Tell me what you read and I will tell you how you translate
How I discovered that my literary background (and, truth be told, taste) influenced the way I translated texts.
Reading Manzoni is a cultural must. Reading Amy Hempel, though, is an experience that leaves beautifully carved scars in your memory. Sorry not sorry, dear Alessandro. I had better not repeat the above sentences in Italy, unless I want to be chased by an enraged crowd of Italian literature professors, coming out of their ivory towers armed with pitchforks and torches to punish my brazenness.Literary feuds aside, who is Amy Hempel and what does she have to do with the way I translate texts? Hempel is an American writer, mostly famous for her short stories. She has written four collections (Reasons to live, At the gates of the animal kingdom, Tumble home, The dog of the marriage) and I personally recommend (read: assertively order) you go to the nearest Waterstones and grab a copy of her Collected stories, where you can find all of her four collections in a single volume. She is normally regarded, along with Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk and a bunch of others, as an exponent of a literary movement that was on the rise in the 70s-80s: minimalism. However, rather than a minimalist, she has always preferred to be called what Raymond Carver himself called her at first: a ‘precisionist’. And how is this ‘precision’ demonstrated in her work? Simple: her sentences are short. Sometimes as short as the sentences of a poem. Sometimes a single sentence is a short story in itself. An example? Here’s the short story Housewife:
She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, “French film, French film.”
Brief, chiselled, polished. Each sentence is a little work of art, and it feels as if she spent hours on some of them. And she also has a surgical precision when it comes to omitting things from her short stories that nevertheless have a big impact on the narration. Also, the thing that she most loves to omit is cheap sentimentalism, and in 2017 I think we could really do with less cheesy or tear-laden literature. So in short: brief, concise sentences. Each sentence is contained by a full stop, and so is the meaning it carries. Before reading the original text, I was delighted by the Italian translation that Silvia Pareschi has carried out of The collected stories, that were finally published in Italy with the title of the first collection, Ragioni per vivere. Pareschi did a wonderful job and kept intact the witty voice of the author. What happens when you read Hempel (along with her other minimalists, such as Palahniuk –who defined Hempel as ‘the goddess of writers’– and the above-mentioned Carver) is that you grow accustomed to the rhythm of those perfect, short sentences. You start hating the long ones, burdened with descriptions of places and people, filled with too many adjectives and adverbs. Let us face it: no matter how thorough a description can be, you end up conjuring up an image that is completely yours of a character or a place. Well, that is what happens to me, at least.
So, back to my point: I had fallen in love with Hempel’s rhythm to the extent that I ended up producing translated texts into Italian that reflected it. Or, I should say, I stopped noticing that the way the English language organises information, sentences and more in general texts (in other words, the way in which English achieves cohesion and coherence) really differs from the way the Italian language does this. Open a book on translation from English (come on, you know you should every now and then – I recommend Mona Baker’s In other words) and you will soon notice how English is regarded as a straightforward, succinct language. Guess which languages are far from that? Romance languages, ça va sans dire. So when Grazia Gatti, my former professor of institutional translation into Italian, told me I really struggled to make my texts cohesive in my mother tongue I was utterly astounded (“How very dare she?!” said the inexperienced-yet-obnoxiously-perfectionist translator). I remember a very fragmented English text full of short sentences that I left separated in the Italian translation. They sounded perfectly fine to my minimalist-influenced mental rhythm. Perfectly Hempel-ish. But this is really a no-no: an Italian translator should (unless the brief clearly does not allow this, which would be the case with a short story by Hempel) join two or more sentences if the final sentence sounds more natural and idiomatic in the target language. Alas, in Italian we do tend to use specific rhythm and different devices to achieve cohesion: long sentences, subordination, adverbs, scaffolding, we do everything we can to embellish our translations if the brief allows it. On the one hand this sometimes makes us produce texts that are astonishingly better than the original. On the other, if we do not measure out carefully our ‘translational creativity’ we end up with a target text that reflects more our taste than its function, and the translator becomes a demonic possession of the voice of the author. I remember that during my BA one of the translation studies professors held an insightful lesson about how many Italian poets (name-dropping time: Beppe Fenoglio, Eugenio Montale, Cesare Pavese and the likes) were influenced by the English poems they translated to the extent that they ended up producing similar sentences when writing their own novels and poems. There is no reason to believe that this does not also work the other way around, and that translators are immune to their own cultural and literary background. In my case, it influenced the way I perceived rhythm and cohesion. But maybe this process is multifaceted and can have an impact on the way we reformulate sentences, or choose an adjective in our mother tongue, for instance.
All the above are just the conjectures of a fresh graduate, be warned. But one thing is for sure: I really need to vary my literary choices. Maybe I will not open Manzoni’s The betrothed once again, but I believe it is high time I gave Alice Munro a go.
Davide is a fresh graduate in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Westminster, currently working on his MA translation project, and he aims at working as a freelance interpreter and translator after completing it. An insatiable curiosity has always been the driving force of his career choices – during the BA in Interpreting and Communication he fell in love with the concept of ‘encyclopaedic knowledge’, and have been trying to build one ever since. He has many passions, ranging from botany to the world of tattoos, psychology and philosophy, contemporary literature, gender studies and creative writing, fitness and science.
