GOD SAVE THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE. FROM THE BAD TRANSLATORS

CULTURA. IN ALTRE PAROLE. By Michele Gravino. IL VENERDI DI REPUBBLICA. English Rendering By CrossCommunicationBiz - Salvatore Ivan Italiano

There are too many errors in the English versions of the Italian literary masterpieces reports the writer Tim Parks. He explains how he has translated Leopardi, Moravia, Pavese … and the way he teaches how to do it.

FLORENCE. Let us picture an "English expat writer in Italy" and we can conjure up a gentleman wandering among the hamlets in the Chianti-Shire and between the villas in Capri, ready to rediscover the meaning of life before a dish of pappardella and wild boar or during a conversation with a fisherman at dawn. And when he is invited to conferences and talk shows to discuss the secular problems of Italy he needs a simultaneous interpreter.

Tim Parks is not affected in this way. He was born in Manchester in 1954 and he is the author of numerous novels and essays. He has been living in Italy for almost forty years, but he has done so away from the postcard-like landscapes: He has for a long time lived in the province of Verona and has for a few years now been established in Milan.

He has written about Italians with both humor and harshness starting with his co-residents in the Veneto Region (in the longseller Italiani) and about his fellow football fans of the team Hellas Verona (Questa pazza fede): but he has never described Italians as anachronistic good savages or as devils in paradise. Above all, Parks knows the Italian culture and language very well – better said that he is in love with them, if this was not a rhetorical excess not suited to his character – so much so that he has rendered into English Machiavelli and Leopardi, Moravia and Tabucchi, Calasso and Pavese. Parks is also a researcher and a theorist of translation studies: he teaches it at the IULM University in Milan and writes about it in numerous magazines as well among which is the New York Review of Books.

From 7 January he will be running intensive classes – named by him check-up courses – for about fifteen Italian-to-English professional translators at the Fenysia school of "linguaggi della cultura" founded last year in Florence. A wide-spread misconception is that any given excellent translation has to be, in some way, unfaithful and/or vice versa. He said this at the headquarters of the school, a labyrinthine and noble floor in the splendid PUCCI building in the centre of Florence. However, this is often an excuse to conceal shabby or ignorant translators and, in most cases, the clients concerned are unable to make their own judgement in view of them not possessing an adequate knowledge of the source language. With these translations from Italian this happens more often than thought.

For example? In a recent English edition of the novel of Ferrara by George Bassani, incidentally released by a serious publisher, there is a self-styled refugee - sedicente profugo [the English translation of sedicente is self-styled] wrongly rendered into English as a sixteen year-old refugee [the Italian word sedicenne (sixteen year-old) is not sedicente (self-styled). Not to mention that another Jewish character, who "had no intention to convert himself” [IT: a convertirsi non ci pensava affatto] in the English translation “converted himself without a second thought.”

These are not just plain mistakes: it means that the translator in question does not understand the elementary expressions of the language from which he is translating; in this instance Italian. By the end he has distorted the actual meaning of the original version. There are dozens of such mistakes in this novel. It could be expected that for technical translations – such as product flyers, for example – that mistakes would not be tolerated. This is the very paradox of literature: we consider it to be the highest expression of human ingenuity for its being rich in meaning, hints and innuendo but when we are required to make it available in another language for the general public, it is put in the hands of untrained translators who are in any case underpaid and subjected to a three-month deadline without revisions and/or any expert advice. 

However, it seems from this point of view that the Anglo-Saxon publishing business is more inaccurate than its Italian counterpart. Without any doubt - there is more attention to it in Italy. The translation industry here was born much earlier: perhaps because Italy did not have a tradition of fictional entertainment which flourished, instead, in England or in France. There was considerable translation in hand in the 20s and 30s and so much so that the labour union of the fascist writers made an official protest to Mussolini for an excess of xenophilia. Vittorini responded that without translations the Italian publishers would have gone out of business.

Today, however, the English audience seems more attentive to the translated books: for example, the international success of Camilleri or Elena Ferrante … Yes, the English and Americans simply started to translate more. Then, after some pats on their backs, they began to think of themselves as more worldly wise. Those who read translated versions are in some way rather smug with their perceived broad mindedness. They feel that they are part of other cultures and in a manner concerned with world problems. They think that they draw fully from great literature even when the works before them are of average value.  

It is not by chance that the international literary prizes - the Nobel above all - were born, more or less, together with the big sporting events such as the Olympic Games or the Football World Cup: They are all attempts to construct a uniform international community based upon a certain liberal ideology, perhaps naïve, illusory …  

What are the main difficulties for those who translate from Italian? None of the idiomatic expressions have a precise target word for translation: tagliare la corda, fare bella figura, farsi le ossa … In general there is a different way of perceiving and dividing the world. The Italian word "fratelli": does it mean just brothers or sisters too? In English I have to specify it. That famous passage in Lessico famigliare by Natalia Ginzburg: "Siamo cinque fratelli …" "We are five brothers and sisters" - it does not exist, it is not English. I had to write "There are five of us, brothers and sisters." But it would be clumsy.

Not to mention the dialects … No, that is a false problem. I can use a colloquial and informal register, but rendering in English the dialect of Gadda or Cammilleri is impossible, period. I cannot make Montalbano speak as a native of Liverpool.

What are you translating now? I am working on La luna e i falò by Cesare Pavese. That is difficult: when I look for a word in the dictionary of which I am unaware, it is almost always stated that the word has been found only in Pavese.

My objective, and which I try also to communicate to my students, is to - perhaps idealistically – render into my own language the experience that I have had when reading the book in the original. Obviously, I can afford to do so because I have other sources of income. If I had to calculate my working hours as a translator I would be paid less than a baby-sitter.