Lost in Warsaw:
Lost in Warsaw:

the subversion of multilingual humour in the Italian subtitles to the Polish war comedy Giuseppe in Warsaw (1964)

Summary/Abstract: In 1964, many decades before multilingual movies have become fashionable, a Polish director,Stanisław Lenartowicz, made a war comedy called “Giuseppe in Warsaw.” It narrates theadventures of an Italian soldier who on his way home from the Russian front during World War IIis stranded in Poland. Pseudo-language, translation, mistranslation, and mock translation figureconspicuously in the movie, which shows a series of clashes between Polish, German and Italianlanguages in the most improbable combinations. The original film used no subtitles, because thelinguistic chaos was pivotal to showing the absurdity of the war through the deforming lenses of thecomedy. This paper analyses various mechanisms of the multilingual humour in the original filmand in its subtitled version in Italian, in order to see how the dynamics of humour change in thecase of L3TT which becomes L2 in translation (Italian), especially when the point of the view of theaudience is subverted and the viewers identify with the protagonist rather than the Polishcharacters in the movie.

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