Journal of Italian Translation

Translating by the Numbers
by John DuVal
I
was raised in the faith and discipline of the New Criticism, scrutinizing,
dissecting, and reassembling that exquisite monument, the
poem itself. A frequent implication of the New Criticism was,
“There’s only one way to say something and that’s how the great poet said
it.” Thus if Keats wrote, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” he wrote
to be because to be was the perfect expression, far better than to exist or to live,
and may cease to be was better than may die. It was our job as students to
explain why to be was best, and woe to the smart aleck who claimed it was
best because it rhymed with charact’ry.
This approach was useful because it taught us to learn from the masters,
how they packed the maximum meaning into every word despite the
requirements of meter or rhyme. It was also useful in that we learned to
cherish the words of the great craftspeople of our language. Where it failed,
I believe, is in not paying due respect to the language itself and the infinite
choices it offers of saying almost the same thing, with infinite slight and
delightful variations and always a hint that a phrase could be better phrased.
For us translators the New Critical approach is still useful in that it
encourages us to study each word and each phrase of an original to learn
what the original writer has done to make it so wonderfully what it is. The
problem is that it directs us straight to the Slough of Despond, where we stay,
sunk and moping unless Faith in the language we are translating into pulls
us out. We will not find in English the phrase that G.G. Belli, for instance,
wrote in Romanesco, the dialect of the people of Rome, but given how slowly
our minds work and how vast our language is, we can always discover
another phrase like it, and then another, and if we keep looking, we may find
a better one than the ones we found before.
I had thought the following translation of a poem by Trilussa, another
Romanesco poet, was finally and after much struggle finished when I had
this down on paper:
To Mimi
Do you remember our first rendezvous
behind the Convent House, alone
together in the cloister? We carved
each other’s name into the ancient stone
I wrote, Fourteen May,
Nineteen hundred. Here Carlo kissed Mimi.
Twenty years. And yesterday
as I reread the names and the date,