Shakespeare’s Metaphorical Swarms: Text Functions in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Implications for its Translation into Italian

This article will look at figurative language in Shakespeare’s early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona and at its translation into Italian. Particularly, it will apply to this comedy the notions of conceptual conflict and of metaphorical swarm as devised by Prandi (2012, 2017). Based on these notions, a linguistic analysis of three passages from the comedy will be conducted. This analysis will also serve as a basis to study and compare two Italian versions of the Gentlemen: Mondadori translation (1990) and Bompiani translation (2015). This examination will highlight the implications of the presence of metaphorical swarms for translation.