The American film musical in Italy. Translation and non-translation.

We need a key to open the shimmering glass door musicals place between themselves and any form of intellectual inquiry. Musicals seem to be particularly resistant to analysis: peel away the tinsel and you find the real tinsel underneath. (Feuer, 1993: ix) Jane Feuer's introduction to her well-known book The Hollywood Musical is rather clear about the nature of the American musical film. Generally considered as a form of ‘pure entertainment’, due to provide pleasure to mass audiences and mask, beyond its glittering images and catchy tunes, a well-crafted structure, this genre flourished beyond expectations while still being largely neglected by critics. In the last few decades, with the increasing injection of cultural and social theories within film studies, film musicals has received more attention and the "tinsel" has finally released a number of traces for the investigation of its linguistic, musical and socio-cultural features. Over the years, especially since the Golden Age of the musical genre reached its climax in the 1950s, the magical and utopian worlds evoked by American musical films have been reaching Italy in a very short time, with distributors eager to exploit the wave of success obtained by these productions in their country of origin. However, just as the genre itself has not, until recently, received the attention it deserved by international critics and scholars, the adaptation into Italian of musicals seems to have been left to random, having largely ignored their semiotic complexity and given way to an incredible variety of translation strategies. From the partial dubbing of dialogues with the songs left unchanged in An American in Paris to the thorough dubbing of dialogues and songs for My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, down to a mixture of dubbing and subtitling for a number of other films throughout the 70s and beyond, there has been no continuity of translation solutions for American musical films into Italian, especially with reference to the treatment of songs. The reasons for such an attitude are to be sought at various levels: if the very nature of musical films makes their adaptation into a second language more difficult than other genres, it seems more likely than the heterogeneous translation solutions adopted in Italy from the 1950s onwards call for investigation beyond the linguistic and musical components of the films, calling into play cultural, commercial and, at times, ideological purposes. After a brief exploration of the genre evolution from the 1950s until the end of the XXth century, this paper will attempt to provide a thorough overview of the distribution of some extremely popular musicals in Italy, outlining the translational choices they reveal and trying to come to some hypothesis as to the reasons beyond such a great heterogeneity. In the investigation of the Italian distribution and reception of American musical films, the need to go beyond film studies and translation studies as theoretical frameworks will appear increasingly clear, thus confirming that peeling away the tinsel can lead to unveiling a host of socio-cultural and economic factors which have had a great influence on translation.