Maher, Brigid (2011): Recreation and Style, Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 193 p.

Except maybe for puns and other wordplays, humour has not often been addressed in translation studies and yet, humorous texts can be very challenging for the translators, on many levels. With Recreation and Style, Brigid Maher makes an insightful contribution to the matter by exploring the possibilities and the limitations of the translation of humorous elements and styles in literary texts. Her goal is to understand and illustrate how literary translators manage to transfer various humorous styles from one language to another and from one culture to another, which is sometimes deemed as an impossible task. As Roland Diot wrote, for instance, “when it comes to translating humour, the operation proves to be as desperate as that of translating poetry” (1989: 84). Maher also studies how the notions of humour, language, culture and identity are all related in literary works, and how the translator’s “creativity and playful rewritings,” to quote the summary of the book, are key elements in this translational process. As a lecturer and researcher at La Trobe University as well as a professional literary translator (she’s actually the vice-president of the Australian Association for Literary Translation), Maher is certainly in a good position to offer a rich and accurate contribution to the matter, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The obvious first step for Maher’s project is the not so evident task of defining the concept of humour itself, in a literary perspective. For her study, and according to her heterogeneous corpora, she used a very broad definition that covers irony, satire, parody, farce, wordplays, grotesque and so on. The first chapter thus begin with a short reflection about the multicultural perception of humour, the so-called “universals of humour” and equivalence. The overview of the variety of humorous styles that follows then gives the reader a very good idea of how text-based humour works, and the social and cultural implications that the translator must consider in order to, for instance, “reinforce social norms” (p. 4) in the case of more traditional humour, or successfully transgress these norms. Humour, then, is mostly a cultural phenomenon since it is “born of the peculiar cultural, historical and social experience of a group of people” (p. 7) and its translation becomes a functional activity that requires the translator to play the role of a cross-cultural negotiator, whose main goal is first and foremost to retain the humour. As Jeroen Vandaele (one of the few authors named by Maher who wrote about humour in translation studies) mentions, “it is obvious that the translator has failed when no one laughs at translated humor” (2010: 149). Beyond this challenge of making the target readers “laugh,” Maher aims to study the many factors that influence the translator, including notably the target literary systems, the norms in translation and the involvement of various parties such as editors and publishers. As a theoretical framework for her analysis, Maher mentions, among others, the contribution of André Lefevere on the cultural aspects of translation, the work of Ana María Rojo López, for whom the successful cross-cultural reception of humour relies on shared knowledge and cultural background, and Maria Tymoczko’s notion of “comic paradigm” which basically determines “what is or is not generally considered funny in a given culture at a given time” (p. 9). Combining such theoretical preoccupations with observations of carefully selected examples, Maher demonstrates that the translation of humour requires the translator to act as a decision-maker whose creativity “enables unlikely exchanges” (p. 19) between different cultures. Chapters 2 and 3 study examples of Italian to English translations of humorous texts that rest on a cultural …