The delights and sorrows of being a translator and cultural mediator

Over the last three decades I have worked as a co-translator and a cultural mediator between the UK and Italy, bringing plays by Alan Bennett, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, David Greig, Claire Dowie, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Hanif Kureishi, Liz Lochhead, Sabrina Mahfouz, Rani Moorthy, Arnold Wesker, to the Italian stage. Within a complex web of Italo-British relations, I will be discussing how my strategies of cultural mediation have evolved over the years as a response to significant changes in the two theatre systems. I will explore why the task of finding a publisher and a producerdirector for some authors has been more difficult than for others, the stage and critical success of certain dramatists more limited. I will provide a specific focus on Edward Bond’s Italian ‘journey’, including my co-translation, with Salvatore Cabras, of Bond’s Warplays for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin.