Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

cially in light of the considerable challenges offered byGeertz’s complex writing style. The main ideas and thesespresented in the text come across quite clearly; neitherthe author nor his Italian readers need be concernedabout that. What they could legitimately be concernedabout, however, is a loss of force in the target text, andmore importantly, a partial loss of its identity, or perhapsmore appropriately, of its diversity, effected by a paringback or a smoothing over of its special features into amore standard, genre-typical, academic prose. A loss, inother words, of style, which becomes quite visible, Ithink, when we translate the Italian text back intoEnglish.However one judges such affirmations, or as surprisingas it might be to hear them proffered by an anthropologist,all of this certainly touches a contemporary rawnerve. In recent social thought the attractions of a “deafnessto the appeal of other values” and of a relaxed andcomplacent approach to imprisonment in one’s own culturaltradition, are more and more celebrated. Incapableof embracing either relativism or absolutism — the firstbecause it doesn’t allow judgment, the second because itremoves it from history — our philosophers, historians,and social scientists turn toward the kind of impermeabilitéof identity that Lévi-Strauss warmly recommends.Whether one considers it as a sign of easy arrogance, ofa justified prejudice, of “Lutheran irremovability,” thesplendid frankness expressed in the motto “when you’rein Rome do as if you were in Millidgeville” of FlanneryO’Connor, this clearly poses the question of the future ofethnocentrism (and of cultural diversity) in a rather newlight. To withdraw, to distance oneself from the elsewhere,to choose the “view from afar,” is that really theway to escape from the desperate tolerance of the cosmopolitanismof UNESCO? Is moral narcissism reallythe alternative to moral entropy?What is at issue here is not the overall success orfailure of the translation (by and large it succeeds) butrather its tendency to homogenize Geertz’s complex andcontrapuntal style into drab academic Italian. The translatorseems to subscribe wholeheartedly to theliterary/nonliterary distinction and to follow all too energeticallyPoggi’s advice to move the text toward the(Italian academic) reader. This strategy, as I will presentlytry to demonstrate, seems particularly inappropriate inthe case of Available Light, and furthermore, its use herecalls into question, I think, the very distinction on whichit is based. Reading “The Uses of Diversity” makes mewonder if it is still useful, assuming it ever was, fortranslators to distinguish between literary and critical or“technical” texts, between texts in which style is importantand those in which it is not. Perhaps the more usefuldistinction is not between text-types but style-types,between source text styles that are closer to standard targetlanguage styles and that consequently are easier toimitate, and styles that are more distant, more expressiveof cultural diversity, and thus more difficult but alsomore important to reconstruct in the target language.As we have already seen in our sample paragraph,Geertz’s chapter article on diversity and its discontents ispeppered with allusion, invention, and manipulation ofpopular sayings or ways of speaking, and it is preciselythese deviations from standard academic style that createproblems for the translation. Over the course of the twenty-pagetext, there are about the same number ofinstances in which Geertz’s idiosyncratic style is notreflected in the Italian. Depending on the case, the translatorseems to have adopted one of three tactics: standardization,elimination, or literal transposition(calquing) without compensation. What follows is a listof examples taken from throughout the chapter alongwith some brief analysis and some suggestions of howthey might have been handled differently in order to provideItalian readers with better access to the style as wellas the substance of Geertz’s arguments.just to have something that sticks in the mind >Tanto per avere un punto di riferimentoThe translation changes the register from informal to formal,colloquial to academic, for no apparent reason. Analternative solution might have been “qualcosa cherimane in testa,” or “qualcosa che si appiccica in testa.”The failure of Third World countries to live up to thethousand-flowers hopes for them > La maggior partedei paesi del Terzo mondo non sono riusciti a tener fedealle speranze delle loro lotte per l’indipendenzaThis time the “thousand flowers” have been eliminatedand the hopes have been shifted from First Worldobservers and sympathizers back to the Third worldfighters for independence. In the process, the allusion tothe language in which those hopes were expressed at thetime — reminiscent of Chairman Mao’s 1957 declaration“Let a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools ofthought contend” — and to their consequent fragility hasbeen lost.Translation Review 23