Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

ary allusion, to slogans or key words from American historyand jurisprudence, that don’t make a perfect transitioninto the Italian.as someone has said of the writings of V.S. Naipaul …making the world safe for condescension > a fare delmondo un luogo tranquillamente adatto alla condiscendenzaGeertz, or the “someone” he cites, refers to WoodrowWilson’s claim that World War I would “make the worldsafe for democracy,” often used as an example of naïvetéor demagoguery and later spoofed during the Gulf Warwhen some critics accused the United States of trying to“make the world safe for Emirs.” The allusion doesn’tcome across at all in the translation, which does manage,nevertheless, to communicate the substance of the critique.a clear and present danger > un pericolo chiaro edattualeThe reference here is to Supreme Court Justice OliverWendell Holmes’ opinion in a case regarding the powerof the government to limit free speech: “words that createa clear and present danger that they will bring aboutsubstantive evils” may be restricted. The Italian translationleaves nothing to be desired except perhaps a footnotewith an explanation of the allusion. Left as is, itseems highly unlikely that Italian readers could appreciateor evaluate the aptness of the allusion to Geertz’sargument and the implication that it is the words of theethnocentrists rather than those of the cultural relativiststhat need to be defended against.Before he set out on his career as an ethnographer,Geertz’s dream was to become a novelist. His love ofand knowledge of literature are evident in the many literaryallusions in “The Uses of Diversity” and throughoutAvailable Light. In most cases, as we have seen withFlannery O’Connor, Geertz is careful to cite the authorand sometimes the title of the work. Such explicit allusionscreate few problems for the translator; thingsbecome more challenging, however, when the allusion isimplicit and neither author nor work is identified, as inthese two examples:Their different hobby-horses notwithstanding > nonostante… le lore differenti fissazioniAs in the “clear and present danger” example, the translationagain comes up with a perfectly adequate synonymfor “hobby-horse”: fissazione. But, of course, Geertz’schoice to use “hobby-horse” rather than “fixation” carrieswith it an allusion to Laurence Sterne’s seminalnovel Tristram Shandy, whose narrator’s sarcastic expositionof the use of “hobby-horses” by “the wisest men ofall ages, not excepting Solomon himself,” has foreverpainted the poor little toy animal in tones of ridicule that“fixation” has yet to acquire. Replacing “fissazione” withthe literal translation “cavalluccio di legno” would certainlybe even less adequate, but an explanatory footnotewould allow Italian readers access to the literary/philosophicalbackground shared by many if not most of theirAnglophone counterparts.It [anthropology] has stressed particularity, idiosyncrasy,incommensurability, cabbages and kings > Ha sottolineatola particolarità, l’idiosincrasia, l’incommensurabilità,cavoli e reThis is also an implicit allusion to a classic work ofEnglish literature, Lewis Carroll’s Through the LookingGlass, as well as a vintage Disney animated film, Alicein Wonderland. Carroll’s work is no doubt much betterknown in Italy than Sterne’s, and perhaps for this reason,the translator has decided to transpose Geertz’s allusionunchanged into Italian. But to appreciate Geertz’s use ofthis allusion and its communicative force with anEnglish-speaking readership, we might imagine an Italianauthor making a reference to “il gatto e la volpe,” twocharacters from Pinocchio who have by now becomealmost synonymous with deception and underhandedtrickery. The English translation of such an allusion as“the cat and the fox” would be correct but hardly satisfactory.Even readers, or movie-goers, familiar withPinocchio would be unlikely to appreciate the resonanceof the reference to Italian readers. In our case, anexplanatory note would seem to be doubly useful insofaras Geertz’s allusion to Carroll’s poem appears to serve asa description of and a further allusion to his ownapproach to cultural anthropology, namely empiricalstudy of the variety of human cultures rather than thesearch for underlying common structures:“ ‘The time has come’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of manythings:Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax —Of cabbages — and kingsAnd why the sea is boiling hot –And whether pigs have wings.’”Translation Review 25