Decadent Culturemes. Translating Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses into Italian

This article discusses my Italian translation (2022) of George Bernard
Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses (1892), mainly by considering the concept of
the cultureme. Culturemes, which are semantic units that exemplify and serve
as paradigms of certain cultures, have been employed in translation studies in
recent years to see how, and even if, culture-specific concepts can be translated.
Culturemes are here seen in the light of the transculturality of decadent poetics,
and hence interpreted as possible facilitators in the translation into Italian of
Widowers’ Houses, a play written in the decadent period, and developing many
features of decadent poetics, whose author utilised key transcultural concepts
of the period. Viewing Shaw’s text from the perspective of such decadent
culturemes as the slums, Cockney English and other decadent sociolects, and
the decadent hero, together with the New Woman, not only substantiates the
idea of Shaw as a decadent artist, but also suggests possible translation practices
and processes for decadent literature.