Dialogue in historical films participates in their engagement with the Other. It must be comprehensible to the audience and compatible with the era presented on the screen; relevant today but evocative of the past. Yet it is often the weakest component of the presumed ‘authenticity’ of the vision of the past, especially in films set in cultural and linguistic contexts removed from the language used on the screen. Such is often the case of the Italian Renaissance Era, which has been portrayed not only in Italian, but also in many American and European films. In my paper I would like to carry out a comparative analysis of the forms of address used in original Italian films and in the Italian versions of American or European productions, focusing on different portrayals of the Borgia family. I won’t concentrate on the much-discussed problem of V-T address, but rather on the use and functionality of nominal forms of address. Since the cinematographic dialogue in the films cannot risk alienating the audience by sounding too difficult and archaic, the use of historical titles and address forms is usually the simplest and most effective way to create the effect of the diachronic distance between the viewer and the reality presented on the screen. The system of historical polite forms recreated for the needs of a given cinematographic production is never completely accurate, but what is more important, it is influenced by the film conventions of a given country and by the linguistic norms of the language used in the movie: an Italian Cesare Borgia speaks differently from his American or Spanish incarnation. But what happens when the forms of address are being translated from English or Spanish into Italian? Are they being corrected/modified according to the Italian historical norms of address or are they influenced by the forms used in the source text? I will discuss these issues taking as a starting point the results of a quantitative analysis carried out on a corpus of scripts – both original and translated. I will take into consideration both TV (The Borgias 1981; Borgia 2011-14; The Borgias 2011-2013) and cinematographic (Lucrezia Borgia 1940; Le notti di Lucrezia Borgia 1959, Il duca nero, 1963) productions.

References

• Hołobut, M.Woźniak, Historia na ekranie. Gatunek filmowy a przekład audiowizualny. Kraków: WUJ 2018.