giovanni luciani_the humble craft of translation_4!3!2010

8/12/2019 Giovanni Luciani_The Humble Craft of Translation_4!3!2010

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resists being translated. Cheddar cheese is cheddar cheese, despite being not so

different from several kinds of cheese made in Italy. Jakobson, thought the opposite:

its always possible to translate a message from one language to another, though it

might require many more words than in the original. Russell was right in that no

translation will ever be perfect, a carbon copy of the original, nor its message will be

100% clear to the reader. But when it comes to the message, the original text its not

necessarily more clear than its translation. Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway ( La

signora Dalloway ):

The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham, what wasit? she wondered, for the street was blocked.

(Cera una calca terribile, a quellora della giornata. Lords, Ascot,

Hurlingham, che cosera mai?, si domandava la signora Dalloway, trovando

la strada ingombrata).

They are all famous places; Lords as a cricket ground, Ascot as a racecourse,Hurlingham as a fashionable sports club. But how many of us in this room would

know it? And how many of those who know what they are have actually been to any

of these places? Bertrand Russell had a point. The Italian translator could have given

the reader some clues by saying for instance lippodromo di Ascot o Lords, il noto

campo da cricket. With some explanations, the Italian reader might understand a bit

more why Woolf is mentioning these places in a context which apparently has got

nothing to do with them. It seems that Jakobson is right: everything can be translated.

On the other hand, such explanations would have broken the flow of thoughts, the

stream of consciousness, in Clarissa Dalloways mind. They would have been maybe

more appropriate in a descriptive passage. But here it would be confusing, as though

is not Clarissa Dalloway who thought about Ascot, but the narrator. The Italian reader

could easily lose the connection between Ascot and Clarissa.


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that years later Sergio Perosa, the editor of the first Meridiani edition of Virginia

Woolf, here added a footnote to Scaleros translation.

Translation theory doesnt always help us understand the craft of translation.

For instance, two concepts in translation theory are those of formal equivalence and

dynamic equivalence. In a website dedicated to the Bible, called Bible Research

(http://www.bible-researcher.com ), we find the following explanation:

Translations can be located on a spectrum, which would have, at one extreme,

rigid adherence to the form of the original language ( formal equivalence ), and

at the other extreme, complete disregard for the form (not the message) of theoriginal language ( dynamic equivalence ).

It sounds more than plausible but lets read the following example:

The shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence to the

shepherd on the west hill over the intervening town chimneys, without greatinconvenience to his voice, so nearly did the steep pastures encroach upon the

burghers backyards.

(I pascoli scoscesi giungevano cos vicino alle case che, da una collina

allaltra, i pastori, anche senza dover gridare troppo, potevano segnalarsi la nascita

degli agnelli, al di sopra dei tetti della cittadina posta in mezzo).

This is the incipit of Fellow-Townmen , a short story by Thomas Hardy that I

translated twenty years ago. Hardy is a late Victorian author who wrote novels, short

stories, letters, diaries, and hundreds of beautiful poems. Yet this incipit is so clumsy

that its difficult to believe it was written by a professional novelist. Repetitions like

the shepherd on the east hill the shepherd on the west hill , expressions like lambing

intelligence or intervening town chimneys it all makes the incipit very cumbersome.

As a translator I had to ask myself why Hardy wrote it this way and what to do with


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it. Translation of literary texts calls for a certain amount of literary criticism as well

as a developed sensitivity to the text.

The style of the incipit is typical Hardy. We find this same lack of brilliance in

many of his novels and to me it had to be preserved. I tried to keep the impression of

an effort, as though to tell a story requires both writer and reader to overcome some

initial obstacle. Hardy was one of the protagonist of the success of the short story in

Britain towards the end of the 19 th century, but his short story is not Edgar Allan

Poes: like his novel, like much of Victorian literature, it always moves from the

assumption that we read at leisure, for hours non stop. But had I stuck too closely to

the English text, the Italian reader could have thought that I didnt know how to writein Italian. As for the publisher behind the reader, they wanted me to simplify, make it

more readable because the publisher runs a business, not a charity, and part of the

fascination of translation is given by its commercial side which makes it closer to

literature, at least English literature than criticism.

I had to reach a compromise: I slightly simplified the text (east hillwest hill

became da una collina allaltra , encroach upon became giungevano cos vicino ,when encroach conveys a sense of invasion, of oppression) but kept the impression of

a narration that starts slowly, like an old engine. Ultimately I didnt get neither a

formal nor a dynamic equivalence: any translation is too much of a patchwork of

continuous compromises to fit into such rigid categories.

Translation is often conceived as a relationship between source and target

language, or author and translator. We should conceive it instead as a process that

involves a busy triangle which includes also the reader in the target language, and

behind the reader the publisher and the market rather than just a one-to-one

relationship between author and translator.

Any foreign book translated into Italian is seen by the Italian reader as a book

written in Italian by an author with an unusual name. A translation is a finished text

written in the target language. Translation we are reminded by Derek Walcott

literally means a crossing to another place. A crossing, we might add, which is not


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neutral, for it entails a progressive erasure of the texts origin. One novel was written

in German at the turn of last century; another one in English-American in the Fifties;

a third one in Russian in the 19 th century: after Walcotts crossing is completed, they

are all Italian novels with protagonists who are called Thomas Buddenbrook,

Holden Caulfield, Oblomov. To this extent, translation is fiction, an artefact built

over another artefact. The translator has to generate an illusion in the reader.

It doesnt follow that a translation is an arbitrary creation: if I translate Portrait

of a Lady by Henry James everything as far as form and content are concerned will

be as close as possible to the original text, except that the final impression on the

reader must be that James wrote the book in Italian. Thus a good translator intoItalian must have an excellent command of the Italian language: you might be almost

bilingual but if you dont write Italian very well you are not a good translator.

A second consideration is that the original work must be translated into present

Italian. It is so important, that publishers tend to hide the date of translations. We are

not disturbed by Manzonis Italian in I Promessi Sposi , though at times its difficult

to understand. But when it comes to the Italian translation of, say, Wuthering Heights we expect it to be written in contemporary Italian. Yet I Promessi Sposi in its final

version was published in 1840-41 and Wuthering Heights in 1847.

Agostino Lombardo insisted that translations get old. There are several reasons

for this. It can be a matter of changes in taste: starting in the Fifties, for instance,

there had been a tendency not to translate foreign proper names anymore except for

Shakespeare. In recent years, to give you a similar example, there has been a growing

tendency to keep movies titles in the original. Of course taste has got nothing to do

with quality.

Then its a matter of language. The evolution of language is a never ending

process. At times this process is more intense (for instance in the Sixties, the

Seventies, maybe the Eighties), at other times it slows down, like today or maybe

its me that is getting older and cut off from vital changes in the language. However

there are exceptions: Enrichetta Carafa DAndrias translation of Tolstoys War and


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Peace was published in 1928, and revised by Leone Ginzburg in 1941. To my ear, the

style sounds still appropriate:

Il combattimento, che consisteva soltanto nella cattura di uno squadrone

francese, era stato presentato come una brillante vittoria sui francesi, e perci

limperatore e tutto lesercito, specialmente finch non fu dissipato il fumo

della polvere sul campo di battaglia, credettero che i francesi fossero stati vinti

e si ritirassero contro la loro volont.

Its also true that, generally speaking, today we translate more accurately than

in the past. When it comes to English, we must always remember that till the end ofthe Second World War French and German, not English, were considered the two

most important foreign languages in Italy,. This, in its own turn, explains why the

quality of translations from English into Italian in the first half of the 20 th century is

not so great. Again we have exceptions: I find Giulia Celenzas translation of

Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse superior to Nadia Fusinis version, published

fifty years later. Just from the title: Celenzas is Gita al faro , while Fusinis is Al faro .In English is To the Lighthouse but the Ramsays actually get there only at the very

end of the book. Fusinis is linguistically more accurate, but Celenzas catches better

the impressionistic and autobiographic quality of the novel.

A third consideration concerns the genre. There isnt just one way to translate

everything. Form will ask for greater attention in poetry than in prose or in a novel

than in an essay. It doesnt mean than one genre is certainly harder to translate than

another. Its rather a matter of a shift in priorities. Once I translated for Mondadori a

novel by Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full ( Un uomo vero ). I tried to be as faithful as

possible to the original, and it was quite difficult for Wolfe is a master in rendering

dialect and jargon in this case the American English spoken in Atlanta and the

jargon of lower class people. It was my first and last experience with a commercial

novel. Mondadori didnt care too much about faithfulness. They wanted readability.

And they wanted the translation in time: six months to translate 1200 pages.


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Its different when one translates literary criticism. There the main priority is to

be as faithful as possible to the content of the original text and a good translator must

also be a scrupulous editor. Yet even in literary criticism we have to tackle the

problem of a correct form, beginning with the fact that criticism in Italian is written

with a sort of elegant, often pretentious, style which has no parallel in English. One

reason why English is the international language of research is also that academic

English can be mastered by many more people than academic Italian or French. It

implies that when it gets translated into Italian one has to recreate a specific illusion

of an Italian text and maybe make the Italian version more elaborate than it was in

English. It also depends on the publisher: Adelphi cares almost obsessively aboutstyle; Il Mulino cares less. It doesnt follow that Adelphi is always better. In recent

years, for instance, I translated for Adelphi a book by Auden which made available a

series of lectures on Shakespeare given by Auden just after the Second World War.

The book was made possible by the transcript of those lectures taken by several

people: Auden never bothered to write them down. When you read the original book

you can almost hear Auden improvising in front of hundreds of people, young andold, who travelled a long way to listen to him every week. I tried to keep a bit of this

colloquial approach in my Italian translation but Adelphi didnt like it. Up to a point,

it is as though all Adelphis publications are written in the same language Adelphis

Italian. A beautiful Italian but not always the right one.

Since I mentioned Adelphi, I will tell you an anecdote it happened to me

almost twenty years ago. I mention it just to emphasize once more the main, and

indeed only, point I tried to make this evening: that translation is a collective process

which involves several people apart from the writer and the translator and above all

the reader. In 1992 I was approached by Adelphi to translate a book by Ren Girard.

Girard is a French scholar who long ago emigrated to the States. He wrote in English,

a very interesting book on Shakespeare, published by Oxford University Press,

without the slightest editorial revision. Yet for reasons I never properly understood,

before the publication of the original version in English, Grasset in Paris published a


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French translation by a friend of Girard himself. This French version didnt always

follow the English version and at times was very different indeed. So I asked Adelphi

to ask Girard what was I supposed to do. He answered acknowledging that the two

versions were different and suggested that I produced yet another version on the

strength of the two previous ones. Was I faithful to Girard? Which of the two?

One final point about the craft of translation concerns technology. When I

started translating in the early Eighties computers were just beginning to be available,

and were very expensive. Thus the first book I translated was done with a glorious

typewriter. I dont think I would have ended up translating all the books I translated

without the computer, for I reach a final version through a process of working andreworking my translation many times. And only the computer allows you to do that.

So one minor but significant feature of a translator should be to have more than just

some familiarity with the computer.

But then today theres Internet, which offers translators possibilities which

were unthinkable only twenty years ago. A couple of years ago I translated a travel

book by Patrick Leigh Fermor called A Time of Gifts . I dont think I ever translated amore difficult book and I dont know what I would have done without Internet. The

book is a tour around Central Europe in the Thirties and Fermor describes everything

down to the smallest detail. I did the book with the CD of the Zanichelli English-

Italian Dictionary, plus The Free Dictionary ( http://www.thefreedictionary.com ),

plus De Mauros Dictionary online which unfortunately now is no more available,

plus Homolaicus ( http://www.homolaicus.com ), plus Google Images and Flickr

(http://www.flickr.com ). To give you an example, Fermor describes the abbey of

Melk with passages like this:

Aurora chases the Queen of the Night across the sky and Watteau-esque trios,

tuning their lutes and their violins, drift by on clouds among ruins and obelisks

and loosened sheaves .


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Aurora insegue la regina della Notte attraverso il cielo e gruppi la Watteau,

accordando liuti e violini, vagano portati dalle nuvole tra rovine e obelischi e

covoni di grano.

At some point I had no alternative but to look for my cheddar cheese in

other words to look for pictures of Melk that made me get a better idea of what

Fermor was writing about, and found them in Flickr. All this to say that today as a

translator needs to be very familiar with the computer so s/he needs to be no less

familiar with Internet and all the resources it offers.

giovanni luciani_the humble craft of translation_4!3!2010

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