Hell and Back Read online

  I mention this episode because it offers the opportunity to make two reflections: first that, aside from economic reasons, a writer will change language successfully only when the particular aesthetic he has drives him to it. Not otherwise. One can see how, obsessed as he was by the compulsive nature of language, our lack of individual control over it and its distance from our experience of reality, a writer like Beckett would choose to work in a second language where any alienation he might feel, or lack of expertise he might fear, would play to his poetic. Joyce, on the contrary, whose project was exactly the opposite of Beckett’s - an attempt to use all the resources of language to recover our experience of place and time, to make the text, as the young Beckett described it, ‘not about something, but that something itself - remained anchored, despite all his experiments and all his years abroad, to Dublin and to English.

  The second reflection that arises out of the otherwise trivial episode of my Italian novel, is that the very notion of ‘stylistic transgression’ may have a very different value in different cultures. I nani di domani was accepted because its trangressions, even when intended and aimed at some particular target, could nevertheless be seen as the amusing shortcomings of the learner, of one seeking to become an initiate on the same level as the reader. In this sense, far from being subversive, the book was actually reinforcing convention. And Italian is a language where there has been very little seriously transgressive prose of the Lawrence or Beckett variety, and much extremely attractive writing within generally accepted, and in the end by no means despicable, conventions. This, after all, is a country where one of the leading satirical magazines will still reject an article because it too aggressively attacks Catholic sensibilities, a country where a famous writer and translator like Elio Vittorini could openly defend the radical cuts and changes he made to Lawrence’s work on the grounds that not to make them would ‘damage the beauty of the prose’. Certainly - for example - there is nothing transgressive that I can see in the Italian translations of Kundera’s work.

  Italy is thus a country with very different sensibilities from England, where these days a novel with even the most modest literary pretensions is obliged to be openly transgressive at the linguistic level, something that has led to the tedious multiplication of idiosyncrasies and the wholehearted, often uncomprehending, acceptance of different forms of English from all over the world. The quirky is at a premium. Thus, in a sense, to write in a rigidly ‘conventional’ prose becomes itself a form of transgression.

  Shortly after winning the Booker Prize, Kazuo Ishiguro, the Anglo-Japanese writer, gave an interview to Time magazine in which he criticised his British contemporaries for writing in ways that made translation difficult. His rigidly austere prose, which so effectively expresses the emotional limitations of his protagonist in The Remains of the Day, was, he claimed, partly the result of his attentiveness to eventual translations. He pared his English down to what a translator in any language could easily handle. What Ishiguro could not have appreciated is that the underlying menace of that precise conventional voice disappears entirely in, say, Italian where such a controlled form of expression is common in prose fiction. The distance Ishiguro establishes from other writers in English has gone. What is disturbing, if one wishes to be disturbed by such things, is with what appetite the public laps up translated literary works whose essential cohesion has all too often been lost in translation. Might it be, I sometimes wonder, precisely that loss of depth that makes translations attractive?

  And yet I translate and people tell me they enjoy my translations. So I would like to wind up by considering my relationship with one of the Italian authors I have translated and to look at a paragraph of his work in original and translation.

  Roberto Calasso is about as different from myself as a writer could be. A meticulous scholar, admirably intellectual, he sternly avoids any autobiographical material. His creative reconstructions of Greek and Indian mythology have the advantage, from the translator’s point of view, that they contain little that is culture-specific to Italy in terms of semantic content. They are attempts to enter and regenerate different mindframes, though of course they do so from an Italian starting point and in the Italian language. If my own writing has matured and changed radically over the last few years, it is largely due to my reflections on Calasso’s work and on what it has meant to translate it. Sometimes, however, it occurs to me that I have come closer to putting him into English in the echoes of his writing in my own than in my translations. But here he is, introducing the god Apollo in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:

  Delo era un dorso di roccia déserta, navigava seguendo la pg=>corrente come un gambo di asfodelo. Nacque li Apollo, dove neppure le serve infelici vanno a nascondersi. Su quello scoglio perduto a partorire, prima di Leto, erano state le foche. Cera perô una palma, a cui si aggrappô la madre, sola, puntando le ginocchia sulla magra erba. E Apollo apparve. Allora tutto divenne d’oro sin dalle fondamenta. D’oro anche l’acqua del fiume, anche le foglie dell’ulivo. Quell’ oro doveva espandersi nel profondo del mare, perche ancorô Delo. Non fix più, da allora, isola errante.

  As I suggested, Calasso’s book involves a daring recreation of Greek mythology and one is struck throughout both by the vatic authority of the tone and the presentation of myth as real event, or at least as something that requires no apology. The voice combines certain poetic or archaic elements, particularly of diction and focusing, with the short, even terse sentences that we tend to associate with modern prose. That is, while it draws on literary resources from previous periods, it does not appear to be a pastiche, but rather uses them to acquire a peremptory authority that is all its own. Since not everyone reading this will understand Italian, let me try, however unsatisfactory this approach may be, to give you a brutally literal translation so that you can grasp, in however crude a form, the content offered.

  Delos was a spine of deserted rock, it sailed about following the current like a stalk of asphodel. Born here was Apollo, where not even the unhappy servant girls go to hide themselves. On that lost rock to give birth before Leda were the seals. There was, however, a palm tree to which the mother clutched, alone, bracing her knees on the sparse grass. And Apollo appeared. Then everything became gold right from the bottom. Of gold also the water of the river, also the leaves of the olive tree. That gold was to expand into the depth of the sea. Because it anchored Delos. It was no longer, from then on, a wandering island.

  From the purely semantic point of view, this is a faithful translation. The Italian is not standard Italian and this likewise is very far from standard English. The focusing, particularly, is bizarre in both texts, most notably in the flourish, “Born here was Apollo …’ (“Nacque li Apollo …’) But one transgression is not equivalent to the other. Where the Italian elegantly and fluently -for there is rhythm and alliteration in plenty here - gestures back towards archaic forms to acquire its lofty tone, the English drifts aimlessly about the syntactical currents of the original; and if it is not incoherent semantically, it certainly is so in terms of register and thus risks drawing more attention to its own vagaries than to its content (in a way the Italian does not).

  So the English will have to be changed. But how? A standard modern English would be banal and inappropriate. The only solution would seem to be to draw on the resources of an older English as Calasso has drawn on those of an older Italian. But notoriously these resources are not equivalent. In short, to be faithful to Calasso’s strategy and the reading experience it generates, which I so enjoy, I shall have to appropriate - that awful word - the text into an English context. But any notion of translation without appropriation is nonsense. The only way not to appropriate a text is to leave it in its original language. Here is the published translation:

  Delos was a hump of deserted rock, drifting about the sea like a stalk of asphodel. It was here that Apollo was born, in a place not even wretched slave girls would come to hide their shame. Before Leda, the only creatures to gi
ve birth on that godforsaken rock had been the seals. But there was a palm tree, and the mother clutched it, alone, bracing her knees in the thin grass. Then Apollo emerged, and everything turned to gold, from top to bottom. Even the water in the river turned to gold and the leaves on the olive tree likewise. And the gold must have stretched downward into the depths, because it anchored Delos to the seabed. From that day on, the island drifted no more.

  There is neither time nor space here to go through this translation line by line: suffice it to say that when I have invited students to compare these passages they invariably remark on the very different syntactical structuring of the two texts, and the more generous lexicon of the English. Thus Nacque li Apollo” has become: ‘It was here that Apollo was born …’, the English retaining the focus on ‘here’ at the expense of a much longer and more regular locution. And the rhythmic, alliterative 'Su quello scoglio perduto a partorire, prima di Leto, erano state le fochë' (On that lost rock to give birth before Leda were the seals) has become: ‘Before Leda, the only creatures to give birth on that godforsaken rock had been the seals.’ Once more the foregrounding of the place and, in this case, the focus on ‘seals’ at the end of the sentence, has been kept at the expense of a certain expansion. The Italian is powerfully elliptical, in a way that much poetic material in Italian gestures back to Latin ellipsis. While this is sometimes possible in English, it is rarely so when the content is determined by another language.

  Meanwhile in lexical terms, one notes how 'serve infelici” (unhappy servant girls) has become ‘wretched slave girls’ ‘perduto” (lost) has become ‘godforsaken’, ‘nascondersi’ (hide themselves), has become ‘hide their shame’, and the word ‘seabed’ has been introduced to offer an anchor to ‘anchored’ which in English seems to require an indirect object.

  How long it would take to discuss each one of these and all the other decisions involved in the translation of this brief text! How complex it all is, not just syntactically, but in terms of the larger literary context. At first sight, it would appear that I offer the perfect example of Kundera’s obtuse translator, substituting one sentence for two at one point, using more literary words, entirely reorganising almost all the sentences. But Italian is not English and the spirit guiding these decisions is clear enough. The English is groping for a rhetorical tone, a register, comparable to that of the Italian, drawing on an archaic, perhaps biblical language with which my vicarage youth makes me all too familiar. Given the larger and more layered lexicon of English, the move away from ‘unhappy’ to ‘wretched’ is dictated by the need to gesture to the classical world through the use of a slight archaism (infelice in Italian sits happily with either a modern or archaic register). In English a ‘servant girl’ would normally be a ‘maid’, which would tend to make us think of the British upper classes, hence the switch to ‘slave girls’. ‘Hide themselves is as inelegant as third-person plural reflexives tend to be in English and, what’s more, not immediately comprehensible here, hence the interpretative introduction of ‘hide their shame’. The ‘lost rock’ would not easily give the Italian sense of ‘far away from anywhere’, nor would it, as does the word 'perduto', offer alliteration (“perduto a partorire, prima …’). The choice of ’godforsaken’ does give that sense and offers a rhythmic alliteration with the earlier ‘gives’, albeit at the risk of introducing a concept not present in the Italian. The last sentence of the translation, ‘From that day on, the island drifted no more’, completely rearranges the Italian to discover a poetic register complete with alliteration that matches the original in gesture if not in exact semantics.

  So the text is now in English. It is faithful in that it suggests a consistent, coherent relationship between this voice and a literary past, not unlike that of Calasso’s text. It includes much of the same alliteration, rhythm and peremptory fluency. Am I happy with it? Yes and no. The main failing comes in the translation of E Apollo apparve. Allora tutto divenne doro sin dalle fondamental. This is clearly the climax the text has been working towards. And here I lost my nerve. Having already used an ‘and’, rather than a relative, to link the previous sentence, I chose to begin this sentence with ‘Then’. This would be all very well if the next Italian sentence didn’t begin with ‘Allora’. Unable in the translation to start a second sentence with ‘then’, I thus chose to run the two sentences together. Looking at the whole thing in Italian and English we have:

  E Apollo apparve. Allom tutto divenne doro sin dalle fondamenta.

  Then Apollo emerged, and everything turned to gold, from top to bottom.

  Clearly the English loses drama by not introducing a fullstop after ‘emerged’. Worse, it loses the now extravagant alliteration of ‘Apollo apparve’ (an alliteration then echoed, as it were, in ‘Allora’). Why? I was worried about the semantics of ’appeared’ as a description of birth, thinking that this word might be more acceptable in Italian than English. I also felt the alliteration was now overly heavy. I thus settled for ‘emerged’ which, on reflection, seems no more appropriate than ‘appeared’, since one does not, I don’t think, speak of babies as ‘emerging’, though technically one might see that this is a more accurate choice. But my real mistake here was not to think in terms of the relation of style and content, not to understand what Calasso was up to. Apollo is the god of ‘appearance’, of beauty, of art. With him, appearance, as it were, appears, for the first time. And with this sentence the alliteration, the artifice of the paragraph, now comes to the surface in a way that no one can ignore. Had I been aware of all this, I would surely have had the courage to write: ‘And Apollo appeared.’

  But even assuming I made this correction, my difficulty here does little more than suggest a deeper loss that takes place in this translation. We have noted that almost all the changes I have made to adjust register and rhythm involve a slight loss of concision, a slight expansion. But perhaps the best way I can explain my misgivings is by quoting the next paragraph from the original.

  L’Olimpo si distacca da ogni altra dimora celeste per la presenza di tre divinità innaturali: Apollo, Artemis, Atena. Irriducibili a una fiinzione, imperiose custodi dell’unico, hanno stracciato quella lieve cortina opaca ehe la natura tesse intorno alle sue potenze. Lo smalto e il vuoto, il profilo, la freccia. Questi i loro elementi, non acqua o terra.

  Here Calasso begins his presentation of the Greek obsession with appearance and aesthetics, the sharp line, the fine profile, a love affair with clarity, the territory of Apollo. And clearly it is to this that his prose is aspiring. Indeed we could compare the sharpness of Calasso’s focusing with the clarity of gesture on those black-on-white designs that characterise the pictorial vases of the early Hellenic period. A literal translation will be so ugly and clumsy as to give only a vague idea of this intention. But here it is:

  Olympus detaches itself from every other celestial dwelling through the presence of three unnatural divinities: Apollo, Artemis, Athena. Irreducible to one function, imperious custodians of the unique, they tore away that flimsy, opaque screen that nature weaves around its forces. The enamel and the void, the profile, the arrow. These their elements, not water or earth.

  Once again it is clear that this will not do. The intention is lost in the extravagant unusualness of the English which seems to have no point of contact with the rhythms of any known English prosody. Once again, as we shall see, the published translation seeks a rhetorical gesture similar to that of the original, but at the expense of that concision that welds the style of the Italian to its subject. Note in particular what heavy weather is made of that crucial and crucially brief sentence, Lo smalto e il vuoto, il profilo, la freccia.

  If Olympus differs from every other celestial home, it is thanks to the presence of three unnatural divinities: Apollo, Artemis, Athena. More than mere functions, these imperious custodians of the unique stripped away that thin, shrouding curtain which nature weaves about its forces. The bright enamelled surface and the void, the sharp outline, the arrow. These, an
d not water or earth, are their elements.

  The problem in this case is that one simply cannot translate the semantic freight of 'smalto', or 'profilo'? as used here in Italian with just one word. And then of course there are questions of rhythm and balance to consider, two aesthetic qualities as dear to Apollo as clarity. Yet precisely because one appreciates how much Calasso’s text is doing, one fervently wishes one could have followed the Italian more closely. Perhaps the most dangerous moments for a translator are those when he so admires the original, so understands its surrounding context, that he wishes his own language were the same as the language he is working from, and then stubbornly tries to make it so. This is the territory of Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin, which is all but unreadable; it is the experience of the bilingual person who is shocked by the idea that the same text can be so radically different in two different languages, as different indeed as those two languages are from each other. It is the starting point of all Kundera’s criticism. It also explains, I hope, why I have decided never to translate into Italian. And never to translate poetry. The more poetic, or transgressive, a text is, the more it departs from familiar usage, so the more it comes to be about the language it is written in, not in a narrow linguistic sense, but in the sense of all that language stands for and supports. While I feel I can manage this conundrum with prose, where content still plays its very large part, I find poetry, not being a poet, quite beyond me.