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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
Other ways of going at life > altri modi di condurre lavitaHere again, a colloquial expression is formalized and thetone is modified. “Conducting” life is a structured, purposeful,and measured performance; “going at” it, on theother hand, implies an activity that is much more tentative,unsure, and irregular. There must be any number ofways to say this in Italian, but “tirare avanti” and “tirarea campare” are two that immediately come to mind.To-each-his-own morality > una moralità relativisticaThis instance of standardization verges on misinterpretation,since Geertz charges Lévi-Strauss and Rorty with amisguided anti-relativism, whereas here the translationimplies that they are guilty of relativism. A better renderingin Italian might be “una moralità a ciascuno la sua,”which would be both closer to the original and reminiscentof the title and spirit of Leonardo Sciascia’s Siciliancrime novel, A ciascuno il suo.punk is where it’s at > ormai siamo arrivati al punkHere Geertz is quoting philosopher and art critic ArthurDanto, who in turn is quoting the slang of the contemporarypopular music scene. Again, the standardizationturns the idiom on its head, a celebration of punkbecomes a begrudging acceptance. Current Italian slangoffers the alternative of “il punk è fico.”At what sort of angle...we stand to the world > in qualeangolo del mondo...noi stiamoThis is one of many deliberately imprecise expressionsused by Geertz to refer to “ways of living” or “ways ofbeing in the world.” The Italian misinterprets angle asangolo (corner instead of angolatura) and eliminates“sort of,” thus accentuating the misinterpretation by makingit more precise than the original. A related example isthe phrase “turn of mind,” which is translated on oneoccasion as the generic “modo di pensare” (way of thinking)and on another as the odd “giri di mente,” neither ofwhich captures the allusion to a special shape or attitudeas in “the turn of his chin” and similar expressions.like nostalgia, diversity is not what it used to be > alpari della nostalgia, la diversità non è ciò che solevaessereOnce again, Geertz dips into the language of popular culture,this time an old comic line sometimes attributed tothe American “Mr. Malaprop,” former baseball playerYogi Berra, as a way of branding Rorty and Lévi-Straussas nostalgics. But Geertz’s (or Yogi’s) oxymoron is lostin the Italian, which might have done better with “non èpiù quella di una volta.”They don’t make Umwelte like they used to > non costituivanoUmwelt come succedeva una voltaLike the previous example, this is another play on thenostalgia theme through manipulation of an old sayingby inserting the pretentious-sounding academic Germanexpression into the form of the popular adage. In Italian,we get the standard language of the academy. The playfulnessdisappears and so does the barb.It’s their ears and their funeral > gli orecchi sono i loroe sono affari loroAnother standardization of an American idiom, this timeinto a standard Italian idiom. But the expression “theirfuneral” is itself a play on the usual “their business,”which is all we get in the Italian, without the additionalironic twist. Admittedly, such twists are always difficultto translate, but one possibility might be to make a playon an Italian alternative to the standard Italian expression:gli orecchi sono i loro e anche i cavoli, per quantoamari.some bats are battier than others > alcuni pipistrelli sonopiù pipistrelli di altriGeertz uses Danto’s reference to bats several times tocreate a kind of leitmotiv. This time he takes advantageof the metaphorical connotation of mental illnessattached to the adjective “bats” or “batty” to make thepoint that even those we call different have differencesamong them. Since pipistrelli don’t carry the same connotationin Italian, it might have been better to changeanimals: alcuni cavalli sono più matti di altri.The foregoing examples show Geertz playing withpopular sayings, mixing registers, juxtaposing formal andinformal tone to broaden the appeal of his argument andto sharpen his critique of his adversaries. Another strategyhe employs for the same purposes is allusion, both literaryand otherwise. Here are two examples of nonliter-24 Translation Review
Page 2: TRANSLATION REVIEWNo. 66, 2003TABLE
Page 5 and 6: I could about the period. I tried t
Page 7 and 8: ings are for. But there are also so
Page 9 and 10: and we see how that is expressed in
Page 11 and 12: NOT GETTING IT RIGHTBy David Ferry[
Page 13 and 14: songs of the dead,” but it’s no
Page 15 and 16: oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia p
Page 17 and 18: FROM DEAN TO DEANTREPRENEUR: THE AC
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Page 42 and 43: ON THE CATHAY TOUR WITH ELIOT WEINB
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Page 72 and 73: THE MEXICAN POET HOMERO ARIDJISBy R
Page 74 and 75: THE ART OF WARSUN-TZUEdited, Transl
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Street of Lost FootstepsBy Lyonel T
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