The last few decades have seen a rapid development of novel aspects concerning the reception of classical tradition within contemporary culture, especially in mass culture. Shifts in the dynamics of communication have brought to life new manifestations, such as video games, live and virtual reconstructions, multimedia and cyberspace narratives. What is more, these phenomena represent the main way in which large parts of society - especially young people - are able to experience the antique world today. The project intends to look into the mechanisms of reception of classical antiquity in contemporary popular culture, focusing on "the voice" of ancient Romans in literary, film, multimedia and transmedia narratives, and exploring linguistic and cultural issues related to their translation. This verbocentric approach to the topic aims at opening new research perspectives in more than one way. Firstly, it should allow bridging several disciplinary fields into a comparative, interdisciplinary analysis on the basis of the common denominator. Secondly, it should lead to a better understanding of the importance of the verbal component in audiovisual representations of ancient Rome and of dialogic parts in the literary texts. Finally, it has in view developing new insights into audiovisual and literary translation by exploring the impact of external factors and given classical tradition on the recreation of "the voice" of ancient Romans. This last research goal is also related to educational purposes: given that a majority of popular representations of Antiquity reach the Italian audience mediated by translation, it is crucial to make students of languages aware of the tensions between classical traditions of different cultures and countries. Therefore, the research on the topic will be combined with a series of workshops for graduate and doctoral students from different cultures, focused on audiovisual translation (dubbing, subtitling, audio description) of ancient Rome.
The richness and complexity of the proliferation of transmedial representations of ancient Rome require an interdisciplinary approach and new tools of analysis. Articulating such an approach is, in fact, the general aim of this project, which assembles a group of specialists in neighboring research fields in order to explore an undoubtedly under-researched topic. The proposed collaboration of the team of Sapienza University with classical philologists coming from 3 different national contexts (British, German, Polish), will offer a unique chance to combine interdisciplinary and transnational perspective of study (particularly important for the translational angle of the research). Such an approach would not only enrich studies on the reception of antiquity, but also provide new stimuli and perspectives on the functions of literary dialogue, on the interaction between images and words in audiovisual productions, on the influence of classical tradition on the strategies of audiovisual translation, on the tensions between national and imported classical traditions. The exciting potential of this kind of research has already found a preliminary confirmation in the results of the international conference on Henryk Sienkiewicz¿s Quo vadis: inspirations, contexts, reception (2016) organized by Monika Wozniak, as well as the workshop Audio/Visual Romans, organised in 2018 by Monika Wozniak (Sapienza) and Maria Wyke (UCL), which hinged on the analysis of the intersections between image and sound in representations of ancient Rome in cinematographic adaptations of "Quo vadis". The workshop, in particular, made it possible to envisage a number of applications of our methodological approach, and the great interest sparked in other Universities gives us reason to believe in the fruitfulness of our research and the favorable outcomes it will yield both on the scientific and didactic level.
From a logistical point of view, the project is indeed designed as a basis for building an international collaboration network and a cyclic annual workshop program. First of these encounters will be a conference and workshop on Julius Caesar, organized in collaboration with University College London (responsible: prof. Maria Wyke), Polish Academy of Sciences (prof. Piotr Salwa) and Roma Tre University (responsible: prof Maddalena Pennacchia). The workshop will be addressed to graduate/ doctoral students from all the Institutions participating in the project. In 2021 a second, similarly structured conference and workshop will take place. The members of the research team will also help to organize workshops abroad, aimed at promoting research and expanding the network of scientific collaboration that ideally should lead to proposing a European ERC project later on.