Journal of Italian Translation

Rina Ferrarelli
der on the absurd. And I’m saying this after translating hundreds of Italian
poems into English and feeling that I was doing a fairly good job. English
has great synthetic power, and Shakespeare is master of syntactic concision,
a great inventor of verbs; while the forte of Italian is the strong phrase,
the musical phrase.
When I was growing up I never considered translation as one version
of the original. I had no idea what the differences between the two might
be, the different approaches and complementary results, or that different
versions might be needed for different purposes. Despite a spoken vernacular
that deviated in major ways from Italian, which was in fact another
language; despite the study of Latin and French, I took translations
into Italian for granted just as the natives of any place take their language
and mores for granted --as the only way something is said and done. No
matter what the language, one’s way of seeing the world through words
becomes the way it is. Translation, in this frame of reference, is seen as the
same piece of writing with the very same words but in a different language.
I did not entertain the idea that translators have to interpret what
they read, and may interpret the same passage differently, or that if a word
is ambiguous in one language, the same word might not be in another language.
Carta can be both paper and map in Italian, but has to be one or the
other in English; sueño is both sleep and dream in Spanish, but has to be
one or the other in English. It’s impossible to ignore the context, but even
that does not solve all the conundrums. It takes a conscious effort to realize
that every piece of literature is another way of seeing, another way of doing,
of being, not only of a people, but of a particular person living at a
particular time and place-- every experience being filtered through the individual
consciousness and sensibility of the author-- and that authors have
affected in major ways, if they’re Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, the language
they have chosen or inherited.
Dante chose to write his epic-length poem in the spoken tongue rather
than in Latin, the literary language. And he consciously forged a national
language out of his own Tuscan dialect. A language all writers had to subsequently
learn, regardless of their mother tongue. Alessandro Manzoni,
who is given credit for developing the historical novel in the nineteenth
century, and for enriching the language of prose, was a northern Italian
who started with the language he had learned in school and then, he said,
went to Tuscany to rinse it in the waters of the Arno.
Translators not only have ways of reading (first level of interpretation);
they have ways of re-creating through their choices (second level of
interpretation) character and literary persona, diction and syntax, rhythm
and sound, tone. Sometimes they have to invent what their own language
does not have to come out with an equivalent. The translation is always the
product of a symbiotic relationship, for the translator’s interpretation of
the original and her sense of her own language, of the language of literature
always play a part.
39