Translating outside the box: un sottomarino giallo da Pepperlandia a Roma via Liverpool

Yellow Submarine, the famous Beatles’ song was recorded in 1966. Two years later, thanks to the collaborative, creative effort of playwrights, poets, visual artists, musicians, actors, managers, etc. the jingle, mingled with the imagery of the concept album Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band, became a successful movie, and an icon of the psychedelic pop culture. The movie in turn engendered many other products such as graphic novels, picture books, pop-up books etc., forming a chain of adapted texts that have allowed the story to circulate intersemiotically into new media and forms. Moving from the description of the text metamorphosis, and from a general premise on translation as a transdisciplinary and mobile, highly constrained albeit creative activity, the paper focuses on the translational analysis of a new Italian version of the Beatles Yellow Submarine Picture Book, published by the writer of the essay. The puns, the cultural allusions, and particularly the hidden intertextual quotations of the Beatles songs, well known in their original language by most of the readers in the target culture, are a sort of unique, challenging translating problem, the solution of which might be found in a “Translating outside the box” strategy.