Journal of Italian Translation

Angela Jeannet
ergy required to make the carts move forward. Simply pushing or
pulling would not do.
I suppose it’s fair to ask how I would translate this passage.
So here is my tentative version:
Pino and Saro started out toward their assigned work area,
each leaning forward on his cart. It would take half an hour
to walk to the pasture if you moved one foot after the other as
slowly as they were doing. They spent the first quarter of an
hour, already sweaty and sticky, stubbornly clinging to their
silence. Then Saro was the first to speak.
“That Pecorilla is a cuckold!” he blurted out.
“A major cuckold,” Pino added.
Sartarelli’s use of the word “bastard” is probably more appropriate
as an American epithet, but in using “cuckold” I wanted
to retain a measure of the strangeness evoked by the code-switching
in Camilleri’s text. Americans generally do not use the word
and some would have to look it up in a dictionary. Hence “cuckold”
would work almost the same way for Americans as one of
Camilleri’s Sicilian words for Italians. In conclusion, while it is
possible to achieve a similar effect in the English translation, it is
very likely that the translator would adopt the minimax strategy,
that is, he will try to obtain the maximum effect with the minimum
of effort and in real life it takes too much time to imitate
Camilleri’s style. Hence the English translations of his work will
inevitably be monovocal.
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