Journal of Italian Translation

14
Journal of Italian Translation
question. The straight and immediate answer that comes to my
mind is that you really cannot translate Camilleri, if you expect to
present an English-speaking Camilleri. But I would give the same
answer to the question “how can you translate Dante, or Petrarch
or Calvino?” Theorists of translation can tell you in two hundred
pages or more that translation is an impossible task. The reality is,
however, that translation has always been part of the literary world
and it has been accomplished in various degrees of fidelity since
the beginning of time. As a practicing translator I am more interested
in the pragmatic aspect of translation that accomplishes every
day something that presumably is impossible to do. Thus, it is
true, Camilleri is impossible to translate, but I venture to say that
his books will in fact be translated one after the other. Already the
first translation has come out. It’s The Shape of Water, La forma
dell’acqua, translated by Stephen Sartarelli and I understand that
two more novels will be coming out in April. Many more of
Camilleri’s books have been translated into French and Spanish,
although I have no data on these. I do have a copy of La forme de
l’eau, by the French translator Serge Quadruppani and I have been
comparing it to the English translation to see how the two approached
the subject.
As most of you know, If you have read any of Camilleri’s
books, the problem of translation is complicated by the writer’s
intentional interspersing of his text with Sicilian words or expressions
camouflaged as Italian and his frequent use of Sicilian especially
in dialogues. It is clear that the conscious use of dialect,
whether in an undiluted form or camouflaged, transformed or even
parodic, constitutes the most obvious element of this writer’s style.
A translator faces three different challenges of various difficulties.
The first is the fairly straight forward problem of translating Italian
into English which ought not create much of a problem; the
second is the frequent use of the Sicilian language—notice I said
language, not dialect—in dialogues with people who for one reason
or another speak in that language. This too should not represent
an unsurmountable difficulty since Sicilian is a language like
all the others and as such can and is normally translated to English.
The easiest way of translating these dialogues is to add a
qualifying sentence that says these words word were spoken in
Sicilian. Another way could be to translate the dialogues into slang
or colloquial speech. The third and certainly the most difficult
subtext to translate in Camilleri is his unpredictable and whimsi-