Journal of Italian Translation

Franco Buffoni
“How then, can we reproduce the style?” The heart of the matter, in
my opinion, is in the verb used to ask the question: reproduce. Because
literary translation cannot be reduced conceptually to a mere reproduction
of a text; it should rather be considered as a process, which sees not an
“original” and a “copy” move through time and possibly bloom and flourish
again, but two texts equally endowed with artistic dignity.
The Movement of Language by Friedmar Apel is a fundamental study
in this regard. The concept of “movement” in language comes from the
necessity of deeply analysing the so-called language of departure before
embarking on the translation of a literary text.
The idea is commonly accepted for the so-called language of arrival.
No one, in fact, casts any doubts on the need to constantly retranslate the
classics in order to adapt them to the transformations that language continuously
undergoes. The so-called departure text, on the other hand, is
usually viewed as a monument — immobile in time — marmoreal and
rustproof. And yet, it too is moving in time, because the words which compose
it are also moving semantically in time, as well as the syntactic and
grammatical structures and so on.
Essentially, what is being proposed is to consider the classical or
modern literary text to be translated not as an immobile rock in the sea, but
as a floating platform, where the translator works on the live body of the
text, but the text itself is in constant transformation, or precisely, moving
in time. In this view, the aesthetic dignity of the translation appears as the
fruit of a meeting between equals (the author and the translator) fated to
cause the traditional dichotomous pairs to fall away, since it is aimed at
removing all stiffness from the act of translation, by giving its product an
intrinsic autonomous dignity as text. This principle was already anticipated
by Blanchot through the image of the “solemn drift of literary works.”
You can go so far as to affirm that the movement of the language in
time, during this process of literary translation, begins even before the drafting
of the “definitive” version of the “original,” when it is possible for the
translator to access the “pre-text” (that is, all those documents from which
the “definitive” text takes shape).
In this way, the translator takes possession of the path of growth and
germination of the text in its various phases. In this regard, a linguist may
speak of the formativity of the text; while a poet may speak of sympathetic
adherence, on the part of the translator, not so much to the finished text,
but to the myriad of emotional cells that made it possible.
The text, therefore, moves toward the future but also toward the past
if we take into account the “pre-texts.” Think of the eight thousand sheets
which gave rise to the four hundred pages of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la
nuit, or of the Epiphanies from which Joyce’s Portrait descends, or the Cahiers
upon which La Recherche du temp perdu is formed …All this in the awareness
of the stratification of historical languages. It is a concept that Luciano
Bianciardi exemplifies with “architectonic” clarity at the beginning of his
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