Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Scouts are Cancelled en Italiano?


Mama Mia! Oh My Jumpins!

Scouts are Cancelled, the movie (Magpie Productions) is based a book of poetry: Scouts are Cancelled (Insomniac Press) which is written 'in dialect' and which attempts to capture the regional voice of folk in the annapolis valley with specific expressions like: "oh my lamb", "dummer than a sack full of hammers" "givver jimmie givver" "friggen rights" and so on. The film has recently been a festival pick of the Hot Docs International Film Festival in Toronto and has just been accepted into a prestigious literature Festival near Milan in September and will play as part of Pagine Nascote "hidden pages" in Mantova's "festival della letteraturi" which features such poets as Simon Armitage and which showcases other films about writers Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway and other well known writers -- of course this is a real feather in the cap of Port Williams, NS raised author, John Stiles -- but since the audience might be Milanese literature lovers they will have to watch the movie in subtitles, so expressions like "Givver Jimmie Givver" "How Yah Doon anight?" will have to be translated into Italian. How this will work is anyone's guess, but we believe it's a Canadian first: Nova Scotian, Annapolis Valley dialect translated into formal Itailan... An example of one of the poems, "little buggers my mom", translated in Italian is: "piccolo maledice il mio mom" and translated back is: "small curses mine mom." Holy Smokes! No make that: Mama Mia!

NB. It is a good thing that the film does not feature the poem Torpedo Chicken as it contains the opening line: "Scrawny Rawny was an ol time stun a mun..." which only hard core port rats would understand anyhow.


The link and blurb are below:

http://www.festivaletteratura.it/2007/Giovedi.rtf
http://www.magpieproductions.com


Pagine Nascoste
SCOUTS ARE CANCELLED
di John Scott, Canada/Stati Uniti, 2007, 72’
versione originale inglese, sottotitoli in italiano
Anteprima italiana
John Stiles, venditore telefonico di Toronto, non ha
un gran futuro davanti a sé: la sua esistenza è
scandita dai sempre più insofferenti “pronto?” dei
possibili clienti, a cui egli immancabilmente risponde
con un “cooome va?”. Ma è a partire da questo minimo
scambio verbale che Stiles inventa una personalissima
performance. Sia improvvisando nel mezzo delle sue
chiamate dal call center, che poi nelle letture
pubbliche e nei suoi due libri di poesie, Stiles
condensa memorie infantili e un immaginario folk, che
esprime con energia e vocalità che sorprendono e
conquistano i suoi ascoltatori.

1 Comments:

Blogger John MacDonald said...

hot enough for yah?

10:19 pm  

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