Journal of Italian Translation

40
Journal of Italian Translation
Still, most of us even today ask no questions, or, with a little knowledge,
swing to the opposite position and assume the worst, and are quick
to cry, Traduttore traditore (translator traitor), unaware that in every translation
there are losses and gains, and that, broadly speaking, translation is
all there is. The original and the translation are both translations, and as
such, approximations. Authors translate what they see and feel, the experience
of life into the experience of words, structures made of words, choosing
out of huge vocabularies, and they may be more or less successful,
more or less satisfied. What the authors think they have accomplished, how
much they’ve brought across, can often be different from what readers think.
Regardless of how it was, how many versions this version went through, it
is now fixed and the words are all a reader has. The reader who is also a
translator lets the words take him beyond the words, as close to the experience
that inhabits the words and that the words conjure as he’s capable of
going. He has to try to imagine what the author saw or felt, and it is only
when he has a view, that he can re-create the physical and emotional landscapes.
A translator has access to the original. For most of us, the approximation
that we call translation is all there is. Without it, we wouldn’t have
the Bible, The Iliad and Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses, The Divine
Comedy, Shakespeare’s plays, The Gilgamesh, The Tao, The Bhagavad Gita, the
great Russian novels, etc. In fact, even with a second and a third language,
we would know very little of the world’s great literature.
Many of the books I read as a child were in translation. And in many
cases, the name of the translator wasn’t even in the book-- the exception
being Cesare Vico Lodovici, who translated Shakespeare’s plays--as if one
translator would make the same choices as any other, given an excellent
knowledge of both languages! Not only hadn’t the readers given much
thought to translation, even the people who should’ve known better had
not given much thought to the art. And in Italy, a great many prose writers
and poets have also been gifted translators. Sometimes, they too took for
granted what they did, and so did their editors and publishers. And if they
didn’t, they didn’t leave us their thoughts about it. In modern times, the list
of Italian poet/translators includes two Nobel prize winners, Quasimodo
and Montale; as well as Pavese and Sereni, to mention only four.
When I started reading English Literature in college with barely a
year of English—through some translation error, I started college at 16-- all
of it was equally difficult for me. I had no bias in favor of modern or contemporary
works as the American students did, and I made no distinction
between the English and American dialect. Likewise, as a child I read Little
Women and Gulliver’s Travels in translation and, unlike my children, had no
trouble with the language. They had to contend with archaic versions of
English, while I read contemporary Italian translations. The strangeness I
had encountered had to do with content, with elliptical political and social
references rather than with terms and phrases that had become obsolete.
Translation into the language of my time had smoothed the way, and had