’S TRUE that every poetic translation is faced with metrical, rhetorical and idiomatic difficulties, most of the songs translated in that period obey a very specific soft power, becoming bearers – as a text composed of music, words, performance and image – of values traditional as opposed to “modern” ones: love, family, religion and so on.
Paradoxically, however, it is precisely the covers that drive many originals on the Italian market. And here another discussion opens, in which the recording and publishing industries intersect. Franco Fabbri writes: «A record company came out with a potential success, and with the firm intention of spreading it in all accessible markets. The publisher of the piece submitted it to competing record companies, deemed more effective in their area of influence; what the publisher was interested in was obtaining maximum circulation of the piece. The covers were pouring in.”
And the royalties were also pouring in. In fact, the legislation on copyright – law 22 April 1941, n. 633, another souvenir of the twenty-year period – protects «the creative elaborations of the work itself, such as translations into another language» by assigning to the translator, standard bearer of the Italic idiom, 2/24 of the proceeds, half of the share reserved for the author of the text.
BUT THE SAME translator also receives the rights to the uses of the original piece in the territory of Siae competence. Another random example? Part of the royalties of A Whiter Shade Of Pale they go to the lyricist of Without light, who knows a lot about Siae (don’t worry, Mr. Rapetti). It is not surprising that the publishing catalogs of the time include Italian versions of all the major hits, many of which were never recorded: a sheet of music is enough to share the shares. This “semi-parasitic bandwagon”, quoting Fabbri again, affects not only the relationships between record companies and publishers, taking away funds from musical development, but the very meanings transmitted by the songs.
Only after 1968 did the phenomenon begin to wane and the bandwagon vanished on the horizon. Maybe the values change; it may be that the more widespread diffusion of the originals makes the covers obsolete; Maybe it’s because foreign publishers see through the trick and start banning translations. However, without depriving ourselves of the joy of listening Creep translated by Vasco.
Tags: Translations betrayals Boom Italy
