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agreement than dissent. The authors of both books agree,for example, that translation is a form of interpretationthat starts with a solid knowledge of both languages andboth cultures; that there is no one right way to translate atext; that translation requires both creativity and method(research, self-awareness, and consistency); that methodand theory must be based in practice; that the elements tobe weighed in making choices include genre, purpose,intended audience, and structural and expressive featuresof the text; that translation always involves loss; and soon.The essential difference is not absolute but a questionof emphasis. Whereas Thinking Italian Translationstresses a methodology for translation choices ensuringthe conservation of as much as possible of the “salientfeatures” of the original text, which features are presumablyobjectively recognizable, the Manuale stresses theindividual talent of the translator in identifying these featuresand replicating or transforming them. This statementfrom Marco Fazzini’s essay on translating poetry isa typical example: “And yet, a clear and unifying strategyfor translation does not exist …. [T]ranslationoften means inventing one’s own strategies, extractingthem from the features of the text that one chooses totranslate, including its linguistic particularities (syntactical,lexical, etc.) which that text contains necessarily invarying degrees, and to which the translator would bewell-advised to pay more than a little attention.” (emphasisadded)But even if these two approaches to translation arenot quite so different as they first might seem, the booksdo have different strengths and weaknesses as instrumentsfor teaching and/or learning the art of translation.Thinking Italian Translation provides an extensive andstandard terminology that can be used to analyze textsfrom all genres. It follows from this that students andtranslators working in different fields can use the terminologyand the methodological techniques to shareinsights and experiences and learn from each other asthey identify the common aspects of texts across differentgenres. Students and translators can use this book tolearn and improve a variety of interpretive skills that canthen be applied to all kinds of texts. It can provide them,in other words, with basic skills that can be transferredfrom one specialized field to another. It is worth notinghere a subtle difference in phrasing between the twobooks: Thinking Italian Translation states that its methodapplies “to any text given for translation,” whereas theManuale tends to speak of texts “the translator chooses”to translate. The first formulation envisions a trained professionalwith a flexible set of skills able to serve a variedclientele, the second an artisan whose clientele isdetermined by his choice of material and projects towork on.In a certain sense, the strengths of one approach arehighlighted by the weaknesses of the other, and viceversa.The individual essays of the Manuale consistentlyfail to note and examine the common features betweengenres, even where the insights of the individual authorswould seem to call for it. The authors of the essays oncinema, theater, and comic strips, for example, all makethe interesting observation that their genre differs frommost text-to-text translation because the translator musttake account of the relationship between text and image.None of them, however, examine the similarities and differencesbetween stage and cinema, say, or between themoving image (cinema and TV) and a sequence of stillimages (comic strips) and the implications of those similaritiesand differences for translation. Another missedopportunity for comparative discussion involves thecomparison of translations of poetry and prose. Severalof the authors in the Manuale mention that in non-literaryprose translation (literary criticism, medical texts),the translator has more liberty with respect to form, morefreedom to, in Goethe’s formulation, “move the texttoward the reader.” With regard to poetry, on the otherhand, Massimilano Morini contrasts the translation ofcontent-based poetry, “The Temple of Nature” byErasmus Darwin, and form-based poetry, “The Huntingof the Snark” by Lewis Carroll, to conclude that thetranslator can take more formal liberties in translating thelatter. So the content/form distinction would seem tohave inverse consequences for translation, depending onwhether the original text is in poetry or prose, but thegenre-enclosed format of the Manuale does not allowthis question to be raised and addressed.But more than anything else, what undermines theManuale’s usefulness as a teaching tool is its choice ofthe apprenticeship model. Having rejected the feasibilityof developing and teaching a systematic and generallyapplicable methodology, the editors and readers of theManuale are left with the strengths and weaknesses ofthe performances of the individual maestri. Fortunately,many of the presentations included here are very welldone and instructive. Maurizio Ascari’s article on theshort story makes excellent use of comparisons of histranslations of Katherine Mansfield and WilliamFaulkner with previous translations to demonstrate theimportance of analyzing and interpreting the semantic,prosodic, and cultural aspects of the text in makingTranslation Review 55
choices of how to render those features in the TL. MarcoFazzini’s article on translating Scottish and SouthAfrican poetry provides a superb example of sensitiveanalysis of the visual as well as the phonic and rhythmicaspects of poetry and the careful preservation or reconstructionin the TT of dialectical diversions from standardSL. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Fazzini’s translationof Edwin Morgan’s “Opening the Cage” is also discussedin Thinking Italian Translation.) AlessandroSerpieri’s examination of the “peculiarities of dramatictexts” illuminates the complex relationship between spokenlanguage, visual images, and the language of mimeand gesture.But the strength of these and other individual performancesonly confirms the limitations of teaching orrather of “showing” how to translate exclusively byexamples. For what distinguishes the best articles in thecollection is their authors’ ability to articulate, illustrate,and apply a systematic, albeit avowedly personal,methodology. Ascari expresses this quite well by way ofthis ironic twist on the Italian adage “traduttore/traditore”:“it seems to me that the translator shows himselfto be a ‘traitor,’ as the old adage goes, only when thelack of correspondence between the source text and thetranslated text are the product of neglect and indifference,but there is no betrayal when the distance is theresult of careful choices, subject to precise formal rules.In other words, one must ‘betray with art.’” Ascari’sobservation implies, of course, that “art” necessarilydepends on method, and the fundamental weakness ofthe maestro approach to teaching translation is that itinhibits the systematic articulation and transfer ofmethod across genre divisions and beyond the individualmaestro’s range of operation.Finally, there is one issue that both books raise, eachin its own way, but in my opinion fail to answer satisfactorilywith regard to literary translation, and that is thequestion of what should be the translator’s objective.Thinking Italian Translation frames the issue in a usefulway by defining “translation loss” as the incompletereplication of the ST in the TT and pointing out that, inany translation, loss is inevitable. The goal for the translatorthen, in any genre, becomes not to maximize samenessor equivalence but to minimize difference: “thechallenge to the translator is not to eliminate [loss] but tocontrol it and channel it by deciding which features, in agiven ST, it is most important to respect, and which canmost legitimately be sacrificed in respecting them.” Inkeeping with their horizontal, cross-genre approach, theauthors then conclude that there is no universal criterionfor making these decisions and that “everything dependson the purpose of the translation and on what the role ofthe textual feature is in the text.” True enough, but ashelpful as it is to frame the question in terms of acceptingand minimizing loss, this formulation still leavestranslators without much guidance in deciding what lossesto accept in any specific situation. The literary translatoris still caught in the traditional bind between fidelityto the ST and fidelity to the TL and the TL reader.As mentioned earlier, most of the essays in theManuale concern literary genres, but each author eitherdefines his objective in individual terms or, in thosecases in which the author proposes a more generalanswer, tends to overstate the case for a single standard.In her article on translating for the cinema, for example,Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli quotes Gianni Galassi,one of the most famous Italian dubbing directors, andthen endorses his prescriptions as a model for all translation:“ ‘The accomplishment of a dialogue writer ismeasured by his ability to forget how the original linewas constructed, to distill the proposition, any subtexts,allusions, intentions and reformulate it in Italian as if hewere the writer of the script.’ It seems to us that this iswhat every good translator must do with whatever kindof text, with the only difference being that the reformulation,in the case of dubbing, must take into account therelationship between image and word.” This unquestioningendorsement of domesticating translation seems to bean overstatement even if restricted to cinema — there aremany genres of film, some of which would undoubtedlybe better served by a more foreignizing approach — butit is certainly unacceptable as an evaluative tool for literarytranslation.Another author in the Manuale, Sylvia Notini, proposesthat literary translators should be guided byMatthew Arnold’s appeal to what Eugene Nida has called“dynamic equivalence.” In literary translation, Notinistates, one must “put oneself in the mind of the authorand confront the text as if s/he were present. I agree withMatthew Arnold when he holds that the objective of thetranslator should be that of ‘producing on his readers aneffect as much as possible analogous to that which theoriginal presumably produces on the audience for whichit was intended.’” That is a very high-sounding goal, butas the authors of Thinking Italian Translation point out,it is impossible to know what effect the original producedon its readers, while it is certain that it did not producethe same effect on all of them. As a practical matterthen, Arnold’s advice is not all that helpful.At the same time, however, Arnold’s and Notini’s56 Translation Review
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TRANSLATION REVIEWNo. 66, 2003TABLE
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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
Page 19 and 20: elations and fundraising in part to
Page 21 and 22: academic leadership in the post-ent
Page 24 and 25: his ideas.” Schweder’s closing
Page 26 and 27: cially in light of the considerable
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Page 30 and 31: SAD TROPICS, OR TRISTES TROPIQUES?B
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Page 36 and 37: During the period 1989-1997 when Da
Page 38 and 39: da fuori non si vede niente, però
Page 40 and 41: only to then qualify, rebut, or exp
Page 42 and 43: ON THE CATHAY TOUR WITH ELIOT WEINB
Page 44 and 45: “Thaar’s where ole Marse Shao u
Page 46 and 47: Chinese lady’s I or my beginningM
Page 48 and 49: It is not a bad translation, but th
Page 50 and 51: Facing SnowEnough new ghosts to mou
Page 52 and 53: likely a tea the speaker had been d
Page 54 and 55: 1945 to face trial for treason for
Page 56 and 57: METHOD OR MAESTRI: TWO APPROACHES T
Page 60 and 61: analogy between author and SL reade
Page 62 and 63: vide the reader with the finest lit
Page 64 and 65: languages, every language is potent
Page 66 and 67: (10th c.) is remarkably similar to
Page 68 and 69: eight distinct cases, whereas Engli
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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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Page 78 and 79: dence and bear close scrutiny wheth
Page 80 and 81: Street of Lost FootstepsBy Lyonel T
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