Translating Us Underground Comix in Italy: A Semiotic Perspective on Satire and Subversion

This book analyses 1960s-1970s US underground comix, a ’counterculture’ art form that satirised mainstream values and taboos. The author observes comix in their multimodal components in the original English-language versions and in their Italian translations by unpacking the several layers of verbal and visual meaning-making. She then goes on to scrutinise translation and resemiotisation processes, including modifications, mitigations, and omissions, encompassing socio-historical and cross-cultural perspectives. The book argues that translation, meant to bridge two (counter-)cultures, served as a gatekeeper instead, zooming in on certain themes, while inadvertently overlooking or purposefully manipulating others, with an outcome close to censorship. The volume is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 summarises the aims and scope of the volume. Chapter 2 introduces comix as a subversive phenomenon. Chapter 3 illustrates the theoretical and methodological framework of analysis, based on semiotics and multimodality. Chapter 4 presents the corpus of Italian translations, which includes works translated between 1968 and 2022 by both mainstream and alternative publishers. In Chapters 5-8, Italian translations of comix dealing with such controversial themes as sex, drugs, political struggle, and religion are analysed, with qualitative observations of several translations of the same comix provided to highlight changing times, cultural frames, ideologies, editorial policies, and target audiences. Chapter 9 discusses the findings of these observations and maintains that, as a recursive translation strategy, seditious contents were mitigated, trivialised, or censored by adopting light-hearted frames so that potentially problematic contents could be left out. With its linguistic, translational, and intercultural analyses, this volume will be useful for researchers of linguistics, semiotics, translation, and comics studies.

Chiara Polli is Research Fellow of English Linguistics and Translation at the Department of Ancient and Modern Civilisations of the University of Messina, Italy.