Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

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