Journal of Italian Translation

Anne Milano Appel/ Claudio Magris
ing returned to your country, you wish to come here again. Remember
Hypsipyle, therefore, even from afar, even after you have
returned and…” – “Well, don’t you know how the rest goes, like in
school? Come on… Here, repeat after me, ‘and leave me your progeny,
whom I may care for with all my heart, if the gods grant that
I give birth to your child’.” – Enough, we’re not in school, prompting
during an oral quiz… We don’t want to recite the whole book,
now, do we? And don’t ask me, please, if the gods… what do I
know, how can I know… Jason doesn’t meet her eyes either when
he solemnly replies: “Hypsipyle, may what you have said come to
pass by the divine will.” When I raised my eyes, she wasn’t there
anymore, she had disappeared – no, she was there, like always, but
I didn’t know who she was, a beautiful figurehead without a name
that the fury of the storm tore from the sunken ship, that drifts
along rising and falling with the waves, the large eyes turned upward,
to a void even greater than that of the sea.
[Chapter 39]
Do you like it? Look at that face – beautiful and generic, the caption
says, like beauty should be, purified of every incidental, particular
dross, of any doleful individual expressivity. Would that I could
erase from my own face as well – the way I plane and smooth them
from the face of this figurehead – the lines carved by my heart, that
are mine and accursedly mine alone. A good idea, doctor, this idea of
making us work, of not letting us grow melancholy, twiddling our
thumbs; to each his own task, his specialty. Ergotherapy, Arbeit macht
frei, I’m familiar with the treatment. I can’t complain, since I enjoy
sculpting and carving these women of wood. To tell the truth, I
wouldn’t even need those beautiful illustrated catalogs you give me to
copy the figures from. I’m not a novice, I even earned a few bucks by
making or repairing a couple of figureheads for ships that reached
Hobart Town with their prow and figureheads in bad shape. Also, I
like having those wooden breasts beneath my hands, planing them
until they become smooth and it’s a joy to caress them, oh nothing
lewd, for heaven’s sake, it’s that they remind me of those odd jobs of
those days, I’ve even tried to model those pouting lips of Norah’s,
eager and impelling up until the end, but…
I realized that the face of these women who accompany men
at sea must be polished, serene, imperturbable; woe if it were to
show passion, personality. Besides, who would dare display a personality?
Only a fool, made of phony, interchangeable flesh rather
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