The Pragmatic Translator: An Integral Theory of Translation (Bloomsbury Advances in Translation) 1441151303, 9781441151308

Table of contents :
Cover
HalfTitle
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Linguistic Theory of Translation
1 The Pragmatic Translator
The birth of a discipline
The three functions of translation
Conclusion: The human touch
2 The Performative Function/1: From Text-Type to Text Act
Text typologies for translating purposes
From text-type to text act
Two examples of text acts
Conclusion: Translation viewed in narrative terms
3 The Performative Function/2: How to do Things with Poems
The poetic fallacy
Bees and crocodiles: How to translate a funny poem
Swimming Chenango Lake: The translation of light and water
Conclusion: Everything has a purpose
4 The Interpersonal Function/1 (External): The Translator’s Personality
The translator as an individual: Introduction and overview
Linguistic intervenience: A stylistic model of translation
Translation and neutrality: Zero-style
Conclusion: Faithful to what, loyal to whom?
5 The Interpersonal Function/2 (Internal): The Voice of the Source Author
Translating texts or translating people/voices? Translation as ethnography
Text-bound and voice-centred versions: Translating cultural capital
Conclusion: Translating voices, translating people
6 The Locative Function/1: Translating Space, Translating Time
Introduction: Time, place, intertextuality
Translating Scotland
Time and tradition: Translating Middle Scots
Conclusion: Time is the same as space is the same as text
7 The Locative Function/2: Repositioning Humour in Film and Comics
Introduction: Humour in constrained translation
Locative adaptation in audiovisual humour: Monthy Python in Italy
Locative adaptation meets with unqualified success: Astérix in three languages
Conclusion: Same strategies, different results
Conclusion: The Use of the Theory
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Pragmatic Translator

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Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Series Editor: Jeremy Munday Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds, UK Bloomsbury Advances in Translation publishes cutting-edge research in the fields of translation studies. This field has grown in importance in the modern, globalized world, with international translation between languages a daily occurrence. Research into the practices, processes and theory of translation is essential and this series aims to showcase the best in international academic and professional output. Other Titles in the Series: Corpus-Based Translation Studies Edited by Alet Kruger, Kim Wallach, and Jeremy Munday Global Trends in Translator and Interpreter Training Edited by Séverine Hubscher-Davidson and Michał Borodo Music, Text and Translation Edited by Helen Julia Minors Quality in Professional Translation Jo Drugan Retranslation Sharon Deane-Cox Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust Jean Boase-Beier Translation, Adaptation and Transformation Edited by Laurence Raw Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context Edited by Nana Sato-Rossberg and Judy Wakabayashi Translation as Cognitive Activity Fabio Alves and Amparo Hurtado Albir Translation, Humour and Literature: Translation and Humour Volume 1 Edited by Delia Chiaro Translation, Humour and the Media: Translation and Humour Volume 2 Edited by Delia Chiaro

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The Pragmatic Translator An Integral Theory of Translation Massimiliano Morini

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Massimiliano Morini, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Massimiliano Morini has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-7192-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morini, Massimiliano. The Pragmatic Translator : An Integral Theory of Translation / Massimiliano Morini. pages cm. – (Bloomsbury Advances in Translation) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-5130-8 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-7192-4 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4411-2146-2 (ebook) 1. Translating and interpreting. I. Title. P306.M67 2013 418’.02–dc23 2012039501

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Contents Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: A Linguistic Theory of Translation

1 2 3 4 5

The Pragmatic Translator The Performative Function/1: From Text-Type to Text Act The Performative Function/2: How to do Things with Poems The Interpersonal Function/1 (External): The Translator’s Personality The Interpersonal Function/2 (Internal): The Voice of the Source Author 6 The Locative Function/1: Translating Space, Translating Time 7 The Locative Function/2: Repositioning Humour in Film and Comics Conclusion: The Use of the Theory

Notes Bibliography Index

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Series Editor’s Preface The aim of this new series is to provide an outlet for advanced research in the broad interdisciplinary field of translation studies. Consisting of monographs and edited themed collections of the latest work, it should be of particular interest to academics and postgraduate students researching in translation studies and related fields, and also to advanced students studying translation and interpreting modules. Translation studies has enjoyed huge international growth over recent decades in tandem with the expansion in both the practice of translation globally and in related academic programmes. The understanding of the concept of translation itself has broadened to include not only interlingual but also various forms of intralingual translation. Specialized branches or sub-disciplines have developed for the study of interpreting, audiovisual translation, and sign language, among others. Translation studies has also come to embrace a wide range of types of intercultural encounter and transfer, interfacing with disciplines as varied as applied linguistics, comparative literature, computational linguistics, creative writing, cultural studies, gender studies, philosophy, postcolonial studies, sociology and so on. Each provides a different and valid perspective on translation, and each has its place in this series. This is an exciting time for translation studies, and the new Advances in Translation series promises to be an important new plank in the development of the discipline. As General Editor, I look forward to overseeing the publication of important new work that will provide insights into all aspects of the field. Jeremy Munday General Editor University of Leeds, UK

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Acknowledgements I wish to thank all those who have helped me along the way: in particular, Paola Venturi, Valentina Poggi, Romana Zacchi, Jeremy Munday, Gideon Toury, Mona Baker, Enrico Monti, Fabiana Fusco and Giovanni Iamartino. Also the journals Intralinea, RiLUnE and Target, for welcoming my contributions and helping me to clarify my ideas.

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Introduction: A Linguistic Theory of Translation

In an age of case studies, this volume was conceived of with a very unfashionable purpose. The Pragmatic Translator aims at formulating a general theory of translation, where ‘theory’ is used in its etymological sense of ‘observation’ rather than with its time-encrusted meaning of ‘abstract description’. In its definition, this theory is deductive rather than inductive, but it is based on the observation of innumerable processes and products, and should ideally provide a framework for the observation of all processes and products of translation. More than two decades have passed since such a construction was last attempted in the field – Mary Snell-Hornby’s Translation Studies (1988) ostensibly being the most recent monograph trying to bring all kinds of translation, and all different scholarly approaches to translation, under the umbrella of a unified (or, as Snell-Hornby herself has it, ‘integrated’) theory. Snell-Hornby’s book was the late spawn of a long line of functionalist approaches to translation, and these functionalist approaches were the extreme offshoot of the linguistic theories which had held sway between the 1950s and the 1970s. The theory proposed here is itself of a linguistic nature – no general theory of translation can help being that1 – but it takes into account the momentous changes which have taken place in post-1970s linguistics (cf. Chapter 1). The pragmatic theory proposed here is ‘integral’ – just as Snell-Hornby’s is ‘integrated’ – insofar as it aspires to reconcile all existing theories rather than to disprove or supplant them.2 In this sense, it belongs in the ‘map’ drawn by James S. Holmes in his famous article of 1972, ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ (Holmes 1972/88), which depicted the ‘pure’ sector of the discipline as branching between ‘descriptive translation studies’ (DTS) and

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‘translation theory’ (TT). After 1972, these two branches have grown rather independently of each other, with the descriptive side of translation studies gradually becoming so big that it seemed to swallow the whole discipline, while a small number of functionalists laboriously tried to create new definitions which would take extra-linguistic elements into account (cf. Reiss and Vermeer 1984/91). In the 1990s, DTS even constructed its own complex theory (cf. above all, Toury 1995), while linguistic theories petered out and all but vanished from sight after 1988. One could say, of course, that the need for a unified theory is already satisfied by these norm-centred, system-oriented approaches (cf. Hermans 1999) – that DTS has produced its own TT. But while the theories formulated by DTS have been and are invaluable in understanding which translations are produced at a given time and in a given place (and can therefore teach the translator to recognize the obligations and conditionings he/she has to work under), they cannot be said to provide a unified description of translation. For one thing, they tend to concentrate on societies (on norms) rather than on individuals – a shortcoming which can be corrected by insisting on ‘localism’ (Agorni 2007) or on the translators’ ‘habitus’ (Gouanvic 1999; Simeoni 1998). More crucially, though, the scholars working on norms and systems have provided theories of ‘translations’ rather than of ‘translation’ – not to mention ‘translating’. From its very beginnings, DTS has been concerned with existing translations, and with the links between existing translations and the context in which they were produced. Therefore, all the theoretical terms its theories provide describe something external to the actual process of translation, and the only definite thing which DTS has been able to say about ‘translation’ is that it is always a rewriting and a manipulation. While obviously true, such a statement does not do much to explain what actually happens in translation at all levels, and a more general theory of translation is still needed to connect translators and societies with texts in the making, existing ‘translations’ with the actual decision-making processes of ‘translating’.3 These distinctions may seem captious, but they become clearer when viewed in the light of translator training. It is notoriously difficult, for the translation scholar who works as a teacher, to instil a sense of the importance of theory in the translator trainee – whose only aim is to master a useful craft in as little time as possible. Things are not made any easier by the fact that while translation theory is no longer as abstract and impractical as it was in

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the 1970s, most of it still takes the process of translation largely for granted. The only part of this process which is exhaustively described by prestigious scholars has to do, as seen above, with the connections between translators/ translations and their societies – and the scholar who is also a teacher or a trainer duly prepares one or more lessons on the conditions in which his trainees will be expected to work. However, once those theoretical premises are given, and the ground appears to be clear for some practical translation exercises, the teacher/trainer has to admit to having no stable and updated terminology to define what he/she perceives as good or less good (completely wrong renderings are always easier to assess).4 He/she may variously have recourse to such terms as context, register, genre, etc. – but the chances are that he/she will end up saying that one rendering is more ‘equivalent’ than another, or – if he/she does not want to employ such an outdated terminology – more ‘adequate’ than another to the source wording (Toury 1995: 56–7). The difficulty, on the other hand, is not his/hers alone: most practical translation manuals seem to denounce it in their skilful avoidance of theoretical terminology (cf. Chapter 1; for recent attempts at including theory in translation training, cf. Pezza Cintrão 2010, Gile 2010: 255–7). The lack of a consistent terminology has something to do with the above-mentioned petering out of linguistic theories after the 1970s. As will be seen in Chapter 1, early linguistic theory was too context-free and ‘scientific’ in the hard sense of the term to last – its demonstrable aim was providing algorithms for automatic translation, or at the very least easy recipes for unthinking translators. But while that aim was ultimately utopian, many of the terms coined or current in those decades are still used by teachers and practice-oriented theoreticians. An illustration is provided by a relatively recent terminology compiled by Jean Delisle, Hannelore Lee-Jahnke and Monique C. Cormier (1999/2002) – where such outdated terms as ‘equivalence’, ‘correspondence’, ‘free’ and ‘literal translation’, ‘word-for-word translation’ and even ‘faithfulness’ are listed alongside more modern and ‘academically correct’ expressions like ‘source-’ and ‘target-oriented translation’.5 The suspicion arises that the newer scientific expressions are a rather literal – though more bureaucratic – translation of their older counterparts, and that whenever they must define a translational strategy or a linguistic relationship between source and target texts, translation studies and translator training still have recourse to a terminology which they theoretically disparage.6

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While the present theory has no particular objection against any of the terms mentioned above (except perhaps the highly misleading ‘faithfulness’; cf. Chapter 4), it aims at providing a complementary set of terms to define, on the linguistic plane, the novelty represented by the ‘cultural turn’ of the discipline from the late 1970s onwards (cf. Lefevere and Bassnett 1990). The ‘scientific’ view of translation was bound to peter out because the context of each individual translation event kept shifting the ground beneath the linguistic scientist’s feet – but a new linguistic theory of translation will draw inspiration from the linguistic approaches which take the context of situation into due account, and busy themselves with establishing links between linguistic wordings and the world. In this sense, sociolinguistics, functional/ systemic grammars, conversation analysis and corpus linguistics can all give (and have variously given) their contributions to the study of translation. More generally, pragmatics – as the discipline studying the relations between language and context (Levinson 1983: 11) – can provide a framework in which each translation event is seen to produce or to aim at producing certain effects, to variously involve real or fictive people, and to happen in space and time (speech-act theory, implicature and politeness theory, deixis). Once these basic coordinates are given, translators’ choices and actual translations can be studied for what they attempt to do and/or succeed in doing, for the voices they create or the readers they implicitly involve, for the geographical and historical adjustments they operate, rather than for any formal or generic connection between source and target texts.7 In other words, translators’ choices and actual translations can be looked at for the kind of ‘manipulation’ they create. I define these coordinates, or these three dimensions, as the ‘performative’, ‘interpersonal’ and ‘locative’ functions of translation. Of course, the three functions are always interrelated, but separating them artificially can be demonstrated to be theoretically fruitful and psychologically plausible – translators and readers think of texts in terms of the effects they produce, of the people they describe or involve, of the places and times they describe and take place in. These functions are predicated not only as attributes of translations, but as characterizing all texts: once their contours are theoretically established, each translation event can be analysed for the modifications it brings and the choices it mirrors (as, inevitably, a ‘rewriting’) along the three axes. In what follows, a general chapter on ‘The Pragmatic Translator’ – providing the vital connections and outlining the differences between this approach

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and all major theories of translation – is followed by six more practical and descriptive chapters, two for each of the three functions. The functions are outlined in detail, though some chapters tend to concentrate on the aspects which have been mostly disregarded by other theorists (in Chapters 4 and 5, for instance, the various external forces influencing the transaction are largely taken for granted, and the description concentrates on the translator’s position with respect to these forces, and on the rendering of the interpersonal function as embodied in texts) – and when this is the case, the practical description may tend to assume ideological overtones. Each of these chapters, after a theoretical introduction and an overview of relevant theories, illustrates a couple of case studies chosen from the sub-fields of literary, specialized and constrained translation. Finally, in the conclusion, the theory is summed up and reviewed again for the hermeneutic, terminological and didactic advantages it can bring to the discipline. The case studies in each practical chapter, and the examples quoted more briefly in Chapter 1, are chosen with a view to providing variety – though many cases are autobiographical – and occasionally, to creating parallels between apparently disparate textual objects, so as to demonstrate the versatility of the theory. Most examples are taken from English- (and Scots-) Italian translations, though there is one source-target inversion (in Chapter 5) and a section (of Chapter 7) in which English and Italian translations from French are analysed. Throughout, when Italian or French excerpts are given, back-translations or textual explanations in English are provided. In Chapter 2, the performative function is seen through the lens of literary and specialized translation, while Chapter 3 tries to judge poetic translation in performative terms. Most of Chapters 4 and 5 – the ones about the interpersonal function – are dedicated to the analysis of English classics in Italian translation and vice versa, both in prose and verse. Chapter 6 studies what happens to the locative function of texts in the translation of Scottish (i.e. regional, or at any rate non-standard) writing; while Chapter 7 is about the locative transfer of humour, specifically in cases of audiovisual translation and in the translation of comics. However, as hinted at above, each couple of chapters, and sometimes each chapter within each section, is also dedicated to discussing a specific branch of translation studies – so that though the book is not organized as a handbook, it can certainly be read as a critical survey of translation theory. Thus, Chapter 2 is about functional theories and accounts of specialized translation;

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Chapter 3 re-reads commonly held scholarly views on the translation of poetry; Chapter 4 is a review of all ‘translator-centred’ approaches, from Lawrence Venuti’s embattled studies to more recent collections of essays on the translator as writer; Chapter 5 discusses ethnographic theories of translation, and, more marginally, a number of studies on canonicity and translation; Chapter 6 picks up a thin line of enquiry on the effects of geographical, historical and intertextual distance in translation, from Ezra Pound through James S. Holmes to André Lefevere; and Chapter 7 briefly discusses the critical literature on constrained translation, audiovisual translation and the translation of comics, and touches on the translation of humour. All these theories are introduced not to be disproved, but to be included in the present approach, which proposes a comprehensive vision rather than a new ‘paradigm’ (cf. Pym 2010: 2–4). It may be noted, in conclusion, that systems- and norm-based theories of translation are not present in this brief summary, though they have been mentioned at the beginning: that absence is due to the difference between Itamar Even-Zohar’s, Gideon Toury’s or Theo Hermans’ point of view and the one adopted here – the former being external and sociological, the latter internal and linguistic. But though the systemsbased approach is never discussed at length, it is implicitly or explicitly present whenever the connections between translation and society are at stake. And if the ideological model proposed by these scholars within descriptive translation studies can hardly be bettered, their sociological descriptions can be seen to accord with the textual explorations conducted in this book, which aims at providing a vital missing link between the position of translation within the cultural polysystem and the translator’s position when working at his/her desk.

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The birth of a discipline Translation studies was born as a separate discipline in the 1950s. Though thinkers and practitioners had been writing about the act of translation for at least a couple of millennia (since Cicero’s De optimo genere oratorum, around 52 bce), this corpus of theoretical pronouncements had never been assembled into anything like a coherent whole. In 20 centuries of translating, only a handful of fairly exhaustive essays can be isolated: Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta (around 1420), Alexander Frazer Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790) and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (1813) come to mind. These full-sized treatises, as well as a number of shorter works (Martin Luther’s 1530 Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, Etienne Dolet’s 1540 La maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre), and a host of minor, often repetitive pronouncements, discuss the nature of translation, the methods of translating or the requirements of a good translator in very general terms. In the 1950s and 1960s, scholars within the fields of information theory and linguistics set out, in a much more systematic manner, to define the phenomenon of translation in its entirety. Ultimately, these scientists aimed at excluding the operation of chance from the translator’s activity. The Zeitgeist is evident in Anthony G. Oettinger’s words: Placing patterns into correspondence is one major linguistic problem of machine translation; devising recipes for transforming source patterns into target patterns is another. Of the existence of some solutions to these problems there is little doubt, especially for closely related languages. A unique solution seems too much to hope for. While the study of formal

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linguistic patterns for their own sake interests many investigators, students of information theory in particular, the formal structure of discourse is relevant to translation only as a vehicle of meaning. Corresponding patterns, therefore, must be defined as conveyors of equivalent meanings since, whatever meaning is or means, it is generally agreed that it must be preserved in translation. (Oettinger 1966: 248)

‘Patterns’, ‘correspondence’, ‘recipes’, ‘transforming’: Oettinger’s is the language of computers and technical manuals, and other scholars employ very similar styles. In the interests of machine translation and in order to facilitate the task of human translators, linguists and computer scientists tried to define ‘invariance’ (Oettinger 1960), ‘formal correspondence’ (Catford 1965) or ‘equivalence’ (Nida 1964), on a descending ladder of scientific assurance.1 Gradually, these scholars came to realize that no univocal solutions could be devised for the problems of translation, and that the correspondences between even closely related languages were too variable to be definitively systematized.2 In the 1970s, a revolution took place which transformed translation theory and translation science into ‘translation studies’. The term itself was coined by J. S. Holmes, who proposed, in a famous 1972 paper, the use of a label that had already proved productive in the general field of humanities (Holmes 1972/88: 70). In Holmes’ wake, a number of scholars, mainly on the ‘Tel Aviv-Leuven Axis’ (Hermans 1999: preface), started to look at translation not in normative terms, as the linguistic school had done, but in a descriptive light. For the first time, translated texts were viewed not only as target texts (i.e. in relation to their sources), but also as texts in their own right (cf. Even-Zohar 1978). Scholars adopting this new approach challenged the normative validity of ethical requirements such as ‘fidelity’ and of linguistic constructs like ‘equivalence’, by claiming that far from being eternal and universal, such concepts were historically determined. Thus, translation came to be seen as a manipulative operation rather than a simple textual substitution: Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in the service of power, and its positive aspect

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can help in the evolution of a literature and a society. (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990, preface)

This new outlook has produced and is still producing an impressive body of work in the field of descriptive translation studies – so much so that the whole discipline today seems confined to the descriptive field. In Holmes’ seminal paper, however, descriptive translation studies was only one of several branches of what he imagined as a very leafy tree that would sprout new boughs, as well as incorporate old ones. Holmes first distinguished between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ TS: ‘pure’ TS further branched into ‘descriptive translation studies’ (DTS) and ‘translation theory’ (TTh), whereas ‘applied’ TS would ideally produce results in the areas of language learning, translator training, translation aids, translation policy and translation criticism – in other words, it would be of use to language learners and teachers, and above all to translators and translation teachers. In Holmes’ map, translation theory is closely allied to translation description: and it is not by chance that the most influential theories of translation of the last two decades have been descriptive rather than operative (for a quasi-definitive summary of 20 years of theorizing, cf. Toury 1995). Those few scholars in the DTS field who have tried to set agendas for the translator have done so in an ideological vein, and their conclusions do not pass the test of close logical examination (cf. Venuti 1995, when he exhorts translators to resist the ‘domesticating’ tendencies of their society). For the rest, translation training, translation aids, translation policy and translation criticism have generally been conducted without explicit reference to a theory of translation.3 However, it is awkward for a practice-based discipline like translation studies to lack a practice-based theory by which practice can be illuminated. Even a theoretician like Umberto Eco admits that translation theory must be based on some sort of ‘active or passive experience of translation’ (Eco 2003: 13) – that is, on the experience of translating or having one’s writings translated. Conversely, practice needs theory if it is to understand itself. In a fairly recent book in dialogue form on the practical use of translation theory, translator Emma Wagner has asked theorist Andrew Chesterman if thinking about translation can ‘help us to become better translators and give us a feeling of professional self-esteem’. Chesterman’s answer, while apparently questioning the general validity of Wagner’s implicit assumptions (‘Would you pose the

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same question of other kinds of theory, I wonder?’), essentially confirms that some such connection between translation theory and practice is indeed needed, if not inevitable: Should musicology help composers to become better musicians or composers? Should literary theory help writers and poets to write better? Should sociology help the people and groups it studies to become better members of society? Should the theories of mechanics and cybernetics help engineers and computer scientists to produce better robots? I guess your answers to these questions will not be identical: I myself would be more inclined to answer yes to the last one than to the others. To the sociology one, I might answer that it should at least help people like politicians to make better decisions. But the ones on musicology and literary theory seem a bit different; such theories seem more to help other people understand these art forms, rather than the artists themselves. In particular, such theories might help academics (theorists) to understand something better, and hence, in some abstract way, add to the sum total of cultural knowledge. (Chesterman and Wagner 2002: 1–2)

The various sciences mentioned by Chesterman could be seen as mirror-images of different aspects of translation studies. While DTS provides the kind of description which is also the province of musicology and literary theory, the ‘cybernetics’ of translation can only be studied by means of a linguistic theory. Every act of translation is, in the Peircean sense, an act of interlingual interpretation (Jakobson 1959/66: 233), and only linguistics can give us a practical understanding of language-to-language transactions, as well as provide the terminology we need in order to understand what we talk about when we talk about translation. The ‘sceptical turn’ of DTS has rightly questioned the validity of such linguistic concepts as fidelity and equivalence, but it has not provided the necessary substitutes: as Kirsten Malmkjær points out, ‘equivalence, or some sort of notion like it, is hard to give up in translation studies, since there must be some sort of relationship between a Target Text (TT) and a Source Text (ST) if the former is to be considered a translation of the latter; besides, the notion is essential if we are to make sense of certain types of translation and mistranslation and even, arguably, of difference and non-translation’ (Malmkjær 1999: 263; also cf. Halverson 1997). A return to linguistic translation studies is therefore necessary – though with none of the normative rigidity of early ‘translation science’ and

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Übersetzungswissenschaft. The linguistic theorists of the 1950s and 1960s aimed to create formulae and algorithms for something as fluid as language, and wanted to keep context out of such a context-bound activity as translation. A new linguistic theory of translation, by contrast, will have to be operatively open (most translation situations allow for more than one choice) and contextual, that is, pragmatic. There are many possible definitions of pragmatics (cf. Levinson 1983: 1–32), but all of them somehow involve the inclusion of the context into linguistic observation. Of course, a general theory of translation cannot be uniquely pragmatic, just as a translator does not only work at the pragmatic level: but the latter is the higher rung of a hierarchical ladder comprehending semantics, syntax and phonetics.4 The highest-order decisions the translator takes are of a pragmatic nature – decisions that have to do with genre (to which genre does the source text belong? should the target text belong to the same? Is there a comparable genre in the target culture?), historical and geographical distance (how should a text written in Anglo-Saxon or in Farsi be translated?), register, cooperation (is the author/narrator/character following/breaching/flouting/ exploiting Grice’s maxims?), politeness (what is the relationship between the author/implied author/narrator and the reader/implied reader/narratee? can/should it be reproduced in the target text?) and relevance (how is the source text, or any part of it, to be relevant in the target culture?). A theory of translation, that is, a theory of what translation is, of how it works and the effects it produces, should ideally follow the same kind of hierarchy. There are many reasons why it is important to develop the pragmatic aspects of a linguistic theory of translation. First of all, pragmatics was all but ignored by the linguists who tried, and failed, to create a general theory in the 1950s and the 1960s. Secondly, a pragmatic theory of translation will be of greater use to translators than any semantic, syntactic or phonetic theory: because these cannot but be incomplete and microlinguistic; and a microlinguistic theory of translation is ultimately too wide-ranging to be feasible (microlinguistic practice is best left to itself or to translator trainers and teachers). On the other hand, a pragmatic theory of translation has to be illustrated, and illustration necessarily involves the microlinguistic level.5 It must be admitted that the project is not totally unprecedented. From the late 1960s onwards, the linguists working on translation had come to realize

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that certain contextual elements had to be introduced into the system to make it work. These linguists tried to link the methods to be used in translation with the function to be assigned to the source and the target texts. Katharina Reiss first used Bühler’s theory of linguistic functions to create a taxonomy of texts with annexed translating methods (Reiss 1969). Hans Vermeer realized that the target text can have a different function (‘skopos’) from its source (Reiss and Vermeer 1984/91). These functionalist theories were epitomized in Mary Snell-Hornby’s Translation Studies. An Integrated Approach (1988), where a very flexible typology is elaborated which allows for the overlapping of genres and methods. This study stems from these theories, while also taking for granted that no account of translation can be normative after the sceptical U-turn effected by descriptive translation studies: the proven fact that the same text has been shown to have been translated in very different ways, with very different styles and according to very different ideologies, rules out the possibility of creating translation recipes – not to mention formulae or algorithms. This is what translation theory cannot do: what it can do is show the conditions in which translators work (a task already performed by DTS), and analyse the pragmatic possibilities they have in each single translating situation.6

The three functions of translation When they set out to create taxonomies for the use of translators and translation scholars, the German linguists of the 1960s and 1970s (Katharina Reiss, Werner Koller and others;7 later, Peter Newmark popularized some of their ideas for the Anglophone world) tried to define a few main textual types according to the predominance of one linguistic function or another. Drawing on Bühler’s functional model of language (Bühler 1934/82: 24–33), Katharina Reiss distinguished between ‘content-centred’ (predominance of the referential function of language),‘form-centred’ (predominance of the expressive function) and ‘effect-centred’ texts (conative function) – different text-types calling for different translation strategies (Reiss 1969). This simplistic tripartite model was soon expanded to account for a wider spectrum of functional possibilities: Reiss herself operated a distinction between ‘text-types’ and ‘varieties’ (novels, poems, manuals, recipes; Reiss and Vermeer 1984/91: 176–9), while Werner

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Koller invited translators to ‘distinguish between primary and secondary text-functions’ (Koller 1979: 129). Vermeer’s Skopostheorie contemplated the possibility of functional change in the passage from source to target text, and went as far as to subject the skopos of the former to that of the latter (Reiss and Vermeer 1984/91: 100). These functional theories are a creditable attempt to leave the swamp of a-contextual Übersetzungswissenschaft behind, and to establish a connection between language and world, text and context. Nevertheless, their interpretation of the term ‘function’ is somewhat restrictive, even when flexibly applied (cf. Snell-Hornby 1988). In the end, ‘function’, for all these scholars, is the same as, or closely related to, ‘genre’: a way of ‘functioning’ in certain ostensive ways which are commonly associated with given classes of texts (cf. Chapter 2). While it is self-evident that affiliation to ‘genre’ or ‘text-type’ is one of the ways texts have of acting in and upon the world (cf. Chapter 2), it can be argued that it is neither the only one nor the most important. A pragmatic theory of translation must accommodate genre into a wider and more systematic framework. The definition of ‘function’ adopted here, accordingly, incorporates all the (inherently pragmatic) ways in which texts ‘function’ in the world. If one were asked to map the epistemological province of pragmatics, one could say that it is about the ‘where and when’ of language (deixis), about the way people relate to one another through language (implicature, presupposition, politeness), and about what people ‘do’ to each other and the world when they speak (speech act theory). Since the concern of this book is with the pragmatics of written rather than spoken language, one might conceive of a ‘text pragmatics’ studying the where and when of texts, the way texts interact with people (rather than other texts) and what texts do or try to do. In view of this tripartite definition, three main metatextual categories can be envisaged which will henceforth be called ‘functions’: the ‘locative’, the ‘interpersonal’ and the ‘performative function’. Since each of these functions defines a number of means by which texts take place in the world, interact with the contexts they evoke, create and are produced in, one would almost be inclined to call them ‘metafunctions’ – but this, together with the use of ‘interpersonal’ for the second of my three functions, would foster confusion with Halliday’s grammatical system (Halliday 1985).8 If not intended, however, this confusion is not totally unmotivated: just like Halliday’s grammar tries to explain how speakers and writers use language

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as a creative, interactive and organizational bridge between themselves and the world, a pragmatic theory of translation aims at explaining how bi-texts9 create, interact with and (try to) modify and organize the world outside their paper borders.

The performative function: Text acts When J. L. Austin refuted the ‘descriptive fallacy’ of traditional linguistics in his famous 1955 William James Lectures, he observed that words are not only used to ‘state’ or ‘describe’ a state of affairs, but also to ‘do’ things, to change the speaker’s world. Austin observed that every ‘speech act’ has a locutionary content, an illocutionary force and a perlocutionary effect – that is, that every utterance (or ‘sentence’, in Austin’s somewhat dated terminology) aims at achieving something and does achieve something, intended and real effects not necessarily being the same. His ground-breaking observations were mainly confined to oral speech and to the limited scope of the single ‘sentence’ – though his analysis of the ‘felicity conditions’ to be satisfied for the ‘performative act’ to succeed ensured that there was some connection between the single ‘sentence’, the co-text and the context of situation. Since 1955, however, the ‘performative’ dimension of language has been investigated in relation to written as well as oral language, and it has been pointed out that very few illocutionary acts are understandable at the level of the single sentence or the single utterance.10 It is evident, for instance, that in a conversational interaction like the following, a sort of ‘continuous’ illocutionary act is performed by both speakers (roughly, the protagonist/narrator is trying to obtain a worried reaction from Sachiko, and Sachiko is more or less covertly telling her to mind her own business): Sachiko turned and waited for me to catch up. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked. ‘I’m glad I found you,’ I said, a little out of breath. ‘Your daughter, she was fighting just as I came out. Back there near the ditches.’ ‘She was fighting?’ ‘With two other children. One of them was a boy. It looked a nasty little fight.’ ‘I see.’ Sachiko began to walk again. I fell in step beside her.

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‘I don’t want to alarm you,’ I said, ‘but it did look quite a nasty fight. In fact, I think I saw a cut on your daughter’s cheek.’ ‘I see.’ [. . .] ‘As a matter of fact,’ I continued, ‘I’d meant to mention this to you before. You see, I’ve seen your daughter on a number of occasions recently. I wonder, perhaps, if she hasn’t been playing truant a little.’ [. . .] ‘It’s very kind of you to be so concerned, Etsuko,’ she said. ‘So very kind. I’m sure you’ll make a splendid mother.’ (Ishiguro 1982: 14)

On a bigger scale, it can be observed that even entire texts certainly ‘do’ something, in the sense that they modify, or aim at modifying, the status quo of the world – they aim at achieving ‘contextual effects’ on real people in real situations. This is most evident with the text-types that Reiss calls ‘operative’ and ‘informative’ (instruction manuals, advertisements; Reiss and Vermeer 1984/91: 206); but it can be argued that all texts, whether published or not, aim at performing something and may, or may not, perform something (the purpose of a novel, for instance, may be to entertain, or to renovate the English language, or both: if nobody reads the novel, both purposes are frustrated). The intentional/performative value of a text has been defined in various ways by translation scholars, text linguists and pragmatists. As has been seen, translation scholars have listed a number of ‘functions’ that texts are supposed to serve in connection with the main function of language within them. Text linguists have spoken of the ‘intentional’ dimension of texts, whose very nature it is to reach receivers and produce an effect on them (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). More recently, certain pragmatists and systemic linguists have tried to identify the ‘evaluative pattern’ (the ‘point’) expressed by and through a text (Thompson and Hunston 2000; Martin and White 2005; cf. also Labov 1972). Arguably, all these can be seen as ways of looking at the impact of texts upon an existing state of affairs. More generally still, it can be said that when a text is written and/or published, a ‘text act’ is performed that has an illocutionary force and may have perlocutionary effects on the world (cf. Hatim and Mason 1990: 76–92; Hatim 1998: 73; cf. Chapter 2). A pragmatic theory of translation cannot do without a theory of text acts, because translators and theorists have to look at the intended and real effects of source texts and bi-texts in order to re-produce or analyse them. If a translator aims at ‘doing what the source text does’ in the target language – with all the

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obstacles posed by linguistic and cultural barriers – he/she must translate a ‘text act’ rather than a mere text; and translation scholars must consider translations in this light if they want to understand how they change or aim at changing an existing ‘state of affairs’. Of course, illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect are to be kept separated in theory as well as in practice. For the translator, the illocutionary forces inscribed in the text (rather than ‘the author’s intentions’) are generally more important than its perlocutionary effects: in the past, many translators and linguists have spoken of an ‘equivalence of effect’ to be obtained in the passage from source to target language; but while it is very difficult to gauge real effects on real readers, the source text can be analysed for the ‘potential readings’ it contains – that is, for its illocutionary forces.11 Being bound by no practical considerations, the theorist is freer than the practitioner in his/her pragmatic analysis of the bi-text: a translation critic can study the illocutionary differences between a source and a target text, whereas a historian of translation may be interested in the perlocutionary effects of certain target texts in a given place at a given time (one of the great achievements of DTS has been the realization that translations, that is, target texts, can and must be considered as texts in their own right as well as reflections or refractions of their sources). Inevitably, the illusory simplicity of theoretical definition conceals a wealth of analytical and practical difficulties. For translators and translation scholars alike, it is not at all easy to define each single ‘text act’ exhaustively, except in the above-quoted cases (advertisements, manuals), in which the text has a very straightforward function (persuading to buy something, instructing in the use of something). Normally, both the illocutionary forces and the perlocutionary effects of a text are multiple, complex and difficult to isolate with any certainty: ultimately, the weight of performative analysis rests on the translator’s or on the theorist’s shoulders, and though interpretations may differ in degree of correctness and precision, more than one reading is always possible, and Spitzer’s ‘philological circle’ cannot be evaded (we make theoretical predictions and verify them in practice, but our very predictions will influence our verification procedures).12 Though there is no way out of this epistemological uncertainty in ‘soft sciences’ such as translation studies, a route must be chosen, and the most a theorist or a practitioner can do is explain and justify his/her choices. By

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explaining the premises and conclusions of his/her actions, the translator gives his/her readers an idea of the relationship between the ‘source-text act’ and the ‘target-text act’. In producing an Italian translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932; Gibbon and Morini 2005) – a novel set in the Scottish countryside, written in a mixture of English and Scots – I have tried to isolate the illocutionary forces inscribed in the text, as well as the perlocutionary effects produced by the appearance of this experimental Scottish novel in the British book market and cultural milieu of the 1930s (and of today). Gibbon did not use Scots for sentimental purposes, but because he wanted to give it the literary dignity and prestige of other European languages: this is made evident by the fact that both the characters and the narrator speak in a harmonic blend of English, Scots and Anglicized Scots (while novels by earlier ‘northern’ authors confronted an educated English-speaking narrator with rough Scots-speaking peasants). This linguistic choice is therefore ideologically central to the book – it is a consequence of what the book ‘wants to do’ in the world. Inevitably and ironically, the strong ‘national’ tinge of Sunset Song has led to its being perceived as having only ‘local’ relevance in the English-speaking world: while stylistically comparable texts such as Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses are today catalogued as modern classics, Sunset Song is mostly unknown, a literary curiosity for Scottish initiates. In my Italian version, I have tried to give a textual account of the forces and effects embodied in the source text (a reproduction was impossible, because the context of situation was radically different): in my reading, the linguistic/nationalistic issue was crucial to a deep understanding of Sunset Song as a work of imaginative literature – therefore, I tried to fashion a ‘synthetic Italian’, made up of a number of Italian dialects, to reproduce the Scots words, phrases and constructions used in Gibbon’s original (for my other, less noble reasons, cf. Chapter 2). As this example shows, the illocutionary forces inscribed in the source can never be simplistically reproduced in the target text: while Sunset Song is, among other things, an act of cultural/political defiance, Canto del tramonto is an account of that act, as well as an attempt at popularizing Scottish literature in Italy; and other strategies might have been used by other translators to obtain similar or different effects. Pragmatic barriers are, after all, as insurmountable as phonetic or syntactic ones: and as Vermeer understood

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almost three decades ago (Reiss and Vermeer 1984/91), the skopos of a text never remains unchanged in the language-to-language transition. Analysis at the pragmatic level orientates the lower-level choices and observations of translator and theorist: but both translator and theorist must know that no faithful pragmatic copy is possible, because contexts vary just like phonemes, morphemes and syntactic constructions – and the pragmatic forces encoded in different grammatical systems are never exactly the same, though in cognate languages they reach a very high degree of similarity. This pragmatic indeterminacy is inherent in the very act of translation, though it can be masked in modern times by the translator’s tendency to make him/herself ‘invisible’ in order to present a ‘fluent’ version which can pass as a ‘faithful copy’ of the ‘original’ – indeed, the original itself (Venuti 1995). However, DTS has taught us that translation is never innocent, that it always implies some sort of ‘rewriting’ of the source. Even when the translator has no explicit ‘ideological’ vision to impose upon the target text, his/her ideology is brought to bear on his/her work: in Gideon Toury’s terms, the ‘translation norms’ of the translator’s society will influence his/her work in one sense or another. It is revealing to study the bi-texts of former ages as alignments of source-text and target-text acts: from this kind of operation, we can learn a lot about the norms of past societies as well as about the performative indeterminacy of translation. In the numerous translations produced in the European Renaissance, for instance, it is quite often the case that the target text is invested with performative forces which are only partially present in, or even totally absent from, the source: Sir John Harington’s version of Orlando Furioso has a serious epic, ‘Virgilian’ tinge that is totally absent in Ariosto’s original; Philemon Holland’s translations of Roman and Greek classics invested their target texts with English nationalistic fervour. In the Middle Ages, such pragmatic transformations are even easier to detect in the translators’ attempts to turn Pagan masterpieces into pieces of Christian or moral instruction – as in the famous fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé (for all these examples, cf. Morini 2006a). To go back to modern times, however, even the translator’s impulse to subtract his/her signature from the translation is linked to a norm dictating what the target text ‘should do’ in the receiving culture: the translator must be invisible because readers (or so the commonplace goes) want to read

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a ‘primary’ text, as a translation would obtain less attention and have a weaker impact if it was presented as ‘secondary’. All these historical and contemporary examples show that the ‘translation norms’ of any given society are in their essence pragmatic/performative: they primarily dictate what a translation ‘should do’ – all stylistic choices at all levels being both personal and subordinate to the performative function. Therefore, the ‘performative function’ of translation, though not primary in an epistemological hierarchy, takes logical and chronological precedence over the interpersonal and locative functions in theory as well as in practice; because the translator, or the translator scholar, first has to understand what the source text or the bi-text ‘does’ or ‘should do’ – and that understanding will guide his/ her choices or intuitions as far as the other pragmatic functions and the other linguistic levels of translation are concerned.

The interpersonal function: Cooperation, politeness, interest, style If a text ‘does’ something, if it modifies and/or aims at modifying an existing state of affairs, it cannot do so directly: a text only has an impact upon the world through the influence it exercises upon its readers (though that primary impact is not necessarily the only one: one need only think of what Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and its translations mean to an awful quantity of people who never read them in the first place13). A pragmatic description of the bi-text for translational purposes, therefore, cannot but take into account the ways in which the bi-text enters into communication with its (source and target) readers. Grice’s theory of cooperative communication and implicature (Grice 1967/91), Brown and Levinson’s and Leech’s studies of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987; Leech 1983), and Sperber and Wilson’s notion of ‘relevance’ (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95) can help the translator understand the interpersonal relationships inscribed in and presupposed by the source text, and can guide the translator scholar in his analysis of bi-textual links on the interpersonal plane (once again, one must look for the potential relationships realized in the texts rather than actual relationships with real people). All the theories of communication evolved by pragmatics from the 1970s onwards represented an attempt to expand the ‘code model’ of classical

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linguistics, according to which a message is encoded and sent from a sender to a decoding receiver through a channel (air, in the case of human speech) which can or cannot be disturbed by noise. While this model describes the passage of linguistic signals from a sender to a receiver, it does not explain how receivers use contextual information to interpret messages which are often less than completely explicit; neither does it account for all those aspects of human speech which are not strictly functional in communicative terms. Grice first expanded the code model by noting that all speakers intuitively recognize a ‘cooperative principle’ the maxims of which (quantity, quality, relation and manner) they can choose to follow, exploit or flout. Sperber and Wilson tried to simplify Grice’s theory by insisting that the maxim of relation (relevance, in their definition) was really the only one at work in human interaction (hearers extract information by pairing speakers’ utterances with relevant contexts). Brown, Levinson, Leech and others studied all the polite, ‘communicatively unnecessary’ efforts humans make in order to maintain good relationships with one another – to preserve, in Brown and Levinson’s terms, their own and each other’s ‘face’. While an account of what a text communicates to its readers will be primarily semantic (though very little communication is non-contextual), an account of how a text communicates with its readers, of the balance between explicit and implicit information, of the relationship between text (author, implied author, persona, narrator) and readers, will necessarily be pragmatic. The pragmatic theories of Grice, Sperber and Wilson, Brown and Levinson, and Leech were initially conceived for face-to-face interaction – but textual activity also involves interpersonal contact, and the practical difference between faceto-face and textual exchanges (textual communication is more unidirectional and less fluid) does not subtract from their essential similarity. As Basil Hatim points out, texts behave more or less like people: More specifically, Hoey [. . .] focuses on the means by which writers establish a dialogue with their readers, anticipating their reactions and building this into the constitution of their texts. It is this dialogic nature of the written text which has particularly caught the attention of Literary Pragmatics: of course, speech is more personally evaluative than writing, but some speech can be as analytic and objective as any written text designed with these communicative aims in mind. By the same token, it is argued, writing can

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be casual and unceremonial and always capable of interacting with human beings more fundamentally than any speech [. . .] (Hatim 1998: 86)

This dialogue between text and reader(s) can be conducted in many different ways, the degrees and styles of cooperation and politeness varying along the axes of culture, genre, individual personality. First of all, texts address their readers in a variety of ways, either directly or indirectly: advertisements, for instance, often address the receiver directly, whereas scientific articles usually adopt a more impersonal stance which conceals, but does not cancel, the text-reader relationship. In literary texts, a number of fictional figures (implied author, narrator, poetic persona, narratee) mediate between the text, or its originator, and the reader. The collision between text and reader, however, is not confined to those instances in which the reader is openly mentioned and addressed, or covertly evoked; on the contrary, it permeates all texts of whatever description, for writing and publishing a text means establishing a contact with one or more (actual, potential) readers. The quality of the relationship is defined, on the interpersonal axis, by how the text chooses to tell its readers what it wants to tell them: one must look at the ratio between explicit and implicit communication (presuppositions, implicatures, implicitures, subplicit meanings, etc.),14 at the degree of evidence with which relevant information is signalled and distinguished from irrelevant details, and generally at the order in which information is given (in a scientific article, an abstract sums up the main argument or hypothesis; whereas in a detective story or in Jane Austen’s novels, crucial details are withheld until the final denouement). Cooperation/ relevance and politeness interact in unpredictable ways, and no two readers will feel involved by and ‘included’ by a text to the same degree: in certain cases, if the text is clear and explicative, readers will feel included; the reverse may be true on other occasions, because extreme clarity can be felt as offensive (readers may feel that their decoding abilities are being undervalued) or boring (in a literary work of art, but also in a newspaper article, one must not give away one’s goods too soon). Theoretically, one would tend to assign a positive value to clarity and perspicuity: but the changeableness of the principle of politeness and of Leech’s ‘interest principle’15 remind us that no linguistic quality is perceived in the same manner by all people on all occasions.

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At this juncture of cooperation/relevance, politeness and interest, the translator acts as a pragmatic mediator: the task is neither innocent nor simple, and requires knowledge of the norms regulating cooperation and politeness in different cultures. Once again, perfect ‘interpersonal’ equivalence is impossible to obtain – if only because languages and cultures (as well as people) vary in the things they say explicitly or implicitly. In a perceptive article on ‘Presumption and Translation’, Peter Fawcett has noted how the Informationsangebot (information offer) of a text can never be the same when grafted onto another language/culture. If the translator does not take into account ‘interpersonal’ as well as phonetic, semantic and other pragmatic differences, he/she does so at the risk of offending or alienating his/her readers: We need presupposition, of course, because without it we would not get out of the house in the morning; but it poses acute problems in translation. Most Hungarians do not have to be told that Mohács was the site of a military defeat, just as most French people do not have to be told about a certain military difficulty at Alésia. A writer in these languages can call up powerful complexes of knowledge and feeling very economically. Transfer these to another culture, however, and the presupposed supply of information may not be there. The problem then becomes one of assessing the likely state of affairs and the possible solutions, with each step of the way fraught with difficulties. (Fawcett 1998: 120)

Even apart from these interlingual/intercultural differences, translation as a communicative activity seems to display cooperation and politeness principles of its own. Research in the field of corpus linguistics has recently shown that translators from and into all languages tend to simplify, clarify, make explicit what is implicit in the source text (cf. Laviosa 2002: 18). This is probably because while translators are commonly seen as only partially responsible for the Informationsangebot of the target text, any oddities in the latter are frequently attributed to them rather than to the source authors (cf. Venuti 1995). However, as will be shown in Chapters 4 and 5, it is by no means always the case that acceptability (Toury 1995: 56–7) involves clarity or fluency: on occasion, certain societies can require given classes of texts (e.g. classics) to be awkward and obscure, because those qualities are seen to characterize the class and endow it with prestige. In general, translators are more vulnerable than authors to the (interpersonal) pressure of norms: if the target culture requires a

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certain type of text to display certain features, most translators will perceptibly or insensibly mould their texts so as to make them more acceptable, either of their own free will or because urged to do so by editors and publishers. In translating Ariosto, for instance, Sir John Harington deemed it desirable to soften the impact of a number of abrupt, jocular closings that he thought unworthy of Ariosto’s epic qualities (of what he thought were Ariosto’s epic qualities). Therefore, when Ariosto ended a Canto and/or a story with very little narrative politeness – the comic point being the very abruptness of his dismissal – Harington usually added an explanatory note and made the tone more serious: Ma prima che più inanzi io lo conduca, Per non mi dipartir dal mio costume, Poi che da tutti i lati ho pieno il foglio, Finire il Canto, e riposar mi voglio16 (Ariosto 1584: XXXIII. 128) But more of this hereafter I will treat, For now this booke begins to be to great (Ariosto and Harington 1591: XXXIII. 118)

Sir John Harington could well afford to be rather short with his source text, because he had to be answerable for his translation to Queen Elizabeth and a few judges of literary taste. For the contemporary translator, however, many more parties are normally involved in the transaction: in the case of literary texts like the Furioso, for instance, a translation may be judged from the point of view of the source author/text/reader, from a critic’s or reviewer’s point of view, from the point of view of the publisher, of the general public, etc. A knowledge of all the interpersonal relations in which he/she is involved, therefore, is highly desirable for the translator, just as it is invaluable for the translation critic trying to understand the nature of a transaction from the outside. If he/she knows which kinds of translations are deemed to be acceptable in his/her society, the translator can choose either to follow or to defy the voice of common opinion (Toury’s norms). More neutrally, he/she may come to a fruitful understanding not only of other people’s positions, but of his/her own as well, both from an ethical point of view (his obligations towards others and towards himself) and from a stylistic point of view. One of the most neglected aspects of translating is that it works – at least in part – like

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writing: paradoxically, the translator can only reproduce the source style by choosing a style of his/her own – whereas trying to translate ‘invisibly’, with the appearance of having no personal style, can be demonstrated to yield the target text in the hands of other participants in the interpersonal transactions (critics, reviewers, the judges of taste, all those who uphold or ideally represent ‘the norms’; cf. Chapter 4). Translation, however, does not only involve a number of interpersonal relations between senders, receivers and mediators of various kinds, and a modification of these relations across linguistic barriers: it also produces a change in the interpersonal relations depicted or presupposed within texts, be these the mutual obligations among legal persons laid down in a contract or the loves and hates binding characters in a novel. In point of fact, nowhere is this change more evident than in fiction, and particularly in modern, ‘social’ fiction, much of whose effect has to do with such language- and culturebound features as the balance between explicit and implicit communication or the strategies or politeness and social deixis employed by narrators and characters. This internal aspect of the interpersonal function is notoriously difficult to recreate, and other interpersonal norms (the norms which are held to be valid in the receiving culture) may easily overrule the ones represented by the source text. A very straightforward example of this can be found in the above quotation from the English Furioso, where the implicit relationship between narrator and narratee is modified to accommodate Harington’s idea of textual politeness. And while today’s views on translation do not admit for such wide-ranging amendments as Harington’s (the English Furioso counted 700 staves less than its source, and the translator often cancelled the author’s ‘first person’ interventions), subtler interpersonal modifications may be produced by the translator’s ineptitude or by his/her absorption of target norms: in the translation of poetry or literary classics, for instance, an elevated style is often employed which changes the way that narrators interact with narratees, poetic personae speak to adressees, characters deal with characters; or on other occasions, a quasi-superstitious faith in the source text may paradoxically obscure the human agents speaking in and through the text (cf. Chapter 5). However far (in time and space) readers may find themselves from the material circumstances of production, texts are always produced by humans for other humans to read, and even the most barren of operative texts

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presupposes a man’s or a woman’s voice speaking of human things to other men and women.

The locative function: Time, place and text deixis As a pragmatic subject and a performative agent, in order to act and to exercise an influence upon its readers, the text must be situated in time and space. However, the ‘locative function’ of a text is not any easier to identify than its performative and interpretive functions. A text ‘acts’ and ‘communicates’ within, and by connecting with, various contexts of situation: first of all, the context of production, which may or may not be indicated within the text itself (a legal will must contain calendrical reference to the time and place of writing, while a fantasy novel will probably be set in the distant past of some northern country), but is usually betrayed by style and lexicon (even a fantasy novel will bear the marks of its literary period); secondly, the context the text evokes or constructs, which may or may not coincide with the context of production (one need only think of the difference between a historical essay, an instruction manual and a science fiction novel); thirdly, the context in which the text is published and read, endlessly changing with every single reader and every new edition. All these contexts have a bearing on the way a text acts upon readers and non-readers, and must be taken into account (or implicitly considered) when a bi-text is studied or created. Furthermore, unlike flesh-and-blood speakers, texts act and communicate in a further dimension which we could call textual, or intertextual: whether or not it alludes to other similar or different texts, every text is inherently intertextual, because it is built upon a knowledge of how other texts are built (cf. de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; genre is only the most evident of intertextual traits, and the juncture at which the locative overlaps with the performative function). This third locative aspect is less material but not less important than the other two: as T. S. Eliot well knew (Eliot 1919/75) – though his insights were limited to literary creation – every new text enters into a living relationship with all other existing texts, which it modifies and is modified by. When a text is translated into another language and a bi-text is created, the locative function (which cannot be identified with absolute precision in the first place) cannot be kept intact. By being grafted onto another temporal,

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spatial and textual plane, the text acquires, evokes and creates new contexts, and these contexts make it act and communicate in novel ways. When the Orlando Furioso is translated into English by Sir John Harington, it is also translated into England (as sixteenth-century translation theorists well knew): an Italian courtly romance and a sophisticated long poem is turned into an English epic made up of wooden end-stopped lines and references to Queen Elizabeth. Italian landscapes are made to look like the English countryside, and many English readers will find locative references to English places, events and texts (intertextually, many passages of the English Furioso, as well as of the Liberata in Edward Fairfax’s 1600 translation, remind one of Spenser rather than Ariosto or Tasso). It may be objected that this is a borderline case, and that modern translators do not take the same liberties with their source texts that Harington or Fairfax did. Borderline cases, though, are used in mathematics to demonstrate the general validity of a hypothesis: when conditions are less extreme, the application of the rule is less evident but the rule is equally valid. In our time, when a recently written text is translated from a European language into a cognate European language, say from English into German, or from French into Italian, the illusion is created that nothing changes in the locative function – but the changes are there all the same. These changes become more evident, their treatment more crucial for the translator and the translator critic, when the source text and the target text belong to contexts which are very distant either temporally, spatially or textually. In the relativistic universe of translation, the problems involved in translating a source text written in the Middle Ages are analogous to those one has to face in bringing a text from Scotland to Italy (cf. Chapter 6): the same difficulties are created when no textual tradition exists in the target culture which can be compared with the tradition that the source text belongs into (cf. Chapter 7). It is perhaps not surprising that the problems connected with locative transference have been mainly studied by translation scholars whose specialized research field is literary language. In his 1975 Translating Poetry, André Lefevere has observed that the translator’s freedom (what he calls, curiously enough, the ‘freedom of the theme’) is ‘inevitably circumscribed by the concentric circles of language, time, place, and tradition’ (Lefevere 1975: 19). Lefevere’s main interest is practical: he wants to provide translators

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with a series of strategies to come to terms with linguistically and culturally alien source texts. What is of interest here, though, is his intuition that while language as a translational barrier can be taken for granted and therefore need not be taken into consideration at all (his idea of language is semantic/ grammatical; in pragmatic terms, language ‘contains’ all aspects of a text), time, place and tradition can be grouped together in a single definition (‘tpt elements’). Temporal, spatial and intertextual distances are to all effects one and the same thing for the translator and the theorist. Though his solutions are less convincing than his exposition of the problem, Lefevere does try to list a series of techniques and strategies. More or less in the same vein, a better and more efficient set of strategies is provided by J. S. Holmes in his essay on ‘The Cross-Temporal Factor in Verse Translation’ (Holmes 1971/88). Holmes observes that in turning temporally distant source texts into another language, the possibility of translating ingenuously and a-theoretically is ruled out by the fact that even choices which would appear as neutral in other cases (e.g. writing in the standard contemporary version of the target language) impose one interpretation or another (if one translates Beowulf into standard contemporary Italian, one ends up obscuring most of its linguistic strangeness). With such texts, therefore, the translator must decide whether to create a ‘historicizing’ or a ‘modernizing’ version in the target language, on the ‘linguistic’, ‘socio-cultural’ and ‘literary or poetic’ levels (Holmes 1971/88: 37). Though the focus here is on time, the same could be said for space and text deixis: when a text is translated, an effect of ‘locative’ estrangement is automatically created which can be reduced or left untouched by the translator. Once again, there are no single solutions to the problems posed by locative transference. Speaking of temporal distance (which seems to interest the literati much more than geographical or textual distance), Ezra Pound understood as early as 1918 that ultimately, each translator must choose a way of alerting his/her readers to the temporal otherness of the original, and that each translator’s choice will be guided by the textual elements which strike him/her as fundamental. Pound’s choice of language in translating Guido Cavalcanti was pre-Elizabethan English, because he thought this the only way of maintaining Guido’s unique musical quality (Pound 1918/2004: 92); but he was well aware that his choice was not definitive, and that many other

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possibilities could have been envisaged by other individuals working with the same source text.

Conclusion: The human touch Pound’s idea of personal accountability anchored to textual evidence is central to translation and translation theory in general: given the pressures and blandishments exercised and offered by his/her society, each translator will be attracted to different qualities in the source texts he/she works with, and will render those qualities in idiosyncratic ways. Any translation theory, whether ‘cultural’ or ‘linguistic’, must take that personal element into account if it does not want to be lured into the old traps of exhaustiveness and scientificity. Descriptive Translation Studies has avoided those traps by insisting on the ideological pressures attending translation and, at the same time, on the individuality of translational activity; but being a descriptive discipline, it has not and it could not have produced a unified theory of translation (though many insights of DTS are invaluable to anyone who wants to set up such a theoretical building). A general linguistic theory of translation can be of more immediate relevance to practitioners as well as theorists, but in order to be credible it has to remember that not even phonetics, syntax, semantics and pragmatics together can explain or foresee what has taken or will take place in any single act of translation. Ultimately, apart from those cases in which a machine does all or almost all the work (machines are good at working with standardized languages and text-types), translation is performed by one or more unpredictable humans working with that most unpredictable of human products – language. Though theory can observe practice and extract general rules out of it, it will never be able to open the little black box that will keep translation and the other secrets of the human brain locked until the brain’s doomsday.17

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2

The Performative Function/1: From Text-Type to Text Act

Text typologies for translating purposes Towards the end of the 1960s, translation scholars such as Albrecht Neubert (cf. Neubert 1968/81) and Katharina Reiss (cf. Reiss 1969) attempted to create translation-centred text taxonomies as an ‘internal’ response to the generalizing tendencies of early linguistic theories. These attempts were invaluable in that they provided a much-needed link between translation activity and its surrounding context, as well as a number of practical strategies and a critical grid for existing bi-texts. Katharina Reiss, whose taxonomies have been the most successful, took her cue from Bühler’s theory of linguistic functions to define three main text-types (in her final formulation, ‘informative’, ‘operative’ and ‘expressive’; Reiss and Vermeer 1984: 206), and she added the category of ‘variety’ (Textsorte; Reiss and Vermeer 1984: 171–203) to allow for internal diversity. In Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie, co-authored with Reiss, Hans Vermeer gave further scope to these types and varieties, while also partly supplanting them, through the notion of skopos, that is, target-text function (Reiss and Vermeer 1984: 95–105). From Peter Newmark (1988)1 and Mary Snell-Hornby (1988) to Christiane Nord (1997), these functional taxonomies have virtually remained the only theoretical framework within which translators and translation scholars can define the kinds of texts they create and work with – together with the more traditional concept of genre. However, as will be shown below, neither Reiss’ idea of text-type nor the related category of genre is able to cover all the performative aspects of translation. Therefore, in order to define ‘how to do

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things with translations’, it becomes necessary to adopt the wider notion of ‘text act’ – which supplements, but does not supplant, earlier categories.

From text-type to text act Translation-centred text taxonomies display a number of inherent deficiencies which can be cured by no added elasticity or widening of scope. First of all, however far they appear to stray from the origins of translation theory, most of them reflect Cicero’s methodological bipartition between free and literal translation (verba appendere and verba annumerare; Cicero 1973: 41) and Jerome’s bifurcation of sacred versus secular texts (re-interpreted by Humanism and Romanticism as a distinction between literature and non-literature). In Reiss’ functional theory, for instance, ‘form-oriented’ or ‘expressive texts’ are more or less synonymous with literature (form has a ‘specifically aesthetic effect [eine spezifische ästetische Wirkung]’; Reiss 1969: 80); and as such, in contrast with ‘content-oriented’ or ‘informative texts’, they must be translated with a source-text bias (Reiss 1969: 83). Peter Newmark, whose 1988 Textbook of Translation adapts German functional taxonomies for the English-speaking scholarly world, ends up making a special case for literature, and especially poetry; while in a later essay he distinguishes between ‘two types of translation – one concerned with reality, the other with fiction’, and adds that ‘the translation of poetry is a third type, since poetry uniquely makes use of all the formal resources of the language’ (Newmark 1996: 6). Even Mary Snell-Hornby’s intricate diagram linking text-types with disciplines/methods, in Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach, still pivots on a three-way progression from ‘Literary Translation’ through ‘General Language Translation’ to ‘Special Language Translation’ – behind which, and notwithstanding the third addendum, still lurk such pristine dichotomies as literary vs specialized discourse (Snell-Hornby 1988: 32).2 Another problem is that all these taxonomies attempt to create direct links – again, however elastic – between text-types and translation methods. In this respect, even Snell-Hornby’s diagram is a late product of that early period in which establishing equivalence ‘algorithms’ (Catford 1965) still seemed a feasible task: and it is not by chance that Snell-Hornby retrieves the old Übersetzungswissenschaft term ‘invariance’, at least within the domain of

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‘Special Language Translation’. In the end, these taxonomists set out to identify a small or large number of methods which can be consistently applied to a range of text-types: even when Funktionsveränderung (change of text function according to target skopos, in Vermeer’s terms; cf. Hönig and Kussmaul 1982) is taken into account, the conviction remains that a given kind of equivalence or ‘adequacy’ (Vermeer’s term again, later re-defined by Toury with reference to ‘norms’) must be pursued for a given kind of source or target text. This one-toone functional correspondence, however, is made problematic by the countless differences which mark off each text from most texts of its type. The text-type ‘poetry’ displays a potential for diversity which makes for a wide variety of translation strategies (cf. Morini 2007a: 157–89; also cf. Chapter 3). But it is simplistic to assume – as Mary Snell-Hornby appears to do – that specialized texts do not possess any of that potential: as many scholars have observed, even specific fields like the law have spawned various textual sub-types, some of which are a far cry from the formulaic rigidity which is thought to be typical of their jargon (cf. Trosborg 1991; Bathia 1997; Pommer 2008). A third difficulty is that whatever criterion these taxonomies are ostensibly based on, they all seem to fall back on the traditional concept of genre. The process whereby text-types are created tends to be circular. A linguistic function is observed which operates in all linguistic domains, but which is also dominant in a particular genre; this genre is then used to illustrate the text-type which can supposedly be identified by its dominant function. When Reiss has to illustrate the characteristics of expressive texts, her description seems to reflect a man-in-the-street view of literature; while Snell-Hornby’s text-types are professedly traditional – literary translators having to deal with ‘Stage/Film, Lyric Poetry, Modern Literature’. Since text-type ends up being synonymous with genre, its encompassing importance for the translator and the translation scholar is diminished – though understanding genre, of course, is a fundamental step towards translating and analysing translations. Furthermore, if the two terms and concepts are conflated, translators and translation scholars had better make recourse to other contemporary theories of genre, which have been developed outside the field of translation studies and have reached a higher level of precision. The most important single study in this sub-field is Swales (1990), which describes genre in sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic terms,3 as the product of a ‘discourse community’ – that is, a group with a shared set of goals

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and a number of instruments which can be used to pursue those goals. One of these instruments is of course genre itself, defined by Swales as ‘a class of communicative events’ characterized by ‘some shared set of communicative purposes’ (Swales 1990: 45–6), where ‘communicative purposes’ echoes the more general ‘goals’ around which discourse communities cohere. Once established, these ‘discoursive genres’ have a binding and predictive force (‘The rationale behind a genre establishes constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their content, positioning and form’; Swales 1990: 52), though their borders allow for a degree of shifting and stretching (‘Exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality’; Swales 1990: 49). Swales’ examples are mainly taken from specialized fields (his main concern is English for Academic Purposes), but the concept of genre is universal: even a novel or a poem (or: a particular kind of novel, a particular kind of poem) can be described along these lines (a given section of society produces a given class of novels/poems for its own consumption, for the propagation of its values, etc.). As compared with text-type, Swales’ genre is inductive rather than deductive,4 and interpersonal rather than abstract. However, Reiss’ text-type and Swales’ genre are also very similar in that their main defining feature is functional: in Reiss’ taxonomy, the category a text belongs to is identified by its main linguistic function; in Swales’ theory, the principal criterion for labelling a text is ‘some shared set of communicative purposes’. Powerfully predictive as it may be, Swales’ notion of genre faces the translator and the translation scholar with more or less the same problems as (translation-centred) text-types. In the end, the main limitation of these twin concepts is that they do not exhaust the functional aspect of texts. Swales himself admits that while in some cases (a recipe, a party political speech) ‘identifying purpose may be relatively easy’, some genres are characterized by complex ‘sets of communicative purposes’, while some may even ‘defy ascription of communicative purpose’ (Swales 1990: 46–7). Unsurprisingly, it is above all poetry that threatens to topple Swales’ theoretical building: There remain, of course, some genres for which purpose is unsuited as a primary criterion. Poetic genres are an obvious example. Although there may be overt political, religious or patriotic tracts put out in the form of verse, the poetry that is taught, remembered, known and loved is rarely of that kind and inevitably makes an appeal to the reader or listener so complex as to

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allow no easy or useful categorization of purpose. Poems, and other genres whose appeal may lie in the verbal pleasure they give, can thus be separately characterized by the fact that they defy ascription of communicative purpose. (Swales 1990: 47)

A related problem is identified by Vijay K. Bathia, whose Analysing Genre (1993) owes much to Genre Analysis, but with some significant qualifications. In his psychological and cognitive reformulation of Swales’ theory, Bathia notes that the constraints posed by each genre ‘are often exploited by the expert members of the discourse community to achieve private intentions within the framework of socially recognized purpose(s)’ (Bathia 1993: 15). Again, even though Bathia’s study is more specifically limited to professional and academic settings, this qualification is valid for the novel as well as for the University lecture: in both cases, it underscores the fact that even if a text can be assigned to a genre by identifying a shared, more or less conventional set of purposes, its functional dimension may be much wider than those conventional purposes suggest. The insufficiency – for translative purposes – of terms like genre or texttype is attested by the difficulties of definition encountered in the field of translation for specific purposes. Within the discipline of translation studies, TSP scholars are arguably the group who have shown most interest in these matters: yet, though a number of distinctions and subdivisions have been proposed,5 no single encompassing theory exists as yet which is able to describe all kinds of texts. In an article aimed at clearing the methodological ground for a collection of specialized essays, Anna Trosborg has expatiated on the usefulness of concepts like register, genre and text-type, to conclude that it is only by a combination of all three (as well as by an awareness of communicative functions) that the translator scholar can produce ‘guidelines for identifying and generating conventions and functions of language’ (Trosborg 1997: 4). However, Trosborg’s discussion of these categories leads her to a conclusion whose theoretical implications she fails to explore. The communicative purpose of an utterance within a text can be identified as its illocutionary force; yet this illocutionary force, which is the dynamic element in communication, is not to be treated in isolation as the illocutionary force of each utterance. Rather, the interrelationship of speech acts within sequences leads to the notion of

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illocutionary structure of a text. The overall purpose may be that of achieving equivalence of illocutionary force at text level. (Trosborg 1997: 13)

Though her reference to ‘equivalence of illocutionary force’ is misleading, Trosborg is here referring to what one might call the ‘performative function’ of texts, and her proposal involves seeing each text as a text act. The term ‘text act’ has probably been coined by W. B. Horner (her unpublished PhD thesis is quoted in Hatim and Mason 1990: 78), but Basil Hatim and Ian Mason have been the first to adapt the notion to the uses of translation theory. While it owes a lot to Hatim and Mason, however, the definition given in this chapter differs from theirs in one important detail: the authors of Discourse and the Translator write that a text act is ‘the predominant illocutionary force of a series of speech acts’ (Hatim and Mason 1990: 78); whereas here, the text act is seen as subsuming all the performative forces displayed by a text (the possible dismantling of which into ‘a series of speech acts’ has no bearing on its overall force and effect). In Hatim and Mason’s description, the text act is more or less synonymous with Reiss’ dominant function: here it can accommodate the dominant as well as other functions, not to mention genre and other performative qualities. There are various reasons why it is productive to use text-act theory, rather than genre theory or text typologies, in translation studies. First, the concept of text act can be used to describe the performative dimension of a text much more exhaustively. Text-types are only identified by their dominant functions: a text is defined as ‘informative’, ‘expressive’ or ‘operative’, its ‘sets of communicative purposes’ reduced to one encompassing goal. The concept of genre only covers the ostensive side of the performative function: by employing certain rhetorical structures, syntactic forms, terms of art or titles/subtitles (‘An Essay in Stylistics’, ‘A Novel’, ‘A Biography’), the text ostensively declares its affiliation to a certain category. By contrast, a text act is everything that a text aims to do and/or does in the world, all of its communicative purposes – even those which are not predetermined by genre, as well as those which create new genres or transform old ones. Secondly, unlike genre theory, which presupposes a high degree of intentionality (the writer or speaker chooses a genre in order to work within its conventions or twist them), text-act theory does not exclude intentionality, but can dispense with it.While affiliation to genre creates performative expectations,

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there is no necessary or conventional link between texts and their illocutionary forces and/or perlocutionary effects (apart from the ones ostensively declared and sought for by genre affiliation – self-evidently). Therefore, texts may be seen to have unintended, even unwanted illocutionary forces; and their perlocutionary effects can be studied as an integral part of their performative function even if they were never intended in the first place. Thirdly, and as already taken for granted in the two preceding paragraphs, text-act theory does not only cover the illocutionary side of performativity (as in genre theory and functional taxonomies), but also its perlocutionary aspects. In this respect, a slight but significant distance is marked from Hatim and Mason’s formulations and Trosborg’s simplification of those formulations. Hatim and Mason reduce the consequences of text-act theory to a consideration that ‘equivalence may also be judged at the level of the text act: has the predominant illocutionary force of the source text been preserved in translation?’ Trosborg, as seen above, further restricts the usefulness of the theory by specifying that ‘the overall purpose may be that of achieving equivalence of illocutionary force at text level’ (italics mine; but admittedly, Trosborg’s purposes are very practical and specialized). My approach extends these intuitions so that the actual effects of texts on people and ideas are observed as well as their aims and goals. Fourthly, text-act theory can also be expanded to become a theory of bi-textual acts. One of the main limitations of genre theories and functional taxonomies, as applied to translation studies, is that they appear to uphold the idea that equivalence of genre or predominant function must be sought for by the translator. Even when Funktionsveränderung is allowed for, as in Vermeer’s Skopostheorie, only a change from one main function to another is taken into consideration, and its consequences on the target text are then systematically analysed. In (bi-)text-act theory, a complex set of illocutionary forces and perlocutionary effects is observed in the source and in the target texts, without preliminary prescriptions or post-factum simplifications. Subtler differences can be accounted for on the performative level than either genre or function can explain. Within the framework of text-act theory, the translator: (1) expands the notion of genre (which is obviously not abandoned) by supplementing the ostensive part of performativity with a consideration of all the other purposes

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aimed at in the source text; (2) looks at the actual impact of his/her source text on the world, as well as at the impact his/her own target text is likely to have; and (3) openly views his/her own purposes as a translator (the force he/she wants to invest the target text with), and the conditionings under which he/she has to work. By adopting a text-act approach, the translation scholar: (1) expands the notion of genre to comprehend all the non-ostensive, and even non-intentional aspects of performativity into his/her analysis; (2) assigns equal importance to the source and target texts, thus producing a balanced observation of translation ‘norms’ (Toury 1995); and (3) includes the perlocutionary effects of texts in a discipline which has historically concentrated on intention or intended effects rather than on real textual impact.

Two examples of text acts Describing the performative dimension of translation does not mean so much breaking new ground as drawing maps of a territory which has often been explored but never charted. All translators and interpreters ask themselves questions about purposes (their own, the source text’s, the source-text author’s, the target-text publisher’s, etc.): but few of these questions come to the surface of the transaction, or even of translators’ awareness, because it would be uneconomic to make them all conscious or explicit. However, since a frequent mistake of trainee translators has to do with failing to understand the text act they are supposed to recreate and/or perform (they usually concentrate on the microlinguistic aspects of the text, and lose sight of its context), a full knowledge of translation as a purposeful activity (cf. Nord 1997) can accelerate their learning processes;6 and even proficient translators can take advantage from an understanding of how their work is conditioned by the purposes inscribed in the source text, as well as by other people’s goals and their own. The translation scholar, for his/her own part, will not understand the nature of any bi-text if he/she does not look at the performative nature of the interlingual passage. In what follows, two very different examples of text acts are analysed – a literary translation in the first case, a specialized translating/interpreting job in the second. In order to show that this kind of performative analysis is generally applicable, a written kind of transaction is compared with a different task

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involving the oral revision of written texts. The divide between literary and non-literary genres is brought into the foreground once again – not to uphold it but to show its arbitrariness, by demonstrating that very different translation tasks can be viewed in a similar performative light. The analysis comprehends both the illocutionary aspects of the transactions and their perlocutionary consequences, as understood by the translator(s) at the time and as viewed post-factum. Both case studies are drawn from personal experience.

Translating a classic to make it a classic The first case study has unusual performative contours from its very inception. In the autumn of 2004, I persuaded the owner of a medium-sized publishing house to bring out a classic of Scottish literature, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song (1932), in Italian translation. Uncharacteristically enough – for the ‘preliminary norms’ of the Italian book market (Toury 1995: 58) – the translator was not only choosing the book on which he was going to work, but he was also going to be paid. The translation strategies he decided to employ – because this was a book which required a degree of planning – had to do with the illocutionary intentions inscribed within the source text, mainly investing its locative function (cf. chapter 6; also cf. Morini 2006b). Sunset Song is the opening novel in a trilogy, A Scots Quair (1932–4), written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (whose real name was Leslie Mitchell) in a mixture of English and Scots. The use of Scots was not unprecedented in Scottish fiction – George Douglas Brown’s seminal The House with the Green Shutters having been published in 1901 – but unlike its predecessors, A Scots Quair employed Scots in its narrative as well as for the dialogue. This linguistic novelty made Gibbon the narrative champion of the so-called Scottish Renaissance – whose initiator and main poetic representative was Hugh MacDiarmid. A Scots Quair, however, is also the most ambitious work of a highly accomplished writer: throughout his trilogy, Gibbon uses various techniques which had been perfected in the course of 12 decades of British novel-writing, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. His deft use of free indirect discourse, in particular, allows him to drift in and out of characters at will – both his protagonists and the envious villagers and townsfolk he uses as a chorus. In sum, one could say that on the illocutionary plane, A Scots Quair is pervaded

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by its author’s aim of contributing to a linguistic renascence by producing a highly wrought modernist novel in Scottish (MacDiarmid did the same with A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, which can be read as a sort of Scottish Waste Land); even if those had not been Gibbon’s real intentions, the trilogy can be construed as having that purpose. In retrospect, it is also necessary to take the translator’s motives to task in his choice of translating matter. In part, of course, he was drawn to Gibbon by the sheer power of the novels, by the fascination they held for him and by his desire to allow people with small English and no Scots to read them – all commonplace and acceptable reasons for an academic translator to bring up. But he was also lured by the stylistic possibilities he envisaged for the target text, which would allow him to show his abilities to their full extent. After a number of minor enterprises, this translation would be his PhD dissertation as a translator. In consideration of the illocutionary forces of the source text as the translator understood it, and of the motives he can now observe a posteriori, he decided that the means had to be found to reproduce the ‘double difference’ inscribed in Gibbon’s novel (Morini 2006b) – not only the gap separating the Italian reader from the source language and culture, but also the ‘internal gap’ estranging the average British reader from the language of the novel and the culture it represents. In order to do so, and to avoid the pitfalls of dialect translation (cf. Chapters 6 and 7), the translator rendered the Scottish terms of the original with the words of an invented compound language.7 With an effect of locative displacement, the reader was to be plunged into an uncharted linguistic territory which, by accumulation, could come to represent a sort of ‘Italian Scotland’: Right glad she was to be out from the stink of Skite with the road of Mondynes in front of her. Then she heard the bell of a bicycle far down the road behind and drew to one side, but the thing didn’t pass, it slowed down and somebody called out, timid-like, Are you Will Guthrie’s sister? Chris turned and saw her then, knew her at once Will’s quean, young and white-faced and fair, and heard her own voice, near troubled as that looked at her as she answered Yes; and you’ll be Mollie Douglas? (Gibbon 1932/77: 68) Era proprio contenta di scappare dalla puzza di Schianta con davanti la strada di Mondynes. Poi sentì il campanello di una bicicletta giù per la strada dietro di lei e si spostò, ma quella non passò oltre, rallentò e qualcuno le fece,

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con voce timida, Sei la sorella di Will Guthrie? Chris allora si girò e la vide, capì subito che era la fiola di Will, giovane e con la faccia bianca e i capelli chiari, e si accorse che aveva la voce turbata come gli occhi che la guardavano quando rispose Sì. E tu devi essere Mollie Douglas. (Gibbon and Morini 2005: 115. Bold type added to highlight the terms in ‘Italian Scots’) She was right glad to escape from the stink of Skite with the road of Mondynes in front of her. Then she heard the bell of a bycicle down the road behind her and drew aside, but that didn’t pass on, it slowed down and someone called to her, in a shy voice, Are you Will Guthrie’s sister? So Chirs turned round and saw her, and understood immediately that she was Will’s quean, young with a white face and fair hair, and realized her voice was troubled like the eyes that looked at her when she answered Yes. And you must be Mollie Douglas. (The back-translation retains the original Scots terms)

Canto del tramonto did not sell well. Even when booksellers accepted to store copies of the book, a large proportion of these went unnoticed (there were some exceptions, as some University professors teaching courses on Scottish literature let their students know that an Italian translation of Sunset Song was available). In the national newspapers, the book received one enthusiastic review and two notices damning it with faint praise (cf. Morini 2006: 136–8); while a very informed appreciation – written by a specialist in Scottish literature – appeared on an academic journal with limited circulation (Sassi 2007). Reader response was similarly mixed: some reactions were enthusiastic, but the translator also registered the discomfort of friends who were baffled or defeated by the strangeness of the language and the remoteness of the places and situations described in the novel. Whatever the impact of this remoteness, the relative failure may also have to do with another purpose the translator had been consciously or unconsciously setting himself: his point of view was that Sunset Song was a modern classic, the Scottish counterpart to Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway. Its literary interest alone, therefore, would justify its inclusion in the Italian canon of translated literature: once Canto del tramonto was published, everybody would have to recognize its importance. In other words, by proposing an Italian version of Sunset Song (and, if possible, of the whole trilogy), the translator was aiming to create a new classic. However, this kind of enterprise was inevitably a very difficult one, for a variety of reasons. In the first place, Lewis Grassic Gibbon may have been granted

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the status of a classic author by some Scottish critics,8 but he is marginalized in the rest of Britain – as indeed most Scottish literature, and all literature written in Scots. On the British book market, Scottish literature survives only in a very small niche, forced into the back shelves by ‘old’ English literature and ‘new’ English-speaking literatures. Should one look for Hugh MacDiarmid’s Selected Poems in a London bookstore, one would probably find a single copy among a host of collections by such poets as Simon Armitage and Derek Walcott – the former being a good, but certainly not outstanding, English poet. Linguistic difference is felt very keenly, and the use of Scots appears to be the watershed between visibility and invisibility (Liz Lochhead’s books are not as widespread as Carol Ann Duffy’s; Muriel Spark is much more popular than George Friel). Secondly, the Italian book market has rigid rules which determine the acceptance of foreign import and the creation of classics. Whether led by their knowledge of popular taste or by their own prejudices, most publishing houses refuse to take into consideration anything written before 2000, and relegate all books from the 1980s or 1990s to their ‘backlists’. Exceptions are made, of course, for ‘classics’ and ‘modern classics’, but these appear to belong to a relatively conservative category – new accessions are rare. Furthermore, perhaps as a consequence of British bookselling conditions, while ‘English literature’ is a known quantity both in recent publications and within the restricted range of classics, there is no such thing as a specifically Scottish tradition in Italy. This made it even more arduous to establish Canto del tramonto as a modern classic, because its classical quality was incomprehensible without reference to a Scottish line in fiction (before and after Gibbon, from George Douglas Brown to Irvine Welsh) of which the Italian reading public had no inkling. In the end, conferring the status of a classic to a 70-year-old book which had never been published before and appeared to refer to no living tradition proved too much for a single-handed effort. Since the translator’s previous work for the same publisher – a very long ‘novel in verse’ by Les Murray – had been reviewed very well and had sold beyond the publisher’s expectations, he hoped that a similar reception could be organized for Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy: but while Gibbon’s Scotland is much more remote in language and culture, it does not possess the exotic allure and academic attraction of Murray’s Australia. As a result, Italian readers still think of Scotland as Northern England, and the translator of Sunset Song is now wondering whether a higher degree of

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normalization would have done a better service to the hidden masterpiece he wanted to turn into a freely available classic.

The translator as language expert A couple of winters ago, a friend and colleague of mine was asked to take part in a transaction which involved translating a contract from Italian into English. It was one of those periods of the year in which it is difficult to hire the professionals of specialized translation, or indeed the professionals of any specialized craft: this was the reason why she had been asked to do the job, even though she had little knowledge in the fields of either law or finance (the contract regulated a purchase of two companies’ shares by a third). Being no expert, this friend thought it expedient to ask for a colleague’s help – even though the latter had as little experience in the field as she had herself. The man who had contacted her was the business consultant involved in the transaction. The translation service he normally employed had been unavailable at such short notice, so he had set out looking for a viable alternative. However, even if he had often worked alongside professional translators (and interpreters), this man’s notion of translation was rather vague. On the one hand, he did not appear to recognize any particular difference between specialized and what Snell-Hornby terms ‘general language translation’. On the other, when the translators’ task was finally made clear to them, they understood that what was needed in this transaction was not so much a translator as a bilingual expert. Luckily, such a figure was somehow created through the collaboration of all the professionals involved in the transaction. Ideally, as Giuseppina Cortese writes in her introduction to Tradurre i linguaggi settoriali, the specialized translator combines the field knowledge of a technician with the linguistic and textual competence required for the specific task in hand (Cortese 1996: 21). In this case, knowledge and competence were largely provided by the business consultant himself, by the company’s accountant, and by a lawyer with some comparative expertise in the Italian and English legal and financial systems;9 while the translators only contributed general linguistic competence and a number of tools and tricks to make up for their lack of specific knowledge. Whatever their individual accomplishments, the business consultant, the accountant and the lawyer betrayed scarce comprehension of the nature of translation – usually seen by the layman as a mere mechanical

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activity, involving universal ‘accuracy’ rather than situational ‘acceptability’ (Negru 2010) – by failing to acquaint the translators from the start with the performative contours of their assignment. After a while, it surfaced that the transaction had to be kept as secret as possible (the contract had encrypted company names, etc.): therefore, the translators were to be employed as human transposing machines, with no idea of purposes, or even of a general direction. This, however, was highly impractical, and ultimately impossible: little by little, the people with whom they were collaborating found themselves compelled to tell them what the contract was about, because certain passages allowed for a measure of distortion – or to put it more neutrally, alternative interpretations were possible which would favour one party over the other. The practical and performative nature of the task was as follows: in the course of three successive meetings, the translators were to review and revise a bilingual contract and a number of side agreements (also in English/Italian format). There was no actual translating work required, because the Italian and English versions were already in existence: but the English version had been drawn up by the counterpart, and the employers wanted to make sure that no ‘changes’ to their disadvantage had been made in the transition from Italian to English. A strange (locative and performative) feature of these bilingual contracts was that while the Italian version was the source text, the English target text was to be held valid and binding; on the other hand, all controversies were to be solved by Italian courts according to Italian law – and therefore, all references in English were to the Italian code (certain Italian terms of art, like ‘sopravvenienze passive’ and ‘insussistenze dell’attivo’, were eventually maintained in the English text). This strangeness had been imposed by the counterpart, a multinational whose negotiating position appeared to be stronger. As it turned out, the translators’ task was not too difficult, because the English version had been drawn up by a very proficient expert in the field whose mother tongue was English. The two heads of the bi-text were almost always facing in the same practical direction: diversions were rare and easy enough to spot, and whenever the translators found one they consulted with the lawyer and the other two professional figures. The real problem was performative: the aim of secrecy being at cross-purposes with the aim of adequacy, the translators

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had to extort more information from their fellow collaborators than they were initially prepared to give. In cases such as the following, the passage from version (i) to version (ii) was only feasible with an awareness of who could take advantage of the slight but significant shift occurring in version (i): Resta inteso che qualora detto limite dovesse essere superato, la responsabilità dei Venditori comprenderà l’intera somma da indennizzarsi dedotto singolarmente l’ammontare di Euro 50.000 (cinquantamila) che pertanto sarà da considerarsi come franchigia in relazione a ciascuna voce di indennizzo o manleva. (Italics mine) i) provided that if such amount is exceeded, the Sellers’ liability shall be for the entire amount after having deducted the amount of Euro 50,000 (fifty thousand), which shall constitute a minimum threshold in connection with each individual indemnification claim. ii) provided that if such amount is exceeded, the Sellers’ liability shall be for the entire amount after having deducted the amount of Euro 50,000 (fifty thousand) for any single claim, which shall constitute a minimum threshold in connection with each individual indemnification claim. (Italics mine)

The other motives influencing the transaction, and theoretically endangering its success, were the translators’ own. Even though they had made it clear that they were no specialists, they realized from the very first meeting that they wanted to impress their employers/fellow collaborators with the idea that whatever their professional abilities, their general linguistic knowledge was good enough to compensate for any deficiencies in the field. Therefore, some questions they would have liked to ask were not asked, and some tools they would have liked to use were left untouched. Their initial idea had been to use such databases as IATE (http://iate. europa.eu), and other online and offline resources for specialized translators: one of them would check these resources, while the other would be more directly involved in the collegiate work. However, as soon as the translators understood that in the circumstances such aids were not indispensable, they sacrificed maximum efficiency to their self-fashioned image as ready-made field professionals: in the end, it was enough for them to follow the revision with the support of one general-language and one specialized dictionary. This was probably a calculated gamble, but while at the start they had been regarded with a degree of suspicion, in the end these

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non-professional translators were asked to do some non-collegiate work at home – a sign of their increased prestige. In the course of the third and last meeting, which was held on the eve of signing, an extended phone conference was scheduled with the counterpart in order to define all the details and discuss all the proposed corrections. At this stage, the translators understood the situation so well – and had acquired credit enough – that they were asked to conduct the part of the proceedings which had to do with the English version of the contract. Together with the fact that they were paid, and asked to do more work that they did not accept, this told them that they had been able to reconcile the purposes of their employers with their own.

Conclusion: Translation viewed in narrative terms The notion of text act does not provide a ready-made grid linking text-types with translation methods, or neatly dividing one kind of translation from another. Far from being taxonomic, a text-act description of the performative side of translation demonstrates the insufficiency of all taxonomies: disparate genres or text-types can be shown to produce similar performative conditions, while a single text can be translated in many performatively different ways (and not only according to its changing skopos). Thus, while all definitions of genre and text-type – whether arrived at inductively or deductively – are categorical, my definition of text act is narrative. The performative dimension of translation can only be viewed as a story involving texts, organizations, material conditions and human beings (cf. Robinson 2011: 41–111). Since text-act theory is a fundamentally narrative approach, it tends to emphasize the contribution of human agents. Therefore, whereas text-type and genre theory encourage scholars to view texts as directing human choices, rather than the other way round, text-act theory brings the activities of translators (and of the other participants in the transaction) to the foreground of critical debate. More than two decades after Lawrence Venuti’s first denunciation of ‘the translator’s invisibility’ (Venuti 1986), and fifteen years after Douglas Robinson’s first attempts at making it ‘the translator’s turn’ in translation studies (Robinson 1991), it is time to study the full impact of the translator’s individual

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contribution (cf. Chapter 4). In the parlance of translation trainers, it is an ageold commonplace that each translator will produce a different version of the same text: repeated again and again, this commonplace is never explained, and the variability is merely ascribed to the diversity of human personality. But human personalities have purposes, and must react to the purposes of other personalities: and each unique human personality, faced with a unique human artefact produced by other humans, will produce a unique, self-originating, other-driven text act.

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The Performative Function/2: How to do Things with Poems

The poetic fallacy If a performative description of translation is going to be of any use, it must be applicable to genres and discourses which are commonly held to perform nothing, and to have no practical value whatsoever – and no form of writing is universally considered to be less ‘performative’ than poetry. Indeed, poetry is not only traditionally described as useless (and, in Philip Sidney’s argument, supremely useful because of its uselessness): it is also, very often, deemed to be almost non-communicative. One of the most long-lived commonplaces of literary and linguistic criticism assigns a special place to poetry in the vast repertoire of human writing, as well as in the more restricted spectrum of literary endeavour. For linguists and literary critics alike, the language of poetry has nothing to do with normal speech. As a consequence, all or most poems are held to be untranslatable, or almost so. In literature, the commonplace is arguably as old as the image of the poet as a seer or a prophet. The romantic poets-critics have rewritten this myth for modernity: Novalis thought that poetry was the only medium through which the ineffable could be expressed, and even Wordsworth, for all his insistence on nature and the common language, saw ‘the Poet [. . .] singing a song in which all human beings join with him’, and defined poetry as ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’ (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1991: 259). In the twentieth century, the thread was taken up by Benedetto Croce, the Russian Formalists, and the American New Critics, all of whom claimed, with different emphases, that literature (poetry in particular) was different from normal

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speech, and that therefore every attempt to rewrite or paraphrase it had to be regarded as heretical. The linguists, for their own part, have often viewed poetry as straying too far from the norm for its language to be analysed with anything approaching scientific precision.1 This difficulty has been felt with particular keenness in the field of linguistically oriented translation studies: while the theorists of the 1950s and the 1960s still cherished the hope of devising mathematical routines to substitute machine for human translation, their successors were obliged to exclude literature – and above all poetry – from their field of vision, in order to lay the foundations of a future ‘Translation Science’. As early as 1967, Mario Wandruszka concluded that ‘Poetry is untranslatable. Its sound is untranslatable, its rhythm, its melody [Dichtung ist unübersetzbar. Ihr Klang ist unübersetzbar, ihr Rhytmus, ihre Melodie]’ (Wandruszka 1967: 7). As late as 1996, Peter Newmark distinguished between two kinds of translation (one concerned with fiction, the other with reality), only to identify poetic translation as a third, separate type, ‘since poetry uniquely makes use of all the formal resources of the language’ (Newmark 1996: 6; cf. Chapter 2). Most poetic translators, for their own part, do nothing to dispel the romantic mists surrounding their activity: Petru Iamandi, a University professor and a practitioner of the art, asks himself questions on how to translate ‘the Poetic Untranslatable’ (Iamandi 2009); Peter Robinson, an accomplished translator and poet, dubs poetic translation The Art of the Impossible (2010)2; while another colleague, Edith Grossman, rephrases Wandruszka’s judgements for the third millennium when she writes that ‘poetry is the most intense, most highly charged, most artful and complex form of language we have [. . .] its translation into another language [. . .] an act of rash bravado verging on the foolhardy’ (Grossman 2010: 93–4). The prejudice which sees poetry as an untranslatable deviation from common speech, however, is much older than any linguistic theory of translation or any Romantic notion of poetry. In the Renaissance, the idea was already in circulation that every linguistic code had a peculiar nature of its own which made transcodification very difficult:3 as John Florio wrote in the preface of his 1603 version of Montaigne, ‘every language hath it’s Genius and inseparable forme; without Pythagoras his Metempsychosis it can not rightly be

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translated’ (Florio 1603: preface to the reader). This awareness, together with the special status already accorded to poetry, soon prompted such figures as Abraham Cowley and Sir John Denham to style themselves as imitators rather than translators: I conceive it a vulgar error in translating Poets, to affect being Fidus Interpres; let that care be with them who deal in matters of Fact, or matters of Faith: but whosoever aims at it in Poetry, as he attempts what is not required, so he shall never perform what he attempts; for it is not his business alone to translate Language into Language, but Poesie into Poesie; & Poesie is of so subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum, there being certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language, which gives life and energy to the words. (Steiner 1975: 64–5)

Denham’s justification of his imitative mode presupposes a conception of poetry which lies at the root of its special status in literary and linguistic theory, as well as of its marginality in translation ‘science’. More than one century and a half before Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Denham defines poetry in organic – as well as mystical and alchemic – terms. A poem is seen as a living thing, and its transposition into another language is therefore accounted impossible ‘if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion’. One is also reminded of Wordsworth’s ‘breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’: poetry may have themes in common with other forms of human communication, but its language has an energy and a spirit which are exclusively its own. This organicist view – occasionally extended to other literary genres (e.g. ‘artful prose’; Grossman 2010: 93), but most commonly reserved for poetry – explains why most laymen and many specialists are convinced, even before giving any real thought to the matter, that translating poetry is impossible. If a poem is a living thing, it cannot simply be transported into another language and cultural climate – doing that means uprooting it, cutting it away from the soil which nurtures it and keeps it alive. If a poem is an organism, no part of it can be cut off without seriously harming or destroying the whole – its entire body would have to be reproduced for a translation to be alive and organic in its turn. Since such total reproduction is obviously impossible (though dreamt

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of by the theorists of all ages; cf. Rooryck 2008), the only viable alternative, as Denham suggests, is imitation, that is, recreation. Therefore, poetic translation is commonly seen as the nearest thing to creative writing, and poets are often exclusively credited with the ability to translate poetry (cf. Houvenagel, Creve and Monballieu 2008). The perspective changes, however, if instead of looking at what a poem is we look at what it does: if we view poetry, that is, as a genre or text category having not only an organic existence, but also a function in the world. The function of poetry, if it is taken at all into consideration, is normally thought to be merely aesthetic. In Katharina Reiss’ translation-centred text typologies, all literary texts are labelled as ‘form-centred’ (formbetont; Reiss 1969) or ‘expressive’ (Reiss and Vermeer 1984/91). In John M. Swales’ genre theory, poems pose a difficulty to the taxonomist in that their ‘appeal may lie in the verbal pleasure they give’ and therefore ‘they defy ascription of communicative purpose’ (Swales 1990: 47; cf. Chapter 2). However, confining the function of poetry to Jakobson’s ‘poetic function’ (Jakobson 1960), that is, to its aesthetic dimension, is simplistic (as well as unproductive in translational terms): as will be seen below, no two poems are alike in function. Even leaving aside the often-mentioned ‘non-poetic’ uses of poetry (cf. Morini 2007a: 159–70), it is an intuitive truth that Lewis Carroll’s ‘How Doth the Little Crocodile’, S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and W. H. Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’ function in very different ways, or have very different functions. If one looks at what poetry does, one may aim – as translator – at doing something similar in one’s turn; while as scholar, one may compare the performative functions of the various source and target texts under consideration. In what follows, two English poems with very different performative dimensions are analysed for the performative possibilities they create – though inevitably, the locative and interpersonal functions will also come into play. Whatever the general respective merits of the organicist and performative views, it can be shown that the latter liberates translators from the impossible task of translating ‘the whole poem’ (or, for that matter, whatever kind of source text ‘as it is’), and enables them to envisage translation strategies which may differ in kind, but not in nature, from those employed in translating other genres.

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Bees and crocodiles: How to translate a funny poem How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale! How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws! (Carroll 1970: 38)

On the face of it, this is a rather simple poem to translate, at least if the translator has the ability to recognize and reproduce basic comic effects. If viewed in isolation, ‘How doth the little crocodile’ is a light, humorous poem – its humour produced by the nursery-rhyme alternation of trimeters and tetrameters and by the incongruity of its description (the crocodile vainly polishing his own scales, and swallowing little fishes with a welcoming grin). Provided no illustrations or other appendages are there to limit the possibilities of the target text, and provided the performative function is maintained, the translator may not even need to preserve the visual contours of the source (cf. Morini 2002: 44–5). As it happens, however, in this case there are constraints on the translator’s powers, or at any rate there are complications in the performative function of the source text. As the inverted commas signal, this is not merely a humorous poem, but a humorous poem within a narrative frame (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865), and its destination marks a performative difference from all pieces appearing in poetic sequences, collections or anthologies. When it appears in the context of a tale or a novel, and if it is not directly entrusted with the task of telling the story (as in verse novels and narrative poems), verse can display two kinds of relationship with its prose container: thematic or narrative. When the relationship is thematic, the content of the poem links up in direct or suggestive ways with the events described in the story (epigraphs in verse are typical examples of this kind of connection, but occasionally, ‘thematic poems’ can be uttered, read or recalled by characters and narrators). When the relationship is narrative, the impact of the poem on the story (and vice versa) is more direct: this kind of poem is usually uttered, read or recalled

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by characters and narrators, and it has some sort of consequential link with the unfolding of the plot. At this stage of her underground journey, Alice recites the poem in order to make sure that her intelligence has not been affected by her strange surroundings. In order to prove to herself that she has not become as stupid as her classmate Mabel, she tries to repeat the multiplication table, only to discover that in this world, strange mathematical rules seem to apply (‘Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is – oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!’). As a last resort, Alice decides to declaim a poem she knows by heart, ‘Against Idleness and Mischief ’ (‘How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour, / And gather honey all the day / From every opening flower!’) – but again, each line is altered out of recognition as it comes out of her mouth. Isaac Watts’ poems of moral instruction (Divine Songs for Children, 1715) were very well known in Carroll’s time, and a little girl like Alice (or her real-life counterpart, Alice Liddell) would have been asked to read and learn many of them. The transformation of Watts’ ‘Against Idleness and Mischief ’, with its pious reflections on industry and diligence, into the nonsensical ‘How doth the little crocodile’, serves an intertextual as well as a narrative purpose: on the one hand, the substitution of a crocodile for a swarm of bees confirms the estranging properties of this queer Underground into which the young protagonist has fallen; on the other hand, Alice’s recourse to a poem as a gauge of her sanity, or of the sanity of her surroundings, allows Carroll to parody a famous and rather boring poem that his listeners (the Liddell sisters) and his enlarged public of young humans would immediately recognize. All in all, this apparently straightforward little poem seems to be charged with a surprising amount of illocutionary forces – it displays a set of purposes which range far beyond those normally ascribed to the genre it belongs to. A translator wishing to fully reproduce its performative function would have to: (1) write a humorous poem in light verse; (2) make it clear to his/her readers that the lines recited by Alice are an alteration of some forgotten original; and (3) parody a poem performing the same function in the target culture which Watts’ poem had in the source.4 Creating a performative replica of ‘How doth the little crocodile’ is a very difficult task, requiring literary expertise and comic talents. However, the target text will have functions/purposes of its own

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which need not necessarily be a copy of their sources: each target context will provide different models, genres and traditions which may require considerable performative variation. An analysis of three Italian versions of this poem shows that this kind of performative complexity can produce a set of very different results: each in his/her own way, the translators attempt to recreate the illocutionary forces which are relevant to their own purposes, and leave out or alter those which are not. In Italy, the Alice books occupy a middle ground between modern and children’s classics: therefore, ‘serious’ editions with notes and introductions exist alongside juvenile books in which Tenniel’s illustrations are substituted by simpler, and less disquieting, drawings. Predictably, these two traditions tend to employ diverging translating methods.5 The first version is drawn from a serious adult edition of both Alice books first published by Garzanti in 1989. The Garzanti series ‘i grandi libri [the great books]’ is among the most prestigious of its kind in Italy: most of its translations of modern classics are heavily source-oriented, written in a dignified, slightly outdated style, and furnished with bulky scholarly apparatuses. Milli Graffi’s edition and translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is no exception: Carroll’s texts are prefaced by a short biography, by a ‘historical-critical profile of the author and its works [profilo storico-critico dell’autore e dell’opera]’ and by a ‘bibliographical guide [guida bibliografica]’. An appendix is added which contains an excised chapter of Through the Looking Glass, and the edition is completed by 243 notes informing the reader on historical, critical or linguistic-translational matters. Graffi’s style is in accordance with the rather stiff, ‘classical’ formality exuded by this book as an object: the very beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank’ (Carroll 1970: 25), becomes ‘Alice moriva di noia a starsene seduta con la sorella sulla proda [Alice was dying of boredom, sitting by her sister on the bank]’ (Carroll and Graffi 2007: 7), where the old-fashioned (and very literary) term proda immediately signals a heightened register level which will be maintained throughout. Graffi’s translation of the Watts parody, as her opening lines shows, is in keeping with her editing and translating style: T ’amo, o pio coccodrillo: e un sentimento D’innocenza e di pace al cor m’infondi, (Carroll and Graffi 2007: 18)

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I love you, O pious crocodile: and with a sentiment of innocence and peace you inspire my heart,

The translator’s starting point is clearly performative: she has understood the narrative and intertextual aspects of the poem as an illocution, and has proceeded to find Watts’ equivalent in the target culture. Having identified it in Carducci’s famous ‘Il bove [The ox]’, she has written a parody of it which grafts the referential contours of Carroll’s poem onto a different literary context. An interesting ‘compounding’ technique is at work here: the first couplet is almost an exact reproduction of Carducci’s (‘T’amo, o pio bove; e mite un sentimento / Di vigore e di pace al cor m’infondi’ [I love you, o pius ox; and with a mild sentiment / of vigour and of peace you inspire my heart]), while in the following six lines the translator juggles with Carducci’s rhyme and rhyme-words (monumento / fecondi / contento / secondi / lento / rispondi). While this version skilfully recreates points (2) and (3) of Carroll’s illocutionary pattern, point (1) is modified: though it is still a parody of a (pompous) original, ‘T’amo, pio coccodrillo’ is no longer a humorous poem in light verse. No contemporary Italian child would smile or laugh at the intertextual joke, and very few schoolchildren, perhaps, would recognize the reference at all. However, this alteration is perfectly in keeping with what appears to be the performative function of Graffi’s target text. The Alice books, as published by Garzanti, are not meant for children, but for educated adults: and in 1989, most educated Italian adults had been forced to learn Carducci’s poem by heart at school.6 A slightly different performative solution is devised by Aldo Busi, who translated (1993) the first Alice book for the series ‘I Classici / Universale Economica Feltrinelli [The Classics: Feltrinelli Universal Paperbacks]’ – Feltrinelli’s equivalent of Garzanti’s ‘grandi libri’: Piccol’ape . . . ste di un coccodrillo spruzza e sguazza la tua coda in crociera lungo il Nillo fra la densa sua fanghiglia e ti agghindi scaglia a scaglia con la melma più di moda! (Carroll and Busi 2006: 31) Little bee . . . ast of a crocodile your tail splashes and sputters

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on a cruise along the Nille [sic] with its thick slush and you decorate each scale with the most fashionable sludge!

In order to reproduce illocutionary force (2), and to hint at, rather than recreate, illocutionary force (3), Busi adopts a less conservative technique than Graffi. In this case, no Italian model is parodied in the target text: the translator simply imagines a beginning for Watts’ poem in Italian (‘How doth the little busy bee’ becomes ‘Piccol’ape’), then twists that beginning into a poem about a crocodile. From the narrative point of view, the reader still gets a sense that Alice is trying to recite a poem that goes awry in the telling; as to the source of that poem, however, he/she is free to imagine it for him/herself. This trick allows Busi to translate ‘How doth the little crocodile’ with a great deal of liberty, and that liberty is used to attempt a reproduction of illocutionary force (1): individual aesthetic judgements on ‘Piccol’ape . . .’ may vary, but there is no doubt that the Italian poem aims at being funny in a light-hearted way. In order to write a funny poem, the translator goes as far as to develop details which were only hinted at in the source text (which was confined within the limits of parody). Thus, the crocodile’s vanity is exasperated and modernized: the frivolous beast goes on a cruise (‘in crociera’) and decorates himself (‘ti agghindi’). And while Graffi’s mock-Carduccian prosody is naturally more stately and dignified, Busi’s verse is more in line with the nursery-rhyme rhythm of the original. Busi’s performative rendition of ‘How doth the little crocodile’ is a mirror of his personality as a translator and writer – he is a well-known novelist and public figure in Italy – as well as of Feltrinelli’s image. While this initially revolutionary publishing house has become more and more institutional in the last two or three decades, it still preserves some of the literary daring of its beginnings. Consequently, Feltrinelli’s series of classics stands midway between tradition and innovation, philological scruple and carelessness. In this case, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is printed as a bilingual edition, and with an apparatus comprehending an introduction (by Busi), an afterword and a number of endnotes (by Carmen Covito). However, the introduction and the afterword are very brief, and the notes are only 24. Busi’s style is rather modern, arguably more informal than the original (‘What is the use of a book’ becomes ‘a che pro un libro’ [what for, a book?]; colloquial expressions and/ or abbreviations like ‘Bo’ and ‘Cia’ [Who knows? Come on] are employed).

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In the introduction, the translator himself catches the performative spirit of this edition when he says that this is a book for nobody (‘questo libro per Nessuno’), or rather for those in search of disquieting knowledge (i.e. adults: ‘cioè per colui che considera la conoscenza la forma più inquieta del gioco inquietante di vivere’), but at the same time it is the best in the world to read aloud to a child (‘il più bello al mondo da leggere a un bambino’; Carroll and Busi 2006: 6). Feltrinelli has produced a version of Alice which belongs both to children’s literature and to the World’s classics – or to neither, for those on whom the trick does not work. Finally, a translation of ‘How doth the little crocodile’ included in an edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a children’s book will complete the range of performative possibilities made available by this target text. Here are the opening and the end of this version: Il piccolo coccodrillo tutto fiero Si serve della coda splendente, [. . .] Dei pesciolini ammira la danza, Contento di vedere cose belle! (Carroll and Spizzotin 1990: 26–7) The little crocodile, very proud of himself Makes use of his shining tail [. . .] Of the little fish he admires the dance, Quite happy to see beautiful things!

This Alice nel paese delle meraviglie, published by Fratelli Melita Editori, is far from philological in its translation and presentation. The edition is generically attributed to PierAntonio Spizzotin, whom we may suppose to have produced the translation (by patching other versions together?). Tenniel’s original illustrations are substituted with other drawings which are probably held to be more suitable for children. As to ‘How doth the little crocodile’, no attempt is made to reproduce illocutionary force (3), and a new purpose is added which was not present in the source. While Carroll’s parodies usually have a disquieting, even a frightening side to them, here the little crocodile is portrayed as a more inoffensive creature than his English or his other Italian counterparts: the ‘little fishes’, uneaten, dance under the reptilian’s amused gaze. The innocence of Italian children is safe, and Italian parents will not have to skim the text for its offensive sections: when they grow up, if they grow up

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literate, those children will be free to look for a more grown-up version of the same story.

Swimming Chenango Lake: The translation of light and water When Wandruszka, Newmark and Grossman expatiate on the hardships of poetic translation, the poetry they have in mind is not of the kind that is normally found within works of fiction or other non-poetic genres. Wandruszka, Newmark and Grossman’s poems are printed in isolation, with substantial margins all round; and when they are translated at all, their foreign versions are normally presented alongside the originals. At best, the target text can help readers to form an idea of the aesthetic effect produced by the source. There is widespread reluctance to accept the idea that this kind of ‘aesthetic’ poetry has a purpose – the idea of writing as a purposeful activity being commonly associated with other (academic, promotional, polemical) genres. However, poets have been known to state their principles and their motives for writing (one need only think of the prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads), and very few literary products can be read as having no other purpose than a ‘purely aesthetic’ one (one could perhaps mention certain passages by Dylan Thomas, or Dylan Thomas’ 1940s imitators). Furthermore, even when no motives or purposes are explicitly stated, most poetic compositions can be construed as displaying a set of illocutionary forces which are structurally linked to certain formal aspects of the verse. It is Charles Tomlinson’s verse, and not his critical prose, which justifies a reading of his poems as so many songs about the liberation of nature from the tyranny of the human eye (cf. Morini 2001: 159–73). In the whole corpus of Tomlinson’s poems, ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’ is possibly the one which realizes this liberation most harmoniously. Later works like ‘Under the Moon’s Reign’ have articulated the dilemma of the poet who sees what he would like to show as it is more straightforwardly (‘each sign / Transformed, but by no more miracle than the place / It occupied and the eye that saw it / Gathered into the momentary perfection of the scene / Under transfigured heavens, under the moon’s reign’; Tomlinson 1974: 17) – but in

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this poem about a winter swim in a northern lake the liberation is achieved, rather than declared, by a marriage of descriptive language and flowing form: Swimming Chenango Lake Winter will bar the swimmer soon. He reads the water’s autumnal hesitations A wealth of ways: it is jarred, It is astir already despite its steadiness, Where the first leaves at the first Tremor of the morning air have dropped Anticipating him, launching their imprints Outwards in eccentric, overlapping circles. (Tomlinson 1969: 3)

Even a cursory glance at the opening of this 47-line poem reveals that its main inspiration is descriptive – but even descriptions have purposes, and language is never free from ideology. In 1958, Charles Tomlinson had made his literary debut with a collection which bore the telltale title Seeing is Believing: and from those early productions to the collections published in the third millennium, his career has been spent in articulating a sort of religion without gods, of things seen in and for themselves rather than for their human value (as shown in ‘Under the Moon’s Reign’, this religion often amounts to a reversal of Wordsworth’s use of ‘pathetic fallacy’ in the Prelude and elsewhere). Of course, the eye of the beholder cannot be separated from the scene it beholds (‘he has looked long enough’); but the human in the picture is at least as passive as he is active, and his body frames ‘questions’, rather than answers or explanations. The very title of the poem, in which ‘swimming’ is eccentrically employed as a transitive verb, indicates that the swimmer actively does something to the lake by swimming, and prefigures the subsequent conflation between holding and being held, acting and losing oneself in water (somehow, swimming a lake seems a more promiscuous activity than swimming in a lake; and conversely, a grammatically correct construction could be read as meaning that the lake is swimming, not the man). ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’ aims at constructing a three-dimensional picture of the natural scene (with human) it portrays. It is a geometrical poem, both referentially and structurally: water is observed as having ‘a geometry’, not as creating ‘a fantasia of distorting forms’. The poem tries to replicate this geometry by describing, following and recreating it, in and through the verse,

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by the use of certain sound effects and the selection of specialized areas of the lexicon. The kind of verse employed gives a sense of stability in motion. The poem can be split up in a limited number of rather long verse paragraphs, and only a few lines are end-stopped: while these create a sense of finality, of decision (‘Winter will bar the swimmer soon’; ‘It is a consistency, the grain of the pulsating flow’), and attract the reader’s eye by virtue of their rarity, the innumerable enjambments build a continuous, pulsating, flowing rhythm – mirroring the play of light and water as much as the swimmer’s movement. The opening lines immediately set up this effect of ‘consistent variation’: on the one hand, after the end-stopped incipit, they start jolting the reader’s attention from each line to the one following (‘Where the first leaves at the first / Tremor of the morning air have dropped / Anticipating him’); on the other, they produce an impression of stability by alluding to the alliterative metre of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Though the reproduction is not exact, and repetition with variation is already the rule, the rough division of each line into two hemistiches whose significant words bear heavy accents and are linked to one another by alliteration lends weight to this flowing verse: Wínter will bár | the swímmer soón. He reáds the wáter’s | autúmnal hesitátions A weálth of wáys: | it is járred, It is astír alreády | despíte its steádiness

Throughout the poem, the ghost of alliterative poetry lurks behind the modern sheen of accentual-syllabic verse – many lines lending themselves to alternative readings as alliterative tetrameters or iambic pentameters. However, though the rhythm of the poem remains continuous (with variation), its metre never manages to achieve any kind of fixity, iambic or otherwise: as the description proceeds, the lines become longer – richer in both feet and accents – and find their final destination into a conclusive couplet which can be read as having five accents or seven feet (‘Where a wind is unscaping all images in the flowing obsidian / The going-elsewhere of ripples incessantly shaping’). Some sense of an ending is created by the consistent accretion of the rhythm, but no real finality or closure is allowed: the last two lines remain open by virtue of their content (the wind is ‘unscaping all images’, the ‘obsidian’ is ‘flowing’, the ‘ripples’ are going

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‘elsewhere’ and ‘incessantly-shaping’) as well as of their grammar (the –ing forms giving an idea of mutability, of flux). As far as the lexicon is concerned, three main semantic fields elaborate the idea of nature as a complex geometry that the human eye and body have to interpret (by looking, by swimming), while at the same time accepting communion with what the eye sees and the body moves in. A cluster of geometrical terms is concentrated in the first section of the poem: the leaves form ‘eccentric, overlapping circles’, the ‘geometry’ of water ‘squares off ’ the clouds; there are ‘angles’, ‘elongations’, ‘distorting forms’, ‘space’. The swimmer must interpret these forms: he ‘reads’ the water, follows each ‘variation’ of the ‘theme’, must ‘take hold on water’s meaning’, ‘construe’ the ‘lost language’ of the lake, decode its ‘speech’, ‘frame’ a number of ‘questions’ with his body. Finally, a third lexical group develops the theme of identity and possession – the paradox that sees the swimmer as finding his true inheritance when he loses his individuality in the lake: his body is ‘heir to’ a space which is ‘a possession to be relinquished’ in order to be ‘unnamed’ in a ‘baptism’ where only Chenango has a ‘name’. Roughly, these three lexical strands reflect a three-way division of the poem. If the poem is interpreted (from a performative point of view) as portraying/ effecting a liberation of nature from the human eye, and a liberation of the human eye and body from their own interpretive habits, line 27 (‘And to be, between grasp and grasping, free’) seems to hold special significance.7 This line occupies a central position in the poem, spatially (it is preceded by 26 lines and followed by 20) and ideologically: the grammatical opposition of ‘grasp’ and ‘grasping’ anticipates the idea that the swimmer must relinquish his possession (the water he ‘sways to tatters’) at each stroke, that he is held by the water as much as the reverse; and the use of an ambiguous verb, ‘grasp’, allows Tomlinson to say that holding is also understanding (‘For to swim is to take hold / On water’s meaning’), thus linking the theme of interpretation with the theme of possession/identity. Metrically, the line can once again be read as merely accentual (four beats) or as accentual-syllabic (an irregular iambic pentameter), and contains the typical phonic bonds of both types – alliteration (‘grasp and grasping’) and rhyme (internal: be / free). A further confusion, or a further sense of admixture, is produced by the hyperbaton, which splits the line into two equivalent parts, but not down the middle as in Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry: if these two parts are reunited, two lost hemistiches are

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recreated which are kept together by rhyme and alliteration (‘and to be free | between grasp and grasping’), and which separately resume the three main lexical strands of the poem, liberation/interpretation/possession (identity). What follows is a full Italian version of the poem produced in 1999 for an Italian literary magazine, Poesia: A nuoto sul lago Chenango L’inverno presto fermerà il nuotatore. Legge le esitazioni autunnali dell’acqua In una profusione di modi: è turbata, È già, nella sua calma, in movimento, Dove le prime foglie al primo tremore Dell’aria mattutina sono cadute Precedendolo, varando le loro impronte In cerchi eccentrici, sovrapposti. Esiste una geometria dell’acqua, perché questo Squadra gli eccessi delle nuvole E le manda più in basso a galleggiare in un’atmosfera Tutta angoli ed allungamenti: ogni albero Distendendosi sembra un cipresso, Ed ogni cespuglio che tradisce la stagione Uno strale di fuoco. È una geometria e non Una fantasmagoria di forme distorte, ma ogni Variazione liquida si accorda al tema Da cui si allontana, e davanti a esso si muove: È una coerenza, l’inclinazione del flusso pulsante. Ma lui ha guardato abbastanza, e ora Il corpo deve richiamare l’occhio all’ubbidienza Mentre sforbicia il paesaggio acquatico Disperdendone i brandelli. Il freddo dell’acqua Lo stringe a sé, e lui ricambia la presa, Perché nuotare è anche afferrare Il significato dell’acqua, muoversi nel suo abbraccio, Ed essere, fra prendere ed essere presi, liberi. Raggiunge ed attraversa quello spazio Di cui il corpo è erede, creando un dove In acqua, un possesso a cui rinunciare Volentieri ad ogni bracciata. L’immagine che ha strappato Gli scorre dietro, guarisce se stessa,

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Si solleva e si allunga, arruffata come le piume Di un’immensa ala il cui scuro piegarsi Segue come un’ombra la sua solitudine: lui è l’unico a perdere il nome In questo battesimo, in cui solo Chenango ha un nome In una lingua perduta che comincia a decifrare – Una lingua di densità e derisioni, di mezze Risposte alle domande che il suo corpo deve formulare A rana attraverso quell’elemento quasi penetrabile. Umano, la affronta, e umano, si ritrae Dal freddo interiore, la spietatezza Che pure sostenendolo mostra una sorta di pietà. L’ultimo sole dell’anno gli sta asciugando la pelle Su una superficie che è un mosaico di minuscoli frantumi, Dove il vento scentra ogni immagine nell’ossidiana fluttuante, L’andare altrove delle increspature che prende forma, incessante. (Tomlinson and Morini 1999: 25–6)8

Read at this remove, this Italian poem appears to follow its source in many descriptive and linguistic details, and at the same time it demonstrates that its translator could have profited from a clearer understanding of what Tomlinson’s poem was trying to do. Fortunately, certain significant details of the English text will easily, and almost automatically, be transferred into their Italian counterparts: thus, the mounting effect of the rhythm is more or less reproduced, though certain lines are much too long for metrical comfort (e.g. ‘Segue come un’ombra la sua solitudine: lui è l’unico a perdere il nome’ – 23 syllables!); and the three lexical kernels identified above are kept more or less intact, with the swimmer who reads (‘legge’), grasps (‘afferrare’, a verb having the same double meaning as its English counterpart) and deciphers (‘decifrare’) the language (‘lingua’) of water, the water itself possessing a geometry (‘geometria’) and a theme (‘tema’), the act of swimming being seen as a baptism (‘battesimo’) in which the man loses his name (‘è l’unico a perdere il nome’) and only Chenango has one (‘solo Chenango ha un nome’). Some performative details, however, are partly or completely overlooked. The alliterative opening is lost. More importantly, some keywords are slightly altered: the geometrical term ‘elongations’, for instance, is translated as ‘allungamenti’ (extensions, lengthenings), where the more technical ‘elongazioni’ would have been more appropriate in this context; similarly, ‘sovrapposti’ can lead the

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reader to seeing the ‘eccentric’ circles as being paradoxically ‘superimposed’ – whereas they are more properly ‘intersecati’ (intersecting; overlapping but not superimposed). Finally, and most regrettably, the crucial ‘And to be, between grasp and grasping, free’ is translated as ‘Ed essere, tra prendere ed essere presi, liberi’ (And to be, between catching and being caught, free) – in which the ambiguity of ‘grasp and grasping’ is lost (as well as the anaphoric cohesive tie with ‘he grants the grasp’), and the thematic centrality of the line is therefore somewhat obscured. All in all, it can be said that while the general contours of the poem are more or less preserved, its aims, in the target text, are pursued less consistently. The Italian title, in its normalized garb, is a perfect illustration of the performative dilution taking place in the interlingual passage: while ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’, as seen above, has a linguistic eccentricity which reflects the promiscuous conflation of planes in the poem, ‘A nuoto sul lago Chenango’ (Swimming in Lake Chenango, or A Swim in Lake Chenango) is perfectly grammatical and totally predictable. Normality and predictability, in this case, can be seen as disadvantages, not because ‘fluency’ in translation is always a negative value (Venuti 1995), but because this specific estranging construction has a performative ‘value in the game’ (Halliday 1971/96: 67) of Tomlinson’s poem. The process of normalization changes the performative value of the title, which is ideological in the source (in keeping with the rest of the poem), and merely descriptive in the target text. Of course – as the various versions of ‘How doth the little crocodile’ demonstrate – there is always the possibility that a performative shift has been engineered by the translator for purposes of his/her own: but this particular translator had meant to do much the same thing that the source poem did – and therefore, any performative dilution of the source must be read as an imperfection rather than as a manifestation of free will.

Conclusion: Everything has a purpose As seen in Chapter 2, it is a truth universally acknowledged that every translator will produce a different version of the same source text. This variety is usually attributed to the diversity of human personality, with a passing reference to changing times, places and destinations. If bi-texts are viewed

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in a performative light, however, it becomes evident that each individual and arbitrary choice is also a response (or a failure to respond) to the illocutionary forces and perlocutionary effects of the source text as grafted onto a particular target situation. In the case of ‘How doth the little busy bee’, a variety of target illocutionary forces produces very different target texts: whatever readers may think of the individual merits and flaws of the three Italian poems discussed above, each of them is undoubtedly suited to its target purpose. An objection may be brought up against the appropriateness of choosing Carroll’s poem and its Italian versions to demonstrate that poetic translators must think along performative lines, or that translation scholars must look at the performative dimension of poetic bi-texts. After all, ‘How doth the little crocodile’ is a poem with a rather special set of (narrative, intertextual) purposes, while most poems have the sole purpose of being themselves. But each poem has purposes, even if those purposes are more specifically aesthetic than Carroll’s in the case discussed above. Most of Wordsworth’s poetry has the purpose of showing the relevance of nature to human feeling, while many poems by Charles Tomlinson have the purpose of liberating nature from the tyranny of the human eye. Wordsworth’s and Tomlinson’s poems, of course, also aim at giving pleasure to the eye and ear – but even giving pleasure is a purpose, and no two poems – original or translated – will ever give pleasure in quite the same way.

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4

The Interpersonal Function/1 (External): The Translator’s Personality

The translator as an individual: Introduction and overview Since the translator is self-evidently the central individual agent in the interlingual transaction, it seems appropriate to centre an account of the interpersonal function of translation around an appreciation of his/her contribution – not least because this contribution is often left out or minimized in the practical manuals, and even in the theoretical writings that provide descriptions of the interpersonal forces at play. True, translator trainers have always insisted on the individuality of each translation process and product – but scholars have only very recently begun to give more than a passing thought to the exact nature of that individuality. Inevitably, the myth of a perfectly neutral, automatic translation process was dispelled at the beginning of the 1970s by its own impossibility as well as by the so-called cultural turn (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990: 1) of translation studies. The characterization of translating as ‘rewriting’ or ‘manipulation’ (Hermans 1985), of translations as ‘facts of a target culture’ (Toury 1995: 23–39) or as forming an independent system within the ‘literary polysystem’ (Even-Zohar 1978), implicitly militated against the utopia of translator-free theory. Nonetheless, from its very beginnings in the 1970s, descriptive translation studies has been concerned with the ideologies giving shape to target texts and swaying translators’ decisions, rather than with the translators themselves. Within this framework, even though individuality is theoretically granted, individual choices are only relevant insofar as they are produced by a set of ‘norms’ (Toury 1995), which in their turn prompt different reactions from different personalities.1

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In 1995, the year that saw the publication of Gideon Toury’s above-quoted Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, another monograph came out which brought the translator to the foreground of academic discussion, by the sheer force of its title and of the ideas it conveyed – Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility. Venuti’s book – which had grown out of a seminal 1986 article – was at one and the same time an account of contemporary ideas on translation, a polemical pamphlet and a ‘history of translation’, though its historical sections were perhaps more ambitious than exhaustive. Its pivotal ideological point was that translators are expected by modern readers and reviewers to remove their signature from the target texts they write, thus producing ‘fluent’ versions which can be read as if they were originals. This need to erase one’s tracks makes translators the badly paid, rarely acknowledged ‘pariahs’ of the modern literary world they generally are (cf. Prunč 2007; also cf. Sela-Sheffy and Shlesinger 2008). However, even though his book foregrounded the translator’s role by showing how it had always been relegated to the backwaters of literature, Venuti’s battle was fought in the interests of source texts, or of the full exploitation of target-language possibilities, rather than translators (cf. chapter 5). In order to oppose the ‘domesticating’ tendencies of contemporary translation, Venuti borrowed Friedrich Schleiermacher’s nineteenth-century methodological dichotomy to propose ‘foreignizing’ (Venuti 1995), ‘minor’ (1998b: 139) or ‘minoritizing’ (1998a: 11) translation as a way to maintain the foreignness of the foreign in the target text. While this implied reinstating the presence of the secondary author, the task of fully rescuing the latter from his/her state of neglect was left to others. One of the earliest attempts to turn translation studies into ‘translator studies’ was produced by Douglas Robinson, an eclectic scholar who can hardly be assigned to any single school or group, and whose varied production has done much to raise translators’ awareness of their craft, intellectual plight and social position. In his 1991 The Translator’s Turn, Robinson tried to bridge the gap between essentialist theory and impressionistic practice by investigating the ‘somatics’ of interlingual communication. In his description of the translating process, the translator – guided by his/her ‘physical or intuitive response to a text’ – engages ‘in [a] hermeneutical dialogue with the SL author’, to produce a version which ‘invariably turns the original, turns away from it into the

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TL’. Instead of proclaiming the undesirability of individual contribution, the theorist should ‘recognize and, contextually, encourage the translator’s poetic creativity’ (Robinson 1991: xiv, xv). Viewing Venuti’s argument from a different perspective – if only in nuce – Robinson went on to add that the idea of the translator’s task ‘as one of introversion, self-effacement, becoming a window between SL text and TL receptor that the TL receptor will not even recognize as a window’ was ‘another reason for the low status of translation’ (Robinson 1991: xvi). In his 1997 Becoming a Translator, Robinson revisited his translator-centred theory in didactic terms, while also adding new layers to the ideological kernel of his previous monograph. His preoccupation with the marginality of translators, for instance, is not absent from a chapter of advice on how to increase one’s sources of income (Robinson 1997b: 33–40). More importantly, the well-worn subject of ‘translation ethics’ is renewed to include the translator’s ‘internal’ view: The professional ethics of translation have traditionally been defined very narrowly: it is unethical for the translator to distort the meaning of the source text. As we have seen, this conception of translator ethics is far too narrow even from the user’s point of view [. . .] From the translator’s internal point of view, the ethics of translation are more complicated still. What is the translator to do, for example, when asked to translate a text s/he finds offensive? Or, to put that differently, how does the translator proceed when professional ethics [. . .] clash with personal ethics [. . .]? From an internal point of view [. . .] these questions must be asked. Translators are human beings, with opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. Translators who are regularly required to translate texts that they find abhorrent may be able to suppress their revulsion for a few weeks, or months, possibly for years; but they will not be able to continue suppressing those negative feelings forever. (Robinson 1997b: 30–2)

Following the example set by Venuti and Robinson, the new millennium has seen a flowering of studies centred on the translator’s (and the interpreter’s) figure, on his/her experiences, responses, rights and desires. Michael Cronin, in his Translation and Identity, has taken advantage of ‘the interpreter’s visibility’ (Cronin 2006: 116) to investigate both the interpreter’s and the translator’s communicative efforts as ‘embodied agency’ (Cronin 2006: 76–9).2 Also in

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2006, Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush have edited a collection of essays on The Translator as Writer, whose contributors expatiate – with mixed success and different degrees of theoretical awareness – on the stylistic choices and intellectual/physical responses triggered by the source books they have had to work on. A year later, another collection of essays on Translation as Intervention (edited by Jeremy Munday) has been assembled with the purpose of assessing the impact of translators’ and interpreters’ personalities on the communicative events in which they take part.3 What most of these essays and studies have in common, besides the awareness that translation can never be aseptic, is their insistence on (auto)biographical narrative as a form and as an analytical strategy. On the most basic level, this preoccupation with (auto)biography leads to the enumeration and dissection of personal choices in response to the thematic or stylistic features of the source text (cf. for instance Mira 2006).4 While on a more extreme note, the attention paid to ‘translation somatics’ can produce autobiographical accounts which point to the actual clinical dissection of translators’ bodies: For several days I worked on the translation with little more than linguistic enthusiasm, engaged primarily in constructing an English for Labarca’s descriptions of her discouragement. Gradually, however, despite the fact that neither as text nor topic had the journal truly managed to catch my interest, I realized that work on the project had begun to affect me physically. I had no trouble locating words or references, but each time I returned to the translation I felt tired and dispirited; my head and shoulders ached, my legs felt heavy, and I found myself incapable of sitting still for long periods. ‘Something is wrong with this text, or in it’, I kept thinking. ‘Although my mind remains virtually distanced, my body is acting up. Whenever I work on it, my body acts up, even though the words don’t engage my thoughts fully.’ (Maier 2006: 139–40)

The shortcomings of these kinds of observations are that they are difficult to systematize, and that their autobiographical inspiration may occasionally become a theoretical shortcut (cf. for instance Bell 2006: 58–9). Carol Maier herself, in another article on the state of the art in translator-centred translation studies, observes that ‘much of the material about translator’s experience [. . .] is qualitative and therefore highly subjective (and certainly not replicable), making it inappropriate, even suspect, for work in certain research frameworks’ (Maier 2007: 5–6). Maier’s own contribution to the state

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of the art, however, is far from inappropriate or suspect: her characterization of the translator as an ‘intervenient being’ – that is, one who ‘intervenes’ but also comes in ‘incidentally or extraneously; situated or occurring between different points or events’ (Maier 2007: 2) – catches the translator’s own sense of being an acted-upon actor, someone who has to make choices on a foundation which has already been laid elsewhere. The idea, of course, is traditional, not too far from Dryden’s image of translators as slaves labouring ‘on another man’s plantation’ (Steiner 1975: 73), and a myriad other figures: but the mixed semantics of ‘intervenience’ creates a fine balance between activity and passivity, and can be used as a theoretical vantage point for an assessment of the translator’s actual contribution, of his/her position in the interpersonal dimension of translation. If that assessment is to be full as well as balanced, the translator’s contribution, his/her intervenience, must be viewed not only for the light it sheds on the source and target texts, but also as an emanation of the translator him/herself. Generally, translator-centred essays look at how the translator responds (psychologically, physically and/or practically) to a source text, at how he/she solves a series of problems or makes choices in a limited range of possibilities: in other words, the emphasis is on translators’ reactions – not their actions. But our understanding of the interpersonal nature of translation can never be complete until we accept that translators also take part in the transaction in their own person – that they have a personality of their own, and do not exist merely as reflecting or distorting mirrors. Since translators leave textual testimonies of their existence, their personality is available to us as a style: and this style is traceable – if at all – not in the stylistic choices they make to ‘convey’, ‘recreate’, ‘do justice to’ their originals (cf. Hewson 2001; Xie 2010), but in the linguistic idiosyncrasies they bring to all the bi-texts they work on (cf. Baker 2000; Lambert 2010: 44–6). In other words, though it might sound disturbing to some, ‘Translation and translators’, as Josep Marco (2004: 81) reminds us, ‘also display their own style(s)’. In what follows, the intuitions of Venuti, Robinson, Maier and others are expanded in order to look at translational intervenience from a specifically linguistic – that is, stylistic – angle. In order to do so, the translator’s style will have to be disentangled, as far as possible, from the direct or indirect influence of its prompting source.

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Linguistic intervenience: A stylistic model of translation If, as Carol Maier writes, much translational ‘life-writing’ (Maier 2007: 7) tends to the impressionistic and self-indulgent, an autobiographical concentration does not necessarily breed poor quality. Poor quality may be encouraged by the illusion that a capacity for self-searching is enough to write an academic article; but a theory-conscious translator is always best-equipped to understand what intervenes between the source and the target texts, what goes on in the ‘little black box’ of the translator’s mind: direct experience makes him/her ideally suited to observe his/her own methods and procedures, just as professional empathy (or antipathy) gives him/her an insight into the decision-making of others. When I started to observe my own and other people’s translations through the lens of descriptive translation studies, I was mainly interested in how surrounding ideologies influenced individual choices. Historically, this norm-centred attitude implied viewing single translations as products of common ideas on language, textuality and literature (Morini 2004, 2006a); while from a more ‘purely theoretical’ point of view, my systems-based approach led me to a series of critical investigations of contemporary ideas on the processes and agents of translation (Morini 2002–3; Morini 2007a: 17–95). Either way, the translator was seen as a puppet of history, his/her individual freedom limited to an awareness of the conditionings surrounding his/her work. However, my microlinguistic analyses of bi-texts past and present – conducted with a view to identifying the norms regulating translators’ choices – also ended up vindicating the obvious truth that no norm can annihilate an individual. Translators, no matter how insistently one tried to make them the unwitting collaborators of great ideological narratives, stubbornly refused to be written out of their translations, and continued to exist in the wordings they had created in response to their source authors’ wordings. This realization, as well as a series of experiences as a professional translator and as a trainer of would-be professional translators, led me to entertain the possibility of looking at the translator’s style as prompted by, but also independent from, the style of the source text – what Kirsten Malmkjær has felicitously termed ‘translational stylistics’ (Malmkjær 2004).5

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In a recent book on the interdisciplinary link between translation and stylistics, Jean Boase-Beier has tried to consider all the potential viewpoints stylisticians can adopt when analysing a translation: i) the style of the source text as an expression of its author’s choices ii) the style of the source text in its effects on the reader (and on the translator as reader) iii) the style of the target text as an expression of choices made by its author (who is the translator) iv) the style of the target text in its effects on the reader. (Boase-Beier 2006: 5)

If we hold with Leech and Short’s idea that style is choice, or proceeds from choice, translational style must be viewed at the intersection between points (ii) and (iii) (cf. Malmkjær 2004: 16). In part, this is only another way of saying that the translator walks in the author’s footsteps, or works in another man’s plantation: but it is also more specific and less categorical than that, because looking at the translator’s style in the light of the source author’s means showing that if the track is beaten, there remains a certain liberty in the steps one can choose to take. Looking at Boase-Beier’s list in terms of choice, we can rewrite points i–iii as follows: 1. the source author makes choices within an infinite range of possibilities; 2. among all the interpretations made possible by the source text, the source reader (and the translator as source reader) selects one/some; 3. among the range of possibilities offered by the source text (and by his/her own interpretation of it) the translator makes his/her own choices.

At this stage, one basic qualification is needed which brings the discussion back to the idea of norm-oriented behaviour, and re-introduces the other participants in the interpersonal act of translation: the translator’s freedom is limited not only by his/her interpretation of the source text, but also by his/her own idea (which is individual and social, and may be internalized or imposed by editors, publishers and reviewers) of what is acceptable or adequate in translation. In the Middle Ages, translating a secular text often meant repositioning it into a different context, changing the disposition of facts/arguments if not the facts/arguments themselves: in the terms of traditional rhetoric, medieval translation as umarbeitung (cf. Folena 1991: 10) allowed for modifications which invested inventio, dispositio and elocutio. But

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in modern times, the translator’s liberty is only exercised on style, where ‘style’ is more or less coincident with elocution (cf. Morini 2006: 11–13). Very few contemporary translators working in a non-totalitarian state would think of changing the facts of the source text, or of altering the order in which they are introduced – and even those ideology-motivated few would feel obliged to declare their aims and denounce their wilful misreadings.6 If elocution is the translator’s realm, it follows that his/her freedom is exercised on clause- and word-order (while sentence order can perhaps be seen as being at the intersection between elocution and disposition), figures of speech (all translators intuitively know that tropes must often be recreated rather than reproduced) and the paradigmatic selection of individual phrases and words (with reference to order and tropical organization). Faced with these lines from a jazz standard – ‘Look for the silver lining / Whenever a cloud appears in the blue’ – the Italian translator will have to take decisions about clause order (‘Cerca il bordo argentato / Ogni volta che appare una nuvola nel blu’ [Look for the silver lining / Each time a cloud appears in the blue] as against the more natural ‘Ogni volta che appare una nuvola nel blu / cerca il bordo argentato’ [Each time a cloud appears in the blue / Look for the silver lining]), word order (‘Ogni volta che appare una nuvola nel blu’ vs ‘Ogni volta che una nuvola appare nel blu’), tropical consistency (‘the blue / il blu’ can be turned into the non-figurative ‘sky / cielo’ as well as into another Italian colour, ‘azzurro’), and individual words or phrases (‘bordo / margine’; ‘ogni volta che / quando / tutte le volte che’; ‘appare / compare / si vede’). If he/she is translating those lines as musical lyrics, of course, the translator’s choices will have to be guided and further ‘constrained’ (cf. chapter 7) by the mathematically organized medium of destination. While target-text constraints vary according to text-type and destination, source-text stylistic constraints can be of infinite kinds – but the most straightforward are linked to what the Russian Formalists called the ‘automatization’ of language. When training translators, the main linguistic problem one has to face is inspiring them with the perception of how common/ uncommon a word/phrase/construction is, as well as alerting them to the necessity of finding the source-language means to render normality versus foregrounding.7 Another impression arising from translator training (as well as from one’s own experience) is that freedom stands in an inverse proportion to

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automatization: the more commonplace an expression, the more the translator will look for a suitable equivalent within a very limited range of possibilities – whereas a very personal usage will prompt an individual response.8 The two following passages from Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ (1853), alongside three Italian translations, illustrate the difference: ST) I am a rather elderly man.9 TT) Sono un uomo piuttosto anziano. (Melville and Celati 1991: 1; Melville and Giachino 1994: 2; Melville and Berna 2008: 8) ST) ‘Prefer not, eh?’ gritted Nippers – ‘I’d prefer him, if I were you, sir,’ addressing me – ‘I’d prefer him; I’d give him preferences, the stubborn mule. What is it, sir, pray, that he prefers not to do now?’ TT1) ‘Avrebbe preferenza di no, eh?’ digrignò Nippers. ‘Lo farei preferenziare io, signore; se fossi in voi,’ rivolgendosi a me, ‘lo preferenzierei io come si deve: gli darei di quelle preferenze, a quel mulo ostinato! Ma cos’è, signore, sentiamo, cos’è che ha preferenza adesso a non fare?’ (Melville and Celati 1991: 26) TT2) – Preferirebbe di no, eh? – ringhiò Pince-nez. – Lo preferirei io, se fossi in voi, signore, – rivolgendosi a me, – lo preferirei io, gliele darei io le sue preferenze, a quel mulo cocciuto! Che cosa è, signore, vi prego, che preferisce non fare adesso? (Melville and Giachino 1994: 57) TT3) ‘Preferisce di no, eh?’ digrignò, ‘lo preferirei io, se fossi in voi, signore’, rivolgendosi a me, ‘lo preferirei io; gli darei una bella scarica di preferenze, a questo mulo ottuso! Cos’è, signore, che costui ora preferisce non fare?’ (Melville and Berna 2008: 54)10

While the first passage is short and contains a number of (more or less) one-toone correspondences (any other word order would feel strange in Italian; ‘man’ can only be ‘uomo’; ‘elderly’ can only be ‘anziano’; ‘rather’ could be ‘abbastanza’ as well as ‘piuttosto’, but no translator seems to have considered this possibility), the second presents a number of usages which range from the culture-bound to the highly personal. ‘Gritted Nippers’ is an elliptical version of ‘said Nippers, gritting his teeth’, which gets a literal (and rather estranging) translation in TT1 and TT3, and a normalization in TT2 (‘ringhiò [he snarled]’). Nippers’ ‘I’d prefer him’ is very far from commonplace, because instead of meaning what it appears to mean, it echoes Bartleby’s catchphrase ‘I would prefer not to’ and turns it into an ironical threat11 – predictably, the translators’ responses are

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again divided. The same freedom of choice is granted, for the same reasons, by ‘I’d give him preferences’, as well as by the use of italics for phonetic emphasis. Even ‘stubborn mule’ allows for a limited range of options (the literal versions ‘mulo ostinato’ and ‘mulo cocciuto’, but also the curiously deviant ‘mulo ottuso [obtuse mule]’). Finally, the socially deferent imperative of ‘pray’ is rendered by a slightly more aggressive ‘sentiamo [let’s hear]’ in TT1, by the estrangingly literal ‘vi prego’ in TT2, and by nothing in TT3 (where the translator evidently thinks that ‘signore [sir]’ is enough to reproduce Nippers’ respectful tone). Of course, such interlingual samplings are not enough to define a translator’s style: to do so, one must analyse many more passages, as well as infer a number of general translational and compositional choices and verify if these are consistently repeated or not. Furthermore, the bi-textual scrutiny of one single source alongside three target texts – even though conducted with an eye to the latter rather than the former – authorizes the age-old prejudice which assigns precedence to the original over what is held to be little more than a replica. Of course, certain choices are relevant only if viewed in the mirror of the source text: Celati’s rendering of ‘I would prefer not to’ with the estranging ‘Avrei preferenza di no [I’d have preference not to]’ – versus the more commonplace ‘Preferirei di no [I’d prefer not to]’ favoured by the other translators – creates a formal mood which resonates throughout his version. Nevertheless, there must be a way of looking at the translator’s style which does not merely reflect back on the source author’s. The most obvious route is looking at several translations penned by the same author12 – a sure way of discovering that even the most anonymous practitioners have some sort of personality of their own, if only in the form of a studied impersonality. My studies on Tudor translations, the ostensible purpose of which was locating the refractions of continental theory on insular practice, led me to identify a Philemon Holland style, a John Harington style, and most evidently, a John Florio style (Morini 2006a: 65–95). Since the Renaissance was an era of greater liberties for the translator,13 the style of a sixteenthcentury translator is more easily identifiable than that of a modern one: John Florio will use doublets, and triplets when he is engrossed in the subject, no matter how many words Montaigne employed in the first place.14 The style of a contemporary translator is often made of smaller, less visible interventions – but it is there all the same, as any experienced and self-searching practitioner

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can appreciate. In the course of two decades of translating activity, while I have not been able to provide a definition of my own style, I have started to notice a number of small-writ instructions which usually, or almost always, lead me to the same point B when I find a given point A to start from. Some of these instructions, actually, do not seem to presuppose a starting point at all: – Translate ‘suddenly’ or ‘all of a sudden’ as ‘tutto a un tratto’ – not ‘all’improvviso’ o ‘improvvisamente’; – In all but a few cases, avoid the progressive form in Italian (do not translate ‘I am going’ as ‘sto andando’, but with ‘vado’ or ‘andavo’); – Do not use more than a couple of adverbs ending in ‘mente’ per page (this involves finding alternative, adverb-phrase ways of translating ‘suddenly’, ‘certainly’, etc.); – In all but a few cases, do not use ‘alcuni’ (this involves translating plural ‘some’ as ‘certi’; ‘un po’ di’, etc.); – In modern texts, do not use subject pronouns ‘egli’, ‘ella’, ‘essa’, but ‘lui’, ‘lei’, etc.; – Avoid gerunds, as far as possible;

Of course, this list of translational ‘secondary norms’ (Leech and Short 1981/3: 55) is only the tip of an iceberg comprising syntactical preferences, options on the paradigmatic axis (words/phrases), the use of punctuation to separate semantic units rather than to indicate breathing pauses, etc. More generally, all these habits and instructions are part of a strategy which aims at creating a plausible Italian text and at doing justice to the source. As far as I am aware, my ‘stylistic’ efforts have been concentrated on the recreation of the degree of normality/deviance which I had appreciated as a reader of the original: ST) I am a rather elderly man. TT1, TT2, TT3) Sono un uomo piuttosto anziano. TT4) Ormai sono anziano.

TT4) is not presented as a critique of the existing translations of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, but as an illustration of my methods – which tend to err on the side of target-oriented plausibility rather than on that of syntactical, morphological and lexical reproduction. Target-oriented plausibility, it is important to point out, does not equal simplification or normalization: on the contrary, since it

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implies ‘translating’ the degree of choice expressed in the source text, writing a plausible version can entail employing a number of ‘estranging’ (but not ‘foreignizing’) techniques. The effect of target-oriented (im)plausibility is particularly evident in the translation of dialogue, where a single misfired word (a single word – whether estranging or not – that no-one would actually say) can destroy the reader’s suspension of disbelief: ST) ‘Prefer not, eh?’ gritted Nippers – ‘I’d prefer him, if I were you, sir,’ addressing me – ‘I’d prefer him; I’d give him preferences, the stubborn mule. What is it, sir, pray, that he prefers not to do now?’ TT1) ‘Avrebbe preferenza di no, eh?’ digrignò Nippers. ‘Lo farei preferenziare io, signore; se fossi in voi,’ rivolgendosi a me, ‘lo preferenzierei io come si deve: gli darei di quelle preferenze, a quel mulo ostinato! Ma cos’è, signore, sentiamo, cos’è che ha preferenza adesso a non fare?’ (italics mine) TT4) ‘Ah sì? Preferisce di no?’ disse Nippers, digrignando i denti – ‘Gliele darei io le sue preferenze, se fossi in lei’, aggiunse rivolto a me – ‘Gliene darei un sacco di preferenze, a quella testa dura! Ma mi dica, mi dica, signore, cos’è che preferirebbe non fare, stavolta?’ Back-translation of TT4) ‘Oh yes? He prefers not to?’ said Nippers, gritting his teeth – ‘I’d give him his preferences if I were you, sir’, he added for my benefit – ‘I’d give him a fat lot of preferences – that hard head! But please tell me, tell me, sir, what is it he would prefer not to do this time?’

Even a cursory glance at the two versions will tell the informed reader that while Celati’s version is superficially closer to the source, mine prefers to consign almost all tangible reminders that there is a source to momentary oblivion. This kind of rewriting, however, does not necessarily imply the translator’s invisibility – if not in the special sense in which any author aims at being invisible, at making his/her presence impalpable.15 This kind of ‘plausible’ rewriting is an expression of the translator’s style: and as we shall see in the next section, it is not everybody who likes the translator’s style to be perceptible in the end product of translation.

Translation and neutrality: Zero-style Even though they are at the centre of the interlingual process, translators, just like original writers, do not write in a vacuum. They evolve their personal

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styles in the context of a publishing field that may either reward, ignore or punish their manifestations, surrounded by other professional figures (editors, publishers, reviewers) with their own ideas on translation and style. In this context translators are accepted or rejected, and each singular style is taken as it is or modified according to the norms of the market, or of one particular sector of the market. In the following autobiographical case study, a translating style aimed at obtaining target plausibility16 is seen to be unacceptable in the sub-field of ‘modern classics’ in Italian translation. A few years ago, the realization that the Italian ‘Jane Austen’ wrote very stiff narrative and highly implausible dialogue led me to conceive a plan for re-translating all of Austen’s novels. In the existing versions, each and every translator seemed to be straining to hide behind an extreme form of adherence – to Austen’s syntax, her morphology, her lexicon or to all of these things in combination. Here, for instance, was the beginning of an Italian version of Mansfield Park, sacrificing the rhythm of the Italian clause to a remarkable, almost mirror-like reproduction of word-order: About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. (Austen 1814/2003: 3) Circa trent’anni fa, Miss Maria Ward di Huntingdon, con sole settemila sterline, ebbe la buona sorte di affascinare Sir Thomas Bertram di Mansfield Park, nella Contea di Northampton, e di venire quindi promossa al rango di moglie di un baronetto, con tutte le comodità e i vantaggi di una bella casa e una rendita cospicua. (Austen and De Palma 1999: 63; italics mine)17

My italics underline the only Italian word written in excess of the source: all the other words find English correspondents which, as if this were an interlinear version of the Bible, can be syntagmatically superimposed onto their Italian replacements. The translator’s main strategy is clearly one of syntactic/ morphological mirroring: whenever a kind of ‘formal correspondence’ (Catford 1965: 27) obtains between English and Italian, an exact replica is preferred over a more natural turn of phrase (for instance, ‘Circa trent’anni fa’ replaces ‘Una trentina d’anni fa’ on the paradigmatic axis; ‘and to be thereby raised’ is translated as ‘e di venire quindi promossa’, which is syntactically

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awkward in Italian); and when that kind of correspondence is unavailable, the translator recurs to small grammatical changes in order to keep the word-order immaculate (in ‘with only seven thousand pounds / con sole settemila sterline’ an adjective is substituted for an adverb, because an adverb would have been out of place between preposition and noun). This may be an extreme example, though a very significant one – coming as it does at the very beginning of a major work in the Austen canon, and therefore setting the tone for the rest of the novel. But strategies of this kind are pervasive in Austen’s Italian production, with all the consequences that can be imagined for her famous ‘sparkling’ language. The stiffening effect is most evident in the rendition of dialogue, though Austen’s fine transitions from narrative to free indirect discourse are also obfuscated by syntactic faithfulness. Unlike their English counterparts – always formal, but quick enough even in their indirection – Austen’s Italian characters employ modals, compound verb forms, old-fashioned tenses, conversational fillers and implausible tag questions which qualify them as belonging to the world of abstraction rather than to the realm of mimesis: ‘[. . .] We should not like her so well as we do, sir, if we could suppose it. [. . .]’ (Austen 1816/1998: 9) ‘[. . .]Non avremmo per lei l’affetto che abbiamo, signore, se potessimo pensarlo [. . .]’ (Austen and Zazo 2002: 9; italics mine) ‘Oh! very well,’ exclaimed Miss Bates, ‘then I need not be uneasy. “Three things very dull indeed.” That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I? – (looking round with the most good-humoured dependence on every body’s assent) – Do not you all think I shall?’ (Austen 1816/1998: 335) ‘Oh, molto bene’ esclamò la signorina Bates ‘allora non c’è bisogno che mi senta in imbarazzo. “Tre cose molto sciocche.” Per me andrà benissimo, vedete, parola mia, dirò tre cose molto sciocche appena aprirò la bocca, non è così?’ guardandosi attorno con la più benevola certezza che tutti sarebbero stati d’accordo. ‘Non pensate tutti che sarà così?’ (Austen and Zazo 2002: 372–3; italics mine)18

The kind of extreme source-oriented adherence displayed by most translations conspires not only in making Austen ‘classical’ in the composed and rather harmless sense of the term, but also in obscuring the pragmatic level of

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communication within the novels. From the interpersonal point of view, both as regards narrator-reader relations and the social relationships presented in the fictional world, the main rule in Austen is that everybody means much more than they say. But in the Italian versions, many implicatures are cancelled or obscured by the primacy of syntax/morphology/lexicon (cf. Morini 2007b). By trying to ‘intervene’ as little as possible on the linguistic surface, the translators operate significant changes in the interpersonal function of the novels. My re-translating plan gained some ground with one of the few publishers that still produce and commercialize ‘modern classics’ in Italy, and I was asked to do a sample translation of the first chapter of Emma. My version, in contrast with the existing Italian editions, intervened on the source syntax and attempted to recreate my understanding of Jane Austen’s style, and particularly of the interpersonal relations described and presupposed by the novel. Some time later, I received the publisher’s reply – a rejection slip penned by the senior editor of the modern classics division, and accompanied by a negative review of my sample written by an in-house translator and ‘expert reader’. The in-house translator’s commentary was itself prefaced by a slip of paper containing a summary judgement of the first two pages of my translation. The tone of the condemnation was at the same time definitive and general: my version was ‘in various ways deficient’ and ‘unsatisfactory’, and it betrayed a ‘scarce linguistic sensibility for the age in which the book was written’. More practically, when one turned to the expert reader’s line-by-line analysis of the translation, it turned out that all ‘mistakes’ could be traced back to the general purpose of reformulating Austen’s elocution (her syntax, her figures of speech) in order to recreate her style (her narrator’s tone, the characters’ personalities and relations as embodied in their speech). Here, for example, were the opening two paragraphs: Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place

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had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection. (Austen 1816/1998: 3) Emma Woodhouse, di piacevole aspetto, ricca e intelligente, dotata di una bella casa e di un carattere incline alla felicità, sembrava assommare in sé alcune delle più grandi benedizioni dell’esistenza; e in quasi ventuno anni di vita aveva conosciuto ben pochi assilli o contrarietà. Era la più giovane delle due figlie di un padre assai affezionato e indulgente, e della casa di suo padre si era ritrovata padrona molto presto in seguito al matrimonio della sorella. Sua madre era morta ormai da tanto tempo che delle sue carezze le rimaneva soltanto un ricordo indistinto, ed era stata sostituita da una governante, una donna eccellente il cui affetto si avvicinava molto a quello materno.19

This beginning contained two or three additions and reshufflings, either in the interests of source adherence or, more frequently, of ‘target plausibility’. ‘Handsome’ was translated as ‘di piacevole aspetto [of pleasing appearance]’ because it was judged to be less strong than ‘bella’; ‘clever, and rich’ were reversed into ‘ricca e intelligente’ for euphonic reasons (the disyllabic ‘ricca’ would come as a dead stop after the polysyllabic ‘di piacevole aspetto’ and ‘intelligente’); the adjective ‘dotata’ (endowed with) was added in order to better combine the ‘bella casa / comfortable home’ and the ‘carattere incline alla felicità / happy disposition’; ‘had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her’ was turned into the more natural ‘in quasi ventuno anni di vita aveva conosciuto ben pochi assilli e contrarietà [in nearly twenty-one years of life, she had known very few cares or adversities]’; ‘had [. . .] been mistress of her house’, which would be very awkward in the same order, on account of personal pronouns and of the Italian ‘trapassato prossimo’ having a different temporal value, was inverted and adapted as ‘della casa di suo padre [. . .] si era ritrovata padrona molto presto [of her father’s house [. . .] she’d found herself a mistress very early]’; the negative consecutive of ‘Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses’ was turned into a less laborious positive one; likewise, and for similar reasons, the litotes of ‘who had fallen little short of a mother in affection’ was reversed in ‘il cui affetto si avvicinava molto a quello materno [whose affection went very close to a mother’s]’. Whatever the merits of single choices, this version was a conscious attempt at creating a personal translating style to match (the translator’s idea of) Jane

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Austen’s, with the guiding principle that awkard and implausible constructions had to be avoided at all costs (not because translations have to be fluent, but because Emma is). The in-house translator, however, pointed an admonishing finger at every passage which, in her opinion, strayed from the beaten path by evading the inescapable intricacies of the source text. Thus, in her correction of the incipit, ‘ricca e intelligente’ was switched back to ‘intelligente e ricca’; the inversion of ‘della casa di suo padre [. . .] padrona’, was censured because it was an inversion (‘Why the inversion?’) and because saying that Emma was ‘mistress in her father’s house’ was far different from saying ‘mistress of the house in her father’s house’; in ‘her mother [. . .] caresses’, the English was said to be psychologically subtler because of the consecutive/negative construction; and the same was pronounced to hold true for the litotes ‘who had fallen little short of a mother in affection’, which was pronounced to have many more nuances than ‘il cui affetto si avvicinava molto a quello materno’ (which, of course, would have been true if there had been irony at Mrs Weston’s expense). More generally, the in-house translator complained of a lack of ‘faithfulness’ in the sample translation, and saw definitive evidence of this in ‘several gaps or omissions of important words, such as now, too much, also’. Quite obviously, there are as many possible styles for translating Jane Austen in Italian as there are translators, and it would be illogical to present one choice as eminently correct or accurate: it is therefore perfectly acceptable for a publishing house to reject a translation because they do not like its style, or because they do not consider its style to be an appropriate representation of the source. However, on the evidence of her analysis and of the above-quoted comment, what the in-house translator objected to in my sample translation was not that its style was inappropriate in that sense, but that it was a style – that the translator had chosen to make its presence felt by choosing his own wordings with a degree of microlinguistic (syntactical, figurative) freedom. In her view of the interpersonal function of translation – at least as far as ‘modern classics’ went – the translator, though inevitably pivotal in the process of cross-linguistic transcoding, had to be turned into a mere executor of the source writer’s will. The latter was to be put in ‘direct’ contact with the target readers, with the prestigious publisher and a ‘faithful’ translator to act as nonintervening ‘guarantors’. Paradoxically, as seen in the existing translations of Emma and the other Austen novels, this interpersonal effect was to be realized

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through the use of a style that foregrounds the translator’s presence by virtue of its ‘foreignizing’ awkwardness:20 Bella, intelligente e ricca, con una dimora confortevole e un carattere felice, Emma Woodhouse sembrava riunire in sé alcuni dei vantaggi migliori dell’esistenza; e aveva vissuto quasi ventun anni in questo mondo con scarsissime occasioni di dispiacere o dispetto. Era la più giovane delle due figlie di un padre affettuoso e indulgente, e, in seguito al matrimonio della sorella, era stata padrona della casa paterna sin da un’età molto giovane. La madre era morta da troppo tempo perché lei avesse più che un vago ricordo delle sue carezze, e il suo posto era stato preso da una istitutrice, una donna eccellente il cui affetto era stato di poco inferiore a quello di una madre. (Austen and Zazo 2002: 3) Beautiful, clever and rich, with a comfortable abode and a happy character, Emma Woodhouse seemed to unite in herself some of the best advantages of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in this world with very scarce occasions for displeasure or vexation. She was the youngest of the two daughters of an affectionate and indulgent father, and, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, had been mistress of her father’s house from a very early age. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than a vague remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been taken by a governess, and excellent woman whose affection had been only slight less than that of a mother.

Conclusion: Faithful to what, loyal to whom? From its empirical beginnings to its latter-day scientific developments, translation has always been characterized as an interpersonal exchange involving a sum of moral obligations for its perpetrator. This sum has been called ‘faithfulness’, ‘loyalty’ (Nord 1997: 126), ‘service’ (Zacchi and Morini 2002: 9), even ‘humility’ (Izzo 1966/70: 391); it has been defined with reference to the source text, the source author, the target audience, the translator’s publisher or all of these in combination – and it is only very recently that some theorists have begun to ask themselves whether translators were to be granted rights as well as duties, in a transaction that they inevitably conduct more than anybody else. This one-sided ethical insistence, still very fashionable

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in practice if not in theory, betrays a feeling of uneasiness about translators’ freedom: if this is not kept to a minimum, the danger is that the translator will produce something which is not (like) the source text. Since style is individual, the result of personal choice, the translator is often required (especially if the source author is ‘prestigious’) to display no style whatsoever: and as shown by the Italian versions of Austen’s novels and other ‘modern classics’, the easiest way to hide one’s writerly imprint is to reproduce as closely as possible the surface structures of the source text. In brief, if the transaction is viewed in its interpersonal dimension, the translator’s imprint has to be cancelled not to hide the source author’s, so that the publishers will be able to present the text to its target readers as if it were an original (Venuti 1995). Paradoxically, though, if the translator adopts a noninterventionist stance, the ‘internal’ side of the interpersonal function may be altered out of recognition: in the Italian translation of Emma discussed above, the narrator is much stiffer than its English counterpart – and the relationships among characters often assume a tone of formal pleasantry which has no parallel in the elegantly ferocious sparring between, say, Emma Woodhouse and the Eltons (Morini 2009: 129–43).

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5

The Interpersonal Function/2 (Internal): The Voice of the Source Author

Translating texts or translating people/voices? Translation as ethnography In contemporary theory, the interpersonal dimension of translation would appear to have been explored in most of its aspects. The relationship between the translator, his/her audience and the originators of his/her target text, for instance, has either been seen as generating norm-oriented behaviour (Toury 1995), or, less sociologically and more ethically, as creating the necessity for ‘loyalty’ on the translator’s part (Nord 1997: 126). In the wake of Venuti’s embattled studies (1995, 1998a), the position of the translator within his/her society has become much more of a burning issue than the position of translated literature within the literary polysystem. Last but not least, the psychological and physical reactions of the individual translator faced with a given text have come to be investigated by a number of scholars whose ‘inward turn’ (Nikolau and Kyritsi 2008: 7) has been presented as the latest minor revolution in descriptive translation studies – even though, as seen in Chapter 4, the stylistic impact of the translator’s contribution must still be fully gauged. Apart from an all-round appreciation of the translator’s style, however, what seems to be missing from all or most of these interpersonal accounts is the figure of the source author. Occasionally, the authors themselves may happen to be alive and willing to take part in their own translation process (Umberto Eco has gone so far as to claim that being involved in the translations from one’s own writings is enough for a would-be translation theorist; Eco 2003: 13); or they may be their own translators, in which case the comparison between

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source and target texts is conducted on a fairly equal basis, and the author/ translator dichotomy can be studied as the chronicle of a personality split between two languages and cultures (cf. Sengupta 1990; Krouse 2008). But if these special situations be excepted, the figure of the source author is normally effaced by a formalistic culture which tends to see translation as dealing with objects rather than people, or people’s voices: as a fairly recent multilingual Translation Terminology attests, even the interpersonally charged term ‘faithfulness’ is now defined in terms of an impersonal source text rather than of its author (Delisle, Lee-Jahnke and Cormier 1999/2002: 84). Any attempt at recapturing the individual agency of a source sender is seen as an example of ‘intentional fallacy’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946), the volitional dimension of writing being confined to the ‘function’ (as in functionalist theory) or the performative dimension (as in this volume) of the source text. In other words, and somewhat belatedly if compared with other fields of humanistic learning,1 the author is now as dead in translation studies as he/she has been in literature for several decades (cf. Barthes 1967/77). Translators have only words and their context to work on, and the occasional live author is only one more external force they may have to reckon with, alongside audiences and publishers. At most, live authors may be used as valuable informants, for the simple reason that they were on the crime scene: Another electronic resource now available to the translator – one that it is perhaps best to reserve for this phase [after the first draft] – is the e-mail, which can be used to contact the author (if alive and willing to cooperate) or an expert – someone who knows the author, the text, the linguistic variety employed in the original or the specific field of learning the source text refers to.2

From a strictly theoretical point of view, there is no arguing with this impersonal position, and many authors would probably subscribe to the idea that once a text is finished it is theirs no longer. On the other hand, while theoretically impregnable, the impersonal view is somewhat at odds with the translator’s feeling that he/she is grappling with another personality, or with many personalities in the case of polyphonic texts. While strongest in personal genres like the memoir or confessional poetry, this feeling does not completely evaporate in even the most arid of professional writings. Translators say that they are working on Lowell or Shakespeare, that they are striving to recreate

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the idiosyncrasies of Faulkner’s characters, or that they are translating an instruction manual for a washing machine – and the fellow could have made up his mind whether one was meant to depress a button before or after another button. Some translator trainers, and some authors of translation manuals, express this interpersonal awareness aurally, by reminding their students and readers that they have to catch and reproduce a ‘voice’ (Landers 2001: 45), a ‘tone’, or, more scientifically, a ‘register’ (Robinson 1997b: 246). This view of translation as an interpersonal exchange between author and translator is very ancient, and may owe a lot to the oral origins of interpretatio (cf. Lefevere 1997). The translators of former ages did not distinguish as we do between books and their authors, and were therefore positive that whatever they did to a text they also did to a person. In the Renaissance, for instance, both the author and the text were transported, dressed in new clothes, taught to speak English (cf. Morini 2006a: 55). George Chapman, the first English translator of Homer, created a beautifully balanced interpersonal allegory when he had Homer declare that ‘thou didst inherit / My true sense (for the time then) in my spirit; / And I, inuisiblie, went prompting thee, / To those fayre Greenes, where thou didst english me’ (Chapman 1609: preface). Almost a century later, Dryden characterized the personal relationship between author and translator as one of servitude: We are bound to the author’s sense, though with the latitudes already mentioned [. . .] But slaves we are, and labour on another man’s plantation; we dress the vineyard, but the wine is the owner’s: if the soil be sometimes barren, then we are sure of being scourged: if it be fruitful, and our care succeeds, we are not thanked; for the proud reader will only say, the poor drudge has done his duty. (Steiner 1975: 73)

Most of the above expressions can be easily rephrased to make them palatable for our more scientific times. When John Florio says that Montaigne and/or his essays have been transported, re-dressed and taught another language, the contemporary theorist writes that the translator must act as a cultural mediator (Taft 1981; Katan 1997; Morini 2007a: 93–5; Tonkin and Frank 2010). When George Chapman depicts the author-translator relationship as one of mutual hybridization, or when Dryden sees it in terms of thankless slavery, the contemporary theorist writes that the translator develops a style of his own in response to the author’s style (Malmkjær 2004; Boase-Beier 2006:

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5; Xie 2010; cf. chapter 4). However, it would be simplistic to reduce the hiatus between Renaissance/Augustan personality and contemporary impersonality to a mere difference of theoretical approach: the hiatus is interesting in itself, inasmuch as it mirrors the distance between an empirical, aggressive age and its more scientific and timid inheritors. In their different degrees of aggression or submissiveness, Florio, Chapman and Dryden share a confrontational view of translation which finds few parallels in the present age. George Steiner has been severely criticized for drawing a male chauvinist picture of translation which includes an ‘initiative thrust’, an ‘aggression’ or ‘penetration’, an ‘incorporation’, and a ‘compensation’ or ‘restitution’ (Steiner 1975/98: 312–19). Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere have described translation as a ‘manipulation undertaken in the service of power’. But Bassnett and Lefevere speak of manipulation in negative terms, or at most in neutral, impersonal fashion3 – as ‘a rewriting of an original text’ (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990: preface); and even the more aggressive Steiner describes a penetration and an incorporation of words – not of bodies or personalities. Whatever the degree of ‘interventionism’ or ‘intervenience’ (Maier 2007) admitted for or assigned to the translator, what gets attacked, penetrated, rewritten or manipulated is always the abstract creature rather than its creator. While there is no theoretical or practical reason to describe translation in the ingenuously personal terms used by Chapman and Dryden, speaking of the source text impersonally bears significant consequences on the translations that are produced by our post-structuralist society in the present age. Lawrence Venuti (1995) has famously shown how in Anglo-American culture, the virtual subtraction of the translator’s signature from the target text can create the illusion of the translation being its own original. Others have corrected Venuti’s observations by pointing out that in less prestigious cultures, an impersonal translating process can produce subservient target texts which will tend to incorporate linguistic borrowings or mirror the syntax of the original (cf. Kwieciński 1998; Venturi 2009a; Tymoczko 2010b: 10; but cf. also Venuti 2008: 38). More generally, it can be said that if the process of translation is de-personalized, the products of this process will tend to conform to the strong norms operating within a society for a given transaction. In the translator’s virtual absence, the English version of an Italian novel will tend to

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be as fluent as possible (cf. Gutkowski 2009); while the Italian version of an English Victorian classic will probably keep as literally close to the original as Italian lexicogrammar will allow, and will employ an elevated register confirming Italian ideas on how an English Victorian classic should sound (cf. Venturi 2009b). The impersonality of the source text can be made to serve an analogous, if somewhat subtler, purpose. If the original is seen as issuing forth from a human voice, something said by ‘a man speaking to men’ (or, a woman speaking to women), the translator will have to focus on the interpersonal relations contained in or presupposed by the text – the voice of the poetic persona, the idiosyncrasies of single characters in a novel, the parties presupposed by a contract – that is, on the interpersonal dimension of language (in its internal aspect, in this case). On the other hand, if the text is de-personalized, if it is seen as a mere aggregate of ‘words and syllables’,4 the translator will be able to concentrate on the linguistic surface rather than on its pragmatic value. That linguistic surface, according to the translator’s habitus (cf. chapter 4) and to the norms of the target culture (with respect to genre), will either be reproduced with ‘philological’ precision (cf. Hermans 1992: 104) or recreated by making recourse to analogous structures of the target language: but its interpersonal function will not be made the focus of the translator’s attention. In the Austen translations discussed in Chapter 4, a painstaking attention to linguistic detail can paradoxically produce versions in which the narrator’s voice, the subtle blending between narrator and reflector, the stylistic differences between one character and another, are silenced or blurred out of recognition. The next section will attempt to show how a philological rendering of the rhetorical intricacies of sonnet 18 may run the risk of muting Shakespeare’s distinctive voice – the voice of his poetic persona. Concentrating on Shakespeare’s poetic (phonetic, metrical, prosodic) effects, on the other hand, does not guarantee that the individuality of this voice will carry through in the target language: most ‘poetic’ versions, rather than providing the reader with an idea of ‘what Shakespeare sounds like’, reflect the dominant poetic models of the target culture. It is only by focusing on the individuality of the voice/voices contained in, presupposed by, speaking the source text that the translator may be able to make them resonate in his/her own time and his/her own language, by the use of his/her own style.

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Of course, the modern dominance of text-bound translation has its positive aspects: for one thing, it counteracts a tendency to make free with other people’s intellectual property which was typical of the Renaissance – when the rhetorical figures of transportation and re-clothing often covered a radical rewriting of the original. Modern translators, whether they decide to imitate or recreate the surface structures of the source, can usually guarantee a certain degree of similarity between translations and originals; whereas Harington’s version of the Orlando Furioso occasionally reads like a synopsis, and Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essais always reads like Florio. Nevertheless, text-bound translation does have its own – less obtrusive – shortcomings: if Shakespeare is translated philologically, ‘Shakespeare’ will become a byword for awkward, scholarly, difficult writing; if Shakespeare is translated ‘poetically’, the target version will tend to become embroiled in what target readers think ‘Shakespeare’ (or ‘poetry’) should sound like.5 These twin strategies, of course, can tell us much about certain aspects of Shakespeare’s poetry – and where multiple translations of the same text are in existence, each version may light up a different facet of the source. But it is very difficult for a text-bound version – whether philological or poetical – to convey the feel of Shakespeare’s or ‘Shakespeare’s’ voice. If seen as an attempt to recapture foreign personalities and their alien voices (cf. Colapietro 2010), translation faces similar problems to those of ethnography and cultural anthropology. In her monograph on Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum, Kate Sturge has drawn a fruitful comparison between these seemingly disparate disciplines – which appear to share a number of concerns and have independently developed on parallel lines. Translation studies and ethnography deal with distant cultural objects which must be ‘translated’ for a target audience of experts or lay readers, in the form of target texts or ethnographic accounts. In the last few decades, both disciplines have had to accept that their ‘translations’, however accurate, can never be seen as mere faithful reproductions of a pre-existing actuality: As Johannes Fabian points out, anthropology used to yearn for ‘accurate’ representations but is now exploring the implications of an acceptance that representations are not mirrors reflecting pre-existing, separate objects: ‘the Other is never simply given, never just found or encountered, but made’ (Fabian 1990: 755), and in recent decades translation, too, has had to face a

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‘crisis of representation’ which undermined positivist notions of fixed ‘source texts’ capable of objective restatement in another language. (Sturge 2007: 2)

Ethnography, however, has pushed its ‘crisis of representation’ to a further limit than translation studies: while the latter has understood that there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ translation, the former has come to accept that even the source is ultimately ungraspable. To quote Sturge, recent anthropological discourse explores ‘the pitfalls of the “translation” of culture, but the other half of the couplet is at least as controversial’ as the first (Sturge 2007: 9). Traditional ethnography tended to view the cultures it studied as coherent, knowable wholes, and to concentrate on the problem of conveying the sense of their integrity to an alien culture in an alien language. But even the most primitive of cultures are now acknowledged to be very complex nets of individual or group forces interlocking to form a constantly shifting grid. Therefore, the process of understanding and ‘translating’ these cultures cannot be separated from the process of ‘making’ them for the target culture. As another ethnographer and cultural anthropologist has convincingly demonstrated, ‘identity’ (the identity of peoples, of cultural or racial groups) is created or constructed by interrupting a continuous ‘flux’ of cultural traits and selecting a limited number of ‘connections’ from an unlimited stock of available cultural links (Remotti 1996: 9). This interruption, this ‘cut’ (Remotti 1996: 24), is necessary whenever a group wants to build a collective identity for itself: but it is also inevitable whenever an ethnographer tries to describe that group for an external audience – since mere flux is beyond description, a ‘cut’ is operated on the written page of the ethnographic account, and the alien ‘identity’ is arranged for presentation to the target culture. On the face of it, the translator’s plight seems far different from the ethnographer’s – after all, translators do not have to materially construct what they work on. But if the apparent concreteness of printed or electronic words is forgotten for an instant, it becomes easier to acknowledge that the source text is ultimately as ungraspable as any source culture,6 and that the translator is every bit as much of an interpreter as the ethnographer: after all, it is a commonplace of translation theory and practice that translating means reading the original and conveying a sense of one’s reading in one’s translation. From the interpersonal point of view (from the point of view of the identity or identities embodied in the source text), the translator selects

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a number of connections (the connections which make up an identity, the connections which link one identity with another) from the infinite range of possibilities contained or presupposed by the source text: when translating a lyrical poem, he/she will create a ‘voice’ (an aural identity) for the persona of the poet in the target language; when translating a novel, he/she will devise ways of rendering his/her sense of the differences and the relations between narrator and characters, between one character and another. Translation, just like ethnography, entails a ‘cut’, a continuous process of selection. Source texts, unlike source cultures, are admittedly made of words, and words after all are something tangible: but pragmatically, words are just shadows, the locutionary surface of an illocutionary sea which can never be sounded to its uttermost depths. Words, in themselves, are only translatable by accident (the accident of two semantically similar words conveying the same pragmatic meaning at a certain textual stage), and therefore translating words (or phrases, or even rhetorical figures, as will be seen in the next sections) is a defeatist solution, a non-interventionist tactics (cf. chapter 4) which enables the translator not to choose in the flux of infinite connections. The futility of such an escape can again be illustrated by drawing a parallel with ethnographic practice: in Sturge’s chapter on ‘The Translatability of Cultures’, which examines the role of actual linguistic translation within ethnographic practice, there figures a description of Malinowski’s methods in Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935), his vastly influential study of the Trobriand Islands. Malinowski thought that linguistic description was essential to cultural anthropology: he was critical of the representational techniques of traditional ethnographers, whose common practice was to recreate an alien culture in terms of their own, while at the same time offering ‘reparatory’ translations/explanations of single crucial terms which were supposed to afford privileged entry in the source system. Malinowski’s idea was that single words were only significant in their co-text and context, and therefore his own solution was transcribing a number of Kiriwinian utterances and providing them with a literal translation (aimed at showing the workings of the native mind) and a freer translation (that would make it easier for the English-speaking reader to understand the workings of the native mind): Waga bi-la,

i-gisay-dasi,

boge

i-katumatay-da

Canoe he might go

they see us

already

they kill us just

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wala

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Were a canoe to sail out, they would see us, they would kill us directly. (Sturge 2007: 25)

Even though Malinowski’s choice was clearly dictated by an attitude of deep respect for the culture he had studied, the effect of his translational methods may partly be demonstrated to run counter to his intentions. The ethnographer’s purpose is to provide English-speaking readers with an ‘inside’ view of Kiriwinian language, as well as to explain the meaning of their utterances. But the problem with this double translation, as Sturge rightly notes, is that it encourages its readers to think of the Kiriwinians as a simple-minded people whose primitive speech needs to be translated into English before it acquires a degree of coherence and sophistication – while of course, the Kiriwinian utterance must have been fully ‘intelligible and presumably coherent when originally spoken’ (Sturge 2007: 27).7 It is always respect – a ‘philological’ respect for the ‘words and syllables’ of the source text, or of the source culture – which inspires this kind of translation, whether in ethnography or elsewhere. The Middle Ages produced interlinear versions of the Bible which could scarcely have been claimed to make sense if not by juxtaposition with their sources. In our secularized, post-Romantic age, certain literary texts still inspire an awe and exact a respect which lead translators to reproduce them as if a source text were a consistent whole and not a net of interpersonal possibilities. On the other hand, each time a ‘freer’, less source-oriented version is attempted (like Malinowski’s fluent recreation of Kiriwinian speech), the translator/ethnographer runs the risk of confirming deep-seated ideas on the native culture he/she is describing or on the foreign author he/she is recreating for the target audience. As Kate Sturge points out in her chapter on ‘museum ethnography’ – where she details and quotes a number of studies of ‘New Museology’, a recent self-reflexive trend in museum studies – whenever we collect specimens of a foreign culture, the ways in which we arrange them ‘can fruitfully be read as referential indices of the Self ’ (Dominguez 1986: 554) rather than as faithful representations of the Other. If we abandon the idea that our translations must serve as mere cribs for the original, we must accept the possibility that they will reinforce target ideas on the original. A comprehensible, domesticating description of an alien civilization will have to employ conceptual grids belonging to the receiving culture, which will have its

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own preconceived ideas on alien civilizations; and as will be seen in the next section, a ‘poetic’ rendering of a foreign poet will tend to conform to domestic ideas on poetry and great poets. At a distance of two millennia, the Ciceronian free/literal dichotomy appears to loom behind all modern definitions of what translation can or must be: but the dichotomy only holds true so long as one insists that translating is something one does with words and syllables. If one thinks of the source text as a lexical, syntactical or rhetorical construct, one will be only able to judge the target text in terms of closeness or distance. In the case of Shakespeare’s poetry, the philological translator will produce a crib, whereas the poetic translator will recreate some of the metrical or prosodic effects of the original. In what follows, the results of these mutually excluding positions will be compared with one another, as well as with a third strategy which aims at recreating voices rather than words – thus producing an effect of ‘resonance’8 which will inevitably blend the personality of the translator with that of the author.

Text-bound and voice-centred versions: Translating cultural capital The following analysis is centred on a number of translations from English into Italian and vice versa, all of them having prestigious, canonized works as their source texts (Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata). While the theoretical dominance of text-bound translation can be easily gleaned from the terminology and ideological drift of most contemporary studies on translation, in actual practice this dominance is often counterbalanced by other considerations – such as the need to sell as many copies as possible to readers who want to have fun with their reading matter. However, the weight of these considerations is felt less strongly in the case of canonized works, because the classics, either modern or ancient, are ‘cultural capital’, and the translation of cultural capital is subject to different and stricter norms (cf. Lefevere 1998; Venturi 2009a). When they buy cultural capital in translation, readers like to be assured that there is a coincidence or at least an analogy between the source and target texts – and it is illuminating to see how that expected coincidence or analogy is produced, respectively, in a marginal culture and in today’s most global polysystem.

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Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 in Italian It may appear eccentric to exemplify a theoretical description of the (inter) personal nature of translation by looking at the Italian translations from that most mysterious and anonymous of canonized authors, William Shakespeare. And it would certainly be useless to ask oneself questions about who ‘William Shakespeare’ was in connection with the translation of his plays – though those questions have been asked again and again, and have been variously answered by literary critics and historians. However, when it comes to translating the sonnets, the crux of identity cannot be evaded, because in lyrical poetry a shadowy persona of the poet, if not the poet himself, is always presiding over a limited set of characters and events. And as Alessandro Serpieri – one of the most influential Shakespearean critics and translators in Italy – reminds us, Shakespeare’s sequence may be read as a personal re-interpretation of a rather conventional genre: But in his sonnets, Shakespeare aimed at finding a lyrical ‘I’ that was not a mere conventional mask, a fictive pretext for stereotypes, ‘painted’ beauties and swollen similes – but a sincere ‘I’ writing sincerely. He says it very clearly as early as sonnet 21: ‘O let me true in love but truly write’ [. . .] And he reiterates it, he lays claim to this sincerity for himself, in many other passages.9 (Shakespeare and Serpieri 1995: 27)

This personal ‘turn’ no doubt justifies some of the hypotheses which have been formulated about Shakespeare’s life and circle of acquaintances in connection with the sonnets – if nothing else, because choosing between one biographical option or another means dating the composition of the sequence in the mid-1590s or towards the end of the decade (cf. Shakespeare and Serpieri 1995: 14–15). But even if the author’s biography is left aside, this personal quality is crucial to an aesthetic appreciation of the work and its novelty. Whoever reads all of Shakespeare’s verse sequence at a stretch cannot fail but appreciate its distance from more conventional contemporary efforts like Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591) or Spenser’s Amoretti (1595). In comparison with Sidney’s and Spenser’s models, Shakespeare’s sonnets are much more dramatic, both in the sense of fictional development and in the way they build plausible, fully developed characters (or at least one character, the lyrical ‘I’) whose feelings change with the changing of fictional conditions. When Shakespeare’s persona is sad or stricken with fear about its love, one feels that its sadness and fear

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are somehow more tangible and individual than even Petrarch’s sadness and fear – that there is someone behind that fear, whatever the connections of that fictional person may be with the historical person who actually wrote the sonnets. Any personal touch, in literature, is obviously a construct, as everyone must know who has ever read a bad writer’s account of his/her life. Shakespeare builds up this personal effect in many ways, both thematic (above all the fair youth/dark lady dichotomy) and linguistic (a tendency to use unfamiliar figures, or to employ familiar figures in unfamiliar ways). But the translator who is striving for ‘resonance’ will of course concentrate his/her attention on Shakespeare’s linguistic techniques, above all because these are most difficult to recreate. Not every poem has this personal touch, and there is much in the sequence which, if taken in isolation, sounds traditional or repetitive. But certain sonnets manage to develop a familiar theme in unexpected ways, thus forcing the translator to ask him/herself what it is that gives them such an individual feel. This is certainly the case with sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more louely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Shakespeare 1994: 753)

Since it would be out of place to attempt a novel reading of this famous sonnet, the following reading will only concentrate on those passages which ‘resonate’ in a single reader’s mind as particularly personal, as endowing the lyrical persona of the poet with an individual voice transcending the limits of the genre. First of all, there is the opening rhetorical question, asked in the first person and with an urgent tone (as if the poet had been meditating about this

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for a while) which raises doubtful implicatures about the truth of the simile proposed in the following lines: not only is the cogency of this simile disproved, but the conventional beauty of summer is exposed to the jeers of the poetic persona, who proceeds to point out its shortness and roughness (ll. 3–6). The legal/housing metaphor in line 4 is particularly significant, inasmuch as it reduces the glory of summer by conflating it with the precarious condition of an evicted tenant (in sonnet 13, Shakespeare uses the word ‘lease’ to similar effect with reference to the fair youth’s beauty, ‘that beauty which you hold in lease’). Finally, in the midst of Shakespeare’s ‘immortalization’ of the fair youth and his beauty, there comes a famous polysemous line which forces the reader to pause until he/she realizes its full reach: ‘When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st’. Ostensibly, this line merely signifies that the poet’s lines will make their subject immortal: but so many meanings – so many ‘implicitures’ (Bach 1994) – are packed into a single clause that one cannot but wonder what the fellow means; and as soon as one wonders, ‘the fellow’ becomes an audible voice and a very palpable person.10 As Serpieri points out in his very exhaustive notes to this sonnet (Shakespeare and Serpieri 1995: 422), ‘lines’ has the obvious meaning of ‘lines of verse’, but it also evokes the fair youth’s lineage, in itself and as established by poetic art; however, the most estranging part of the line is the particle ‘to’, suggesting that the fair youth will grow towards time (as opposed to in the course of time), or even until he becomes time itself. After that extraordinary line, the final couplet is a sedate return to logical normality, creating a reassuring effect of closure which appears to contain the strangeness of the poem within a conventional form. But before that couplet, so many non-conventional things have been stated or implicated that the poetic ‘I’ may be said to have fully established its claim to a personal voice. Faced with a poem of this kind, as well as with the near-impossibility of recreating all the effects created by Shakespeare, the translator may choose one of the following routes: (1) keeping as close as possible to the syntax and rhetorical texture of the source; (2) trying to recreate its poetic structure and overall effect, its metre and rhymes; (3) attempting a resonant recreation of the poet’s ‘voice’, of the personal quality of the poem. In theory, these routes are not mutually exclusive: but in practice, most translators will tend to emphasize one of these aspects to the relative detriment of the others. In the case of a canonical author like Shakespeare, an Italian translation produced for a prestigious publishing house will tend to be of the first type, while the second and third

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types may be expected to flourish in freer marginal editions. But if the Italian versions of sonnet 18 are scrutinized, it soon becomes evident that the third type of translation, the kind of recreation which is not text-bound, and makes Shakespeare’s voice resonate in the contemporary version, is completely absent from the scene. All of the Italian versions of this sonnet appear to concentrate on the literal and figurative meaning of the poem, on its poetic structure or on a mixture of both. The most perfect example of close adherence is Serpieri’s translation, first completed in 1991 and published in a ‘classical’ Rizzoli edition which includes a 60-page-long introduction with essential bibliography, a chronology of Shakespeare’s life and works, and more than 400 pages of poem-by-poem ‘commentary’. The very disproportion between the sandwiched text (pp. 68–375, 307 pages all told comprehending the original poems as well as their translations) and its attendant apparatus (pp. 5–67, 377–811, a comprehensive 496 pages) alerts us to the fact that we are in the presence of a ‘philological’ translation – a translation, that is, which concentrates on the source text rather than on the speaking person, persona or voice. This kind of translation is best read as a crib for the source: Dovrò paragonarti a un giorno d’estate? Tu sei più amabile e più temperato: rudi venti scuotono i diletti boccioli del maggio e l’affitto dell’estate ha durata troppo breve;11 (Shakespeare and Serpieri 1995: 103)

Though it always remains within the bounds of correct – sometimes even fluent – Italian, this version occasionally reads like a mirror-reproduction of the original. Every word and phrase of the source sonnet finds its most obvious literal counterpart (‘lovely’ becomes ‘amabile’; ‘compare thee’ becomes ‘paragonarti’), or, when at all possible, its etymological cognate (‘temperate’ is mirrored in ‘temperato’; ‘declines’ becomes ‘declina’). In places, the translator exploits or stretches the possibilities of Italian syntax and lexicon to reproduce the exact word-order of the source (‘Rough [rudi] venti [winds] do shake [scuotono] the darling [i diletti] boccioli [buds] of May [del maggio]’12). Even the conjunctions are kept exactly as they are: ‘nor’ becomes ‘né’ (as we shall see, ‘nor’ is usually the first conjunction to disappear in the English-Italian transition); ‘so long as’ predictably becomes ‘finché’, while the second ‘so long’,

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less predictably, inspires the Italian ‘fin tanto’.13 As a consequence of this literal strategy, most figures remain exactly the same in Italian (‘the eye of heaven’ is ‘l’occhio del cielo’), and something is changed only when it would be too awkward to keep the same words in the same order: ‘his gold complexion’, for instance, is turned into ‘l’oro del suo volto’ (‘the gold of his face’), presumably because a literal translation would spread cacophony through the line (‘e spesso il suo incarnato dorato è offuscato’); ‘that faire thou ow’st’ becomes ‘quella bellezza che è tua’ (‘that beauty which is yours’) because a literal version would be too prosaic in Italian (‘quella bellezza che possiedi’). If Serpieri’s version of sonnet 18 is read alongside his endnotes for the same, it becomes clear that his translating technique mirrors his critical interest in Shakespeare’s poetic art: just as the notes follow the structure of the poem and the polysemous intricacies of Shakespeare’s language, the translation attempts to keep that structure and to give a detailed account of all those linguistic possibilities. Serpieri observes that the poem is neatly divided into two rhetorical blocks (ll. 1–8 and 9–14, both signalled by the apparition of summer), and keeps the neat division in his translation. The critic observes that ‘this’, in the last line, means ‘this poem’ but also ‘this poetry’, ‘this sequence’, and the translator accordingly uses the ambiguous ‘questa poesia’ (‘poesia’ is both ‘poem’ and ‘poetry’ in Italian). Most impressively, the note for line 12 signals the ambiguity of that ‘to time’ discussed above, and the Italian version of the poem (‘tu crescerai nel tempo’) manages to combine a weak interpretation of the line (‘you will grow in the course of time’) with a more accurate representation of the original strangeness (‘you will grow into time’, ‘you will grow to be time itself ’; though admittedly, this possibility would probably not occur to an Italian reader unacquainted with Serpieri’s commentary). In general, if we accept J. S. Holmes’ characterization of the poetic translator as a ‘metapoet’ (Holmes 1969/88: 11) – a mythical creature, half poet and half critic14 – Serpieri undoubtedly chooses to graft his critical habits onto his translating technique. A final piece of evidence is provided by the final couplet, where Serpieri does not even attempt to render the effect of closure created by the rhyme, but concentrates on the cola and commata and keeps the end-words of both lines (‘can see’/‘vedranno’; ‘thee’/‘te’). A version of sonnet 18 which tips the balance of metapoetry back towards its ‘poetic’ side is Rina Sara Virgillito’s, first published in 1988 and recently

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republished by Newton Compton. This publishing house occupies a marginal position in the Italian literary system: the backlist at the end of the book features classics from all ages and countries, from Plato to Kerouac, but all these venerable books are generally printed with a slighter critical apparatus, and less painstaking philological accuracy, than their counterparts in the more prestigious catalogues of Rizzoli, Garzanti or Mondadori. In the case of the Sonnets, the opening 15 pages of introduction plus 13 of bio-bibliographical note are dwarfed by the 154 pages of the poems themselves (pp. 29–183), which are followed by no poem-by-poem commentary at all. Furthermore, while in the Rizzoli version each source or target poem occupies a single page (with a lot of blank space above and below the lines), here two English sonnets face two Italian translations, the uniqueness of each sonnet within the sequence being sacrificed to the claims of cost-efficiency. Given these premises, it comes as no surprise that Virgillito’s poems are freer from the claims of philology than Serpieri’s: Ti dirò uguale a un giorno d’estate? Più temperanza tu hai, più dolcezza: i molli bocci sferza il vento al maggio e l’estate ha scadenze troppo brevi.15 (Shakespeare and Virgillito 2008: 47)

The translator decides to work within a rather tight metrical grid, while at the same time preserving the unfolding of meaning in the source text (the main division between blocks 1–8 and 9–14 is kept, alongside with the thematic iteration of ‘summer’): Virgillito produces an Italian endecasillabo for every iambic pentameter of the original, and even though she does not attempt an exact reproduction of the metre, she comes out with a full or a slant rhyme whenever she can, and at whatever distance (estate/cade; dolcezza/bellezza; dismisura/natura/scolora; and above all the consonance in the crucial final couplet, respiro/vivo). While the Newton Compton version is certainly closer to the source poem in its overall rhythmical and musical effect, these self-imposed limits inevitably force the translator to lose track of Shakespeare’s description and finer rhetorical effects. Thus, notwithstanding the unsettling first line (‘Will I pronounce you identical to a summer day?’), Shakespeare’s immediacy and peculiarity are somewhat watered from the second line onwards: the two adjectives of the second line are turned into nouns (‘temperanza’ e ‘dolcezza’) whose attribution

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to the fair youth is grammatically less direct; the non-conventional syntactical order of ‘i molli bocci sferza il vento al maggio’ (the tender buds lashes the wind in May’) confuses the neat reasoning of ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’; the metaphorical surprise of the fourth line is lost into a rendering that abandons every reference to summer as an evicted tenant (summer is simply said to have a ‘brief ’, that is, tight, deadline); ‘declines’ is doubled into ‘inclina e cade’ (‘declines and falls’) to round off the seventh line. More generally, a number of conventional, old-fashioned, ‘poetical’ constructions and terms (the foreshortened ‘bocci’ for ‘boccioli’, one elided ‘Talor’ for ‘Talora’ and one ‘mutevol’ for ‘mutevole’, the literary ‘sembiante’ for ‘faccia’) are needed if the poem is to remain within the bounds of its chosen metre, because the polysyllabic nature of contemporary standard Italian would surely exceed the limit of ten to twelve syllables. On the other hand, Virgillito’s freedom from Shakespeare’s syntax, lexicon and finer rhetorical structure, as well as the somewhat hermetic feel of her poem, allows her to give a very effective rendering of that estranging twelfth line (‘quando al tempo tu cresci in linee eterne’ = ‘when to time you grow in eternal lines’). If read in combination, Serpieri’s sonnet-cum-commentary and Virgillito’s recreative poem may give readers a fairly accurate idea of what the original sonnet means and of what it sounds like. What is absent from both versions is the immediacy and bravado which give Shakespeare’s poem its individual tone. By looking at the source text as a text, either in its lexical/syntactical/ rhetorical texture or in its rhetorical/metrical aspects, both these translators lose track of the personal quality of Shakespeare’s voice. And although this quality resurfaces here and there (Virgillito’s first line, Serpieri’s second), in Serpieri’s sonnet we mostly hear the voice of the critic, whereas in Virgillito’s we listen to the somewhat more formal accents of an accomplished but rather conventional Italian poet. While no poet has been re-translated as often as Shakespeare, his voice is more or less absent from all of the versions produced by Italian poets and professional translators (cf. Zacchi 2006: 42–5; Tempera 2009). The reason for this ‘voicelessness’ can be gleaned from the brief ‘translator’s preface’ included in another philological edition of the Sonetti. Though the translator, Maria Antonietta Marelli, claims that she has attempted to appreciate the ‘right measure and the sound’ of Shakespeare’s poetry – which is declared to be as vast and resounding as Dante’s and Michelangelo’s – and to ‘carry over its

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echo’ in the target text, the rest of the preface makes it clear that the only echo Marelli is interested in is textual and not personal: This translation, which keeps as close as possible to the English text, only aims at being an easy and comprehensible study for all those who wish to approach the poet and to test their abilities on his much debated sonnets. This was my purpose, and in order to fulfil it I had to fight against the endless disputes caused by the ambiguity of many lines, an ambiguity which has spilled centuries of ink.16 (Shakespeare and Marelli 1986: no page number)

Maybe ‘carrying the echo’ of Shakespeare’s voice – of the voice of his lyrical persona – is so arduous that only the sound of words and syllables can cross the language barrier. Here, however, is an attempt at materializing the ‘resonance’ that the original voice produces in an individual reader/translator: Paragonarti a un giorno estivo? Sei molto meglio tu, e meno freddo. Il vento scuote i fiori di maggio nella culla e già l’estate morosa è sotto sfratto; a volte l’occhio del cielo è là che brilla, spesso ha opaco, non dorato, il colorito; tutte le cose belle dopo un po’ lo sono meno, per caso o per capriccio di natura; ma la tua estate eterna non finisce e non smarrisce mai la tua bellezza; la morte non si vanterà di averti preso, perché con questi versi eterni freghi il tempo. Finché gli uomini vedono e hanno fiato, vive anche questo, e questo ti dà vita.17

Metrically, this version is a very free rendering of the sonnet: the verse is irregular, and the rhymes (or more often, assonances, consonances or internal rhymes: culla/brilla; freddo/sfratto; estivo/colorito; finisce/smarrisce) look found rather than striven for, if an exception is made for the final couplet. However, it was not the translator’s purpose to aim at a ‘poetic’ rendering of the sonnet, though he certainly wanted to communicate the idea that the lines are connected with each other by something more than grammar. This translation reaches towards the individuality of the source by attempting something similar in fluent, contemporary Italian, in the belief that any historicizing term would

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dissolve the dazzling immediacy of the English voice. Of course, an element of roughness, or at best of simplification, is inseparable from the overall effect of the Italian poem: the ‘fair youth’ is said to be ‘less cold’ (‘meno freddo’) than a summer’s day, with the effect of turning Shakespeare’s generic compliment into a more pointed one; the repetition of line 7 is completely lost in the vaguer ‘tutte le cose belle dopo un po’ lo sono meno’ (‘all beautiful things become less so in time’); the insistence on mutability in line 8 (‘nature’s changing course’) becomes a mere complaint about nature’s ‘whim’ (‘per capriccio di natura’); the image of the fair youth (not) wandering in death’s shade in line 11 is abandoned. All in all, the tight antithetical and antonymical structure of the poem becomes looser. On the other hand, this Italian version tries to convey the effect of those passages in which the voice of the original poem sounds particularly strong and distinctive. The abrupt opening question, shorn as it is of its auxiliary verb (‘Paragonarti a un giorno d’estate?’ = ‘Compare you to a summer’s day?’), catches the dubious tone of the original, as well as the sense that the speaker had been meditating on this for a while. The metaphor showing summer as a soon-to-be-evicted tenant in arrear of his/her payments (‘e già l’estate morosa è sotto sfratto’) elaborates on Shakespeare’s original metaphor and arrests the reader’s attention. The substitution of the present for the future tense in much of the poem (‘finisce’, ‘smarrisce’) heightens the effect of aural presence, because the use of the future, in Italian, is nowadays confined to formal, literary or specialized contexts. Even the translation of ‘this’ by ‘questo’ in the last line, while apparently literal, contributes to the effect of colloquial spontaneity aimed at reproducing the individual feel of the source poem. Finally, what is perhaps the most debatable passage in this Italian version illustrates both the strengths and the perils of such an interpersonal approach to poetic translation.18 Translating the twelfth line as ‘perché con questi versi eterni freghi il tempo’ (‘because with these eternal lines you cheat time’) means substituting Shakespeare’s daring and mysterious metaphor for a direct – and perhaps rather puerile – attempt at shocking the reader. On the other hand, though much less complex and ambiguous, that line at least conveys some of the sense of shock which Shakespeare’s metaphor produced in the translator – the sense of being in the presence of an individual voice that no amount of philology or metrical ability can ever evoke.

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Tasso’s Liberata in English For a series of complex historical reasons, as well as for its marginal position in today’s global culture, Italy tends to produce source-oriented versions of prestigious literary works: as Paola Venturi has convincingly demonstrated, Italian translators of the ‘classics’ often display a form of ‘immobility’ which chains their versions to the syntax and lexicon of their originals, and only allows for a degree of ‘ennoblissement’ (Berman 1999: 52ff.) aimed at proving that the prestigious text is indeed worthy of its fame (Venturi 2009a). Therefore, in the case of universally canonized authors such as Shakespeare, very few translators dare to recreate the form or effects of the source: versions like Virgillito’s are confined to the margins of the book market, while other ‘poetical’ translations, penned by poets whose renown is at least comparable with Shakespeare’s, are usually published in the poets’ own collections and explicitly presented as compound monsters, half-way between one poetics and another.19 In this source-oriented situation, even those versions which do not keep close to the ‘letter’ (the lexicon, the syntax, the micro-rhetorical structure) of the source text must make a show of their material connections with the source text (with its metre, prosody, sound effects): all or most versions will thus be text-bound – few translators, if any, will concentrate on the voice or voices contained in the source text, and the interpersonal function of the latter will be taken into consideration only rarely and perfunctorily. If one leaves Italy’s marginal position and shifts one’s gaze on the English-speaking world, one finds similarities and subtle differences. In the English as in the Italian translations of canonized and prestigious works, it seems to be understood that translators have to take the material texture of the source, rather than its interpersonal function, as their focus. At the same time, the central position of English-speaking (and above all Anglo-American) culture makes for a higher degree of practical liberty from the constraints of the source. Whatever their reverence for the canonized original, English and American translators will be less likely to produce source-oriented, ‘fluent’ translations, and will in some cases produce passages of what one might term ‘voice-centred’ writing.20 Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) has challenged and maddened generations of English readers and translators. Its metrical complexity, its wealth of enjambments and syntactical complications, its

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lexical inventiveness and abundance of inkhorn terms make it particularly impervious to translation in English or any other language – yet this epic poem was first ‘Englished’ a mere thirteen years after its Italian publication, in Richard Carew’s incomplete 1594 version, and was translated in full by Edward Fairfax only six years later. After Fairfax’s famous and authoritative edition, the Liberata – or, Tasso’s style and poetics in general – was imitated and recreated by Milton in his Paradise Lost, while the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries saw a flood of translations which partially thinned down in the less sympathetic twentieth. Even so, Tasso’s masterpiece remains one of the most frequently re-translated classics of European literature, and the twenty-first century has already welcomed an American and an English edition which compare interestingly with their source and one another – Anthony M. Esolen’s Jerusalem Delivered (2000) and Max Wickert’s The Liberation of Jerusalem (2009). Judging from their brief introductory notes, both translators have started out with the intention of writing text-bound versions – their focus, at least theoretically, appears to have been on Tasso’s language, on his syntax, lexicon and rhetorical effects. Esolen says that his translation is aimed at inspiring target readers to ask themselves what the Italian was like, and therefore his policy is ‘rather conservative. I attempt to preserve all of Tasso’s metaphors, including those encapsulated etymologically in single words. When Tasso uses a word as a leitmotif, I try to translate consistently. I am particularly sensitive to rhetoric and rhythm’ (Tasso and Esolen 2000: no page number). Analogously, Wickert concentrates on technical matters – specifically, Tasso’s metre and its rhetorical deployment: ‘Tasso’s formal unit is [. . .] the ottava rima stanza. Mine is the first English translation [. . .] since Edward Fairfax to attempt strict adherence to this form. [. . .] I have sought to reflect not only the rhyme pattern, but also Tasso’s use of it to achieve internal, rhetorical balances’ (Tasso and Wickert 2009: xxviii). But if these versions are both evidently text-bound in their inception, one immediately notices a different emphasis between Wickert’s closer adherence to metre and microlinguistic structure and Esolen’s concern for the effect of Tasso’s rhetoric. Unlike Wickert, Esolen admits that he did not try to reproduce all of Tasso’s inversions and archaisms; nor did he attempt to reproduce all the rhymes in the Italian ottava rima (his basic stave structure is XAXAXABB) – his reason for all these reductive choices being that he wanted to write in contemporary English, and contemporary English

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would have been subjected to an unbearable strain by Tasso’s intricate pattern. Thus, though theoretically text- and source-bound, Esolen’s version is partially ‘domesticating’ or ‘modernizing’ (Holmes 1971/8: 37; cf. also chapter 6) – and in a domesticating and modernizing version we can expect some of the voices of the source to find some form of contemporary ‘resonance’ in the target text. This difference in outlook is immediately evident if we compare Wickert’s very first stanza with Esolen’s. In order to illustrate their lexicon, syntax and structure to the English-speaking reader, a very awkward, ungrammatical interlinear version of Tasso’s lines is provided: Canto l’arme pietose e ’l capitano che ’l gran sepolcro liberò di Cristo. Molto egli oprò co ’l senno e con la mano, molto soffrì nel glorioso acquisto; e in van l’Inferno vi s’oppose, e in vano s’armò d’Asia e di Libia il popol misto. Il Ciel gli diè favore, e sotto a i santi segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti. (Tasso 1993: I, i) I sing the arms pious and the captain that the great sepulchre freed of Christ. Much he wrought with his judgment and with his hand, much he suffered in the glorious acquisition; and in vain Hell itself opposed, and in vain armed itself of Asia and Libia the people mixed. Heaven gave him favour, and under the sainted signs brought back his companions wandering. I sing the reverent armies, and that Chief who set the great tomb of our Savior free; much he performed with might and judgment, much he suffered in the glorious victory; in vain hell rose athwarth his path, in vain two continents combined in mutiny. Heaven graced him with its favour, and restored his straying men to the banner of the Lord. (Tasso and Esolen 2000) I sing of war, of holy war, and him, Captain who freed the Sepulchre of Christ.

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Greatly he wrought by force of mind and limb, and greatly suffered, nobly sacrificed. Vainly did Hell oppose him, Asia grim vainly combined with Libya, Hell-enticed. Heaven favoured him and guided back, to fight under his sacred flag, each errant knight. (Tasso and Wickert 2009)

This juxtaposition shows that text-bound translation can start out from very different premises and yet take similar forms: unlike Serpieri, Wickert aims at recreating an idea of Tasso’s metre, yet his awkward English reminds one of Serpieri’s thought-stopping Italian.21 One can only admire the prowess with which Wickert manages to follow the ottava rima pattern, yet this kind of admiration has little to do with literary enjoyment: the first line sounds more like a conundrum than an epic-chivalric incipit in the tradition of Ariosto, Virgil and Homer – the qualified repetition of ‘war’ sounds as an afterthought, and the finishing pronoun makes the line look stopped-short rather than end-stopped. Lines 5–6 look similarly contrived: they reproduce Tasso’s rhyme-pattern, his enjambment and the repetition of ‘in vano’ (‘vainly’), but while Tasso’s enjambment is neatly placed in the middle of a clause chiasmus (subject-verb / verb-double qualifier-subject-qualifier), Wickert’s syntax is too complicated for comfortable reading (particularly confusing are ‘Asia grim’ at the end of line 5 and the final addition of ‘Hell-enticed’, possibly presupposed by Tasso’s text). Even the final couplet, though much more comprehensible, is a bit ‘chopped-up’ (its prose counterpart would be: ‘Heaven favoured him, and guided back each errant knight to fight under his sacred flag’). By contrast, Esolen manages to make the meaning flow in and across the lines by abandoning some of Tasso’s rhymes, and by being rather free even when he does follow a pattern. In his note, Wickert tells us that he has taken some care ‘to shun “feminine” rhymes, especially in the final couplet of the octave’ – whereas his American colleague takes advantage of all the possibilities offered by slant rhyme, consonance and assonance (Chief / much, restored / Lord), or imperfect rhyme (free / victory / mutiny). Esolen’s metrical liberty, together with his moderate tendency to substitute modern words for Tasso’s archaisms (‘tomb’ for ‘sepolcro’; see also the compression of ‘d’Asia e di Libia’ – Libia meaning Africa – in the very modern ‘two continents’), allows him to imitate Tasso’s fluent stateliness. Of course, the monolingual reader of this version will not be able to form an

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exact idea of Tasso’s structure, of the constraints within which he created his stately, serious yet mellifluous verse. Fortunately, Wickert’s version is not always as awkward as that – though the first few ottave will probably form a durable impression in the reader – just as Esolen’s does not always flow so smoothly. For one thing, no translator can be consistently awkward or fluent throughout so long a bi-text; and more importantly, if there is space and time enough, there will be passages of the source text which will fruitfully intersect with his/her personal translating style.22 When that is the case, the voice or voices spoken in the source will resonate through his/her lines, even though he/she did not set out to write a voice-centred translation. To illustrate this point, one may quote Wickert’s versions of Tasso’s political speeches. When Goffredo di Buglione tries his rhetorical arts on his men, the translator’s chopped-up style creates an effect of thoughtful yet persuasive eloquence: Therefore he calls them to him and declares: ‘My views on this you have already heard, which, rather than to spurn the lady’s prayers, was in good time to aid and pledge our word. I once more urge this now. You would ease my cares if, after all, our wills at last concurred. For in a world so mutable and blind it’s often constancy to change one’s mind. (Tasso and Wickert 2009: V, iii)23

On the other hand, Esolen’s smoother, more modern style intercepts Tasso’s voice(s) every time the heart is involved rather than the brain. When Clorinda dies at Tancredi’s hands (XII, lxiv), the American translator catches the poignant mixture of single-combat fierceness and repressed sensuality in Tasso’s lines. Tancredi pushes the point of his sword in the fair breast (‘Spinge egli il ferro nel bel sen di punta’) – and Esolen has him sexually ‘thrust’ his blade (‘Into her lovely breast he thrusts his blade’). Tancredi’s blade dips into her body, avidly drinking her blood (‘che vi s’immerge e ’l sangue avido beve’) – and the translator’s blade ‘drowns’ into the she-warrior’s breast, and ‘eagerly drinks her blood’. When Tasso describes Clorinda’s clothes, lined with fair gold, softly and tenderly tightening around her breasts (‘e la veste, che d’or vago trapunta / Le mammelle stringea tenera e leve’), Esolen endows her with a couple of very specific articles of everyday and warlike clothing (a stole and

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a cuirass) which add to the overall phonetic effect of sensuousness (‘Her stole / beneath the cuirass, sweetly lined with gold’), and turns Tasso’s verb (‘stringea’: ‘clenched’) into a very delicate noun-verb combination (‘that held her breasts with light and tender pull’; italics mine). In the final couplet, though the American translator does not reproduce Tasso’s effect of deathly suspension (‘Ella già sente / morirsi’: ‘she already feels herself / dying’), one feels that his own solution (‘She cannot stand; / her legs give way’) once again adds to the general sense of physical abandon. Esolen’s translation is not a particularly ‘modernizing’ one – he uses the occasional literary or specialized term when Tasso’s material description makes it necessary. However, the main part of his vocabulary is middle-of-the-range and contemporary, whereas Wickert likes to use ‘inkhorn’ and disused terms (of course, he is following Tasso in this penchant). More crucially, Esolen’s metrical liberty allows him to employ a very smooth contemporary-looking syntax, whereas Wickert’s involutions force the reader to concentrate his/her attention less on what is said than on how it is said – a very exacting kind of concentration, often associated with ‘great books’: Quivi de’ cibi preziosa e cara apprestata è una mensa in su le rive, e scherzando se ’n van per l’acqua chiara due donzellette garrule e lascive, ch’or si spruzzano il volto, or fanno a gara chi prima à un segno destinato arrive. Si tuffano talor, e’l capo e ’l dorso scoprono alfin dopo il celato corso. Mosser le natatrici ignude e belle De’ duo guerrieri alquanto i duri petti, sí che fermàrsi a riguardarle; ed elle seguian pur i lor giochi e i lor diletti. Una intanto drizzossi, e le mammelle e tutto ciò che più la vista alletti mostrò, dal seno in suso, aperto al Cielo; E ’l lago a l’altre membra era un bel velo. (Tasso 1993: XV, lviii–lix) Here of foods precious and dear prepared is a table upon the shores, and joking there go through the water clear

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two little damsels garrulous and lascivious, that now sprinkle each other’s face, and now vie who first at a given sign arrives. They dive sometimes: and the head and the back bare finally after the hidden route. Moved the swimmers naked and beautiful of the two warriors very much the breasts, so that they stopped to watch them; and they carried on with their games and their delights. One meanwhile stood up, and the tits and all that most the eyesight allures showed, from the breast up, open to the sky; and the lake to the other limbs was a beautiful veil. (my ‘grammatical’ back-translation) A banquet was set out along the banks, a table full of rare and dainty food, while in the water two girls played their pranks, two merry ladies, talkative and lewd, racing to a set spot with slender flanks skimming the water, swimming in the nude, splashing each other’s faces, or going under, then bobbing up and glistening like a wonder. The swimming girls were nude and beautiful and moved the stubborn chests of the two knights so that they stopped to watch them awhile, continuing their games and their delights. One rose so high she showed the men her full breasts, and all else that could entice their sights from the hips up, all open to the sky, while the lake veiled the rest most prettily. (Tasso and Esolen 2000) Here, decked with viands precious, rich, and rare, a table lies prepared upon the shore, and sporting in the crystal water there two wanton damsels wage a merry war. They chatter, splash each other’s faces, dare each other to explore the fountain’s floor, then dive, and heads and shoulders one by one discover when their game at last is done.

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The loveliness of these nude swimmers tests somewhat the armoured heart of either knight and makes him stop to watch, while in their jests and sports the maids continue to delight. One then dips up, and upward from her breasts shows everything that most allures the sight, quite open to the sky, while through the veil of the pond her other limbs glow white and pale. (Tasso and Wickert 2009)

Perhaps it would be too much to associate Esolen’s flowing syntax and sensuous, sibilant-filled diction (‘two merry ladies, talkative and lewd, / racing to a set spot with slender flanks / skimming the water, swimming in the nude, / splashing each other’s faces [. . .] glistening like a wonder’), his artful suspensions (‘her full / breasts’), the very substance of his description (those breasts are not even described as full in the original, for one thing) with analogous (though cruder) forms of entertainment in latter-day America. Nevertheless, the near-complete lack of morphological and syntactic complications, as well as of lexical difficulties (Tasso’s ‘donzellette’ are normalized in ‘girls’ and ‘ladies’), succeeds in recreating something very close to what may have been Tasso’s intended effect, if not the means by which he came at it. Wickert’s version, by contrast, may be read as a perfect illustration of what Venuti (1995) means by a ‘foreignizing’ translation: his lines struggle to convey a sense of the ‘strangeness’ of the source – with the side effect that they end up sounding far stranger and more foreign than the source itself.24 As the comparison of these two versions shows, there is no easy, ultimate way of conveying an idea of the source text’s foreignness; and there is no easy way of deciding which version is ‘minoritizing’ and which is ‘majoritarian’ (Venuti 1998a: 11), even when one reads more fluently than another. As demonstrated by Serpieri’s and Wickert’s styles, certain text-bound, source-oriented translations may reinforce deep-seated ideas on the difficulty, obscurity or complexity of their originals. And in the last analysis, only a great number of different target texts, all of them produced with different focuses, can come close to the utopian aim of reproducing all the aspects of the source.

Conclusion: Translating voices, translating people Source texts are not just collections of wordings arranged in unique ways: they are written testimonies of human voices, and may contain testimonies and

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reproductions of other real or imagined human voices. Attempting ‘faithful’ or even ‘free’ reproductions of the source text, therefore, is no guarantee that the live, personal and interpersonal qualities embodied in the text will cross the language barrier – and even a kaleidoscopic collection of all the existing translations of a canonized masterpiece may fail to convey a sense of the voices speaking in and through the source. It is only by understanding how the source voices speak – the balance between spoken and implicated meaning, the implicitures triggered by a polysemous phrase, the politeness strategies employed by personae, narrators and characters – that the translator may hope to impress the target reader with a sense of the interpersonal nature of the original. However, the pragmatic texture of voice changes rather radically from language to language, and must be altered radically in order to be reproduced. Paradoxically, in order to keep faith to the voices inscribed in the source, the translator has to speak in his/her own voice – or more precisely, he/she must adopt an ‘interventionist’ stance (cf. Chapter 4) which allows him/her to act as a secondary author in the creation of target voices. Thus, though they have been treated in two separate chapters, the internal aspects of the interpersonal function are inseparable from their external resonances: the personalities speaking in the source can only be made to speak in the target text if the translator is in a strong position with regard to the interpersonal, social net comprehending all the other agents and passive subjects of translation.

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6

The Locative Function/1: Translating Space, Translating Time

Introduction: Time, place, intertextuality It is etymologically obvious that translating means carrying across: the Latin verb transferre and its modern European cognates (translate, übersetzen, tradurre, traduire, traducir, mostly and variously derived from another Latin verb, traducere) define an activity of immaterial commerce across linguistic and cultural barriers, while the older Latin term (interpretatio) underscores its interpersonal aspects. The translators of the Renaissance created a number of locative figures which saw the original author travelling to the target country in order to learn its language, or the translator himself (women translators were rare and more prudent in their metaphors) forcefully transporting the author or his text: in his translation of Montaigne’s essays, for instance, John Florio defined himself as ‘at least a fondling foster-father [of this book], having transported it from France to England; put it in English clothes; taught it to talke our tongue (though many-times with a jerke of the French Iargon)’ (Montaigne and Florio 1603: dedication). Two centuries later, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s linguistic Pan-Germanism led him to favour a method of translating which moved the reader towards the original writer in order to leave the latter alone: In my opinion, these ways can be reduced to two. Either the translator leaves the writer alone – as much as possible – and moves the reader in the writer’s direction; or he leaves the reader alone – as much as possible – and moves the writer in the reader’s direction. These two ways are so different from one another that when one is chosen, it must be followed to its conclusion with

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as much rigour as possible; while only very uncertain results can ensue from any kind of mixture, and it is to be feared that both writer and reader will lose themselves completely as a consequence.1

Like all other aspects of translation, the locative function has historically been swayed between the twin poles of literalism and freedom, formal and dynamic equivalence, source- and target-oriented bias. When linguists and information theorists set out to build a science of translation from the 1950s onwards (cf. Chapter 1), they maintained that translating meant carrying something across a linguistic barrier, but tried to devise strategies through which the ‘content’, the ‘message’ or the ‘meaning’ which was carried across could remain unaltered. In 1980, when descriptive translation studies was already in existence, Jean Delisle wrote that in translation ‘it is the meaning of a message that is transferred from one language to another, and the transfer is accomplished by analyzing and then reconstructing semantic relationships’ (Delisle 1980/8: 3). As late as 1996, Peter Newmark defined the aim of translation as ‘the transfer of the meaning of a text (which may be a word or a book) from one language to another’ (Newmark 1996: 5). At least in theory, descriptive translation studies has now definitely done away with the notion of ‘zero transference’, and the view of translation as an ideological manipulation of textual material across social, cultural and political barriers has come to be accepted by all or most scholars in the field. The exponents of the ‘Tel Aviv-Leuven Axis’ (Hermans 1999: preface) and their innumerable disciples have analysed a great number of case studies of how these barriers influence translators’ behaviour, and conversely, of how existing translations reflect the norms of receiving cultures. By its very nature, however, descriptive translation studies is more eloquent on results and choices than on processes and options: and if one wants to understand the locative nature of translation from the inside, one has to turn to a thinner line of inquiry within twentieth-century translation theory – a tradition comprehending Ezra Pound, J. S. Holmes and André Lefevere (in his pre-DTS incarnation). With different theoretical premises and varying success, these three eclectic scholars have tried to put their fingers on what happens when the source text is at a great temporal, spatial or intertextual remove from the translator. In his characteristically impressionistic way, Ezra Pound tried to find a suitable equivalent for Guido Cavalcanti’s Italian in the history of literary English,

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and finally settled on pre-Elizabethan English not because it was historically compatible, but because of a certain degree of literary (intertextual) and phonetic closeness (Pound 1918/2004; also cf. Venuti 2003 for a more sceptical and reader-oriented view). Half a century later, and much more exhaustively, J. S. Holmes (1971/88) defined the ‘modernizing’ or ‘archaizing’ options available to the translator of ancient texts on the linguistic, literary and socio-cultural planes. While André Lefevere, in his early monograph on Translating Poetry (1975), extended Holmes’ intuitions into a study of how time, place and tradition (what he called tpt elements) guide and influence translators’ choices. The locative function as defined in this chapter (in its temporal, spatial and intertextual aspects) is another manifestation of Lefevere’s tpt elements, and integrates Pound’s and Holmes’ findings into an integral pragmatic theory. Self-evidently, each and every process of translation involves locative transfer of all three kinds: but when one translates a contemporary detective story from one European language to another, the cultural gap is often so slight as to be unperceivable, and the translator can happily dispense with any awareness of the locative function. When the source text is at a great remove from the target culture, by contrast, its locative function obtrudes into view, and even the most unconscious of translators will have to ask themselves questions about how to recreate or smooth out that distance in the interlingual passage. Sometimes, the gap is made more evident by the fact that even the source reader (or some source readers, and the translator as a source reader) is at a great linguistic or cultural remove from the source text – what one might term ‘double difference’ (Morini 2006b). In the case of double distance, many translators will probably ask themselves whether that sense of ‘internal estrangement’ should be transferred to the target text and felt by the target reader. In what follows, a series of translations from contemporary and late medieval Scottish literature are analysed in order to discuss the translator’s choices and the alternative routes he might have taken. While Scottish-born ‘British’ authors like Muriel Spark and Lord Byron could well fall into the category of European writers for which little or no locative distance is perceived, the Scottish poets and novelists considered here belong to a proudly national or regional tradition whose distance from the cultural centres of British power is reflected into a variety of significant linguistic and ideological choices.

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Translating Scotland The conscientious translator of Scottish literature must dabble in sociolinguistics and language history, as well as literary criticism and translation studies. Scotland is a multilingual land, characterized by what J. A. Fishman terms ‘within-group (or intragroup) multilingualism’ – a situation in which ‘a single population makes use of two (or more) “languages” or varieties of the “same language” for internal communicative purposes’ (Fishman 1971/2: 15; on translation and sociolinguistics, cf. also Sánchez 2007). In this case, there are two varieties of the same language – English and Scots – and, though less widespread, a language belonging to a different Indo-European family – the Gaelic. The rest of the chapter will deal with the dualism between English and Scots, that is, between the two tongues which are mastered and spoken by most Scottish people, and used as alternative or complementary languages by a number of Scottish writers. Just as Scottish people choose either Scots or English according to personal preferences, topic, domains of language behaviour, role and power relations, so writers’ choices may well be personal, but have cultural and sociolinguistic roots and consequences. Ideally, the translator as cultural mediator (Taft 1981: 53) will be aware of the sociolinguistic nature of writers’ choices, and may decide to inform the reader about them, either within the text or in the notes and commentary. The Scottish/Italian mediation can be further complicated by the introduction of variables which distance the source text not only from the translator and his/her reader, but also from the contemporary Scottish reader: if the source text was written in a different epoch from the present or the immediate past, and in an earlier version of English and/or Scots, the translator must decide if and how to reproduce its diachronic dimension. In André Lefevere’s terms, ‘the freedom of the theme is [. . .] inevitably circumscribed by the concentric circles of language, time, place, and tradition’ (Lefevere 1975: 19). Now, whereas language is an element which the translator cannot but take into account, the elements which Lefevere terms tpt take up more importance as the cultural and literary gap between author and translator widens. According to Lefevere, the translator, when faced with a source text displaying tpt elements which distance it from the target culture, must

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choose one of five strategies: (1) he/she can simply ignore the problem; (2) he/she can produce a calque and not worry about the reader’s understanding of it; (3) he/she can produce a calque and furnish it with explanatory notes; (4) he/she can translate tpt elements as he/she translates language; (5) he/she can elucidate the text by means of amplification and paraphrase (Lefevere 1975: 85–92). As understood by Schleiermacher, the translator must often choose whether the burden of translation is to be borne by the reader or by the original author/ text, and when the source lies at a great distance from the receiving culture, a degree of choice becomes almost mandatory: but what Schleiermacher called the two ‘methods’ of translating can be subdivided into countless techniques through which the translator can make the reader acquainted with the locative function of the source text.

Contemporary Scottish poetry: English and Scots The most typical problem for the translator of contemporary Scottish literature is the co-presence, in the same text, of English and Scots. The first half of the twentieth century saw a heated debate between the supporters of Scots as a national literary language (Hugh MacDiarmid) and those who were convinced that Scottish writers had to write in English because Scots was a dead, dying or marginal tongue (Edwin Muir). For a Scottish writer of the twentieth century, choosing either language, or both, was no mere literary dilemma: it was a cultural and a political issue which the translator has no way of incorporating in his/her target text (if not in the notes and commentaries). Of course, many theorists would say that the translator must not translate the dialect (or the language variety) itself, but the function that dialect (or language variety) has in the source text (Newmark 1988: 194–5): nevertheless, part of the reason for using Scots, part of its function, resides precisely in its cultural and political significance (cf. Thomson 2004). If Scots is used in order to identify the narrator, or a character, as Scottish, how can one reproduce that function in the target text? Though there are a number of twentieth-century texts written in Scots or in English, there are also many texts which hinge upon this linguistic and

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ideological dualism. In fictional prose, for instance, English is traditionally reserved for the narrative parts, Scots for the dialogue. A classical example is George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901), the first great novel of modern Scottish literature: In a dull little country town the passing of a single cart is an event, and a gig is followed with the eye till it disappears. Anything is welcome that breaks the long monotony of the hours, and suggests a topic for the evening’s talk. ‘Any news?’ a body will gravely enquire; ‘Ou aye,’ another will answer with equal gravity, ‘I saw Kennedy’s gig going past in the forenoon.’ ‘Aye, man, where would he be off till? He’s owre often in his gig, I’m thinking –’ and then Kennedy and his affairs will last them till bedtime. (Douglas Brown 1901/85: 41) In un noioso paesello di campagna il passaggio di un solo carro è un avvenimento, e un calesse viene seguito con gli occhi finché non scompare. Si accoglie con piacere qualsiasi cosa spezzi la lunga monotonia delle ore, e suggerisca un argomento per la chiacchierata serale. ‘Novità?’ chiederà uno, con aria grave; ‘Oh, sì, [Oh yes]’ risponderà un altro con aria altrettanto grave, ‘Ho visto passare il calesse di Kennedy, stamattina. [I saw Kennedy’s gig passing, this morning]’ ‘Ah sì? E dov’è che andava? Lo prende un po’ troppo spesso quel calesse, secondo me – [Did you? And where is it he was he going? He rides a bit too often in that gig, I think]’ e a quel punto Kennedy e i suoi affari gli basteranno fino all’ora di coricarsi.

As shown by the back-translations of the characters’ speeches, such a version bridges the gap between characters and narrator, a gap that is one of the main stylistic features of the novel (the narrator, probably a native who has studied in England or Edinburgh like the author, is at the same time a knowing chronicler of the small community he describes and a stranger to it). Of course Italian, like any language, provides the translator with the means to render this distance: characters’ speeches can become more colloquial, dialectal, even syntactically and morphologically incorrect (‘Sì eh? Ma indov’è che va? Fra un po’ lo consuma, quel calesse’ [‘Ah, yes? And where was he going to? In a bit he’s consuming it, that gig’]): but the English/Scots dualism, which has a precise cultural and political significance, is lost in any case, and can only be recovered by means of explanatory notes and commentaries.

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An alternative solution is producing a cultural adaptation of the text. The whole novel can be set in an Italian region, and the Italian dialect of that region can be substituted for Scots (the house with the green shutters can become a farmhouse in the Italian countryside). On the other hand, even though ‘adaptation’ has been described by many as a permissible translation procedure (cf. for instance Vinay and Darbelnet 1958/77: 52–4), our epoch does not consider such experiments as translations ‘proper’ (Jakobson 1959/66), and only tends to accept them when produced by well-known authors who can ‘sign’ the end product as if it was entirely their own (cf. Chapter 5). A lot of twentieth-century Scottish poetry is also based on linguistic dualism. In poetry as in prose, English and Scots can be used in isolation: but when they are combined within a single work, English is usually the narrator’s language, the language of written speech and established culture; while Scots is the characters’ (or some characters’) language, the language of oral speech and family conversations. This is shown very neatly in the opening lines of ‘Condensation’, by the Glaswegian poet and playwright Liz Lochhead: After a two and a half years with His Mother, We were no longer love’s young dream When me, him and the weans got a hoose o’ wur ain In a four-in-a-block in this scheme. (Lochhead 1991: 16)

The English spoken by this young disillusioned woman is full of colloquial turns of phrase like ‘a two and a half years’ and ‘in this scheme’: the codeswitch from English to Scots (‘a hoose o’ wur ain’, ‘weans’), however, marks a further descent into the language of everyday family life. Since in Italy there are no two languages standing in the same relation as English and Scots (there is no Italian dialect which can seriously lay claim to being a language with a full-blown literary history),2 the Italian translator must reproduce the effect by different means. Traditionally, one of three different techniques3 – one of them defeatist, the other two interventionist – is chosen for such linguistically mixed passages. First, the translator can ignore the problem altogether, and translate the whole passage in plain Italian, as if the source text had been written in one language only – a solution which does not seem a solution at all, and yet

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is of some use when the original is printed alongside the translation, above all in those cases when the target text serves as an illustration of the source (school textbooks, cribs). What is lost can then be recovered by adding notes and commentaries: Dopo un due anni e mezzo con Sua Madre, Non eravamo più la giovane coppia da sogno Quando io, lui e i bambini mettemmo su casa In una quadrifamigliare in questo progetto. After a two years and a half with his mother We no longer were the young couple of dreams When the children, he and I put up house In a four-family house in this scheme.

Secondly, as with The House with the Green Shutters, the translator can substitute Scots with a social or a geographical dialect of the target language. As Hatim and Mason point out, there are dangers associated with this method: if ‘rendering ST dialect by TL standard has the disadvantage of losing the special effect intended in the ST [. . .] rendering dialect by dialect runs the risk of creating unintended effects’ (Hatim and Mason 1990/2: 41). The use of dialect transfers the situation of the original into a different context (what Delabastita (2002: 323) calls ‘anatopism’), and turns a translation into a sort of cultural adaptation. Furthermore, rendering Scots with an Italian dialect is dangerous if the source text is not humorous (cf. Chapter 7) or the translator is not a proficient speaker of that dialect. One runs the risk of incurring ridicule, as with the following Italian version with sprinkles of the Italian romagnolo dialect (the dialect spoken in the southern part of Emilia Romagna, between Imola and Rimini): Dopo un due anni e mezzo con Sua Madre, Non eravamo più la giovane coppia da sogno Quando io, lui e i babèn [the kids] trovammo una cà cl’era nostra [a house that was ours] In una quadrifamigliare in questo progetto.

Thirdly, the translator can render the effect obtained through code-switching in the original by different means, that is, by lowering the register within the standard variety of the target language or by interspersing his/her translation

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with spelling and grammatical mistakes. The drawback here is that by choosing this strategy, the translator equates speaking Scots with making mistakes and employing a low register, thus perpetuating a cultural prejudice which may not be warranted by the source text (which, on the contrary – though this is not exactly the case with Lochhead’s poem – can be animated by a desire to vindicate the literary dignity of Scots). Furthermore, the ghost of one or another Italian dialect is always lurking behind every attempt to write incorrect or very informal Italian: Dopo un due anni e mezzo con Sua Madre, Non eravamo più la giovane coppia da sogno Quando io, lui e gli marmocchi ciappamo ’sta casa [the kids we take this ’ere house] In una quadrifamigliare in questo progetto.

Of course, none of these methods is fully satisfying: the first is simplistic, the second and the third create misunderstandings and court ridicule. The translator will choose the method or the combination of methods which he/she thinks best given the particular source text he/she has to translate, the needs of those who take part in the transaction (readers, initiator, publisher, author, the translator him/herself; cf. Chapter 4), and the conditions in which the target text or the bi-text will be published (with the original facing the translation or not, on a literary magazine or in a school textbook).

A fourth method? Synthetic Scots By considering source texts written in English and Scots, the above section seems to take it for granted that the English/Scots dualism is only relevant when actualized through code-switching. But that dualism is so strong that it leaves traces even on those texts in which only one of the two languages is used: a Scottish novel or long poem written entirely in English is no oddity, of course; but a Scottish novel or long poem written entirely in Scots inevitably evokes the ghost of English. For most Scottish writers, Scots is the mother tongue of family and everyday life, English the language of formality and education. Therefore, writing a whole novel or poem in Scots is a conscious choice, presupposing an exclusion which is often undeclared, but not without

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reason or consequences. How can the translator, then, reproduce the marks of that exclusion within the target text?4 Hugh MacDiarmid’s long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle can serve both to illustrate and point to a solution of this dilemma. In his masterpiece, written almost entirely in Scots and published in 1926, MacDiarmid managed to turn a dialect (or a bundle of dialects, some of them half-invented) into a full-fledged literary language. For a short period, Scots became one of the languages of European modernism, on a par with English and French: I amna fou’ sae muckle as tired – deid dune. It’s gey and hard wark coupin’ gless for gless Wi’ Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like, And I’m no’ juist as bauld as once I wes. (MacDiarmid 1992: 26) Sono stanco più che ubriaco. Esausto. E’ un duro lavoro, tracannare bicchiere su bicchiere Con Cruivie e Gilsanquhar e quelli come loro, E io non sono più quello di una volta. (MacDiarmid and Morini 2000: 7) I am tired rather than drunk. Exhausted. It’s hard work, gulping down glass after glass With Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like, And I am not the man I used to be.

The above Italian translation was produced for a literary magazine in which source texts are published alongside target texts, and is written in a language which sacrifices prosodic and metrical precision to the accurate reproduction of the referential dimension (what Leech and Short (1981/3: 37) call ‘the fictional universe’ of MacDiarmid’s poem). Furthermore, as shown by the standard English back-translation, in this version no attempt is made at signalling the fact that Scots, and not English, is the language of (almost all) the original. Of course, since Scots is considered by MacDiarmid to be on the same cultural and literary level as English, it would be misleading to translate it into an Italian dialect or into incorrect Italian. Nevertheless, part of the significance of the original lies in the fact that it is written almost entirely in Scots – a characteristic which endows it with a sociolinguistic impact that is lost or diminished in the target language.

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A possible solution is implicitly suggested by the source text itself, namely by Hugh MacDiarmid’s creation of ‘synthetic Scots’: ‘synthetic Scots’, as used in A Drunk Man and in various other short poems of this early period in MacDiarmid’s career, is a language which exists yet is not to be found anywhere, a new tongue made up of various actual and literary Scottish dialects. By analogy with synthetic Scots, in translating a novel or a long poem (i.e. a work which gives him/her room for experimenting), the translator can try to give shape to a ‘synthetic’ Italian which reproduces the Scots terms used in the original, and functions alongside standard Italian if the source text is characterized by the English/Scots dualism. This ‘synthetic’ language can be of literary or dialectal origin, found or invented, and would ideally come to replace Scots not only on a particular occasion, but also in other works by the same translator, and, if the cultural operation is successful, in translations by other professionals. This, as seen in Chapter 2, was the basic idea behind my Italian translation of Sunset Song, Canto del tramonto. The ‘synthetic Italian’ employed in that novel can now be studied in further detail: So by the winter of nineteen eleven there were no more than nine bit places left the Kinraddie estate, the Mains the biggest of them, it had been the Castle home farm in the long past times. [. . .] So the daftie took Ellison back with him to Kinraddie and made him his servant, and sometimes, when he was real drunk and the fairlies came sniftering out of the whisky bottles at him, he would throw a bottle at Ellison and shout Get out, you bloody dish-clout! so loud it was heard across at the Manse and fair affronted the minister’s wife. And old Greig, him that had been the last minister there, he would glower across at Kinraddie House like John Knox at Holyrood, and say that God’s hour would come. And sure as death it did, off to the asylum they hurled the daftie, he went with a nurse’s mutch on his head and he put his head out of the back of the waggon and said Cockadoodledoo! to some school bairns the waggon passed on the road and they all ran home and were fell frightened. But Ellison had made himself well acquainted with farming and selling stock and most with buying horses, so the trustees they made him manager of the Mains, and he moved into the Mains farmhouse and looked him round for a wife [. . .] Ella White she was not so particular and was fell long in the tooth herself. [. . .] And on the road home they lay among the stooks

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and maybe Ellison did this and that to make sure of getting her, he was fair desperate for any woman by then. They were married next New Year’s Day, and Ellison had begun to think himself a gey man in Kinraddie, and maybe one of the gentry. But the bothy billies, the ploughmen and the orra men of the Mains, they’d never a care for gentry except to mock at them and on the eve of Ellison’s wedding they took him as he was going into his house and took off his breeks and tarred his dowp and the soles of his feet and stuck feathers on them and then they threw him into the water-trough, as was the custom. And he called them Bloody Scotch savages, and was in an awful rage and at the term-time he had them sacked, the whole jingbang of them, so sore affronted he had been. (Gibbon 1932/77: 18) E così nell’inverno del Millenovecentoundici non c’erano rimaste più di nove casette nella proprietà di Kinraddie, Mains era la più grande, in tempi lontani era la fattoria del Castello. [. . .] E così il matto si portò a casa Ellison e se lo prese come domestico, e a volte, quando era ubriaco fradicio e sentiva gli spiriti che gnaulavano nel whisky, lanciava una bottiglia a Ellison e gli urlava Va’ via, straccione! tanto forte che lo sentivano di là in Canonica e la moglie del parroco si scandalizzava da morire. E il vecchio Greig, l’ultimo parroco, dava un’occhiataccia a Casa Kinraddie come John Knox a Holyrood, e diceva che l’ora di Dio prima o poi arrivava. E arrivò, puntuale come la morte, il pazzo lo scaraventarono in manicomio, andò via con una scuffietta da infermiera sulla testa e per strada mise la testa fuori dal carro e fece Chicchiricchiii! a dei bocia che uscivano da scuola e quelli tornarono a casa di corsa con una fifa blu. Ma Ellison si era fatto la sua bella cultura sul coltivare la terra e vendere le bestie e soprattutto sul comprare case, e così gli amministratori gli diedero in gestione Mains, e lui si installò nella fattoria di Mains e si guardò intorno in cerca di moglie. [. . .] Ella White, lei non era tanto schizzinosa e anche lei aveva i denti belli lunghi. [. . .] E sulla strada di casa si stesero tra i govoni e forse Ellison fece questo e quello per assicurarsela, ormai era disperato, gli andava bene una donna qualsiasi. Si sposarono il Capodanno seguente, ed Ellison ormai si sentiva un grand’uomo a Kinraddie, forse si credeva un signore. Ma i soggetti del capanno, i braccianti e i giornalieri di Mains, a loro non gli interessava niente dei signori se non per prenderli in giro, e la vigilia del matrimonio

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di Ellison mentre entrava in casa lo presero e gli levarono i pantoni e gli incatramarono le chiappe e le piante dei piedi e ci cacciarono su delle piume e poi lo buttarono nell’abbeveratoio, com’era usanza. E lui gli diede dei Maledetti selvaggi scozzesi, era infuriato duro e alla fine della stagione li fece licenziare, tutta la masnada, tanto se l’era presa a male. (Gibbon and Morini 2005: 22–3)5

On re-reading Canto del tramonto after publication, the translator discovered that he had written ‘Millenovecentodiciannove’ (1919) instead of ‘Millenovecentoundici’ (1911) in the first paragraph of this passage – thus shifting the temporal plane from before to after the Great War. This oversight demonstrates that great theories are no guarantee against small disastrous mistakes; nor, by the evidence of this bi-textual excerpt, are they immune from the infiltration of less great and more traditional practices. While devising this ‘synthetic Italian’, it was the translator’s intention to overcome all the shortcomings of the three techniques detailed above. But a microlinguistic analysis of the translation shows that those techniques were combined and shuffled together rather than replaced. If looked at separately, the words used to translate the Scots terms in the original tend to fall under five basic categories, most of which can be traced back to one or two traditional methods for translating dialects and sociolects: 1. dialect words: these are words like ‘bocia’ (for ‘bairn’, child) and ‘scuffietta’ (for ‘mutch’, bonnet, cap). The translator meant these words to be taken from a variety of dialects, but they turned out to be selected almost entirely from the dialects of his own region (Emilia Romagna) and the neighbouring ones (‘bocia’ comes from the area between Lombardy and Veneto). Another example, not present here but endemic in the novel, is the verb ‘arcordarsi’, an Italianized version of a word in the romagnolo dialect meaning ‘to remember’ (the same verb used in Fellini’s film title Amarcord, ‘I remember’), and standing for the Scots verb ‘to mind’ in my version. 2. modified Italian words: two examples here are ‘govoni’ and ‘pantoni’ (‘stooks’ and ‘breeks’), which are modified versions of ‘covoni’ and ‘pantaloni’ (‘sheaves’ and ‘breeches’). Though they originate from standard Italian, these terms have a regional flavour, and might well be used in one of Italy’s countless dialects. 3. low, vulgar words: an example is ‘chiappe’ (buttocks), used to translate the Scots word ‘dowp’ (‘bottom’).

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4. standard Italian words: sometimes, a Scots word is translated by a common Italian word, either because the translator did not find any other satisfactory solution or because the word was too crucial to allow for misunderstandings. One example is ‘affront’ (scandalize), which is rendered with ‘scandalizzarsi’ because the translator found no understandable alternative. 5. old-fashioned, formal words: some ‘synthetic Italian’ words, which the translator had meant to sound popular and informal, were, on the contrary, quite formal, old-fashioned or far-fetched: this is the case with ‘gnaulavano’ for ‘sniftering’, or ‘[avere una] fifa blu’ for ‘[being] fell frightened’ (very frightened).

Ultimately, it is up to the individual target reader to decide whether the effect is one of implausibility or of suspension of (linguistic) disbelief. But from the translator’s point of view, such an admixture (of dialects, of linguistic varieties, of translating techniques) has at least the advantage of allowing for a quick narrative pace which a more standard language would probably have hampered. In Sunset Song, among other things, Scots is used to produce swift transitions from one local character to another, from the narrator to the ‘village voice’.6 If the target text had been written in literary Italian, Gibbon’s occasionally heady rhythm (which is functional to the shifting of point of view, and to the depiction of a cohesive, gossiping society) would have been turned into a more composed flow of neatly divided clauses (and therefore into a more detached narration): Perciò il matto si portò Ellison a Kinraddie e ne fece il suo domestico, e a volte, quando era proprio ubriaco e dalle bottiglie di whisky gli sbucavano fuori degli spiriti maligni, gli capitava di tirare la bottiglia a Ellison e di gridare ‘Vattene, razza di straccione!’ così forte che lo sentivano fin dalla Canonica, e la moglie del parroco si scandalizzava moltissimo. E il vecchio Greig, l’ultimo che aveva fatto il parroco in quella canonica, inceneriva con lo sguardo Casa Kinraddie come John Knox aveva fatto con Holyrood, e diceva che prima o poi sarebbe giunta l’ora del Signore. So the madman took Ellison back to Kinraddie and made him his servant, and sometimes, when he was really drunk and evil spirits came out of his whisky bottles, he would throw the bottle at Ellison and shout ‘Go away, you tramp!’ so loud that they would hear him from the Manse, and the Minister’s wife would be scandalized. And Old Greig, the last who had been Minister there, would burn Kinraddie House to cinders with a look as John Knox had

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done with Holyrood before him, and say that God’s hour was bound to come sooner or later.

Time and tradition: Translating Middle Scots When the source text is not only at a geographical, but also at a temporal remove from the translator and his/her readers, the question of how Lefevere’s tpt elements can be rendered, substituted or explained in the target language/ culture is even more complicated, though in essence the same.7 As seen above, J. S. Holmes points out that the translator must choose whether to employ ‘archaizing’ or ‘modernizing’ techniques on three different levels – ‘linguistic’, ‘literary’ and ‘socio-cultural’ (Holmes 1971/8: 37): on the linguistic level, the translator must decide whether to employ the current standard version of the target language or an earlier one; on the literary level, he/she must decide how to render the metric and prosodic forms and conventions of the original (the intertextual aspect of locative difference); on the socio-cultural level, he/ she must decide whether those social and cultural references which may be difficult or incomprehensible to his/her readers have to be kept, obliterated or modified. The applicability of this model and the urgency of these choices become evident if a sample text like the opening stanza of William Dunbar’s The Thrissil and the Rois is analysed for the problems it poses and the possibilities it offers. Dunbar’s poem is an allegorical celebration of a royal marriage, written in highly aureate language and in a metrical form suited to the theme (‘rhyme royal’, a stanza made up of seven lines rhyming ABABBCC); its language is therefore spatially, temporally and intertextually removed from most target readers. The poem opens on the traditional description of the awakening of nature at the beginning of spring: Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past, And Appryll had, with hir silver schouris, Tane leif at nature with ane orient blast; And lusty May, that muddir is of flouris, Had maid the birdis to begyn thair houris Amang the tendir odouris reid and quhyt, Quhois armony to heir it wes delyt; (Dunbar 2003: 2)

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In order to produce an ‘archaizing’ version of this stanza at all levels, the translator must find historical equivalents for its language, literary form and cultural context. As for the latter, it would perhaps be improper to modify the traditional natural description, with its reminiscences of the Roman de la rose and the Canterbury Tales: the literary allusion is perhaps less obvious to the contemporary reader than to his fifteenth-century predecessor, but that problem can be remedied by means of a footnote, or can be simply left alone, as it does not impair a general understanding of the poem. The linguistic level poses a stronger dilemma: Dunbar’s Middle Scots is at a great temporal and geographical remove from today’s Italy (and at a lesser but by no means inconsiderable remove from today’s Scotland), and the sense of that distance would disappear were the stanza to be rendered in contemporary Italian. As for the form, if it is easy enough to reproduce the structure of the stanza (it can be done, though it is difficult to recreate all the rhymes), the archaizing translator must ask him/herself how to render Dunbar’s iambic pentameters. There is no single strategy to produce an ‘archaizing’ version, or, for that matter, a ‘modernizing’ one: the translator of poetry, as James S. Holmes has written, can be seen as a ‘metapoet’, that is, as a ‘secondary author’ who also operates as a literary critic (Holmes 1969/98: 11; cf. also Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 on ‘philological translation’), with an eye to the context in which his/her version will be published. In the following version, produced for an Italian literary magazine, the Scottish decasyllables are rendered with Italian hendecasyllables, and Dunbar’s Middle Scots is matched by Petrarch’s Tuscan (or, since that is hardly feasible, the imitation Tuscan of Petrarch’s successors). This variety of Italian, or Tuscan, is useful for both literary and practical reasons: on the one hand, Petrarch’s Tuscan was the most popular Italian idiom in the British isles between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries; on the other, the use of a concise poetic diction, in which elisions can be employed, makes it easier to contain the ten syllables of the Scottish line in the eleven of the Italian. Since in this kind of total archaizing translation the stanza form and the rhymes have to be kept as well, the target text becomes a sort of tour de force, for the reader even more than the translator: Fuggito Marzo e’ suoi cangianti venti, E poi ch’Aprile e le argentate piogge

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Levaron l’ultima bufera a Oriente, La madre d’ogne fior, splendente Maggio, Facea gli augelli cominciar lor canti D’in tra i teneri bocci e bianchi e rossi, Dalla dolce armonia a gioia mossi; (Dunbar and Morini 1998: 49) Once March and its changing winds had flown, And when April and its silver rains Had taken away their last storm in the East, The mother of all flowers, dazzling May, Made the birds begin their song Between the tender red and white buds, Moved to joy by this sweet harmony;

This version of the first stanza, because of the effect of ‘closure’ of metre and rhyme, can appear perfectly well-done: actually, in order to obtain the ‘archaizing’ effect, some factual inaccuracies have been committed. First of all, the tenses are different: the past perfect of the source text, which should be matched by Italian trapassato prossimo or remoto, and which is followed in the second Scottish stanza by the simple past (corresponding to Italian passato remoto), has been rendered, for the sake of brevity, with Italian passato remoto from the third line onwards. Secondly, some details of the description have been altered: April ‘taking its leave of nature’ in the source becomes April ‘taking away its last storm’ in the target text; in the source, the birds’ song is ‘harmony which it was a delight to hear’, while in the target text the birds are moved to joyous singing by the harmony of the flowers. The translator, if he/she wants to write a full-fledged ‘archaizing’ version, must pay a price in terms of micro-textual precision. Obviously, such a translation can be of some use if it is to be read by men and women of letters: it would perhaps be wrong to submit it to a widely distributed publishing house or to one printing school or university schoolbooks. If a wider audience were to be addressed, the translator could choose the first of the three methods outlined above, that is, he/she might produce a ‘crib’ for the reader to decipher the original; or he/she could write a ‘modernizing’ version at the formal and linguistic levels. Such a version would allow the translator to follow the consecutio temporum and the descriptive details more accurately: Quando Marzo se ne fu andato coi suoi venti cangianti, E Aprile, con le sue piogge d’argento,

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Si fu congedato dalla natura con una bufera a oriente, E la bella Maggio, la madre dei fiori, Ebbe fatto intonare agli uccelli i loro canti Fra i teneri odorosi fiori rossi e bianchi, La cui armonia era una gioia udire; Once March had gone with its changing winds, And April, with its silver rains, Had taken its leave of nature with a storm in the east, And beautiful May, mother of flowers, Had made the birds strike up their songs Among the tender red and white flowers, Whose harmony it was a joy to hear;

This version does not renounce all rhetorical ornamentation, as seen in the web of rhyme, assonance and consonance (cangianti / argento / oriente / canti / bianchi; fiori / udire): but the liberation of the poem from the cages of rhyme and metre makes for livelier lines. It is to be noted that it would be difficult to write an Italian poem displaying ‘archaizing’ features at the formal level and ‘modernizing’ features on the linguistic plane, because the hendecasyllables need the condensation of Petrarch’s Tuscan. At the socio-cultural level, however, this target text is not ‘modernized’, if not for the estranging effect produced on the original material by the updated form and language. The translator, however, is not compelled to choose only one ‘archaizing’ or ‘modernizing’ option at each level, just as he/she is not compelled to choose only one ‘foreignizing’ or ‘domesticating’ strategy in translating contemporary works written in English and Scots. In the actual process of translating, different techniques and strategies are used at different points of the ‘bi-text’. The translator of a poem written in Middle Scots may well mix Petrarch’s with Montale’s Italian, rhymed hendecasyllables with unrhymed longer lines – also because at any stage of his/her work, the translator is concerned not so much with what is right and correct as with what is possible and feasible. A compromising strategy yields good results in translating William Fowler, a Scottish poet who followed James VI of Scotland when he moved to London to become James I. Fowler’s sonnets are of good, but not of the highest, quality, and therefore, the translator need not be afraid to make them worse: Newe wondar of the world, one mo then seaven, whose presence was my pryde and absence payne,

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whils this vyld pest in distance heth vs driven, I equal absence loss with deaths agayne: for quhen by her we mortallye lye slayne, to the immortall thrones our soule dois flie, euen so my harte in this impatient payne abondons this my corss and fleyes to thee. deathe maks vs leave the derest things we see, this pest depryvs me of your heunlye face; deathe cruell is, so absence is to me; deathe full of frayes, all ioyes doth absence chase: yet death putts end to all our noysome caire, bot in this absence myne revius the maire. (Fowler 1914: 160)

This sonnet is a very good example of Fowler’s technique. Fowler’s models are Italian, above all Petrarch and Petrarch’s imitators (in this case, the starting point is poem CCCIX of Petrarca’s Canzoniere: ‘L’alto et novo miracol ch’à dì nostri’). These sonnets, though, are not translations but free imitations: here as elsewhere, Fowler picks up the first line from Petrarch and writes a modified version of that line which gives him the cue for an original poem. Fowler’s imitation is free in form as well as in language, because he prefers the English to the Italian sonnet form. The following version was produced for a literary magazine, and more precisely for an issue dedicated to the English (and Scottish) imitators of Petrarch. Therefore, with an eye to Fowler’s own imitative methods, the allusion to Petrarch was transformed so as to be perceptible but not direct; a rather free sonnet form was chosen – neither the Italian nor the English pattern; and overall, the poem was written in a half ‘archaizing’, half ‘modernizing’ language, half Petrarch’s Tuscan, half contemporary Italian. The end-result was probably more readable than the ‘archaizing’ version from Dunbar: Del mondo nuova, ottava meraviglia, gioia se resti, doglia quando parti, questa peste in esilio ci ha mandati, nella distanza ch’è come una morte: come quando senz’anima si giace ai troni eterni volano le anime, così il mio cuore pesto senza pace la mia carcassa lascia, e vola a te. La morte tutto ciò che amiamo invola,

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tuo volto celestiale questa peste; sì fera la morte, sì per me distanza; la morte pena, non meno l’assenza: ma morte pone fine ad ogni cura, assenza ogni mia cura aumenta ognora. (Fowler and Morini 2004: 345) Of the world new, eight wonder, joy if you remain, grief if you go, this plague has exiled us, in the distance which is like a death: as when one lies soulless and one’s soul flies to the eternal thrones, so my beaten heart which has no peace leaves my carcass, and flies to you. Death steals away all we love, this plague your heavenly visage; as fierce death, so distance is to me; death grief, absence no less grief: but death brings every care to an end, absence increases my care more and more.

This version is close to both Fowler’s original and Fowler’s models, and yet it adheres to neither. It is written in hendecasyllables, but the rhymes are more or less free. A rhyme, an assonance or a consonance is put in whenever possible – with special attention being paid to the final, closing couplet. As for its language, the target text modifies the diction, the syntax, the tenses and the rhetorical organization of the source rather freely. From the point of view of poetic diction, modern (‘pesto’, ‘carcassa’) and archaic words (‘doglia’, ‘fera’, ‘cura’) are combined. From the point of view of syntax, ‘archaizing’ clauses (‘come quando senz’anima si giace’) are set beside less estranging ones (‘ai troni eterni volano le anime’). Since Fowler’s is a free imitation of an Italian sonnet, the translator produces a sort of imaginary original of the Scottish sonnet, but in such a way as to make it readable for the contemporary reader.

Conclusion: Time is the same as space is the same as text In his essay on translation, ‘Des tours de Babel’, Jacques Derrida notes one common shortcoming of translation theories, that in dealing with the passage

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from one language into another (‘des passages d’une langue à l’autre’) they usually do not consider the possibility that a text be written in more than one language (‘la possibilité pour des langues d’être impliquées à plus de deux dans un texte’). What Derrida has in mind are those literary texts whose authors, like James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, employ more than one language to explore and stretch the possibilities of fictional language (Derrida 1987: 207–8). The translator of texts belonging to bilingual or multilingual countries (or, to countries where two or more varieties of the same language are spoken) is in a slightly different situation, and has to face slightly different problems.8 In order to translate adequately, or at least consciously, the translator has to possess sociolinguistic notions about the environment which has produced the source text – that is, notions about the settings, participants, purpose, key and channels which motivate the use of one code or another (Coulthard 1977: 42–6). Once he/she has reached an understanding of the sociolinguistic context of situation of the source text, he/she is left with his/her doubts as to rendering: must those variables be transferred, accounted for or cancelled in the target text – and how? The translator of old texts, written in an outdated form of the source language, has to face similar dilemmas and ask him/herself similar questions – for after all, from the translator’s point of view, diachronic gaps are technically equivalent to synchronic distances: a text written in Middle Scots posits an implicit dualism between Middle and Contemporary Scots, just as a contemporary text may posit an implicit or explicit dualism between Scots and English. Of course, as seen at the beginning of this chapter, the locative function is always modified in the interlingual passage: but its modifications, and the problems of locative adaptation faced by the translator, become more evident when there is little possibility of superimposition between the source and target languages/cultures. Finally, there is the third dimension of the locative function, always evoked but rarely mentioned explicitly in this chapter. All texts exist not only in time and place, but also in the connections they form with other texts – genre being the most evident of these connections, but by no means the only one. Again, the intertextual dimension is always modified in translation – a typically metropolitan American novel may become a typical American novel full stop in Italy, its position as the last of a long series of metropolitan novels utterly

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lost – but when the spatial or temporal distance is great, translating this side of the locative function becomes a matter of finding suitable historical equivalents, or of consciously domesticating the intertextual impact of the target text. An American novel set in contemporary New York may be translated without a thought for the tradition it belongs into; but if a sixteenth-century sonnet in Scots is translated into Italian, the target version will inevitably display its author’s (conscious or unconscious) preference for the English or the Italian sonnet form, for a ‘historicizing’ rendering or for a looser recreation in contemporary Italian verse.

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The Locative Function/2: Repositioning Humour in Film and Comics

Introduction: Humour in constrained translation The previous chapter observed what happens in the locative passage from one language (or more than one language) to another, thereby taking it for granted that the passage is always feasible. While of course, according to popular prejudice and to an extreme interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, no text can be transferred from a source to a target context, because every language endows its speakers with incommensurable ways of looking at reality. Human languages are separated forever like the world of the living and the world of the dead, and the tunnel leading from one to the other has not been found as yet. However, this popular prejudice paradoxically allows for a number of degrees: if all texts and all discourses are untranslatable, some kinds of texts and discourses are held to be more untranslatable than others. Poetry is surely a case in point (cf. Chapter 3); humour is another. ‘Jokes’ as Delia Chiaro writes, ‘travel badly’ (Chiaro 1996a: 77) – and as Chiaro herself goes on to demonstrate, it is only in the absence of code-tied puns and culture-bound references that humour passes on easily from language to language (the banana-skin situation). Undeniably, humour is not the only kind of discourse which ‘travels badly’, but it is true that while other kinds can be appreciated with the aid of prefaces and footnotes, humour cannot. The process whereby a joke rapidly self-destructs when someone demands an explanation, or even when a long time elapses between the end of the joke and its comprehension, is well known. This need for immediacy creates problems of locative transfer with texts or genres that hinge

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on humour: if one translates a poem by Charles Tomlinson (cf. Chapter 3) or a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (cf. Chapter 6), one’s reader – the kind of person who is likely to read Charles Tomlinson or Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the kind of person who appreciates modernist poetry and modernist novels – may be expected to do some of the contextual work required by the target text, and the contextual work he/she does may not impair his/her enjoyment of the text. The effectiveness of ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’ or Sunset Song has to do with complex nets of narrative technique, point of view, sound effects etc. which a small amount of contextual haziness (the employment of estranging techniques) or of contextual work (notes, commentaries, etc.) will probably leave intact. Humour, on the other hand, generally works well if its point is understood while the text is being processed. The information needed to understand a joke cannot be retrieved after the joke is told, because its effectiveness is based on that instant contextual ‘click’.1 Because of this need for instant retrieval, it is interesting to observe what happens in the translation of humour, how the locative transfer of a joke preserves, recreates or annihilates its impact. Faced with the instability of the humorous mechanism, the translator will try to recreate its effects in the target text, and this kind of perlocutionary rewriting will often involve a great number of locative adaptations. Since it is so exacting, the translation of humour can tell us much about the cultural differences (and the differences in the conception of humour) between any source and any target culture; and it can help us establish the degree of locative adaptation that ‘translation proper’ can afford (in our time, in the Western world) before it loses its name. This absolute need for (a high degree of) locative adaptation is not the only difficulty that the translator of humour must face. Another is the fact that this translator often works with genres like comics and films, which pose at least two more interlocking sets of strictures. On the one hand, they are often immensely popular, which makes it even more imperative to make the mechanisms of humour work in the target text. On the other, comics and films (like pop music and all other multimedia or prototypically ‘multimodal’ genres) are based on the combination of language with other non-linguistic codes, and their translation from one language to another is therefore ‘constrained’ by the co-presence of words and still or moving/speaking images.2 The translator of Dickens is faced with elaborate humorous passages which are often very difficult to reproduce into any language other than English – but he/she does

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not have to fit his/her words to any images contained in the original (except for Phiz’s illustrations, but they are few and often left out in translation), and he/she has the further advantage of writing for a reasonably small public which will expect Dickens to be classically serious and didactic rather than outrageously funny.3 The translator of an Astérix book or of a Monty Python film, on the other hand, will have to accord his/her words with the original drawings or moving images, and his/her freedom will be further circumscribed by the popularity of the source – or by his/her employers’ wish to make the target version popular. In short, he/she will have to produce a constrained translation in very constrained circumstances. Predictably enough, the translators of the Monty Python and Astérix adopt a high degree of locative adaptation, and try to fit their words to what they think is funny in the target culture. However, while such a strategy might seem inevitable in the constrained translation of humour, its results may be judged to be variously successful as to comical effectiveness, and are undeniably mixed as regards critical and popular reception. As will be seen in the next sections, Astérix has always been received with enthusiasm in the myriad countries he has visited so far, whereas the Monty Python have conquered more limited audiences, and those mainly with their banana-skin sketches – while their linguistic humour has probably been misunderstood and underappreciated in translation. If this may have to do with the different kinds of comical effects which obtain in an Astérix book and a Monty Python sketch – the former more ‘European’ (cf. Delesse 1998), the latter more British4 – some translators may have to bear responsibility not for adapting their originals, but for choosing strategies of locative adaptation which turn the source into the wrong kind of target text – in other words, for implicitly addressing the wrong section of the target public.5

Locative adaptation in audiovisual humour: Monthy Python in Italy Audiovisual translation, and particularly dubbing, generally involves a degree of adaptation, of ‘domesticating translation’, that no literary translator would dream of applying to his/her material. In film, or in the kind of film which aspires after popularity, fruition must be as immediate as possible, and the dubbed

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product, fluently recreated in the target language by invisible translators and invisible dialogists, will normally6 be presented as if it was its own original. All the cultural or linguistic elements which may create estrangement, therefore, must be neutralized or ‘localized’,7 so as to function smoothly in the target version – and the critical literature on dubbing abounds with case studies of successful or botched attempts at substituting one variety of language or one set of cultural references with another.8 This kind of operation, as seen above, becomes even more vital where humour is involved. In that case, a funny source dialect will inevitably be rendered with a target dialect which is held to be every inch as funny, and an incomprehensible cultural reference will be turned into one that the target public may immediately retrieve. But while these substitutions are necessary if the ‘click’ of humour has to be preserved, there remains a degree of freedom in the linguistic and cultural objects which are chosen to represent their source equivalents. More specifically, translators can choose whether to employ substitutes which graft the audiovisual text completely onto the target culture and language, or whether it is advisable to create versions which are immediately comprehensible but not completely domesticated. Of course, the choice involves a series of considerations on the interpersonal function of translation – on the kind of public one imagines for one’s dubbed film: while the average Italian viewer of Airplane! / L’aereo più pazzo del mondo (1980; the Italian version of the title, a tribute to the commonplace idea that Italians like explicitness, back-translates into The maddest plane in the world) may not object to hearing two African Americans speak in the Neapolitan dialect, the kind of public who is likely to appreciate Monty Python humour would probably be baffled by such an implausible locative adaptation. Monty Python translators have adopted various strategies of locative adaptation, and have met with various degrees of success. A moderate ‘domesticating’ attitude is reflected in the Italian version of Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982), a Californian live show which was released in Italy in 1992.9 Admittedly, a VHS cassette of an American show by a British group of comedians was never going to be a big hit in Italy (though it was conceivably knocked out in a hurry after the belated appearance of Life of Brian / Brian di Nazareth in 1991), so that in this case, the strategies adopted by the translators and/or the dubbing actors can hardly be judged in the light

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of commercial success. On the other hand, these strategies are interesting in themselves as illustrations of the kinds of problems translators face with Python material, and of the kinds of solutions they are likely to find. The show had been conceived as a best-of selection of sketches from the three series of the BBC Monty Python’s Flying Circus – and it is interesting to note that some of these sketches were locatively adapted by the Monty Python themselves along the time or space axes.10 Nonetheless, even in this new guise, the show contained a number of difficult references to British culture;11 and as is the rule with Python humour, the gist of a joke was often contained in the linguistic oppositions it set up (British vs Australian English, RP vs cockney accent, educated vs uneducated varieties of English). The dubbed version of the following ‘Communist Quiz’ sketch provides an example of locative adaptation of culture-bound elements. In the original, the humour resides in the juxtaposition of two different television programmes: what initially appears to be a political debate, impossibly hosting Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, soon turns into a quiz when the presenter starts asking questions about English football and American rock music. Thus, Karl Marx is questioned on the nickname of West Ham United, while Che Guevara has to answer a question on Coventry City and Lenin one on Jerry Lee Lewis. In the Italian version, the questions are about Italian popular culture: presentatore:

E la prima domanda è per lei, Karl Marx. Bomber. Bomber è il soprannome di un calciatore. Vuole dirmi chi è? [. . .] Ahi ahi ahi, Karl, il Bomber è . . . Roberto Pruzzo. Adesso Che Guevara. Che, l’Avellino in che anno ha vinto l’ultimo scudetto, Che Guevara? [. . .] [a Lenin] Claudio Villa ha ottenuto più di diciassette dischi d’oro in Italia e a Trastevere. Come si intitola il più famoso?

presenter:

And the first question is for you, Karl Marx. Bomber. Bomber is a footballer’s nickname. Can you tell me who it is? [. . . ] Ahi ahi ahi, Karl, Bomber is . . . Roberto Pruzzo. Now, Che Guevara. Che, when did Avellino win their last championship, Che Guevara? [. . .] [to Lenin] Claudio Villa was awarded more than seventeen Gold Records in Italy and Trastevere. What’s the name of the most famous of these?12

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The Italian translation of the very famous ‘Albatross’ sketch illustrates the functioning of ‘linguistic’ locative adaptation. In this case, the comic effect is created in English through the contrast between the uneducated and impolite albatross vendor and the highly educated and pointlessly inquisitive customer (the idea of albatross-vending, of course, is itself rather absurd): John Cleese’s vendor says ‘bleedin’ (once), ‘yer cunt’ (once) and ‘innit’ (for ‘isn’t it’), while Terry Jones’ customer keeps questioning him in impeccable RP English. Since there are no common sociolects in Italy, and uneducated speakers are mostly betrayed by their regional parlance, the sociolinguistic disparity of the source text is typically reproduced in Italian by having the vendor speak as a modern Roman. In the process, some of the rough lines spoken by John Cleese become a bit rougher: venditore:

cliente: venditore: cliente: venditore: cliente: venditore: cliente: venditore: vendor:

customer: vendor: customer: vendor: customer: vendor:

Arbatross! Arbatross! Arbatross! Ma che cazzo te fumi, ’na canna? Arbatross! [. . .] Leccalecca de gabbiano. Bonbon de pellicano. Arbatross! Ehm, mi perdoni. Potrei avere due gelati, per favore. Ma che sei cecato? C’ho solo st’arbatross. Arbatross! E che sapore ha? Questo è un arbatross, nun lo vedi? Che cacchio di sapore dovrebbe avere? Deve avere un sapore. Tutte le cose hanno un sapore. Vabbè, Vabbè. C’ha il sapore d’un pezzo d’arbatross. Un pezzo d’uccello marino, con un sapore der cazzo. Arbatross! Con quell’uccello ci sono anche le cialde? Come cazzo ce lo metti l’uccello in mezzo le cialde, a imbecille. È solo un pezzo d’arbatross, nun lo vedi? Arbatross! Arbatross! Arbatross! What the fuck are you smoking, a joint? Arbatross! [. . .] Seagull popsicle. Pelican Bonbon. Arbatross! Ehm, I beg your pardon. Can I have two icecreams, please. What – are you blind? I only have this Arbatross. Arbatross! E what does it taste like? This is an arbatross – don’t you see it? What the fuck should it taste like? It must have a flavour. Everything has a flavour. Ok, ok. It tastes like a piece of arbatross. A piece of sea-bird that tastes like fuck. Arbatross!

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Do you also get wafers with that sea-bird? How the fuck are you going to put it between the wafers, you idiot? It’s just a piece of arbatross, don’t you see it?

Both adaptations are occasioned and made necessary by the presence of culture- or language-bound features which create comic effects in the source. However, they probably reflect two different sets of assumptions: in the first case, the translator/dialogist implicitly makes a guess about the contexts which the sketch is likely to activate in an Italian audience; in the second, a typical Italian prejudice on the connection between humour and regional dialects motivates the rather estranging grafting of Italy’s most fictionalized dialect/ accent onto John Cleese’s very British verbal violence. These two strategies, and the assumptions underlying these strategies, can also be observed at work in a much more extreme case of locative adaptation. The Italian version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) displays such a complete domestication of English cultural references and English dialects/ sociolects as to give viewers of the dubbed version almost no inkling of the source. In Monty Python e il Sacro Graal (released in the same year as the original film), the ‘spoken’ setting is completely shifted from medieval England to medieval/ contemporary Italy: and what is even more striking, many of the jokes are heavily tampered with, supposedly in order to reflect the distance between British and Italian humour. Paradoxically for such an interventionist translation, the small mysteries enfolding its production (no indication is given in the VHS and DVD versions as to who was materially responsible for the dubbing, for instance – though some actors can easily be identified by their voices) would almost seem to point to a voluntary invisibility on the translators’/dialogists’ part, but are more probably due to the freer philological habits of 1970s Italian cinema. Monty Python e il Sacro Graal is, in actual fact, so different a film from its source that it can be assigned to a different genre (in other words, a complete intertextual locative transfer is effected): while the English version is a parody of the Arthurian cycle, exploiting the potential absurdity of its model without explicitly comparing it with the here and now of twentieth-century England (if the final dis-suspension of disbelief be excepted), the Italian version exploits the Arthurian myth for its own purposes. In Monty Python e il Sacro Graal, the Arthurian story is a mere pretext for creating regional caricatures and alluding to Italian contemporary matters.13

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The most evident transposition effected by the Italian translators/dialogists/ dubbers is linguistic. Monty Python and the Holy Grail uses a limited number of (mostly phonetic) varieties of English to characterize a number of marginal characters: a Scottish enchanter named Tim exhibits an exaggerated, Macbeth-like accent (one is reminded of Orson Welles’ 1948 Macbeth); the lower classes are generally cockney; a French soldier uses a strange gallicized version of English. Arthur and most of his knights, on the other hand, speak standard, quasi-RP English. By contrast, in the Italian version everybody has a perceptible accent: Arthur is Tuscan, his companions veneti or emiliani; lowly characters are from all regions of the peninsula; the French soldier absurdly speaks with a marked Sicilian accent, and even more absurdly presents himself as Austrian. And as seen above, the idea of humour lying behind these linguistic adaptations also prompts a less evident but general alteration: most of the jokes of the source film are either simplified or made to refer to contemporary Italy, and many jokes are added to extort what one might call an easy laugh. In the source film, a giant hollow rabbit is introduced within the walls of the French castle with no British warriors inside; when the siege obviously fails, and the rabbit is thrown out from the castle ramparts, one of Arthur’s knights proposes an alternative: ‘Look, if we were to build a large wooden badger . . .’ . In the Italian version, a horse is substituted for the badger, as if the Italian viewer might fail to spot the allusion.14 Towards the end of the film, when Arthur and his knights encounter a mysterious soothsayer whose task it is to ask three questions to all those who want to walk across the ‘Bridge of Death’, his Italian counterpart speaks in a regional voice and asks the questions in the manner of Italian TV Quiz presenter Mike Bongiorno (cf. the note on the ‘Communist Quiz’ above). The kinds of locative adaptation effected in Monty Python e il Sacro Graal are best illustrated by quotation, though the global nature of the transformation can only be appreciated by viewing the audiovisual bi-text as a whole. Here is a transcription of the encounter between Tim the Enchanter and the Knights of the Round Table, where all the strategies pervading the target text (transformation of cultural references, linguistic domestication, creation of new jokes)15 are employed with great liberality: [Arthur’s knights meet an enchanter who is doing various fire-tricks with his magic staff ]

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1 arthur:

What manner of man are you, that can summon up fire without fire or tinder? 2 tim: [Scottish accent] I am an enchanter. 3 arthur: By what name are you known? 4 tim: There are some who call me . . . Tim? 5 arthur: Greetings, Tim the Enchanter! 6 tim: Greetings, King Arthur! 7 arthur: You know my name? 8 tim: I do. [A fire trick] You seek the Holy Grail. 9 arthur: That is our quest. You know much that is hidden, O Tim. 10 tim: Quite [Another fire trick; the knights applaud] 11 arthur: Yes, we’re – we’re looking for the Holy Grail. [Clears throat] Our quest is to find the Holy Grail. 12 knights: Yes, it is, yeah, yeah. 13 arthur: And so we’re we’re we’re looking for it. 14 knights: Yes, we are. 15 bedevere: We have been for some time. 16 robin: Ages. 17 arthur: Ah, so . . . Anything you could do to . . . to help would be . . . very . . . helpful. [As the knights approach, the enchanter is shouting]

1 arthur: 2 tim: 3 arthur: 4 tim:

Boh? [‘Boh?’ corresponding with ‘Tim?’, end of line 4] Salute a te! Hai fatto la dichiarazione? Che dichiarazione? Dei redditi. È un modo di dare denari allo Stato. Beh, non credo che mi tocchi. Siccome sono Re, lo Stato sono io. Nessuno . [As the knights applaud, someone says: ]

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11 arthur:

Noi veramente si va per queste montagne per acquistarci il Graal. 12 knights: Eh sì, eh, è vero.

13 arthur: A prezzo delle nostre vite! 14 knights: Eh sì, già. 15 bedevere: Siamo in tanti, quindi . . . 16 robin: Anche a rate!

17 arthur: Senti, noi non siamo tanto preparati su questo argomento, e se tu . . . ci indicassi . . . come procurarci . . . [As the knights approach, the enchanter is shouting]

1 arthur: Who are you, that light up your obscure terms with fire? 2 tim: If someone understood them, I would be done for. 3 arthur: What is your magical art? 4 tim: I’m training as a

tim: Who knows? [‘Boh?’ corresponding with ‘Tim?’, end of line 4] 5 arthur: Hail to thee! 6 tim: Did you prepare the return form? 7 arthur: Which return form? 8 tim: The tax return form. It’s a way of giving moneys to the state. 9 arthur: Well, I do not think I must. I am the King, therefore the state is me. 10 tim: No-one . [As the knights applaud, someone says: ] 11 arthur: Actually, we are passing through these mountains to win the Grail. 12 knights: Yes, yes, that’s true.

13 arthur: Or we are going to die in the attempt! 14 knights: Yes, yes, true. 15 bedevere: There’s many of us, so . . . 16 robin: Even by instalments!

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17 arthur: Listen, we’re not very well-versed in this subject, and if you . . . could explain . . . how to get hold of . . .

As hinted at above, some of the small mysteries enfolding Monty Python e il Sacro Graal can be solved by identifying the voices of the actors. The collation of various internet sources provides some of the information withheld by the official DVD: ‘P.A.C.’ appears to have been the name of the dubbing company, while Duilio Del Prete, Romano Malaspina, Oreste Lionello, Giampiero Albertini, Claudio Capone, Bombolo, Pippo Franco, Pino Caruso and Silvio Spaccesi feature among the dubbing actors. The fact that some of these names are in the list is itself telltale: Pippo Franco and Bombolo, for example, also acted in a great number of cheap, blandly erotic Italian comedies which attracted great audiences in the 1970s. Some of these comedies had a medieval setting, and one immediately sees the kind of intertextual transformation which presented itself as desirable when Monty Python and the Holy Grail was offered to the company as a dubbing job. Just as a Scottish enchanter was transformed into a Neapolitan tax consultant, a British kind of humour was turned into a very Italian brand of comedy. This kind of comedy favours contemporary references, exploits dialects for comical effects, and dreads the seconds-long pauses its English counterpart occasionally indulges in. However, while one can understand why such a locative adaptation of Monty Python humour was produced in 1970s Italy, one may fail to see the point of re-offering it to the public in a DVD version which was first published in 2005, and in a medium which provides easy comparative access to the original words. The obvious explanation, of course, is financial, yet a subtler line of financial reasoning could have led Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to commission a new Italian version.16 The Italian dubbing went virtually unnoticed in 1974, but since resurfacing in 2005 it has produced a trail of disgruntled comments which indicate that its locative adaptations also involve changes in the interpersonal function.17 For while the Pythons were more or less an unknown quantity in 1974 Italy, they have made a name for themselves since then, and their humour has come to be recognized for what it is rather than for its Italian refractions. The main reason for this belated recognition was the 1991 appearance of Brian di Nazareth, the dubbed version of Life of Brian (1979) – a film which had

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to wait a dozen years before crossing the Catholic boundaries of Italy. When it was distributed in Italian cinemas, this sort of low-key gospel according to Monty Python was accompanied by an aura of exaggerated scandal which obviously won it a higher degree of popularity than any other product by the comic group. At the same time, perhaps because of its very ‘pre-emptive’ popularity, or because of a change of fashion in Italian comedy, the Italian dubbing was much less of a locative rewriting than its predecessor. It is true that Brian di Nazareth features a number of linguistic adaptations, some of them evidently humorous in purpose; but these interventions are minor if not rare, and mostly affect secondary events and characters.18 Analogously, most of the jokes in the source film remain unchanged, or a recreation of their comical effects is obtained through similar means, allowing for linguistic difference. It probably helps that many of the jokes are sexual or scatological: ‘Biggus Dickus’ is turned into ‘Marco Pisellonio’ (‘Marco Big-Dick’), his wife ‘Incontinentia Buttocks’ into the more Latin-sounding but synonymous ‘Incontinentia Deretana’. But the translators/dubbers of Monty Python e il Sacro Graal, faced with the scene in which a Roman centurion forces Brian to write ‘Romani ite domum’ (Romans go home) a hundred times on the synagogue wall, would at the very least have endowed the centurion with a Roman accent. And in the scene in which the governor and his Roman friend ask the crowd to select a criminal to be released from prison, they would have done more than just reproducing the very basic comical effects created by Pilate’s and Biggus Dickus’ respective lisps on the [r] and the [s]: pilato:

Popolo di Gerusalemme, Roma è vostra sorella. Per dimostrarvi la nostra amicizia è uso di questi tempi liberare un malfattore dalle nostre prigioni. [pause as crowd laughs] Allora? Chi volete che vi liberi, allora?, popolo: [one, imitating Pilate’s r] Libera Barnaba! [another] Sì, libera Barnaba! [all] Libera Barnaba! Libera Barnaba! pilato: Molto bene, allora libererò Barnaba. [crowd cheers] centurione: Scusi, non abbiamo nessun Barnaba, signore. pilato: Come? centurione: [respectfully imitating Pilate’s r] Non abbiamo nessun Barnaba. pilato: Ah. [to crowd] Non abbiamo nessun Barnaba. [disappointed oooh from crowd]

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one in the crowd: [. . .] marco pisellonio: pilato: marco pisellonio:

pilate:

crowd:

pilate: centurion: pilate: centurion: pilate: one in the crowd: [. . .] biggus dickus: pilate: biggus dickus:

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Allora è Bruto che devi liberare! Lascia che li apostrofi io, Ponzio. Ah, buona idea, Pisellonio. Sudditi! Abbiamo Sansone lo strangolatore Sadduceo, Sila il famoso assassino siriano, svariati scribi sediziosi della Cesarea, e – People of Jerusalem, Rome is your sister. To prove our friendship, it is customary at this time to release a wrongdoer from our prisons. [pause as crowd laughs] So? Who do you want me to release for you, then? [one, imitating Pilate’s r] Release Barnaba! [another] Yes, release Barnaba! [all] Release Barnaba! Release Barnaba! Very well, I shall release Barnaba, then. [crowd cheers] Sorry, we have no Barnaba, sir. What? [respectfully imitating Pilate’s r] We have no Barnaba. Ah. [to crowd] We have no Barnaba. [disappointed oooh from crowd] Then it is Bruto that you have to release! Let me address them, Pontius. Ah, good idea, Dickus. Subjects! We have Samson the Sadduccee strangler, Silas the famous assassin from Syria, several seditious scribes from Caesarea, and –

There are some examples of locative adaptation in the Italian passage, above all in the names (the English names Roger and Roderick become Barnaba and Bruto, of Hebrew and Latin descent): but the changes are all done with a view to preserving the humorous ‘click’ of the original, rather than substituting it with another kind of effect. And while the suspicion may remain that the more refined and literary humour of Monty Python and the Holy Grail would not have gone down well with Italian audiences in any case, it is as likely that Brian di Nazareth would not have stuck in the minds of so many Italian viewers if

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it had been turned into a comedy of dialects and packed with contemporary references. And with Brian di Nazareth, Monty Python humour won a substantial coterie of fans which might now want to buy a remodelled, relocalized version of the earlier Arthurian film.

Locative adaptation meets with unqualified success: Astérix in three languages If the relationship between the locative and the interpersonal functions (or, cultural/linguistic adaptation and customer satisfaction) may be open to question for the Italian translations of Monty Python humour, it is indisputable that whatever their degree of locative adaptation in most of the world’s languages, the comic books in the Astérix series have always been immensely successful. In part, this may have to do with the aesthetic and comic effects of the series itself rather than with their changes across language barriers. But as the following analysis of the Italian and English versions of a single book in the series (Astérix chez les Bretons) shows, Goscinny and Uderzo’s brand of humour is one that fares particularly well in translation; and the Italian and English translators do well enough to recreate the fun, or at least not to spoil it.19 The translation of comics is of course very different in technique from the dubbing of audiovisual material, though theoretically both can be made to fit into the wider definition of constrained translation.20 In the case of film, the translator is constrained by both visual and temporal limitations, while in translated comics, ‘time remains a prerogative of the reader’ (Zanettin 2008a: 21). However, if this seems to make life easier for the translator of comics than for the audiovisual translator (and it probably does, in most cases), there are visual elements in comics which make the connection between image and linguistic content tighter, and therefore harder to adapt. Quite often – and this is certainly the case with Astérix – drawn characters present a degree of explicitness in gestures and facial expressions which reminds one of the (over-)acting techniques of silent film.21 Therefore, whenever there is some connection between this explicit iconic base and the linguistic content of a balloon or a caption, the translator’s intervention will be constrained within the limits of the characters’ expressed feelings.

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Gestures and facial expressions, as well as the meaning and acceptability of other iconic material (cf. Zitawi 2008: 152), also change in time and space, above all when the source and the target cultures are far removed from one another. But while intercultural differences in the iconic semiosphere can be of great interest for the pragmatician and the politeness scholar, this book and this chapter focus on interlingual translation, and on how ‘translation proper’ (Jakobson 1959: 233) affects the transfer of humour. For this purpose, the whole Astérix series, and Astérix chez les Bretons in particular, seems particularly appropriate: for if humour requires a high degree of locative adaptation, Uderzo and Goscinny’s humour is itself of a highly locative nature. Most of these comic books are centred on Astérix and Obélix’s travels around Europe, a kind of plot which creates the occasion for a great number of cultural jokes on Gaul/France, Rome/Italy (the Romans, obviously, are everywhere) and the various countries which get visited in turn. These jokes, as Catherine Delesse (1998: 275) reminds us, are themselves spurious on the locative (temporal) plane, because they mix antiquity and modernity: the streets of ancient Lutetia are every bit as crowded as those of Paris, and characters use such expressions as ‘la goutte qui fait déborder l’amphore’ (the last straw that breaks the camel’s back – literally, ‘the drop which makes the amphora brim over’). Taken together, the books in the Astérix series create a sort of humorous, light-heartedly clichéd description of contemporary Europe (the Britons are stiff and formal, the Spaniards are dark and fierce, Switzerland is full of cheese and money, etc.) rather than of Rome and its colonies. In the source text of Astérix chez les Bretons (1966), the humour is linguistic as well as cultural. With their customary penchant for anachronism, Uderzo and Goscinny have the Bretons of the first-century bc drink hot water with milk or sugar, stop fighting every day at hot-water-time and eat wild boar in mint sauce in the taverns (where only warm beer is served, much to everybody’s chagrin). On the linguistic plane, even more interestingly, the Britons are endowed with an unnatural brand of French which sounds as if it was transliterated from English:22 thus, the unmarked noun-adjective order of French is inverted (‘il nous faut de la magique potion’; Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 9, italics mine); tag questions are used with great generosity (‘il a un état normal, a-t-il?’; Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 27); various English stock phrases find their exact equivalents (‘Je dis, ça c’est un morceau de chance’ for ‘I say, this is a piece of luck’); and many words are employed which would be

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used differently or more sparingly in French (‘joli’ for adverbial ‘jolly’; ‘plutôt’ for ‘rather’). Considering the similarities in syntax and lexicon between French and Italian, one might expect the Italian translator of this book to face no great problems with the locative transfer of humour. Predictably enough, most of the cultural and linguistic jokes are easily reproduced just by keeping close enough to the descriptions and/or to the syntax and lexicon of the original: thus, the translator intersperses her text with inversions (‘abbiamo bisogno dello magico pozione’ [‘we need the magic potion’]; Goscinny, Uderzo and Marconcini 1986: 8), tag questions (‘È mai egli in uno stato normale, lo è mai egli?’ [‘Is he ever in a normal state, is he ever?’]; Goscinny, Uderzo and Marconcini 1986: 26),23 stock phrases (‘un pezzo di fortuna’ for ‘un morceau de chance’ [‘a bit of luck’]), and other typical English expressions (‘piuttosto’ for ‘rather’). On the other hand, the double task of distinguishing normal from deviating French and of recognizing the non-existent English original for many French expressions requires great linguistic expertise in one language and at least average powers in another (in order to reproduce its ghostly presence). This double task becomes particularly exacting when the deviations from ‘normal’ French are small and grammatically correct, so that it becomes harder to spot the English non-existent original. An example occurs towards the end of the book, when Relax addresses Obélix as ‘vieux garçon’ (Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 30), which becomes ‘mio vecchio ragazzo’ (‘my old boy’) in Italian (Goscinny, Uderzo and Marconcini 1986: 29), thus obscuring the English phrase which is transliterated in French, ‘old boy’.24 Possibly afraid of missing these layers upon layers of interlingual jokes, the Italian translator keeps rather close to the linguistic (syntactic, lexical, at times morphological) surface of the source text in its ‘British’ parts. Even so, Asterix e i britanni displays a small number of locative adaptations which once again reflect the kind of humour Italian readers are supposed to respond to – and the marked difference between this humour and its quintessentially ‘British’ counterpart. At the beginning of the book, when Astérix’s cousin Jolitorax (‘Finethorax’, adapted as ‘Beltorax’ in Italian and changed into ‘Anticlimax’ in English) sits at table sipping his hot water, Obélix notices his fine tweed suit, and asks him if it is very costly (‘C’est cher?’). In Astérix chez les Bretons, Jolitorax’s answer is laconic (‘Mon tailleur est riche’ = ‘My tailor is rich’), a

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clichéd illustration of subdued British humour. This exchange, coming as it does at the end of a couple of panels which build up to a small comic climax (or Anticlimax), may have seemed too weak to the Italian translator or her editors, who decided to give Beltorax’s words a sarcastic turn: when Obélix asks him if tweed is expensive, the Briton says ‘For you it is. It depends on the quantity’ (‘Per te sì. Dipende dalla quantità’). It is rather out of character for Jolitorax/Beltorax to be so cruel, and it is even more out of character for a customarily weight-conscious Obélix not to react to Beltorax’s taunt (Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 9; Goscinny, Uderzo and Marconcini 1986: 8). A more pervasive locative adaptation, and one which is common to the whole Astérix series,25 apparently puts Luciana Marconcini in the same class as some translators/dubbers of the Monty Python sketches and films. As said above, the Romans are present in almost all the books of the series, and of course, as is the case with the other peoples depicted by Goscinny and Uderzo, they are more contemporary Italians than ancient Romans. But while in the source text even the common soldiers speak a standard variety of the language, in Italian the middle and lower rungs of Roman society are made to speak in the same modern Roman accent attributed to John Cleese in the ‘albatross’ sketch:26 [one Roman soldier, as the Britons stop fighting at hot-water time] Mais où vont-ils, par Jupiter? [another soldier] Je ne sais pas, par Mercure! Ils nous laissent tomber en plein combat. Ça ne se fait pas, ça! (Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 6) Where are they going, by Jupiter? No idea, by Mercury. Letting us down like this in mid-fight! It’s not done! (Goscinny, Uderzo, Bell and Hockridge 2004: 6) Pe’ Ggiove! Ma ndo’ vanno? Nun lo so, peì Mmercurio! Ce piantano in piena lotta! Così nun se fa, così! (Goscinny, Uderzo and Marconcini 1986: 5)27

On the whole, however, these are small-scale adjustments in a comic book which is literally packed with interlingual and intercultural jokes, most of which – thanks to the linguistic and cultural similarity between France and Italy, and to the clichéd nature of the humour – cross the Alps with little or no difficulty.

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But things stand differently when Astérix has to cross the Channel – an event which happens figuratively in all the English versions of the series, and of course literally here (Jolitorax informs Astérix and Obélix that that there are plans of a tunnel, but it may take a long time). Predictably, the literal crossing interferes with the figurative one. If the Italian translator may have technical problems – problems of cultural and linguistic comprehension – with a great part of the French original presenting itself as a translation, the English translators have the much more serious locative problem of writing in the supposed non-existent original of the French ‘British’ parlance. How, indeed, can the English element of the source text (which is essential to its performative purpose of making readers laugh or smile) be rendered in English? While the English elements of Astérix chez les Bretons are deviant in French, they would of course become perfectly normal and totally unnoticeable in English. The visual and cultural elements of ‘British’ humour would remain (the stiff ness of the Britons in the most emotional scenes, all the references to contemporary Britain), but they would be strangely unaccompanied by any linguistic traces of ‘localization’.28 The English translators, Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, solved this problem in a rather paradoxical manner, by amplifying the linguistic ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’ of the book. Since mere adherence to the original syntax and lexicon would have been practically meaningless, Bell and Hockridge opted for a very high frequency of outmoded tags and expressions like ‘I say’, end-of-clause ‘what’, adverbial ‘jolly’, ‘old boy’, ‘old fruit’, ‘rum’ in the sense of ‘strange’. Many of these expressions would not be recognized as typically English or British by foreigners, and therefore do not feature in either Astérix chez les Bretons or Asterix e i britanni. Others are present in the French and the Italian versions (‘old boy’ as ‘vieux garçon’ and ‘vecchio ragazzo’; ‘what’ in the French ‘quoi’) – but are employed with much more liberality in Asterix in Britain. This strategy is very effective, though it has the occasional shortcoming of turning conciseness into diffuseness: when Jolitorax says that the trip to Gaul will allow him to see his cousin Astérix (‘Aoh. Cela me permettra de revoir mon cher cousin Asterix. Je ne l’ai pas vu depuis longtemps. Quoi?’), the English touch is all contained in the final ‘Quoi?’ and in a hint of English syntax (‘I haven’t seen him for a long time’); but that touch is inevitably lost in translation, and therefore Anticlimax – Jolitorax’s English

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counterpart – has to reiterate his ‘Englishness’ by saying ‘Oh, I say, jolly good show! This is my chance to see my dear cousin Asterix again. Haven’t seen him for ages, what!’ (Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 7; Goscinny, Uderzo, Bell and Hockridge 2004: 7; italics mine). The ‘English problem’, of course, is not merely one of characterization: it is a problem investing the very purpose of the book, the very nature of its humour, thus forcing the translators to knock out a great number of tricks to rewrite the text in this sort of ‘double English’. Quite often, for instance, the French jokes are based on a misunderstanding between people of different provenance: thus, when Jolitorax invites Obélix to shake hands (‘Secouons-nous les mains’ – a meaningless expression in French and Italian), Anticlimax must say that he ‘would be very proud if you would shake me by the hand’ – the very formal construction partially justifying Obélix’s violently shaking the whole of Anticlimax up and down in the next panel (Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 8; Goscinny, Uderzo, Bell and Hockridge 2004: 8). Later on, an element in the linguistic paratext29 is similarly adapted to look more ‘English’: a framed ‘Foyer doux foyer’ sign (= ‘home sweet home’, though foyer literally means ‘hearth’), placed above the mantelpiece of a semidetached house, reads ‘Bless this hut’ in the English version – an interlingual joke is turned into a humorous anachronism. A different kind of locative adaptation, and one which assimilates the English with the Italian version – as well as with the Monty Python films dubbed into Italian – occurs at the beginning of the book, when the British soldiery is shown relaxing at tea-time, and immediately afterwards when the other two tribes inhabiting Britain (Hibernians and Caledonians) are presented through the figures of their chiefs, Mac Anotérapix and O’Torinolaringologix (McAnix and O’Veroptimistic in French).30 In this case, the need for humorous characterization (provided in English by the linguistic mechanism described above) justifies the employment of sociolects and dialects (or, national varieties) which find no parallel in the source text. The soldiers, sitting upright and sipping hot water on a village green, are served by less educated women who say ‘Right-ho, luv’, and ‘Marmalade’s off ’; while the Scottish chief informs Jolitorax/Anticlimax that they ‘were bidden here by yon laird’ (Anticlimax characteristically says ‘I say, McAnix, we’re in a bit of a fix, old boy!’), and in the following panel asks ‘yon laird’ itself to add ‘Nae sugar, mon. Just a wee drappie

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o’ milk’ (Goscinny, Uderzo, Bell and Hockridge 2004: 6–7; italics mine). Thus, the clichéd repetitiveness of standard ‘Britons’ English’ – which often sounds like the first-person narrator in Wodehouse – is livened up by adding further layers of linguistic cliché. Throughout Bell and Hockridge’s version, this technique of ‘amplified adaptation’ is employed so consistently that it occasionally becomes a compositional principle rather than a translating strategy – so that in the end, while Astérix chez les Bretons and Asterix e i britanni read like translations, Asterix in Britain often looks like an original.31 This transformation becomes evident as soon as Astérix, Obélix and Jolitorax/Anticlimax cross the channel, and stop at a tavern called ‘Le rieur sanglier’ in French (‘The laughing boar’). In the source version, Obélix is disgusted by the beer being warm and the boar having been boiled in mint sauce, and of the latter he says that it has nothing to be laughing about (‘Il n’y a pas de quoi rire’; Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 15). The English translators, in line with the ‘double English’ spoken and written throughout their book, decide to change the whole joke and its ‘paratextual’ preparation. Thus, the name of the tavern becomes ‘The Jolly Boar’; and Obélix shows he has caught the double English infection when he complains ‘This is a bit of a jolly old bore, what!’ The original joke would have been perfectly comprehensible in English – but the translators’ style has taken the upper hand by now, and everything must be made to chime with the initial strategic decision they have taken, which in turn was meant to recreate the stylistic (humorous) consistency of the source.

Conclusion: Same strategies, different results Admittedly, comparing three Italian AVT translations from Monty Python sketches and films with the Italian and English versions of an Astérix comic book is like adding pears to apples. Yet, while the constraints posed by two disparate brands of humour and two different media must obviously be taken into account, one cannot help noticing the recurrence of certain techniques of locative adaptation, employed by the translators either in response to ‘localized’ elements in the source (a French accent, a reference to British culture, the ghost of English syntax and phraseology lurking behind French) or, at times, with no visible pretext at all (the various dialects substituted for

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standard English in Monty Python e il Sacro Graal, the Romans’ parlance in Asterix e i britanni). Though a lot more analyses would have to be conducted on other humorous materials before any definite conclusion can be reached, one could perhaps hypothesize that Italians tend to ‘localize’ comic discourse more than other translating cultures, also because of a widespread idea that humour only works on a regional basis (and of course, no other European country has such an abundance of dialects). But while this is only a starting hypothesis that would have to be verified in other kinds of academic studies,32 what is more interesting for the purposes of this book is that the same sets of techniques can produce very different results: Monty Python e il Sacro Graal may have alienated a generation of prospective Python fans, while the various European translations from Astérix have often been hailed as masterpieces of locative adaptation.33 Therefore, the question an average translation student would ask is: how must the locative elements of the source text be translated, after all? The answer to that question, as usual, is that there is no single answer to that question, which does not mean that there are no answers at all. There is a variety of answers for each bi-text and each translation situation, and each answer can be motivated by interpersonal or performative reasons. At the interpersonal level, there is no doubt that the audience for the average Monty Python sketch or film will always be more limited than the reading public for an Astérix comic book. And while it is very difficult to foresee which public will like which kind of humour, certain decisions taken by translators, dubbing actors, editors or publishers may be demonstrated to cater for the wrong kind of taste.34 Less empirically, though, the answer is performative as well as interpersonal (ultimately, no function can be detached from the others: by performing in a certain way, a certain text involves certain types of readers). Expedients like the modernizing ‘localization’ of Romans in Asterix e i britanni and the ‘amplified’ English of Asterix in Britain are probably effective – if nothing else, in that they do not appear to have created widespread annoyance – because they chime in with the kind of humour created by Goscinny and Uderzo for the Astérix series. In this sense, constrained translation is a privileged field for the study of locative adaptation, because the performative function of the source (in this case, the means by which the authors make their audience laugh) remains

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inscribed in the non-linguistic material which crosses the linguistic barrier with little or no modification, and may clash with the wordings chosen by the translators.35 Thus, since Monty Python humour is only rarely based on the use of dialects or regional accents, watching the expressions of the actors in Monty Python e il Sacro Graal as they are made to utter their Italian speeches is a strange experience: most of them look perplexed at what they are saying. By contrast, in Astérix most of the humour is usually locative, and it is based on cultural/linguistic cliché and anachronism – so that adding further layers of cliché and anachronism does not spoil, and may even contribute to, the general effect. The result is that some of the Monty Python films sound translated, while most versions of Astérix read as if they were their own originals: and if that sounds like a paean to invisibility, we must remind ourselves – once again – of how ‘interventionist’ the translators must be for their translations to sound so fluent and natural.

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Conclusion: The Use of the Theory

Throughout this book, a pragmatic theory of translation has been presented by means of practical examples illuminating one or more functions, and each case study was in turn illuminated by theory. Theory and practice have mixed rather easily, and that ease can give rise to the impression that this approach is just another – rather obvious and neutral, and in the end fruitless – way of looking at translation. Now, while I have no objection against the first of these epithets – many a scientific discovery has provided humanity with an obvious way of looking at the world – I wish to defend this theory from the charges of neutrality and fruitlessness. On the one hand, my pragmatic way of observing translation has ideological implications that have been stated rather openly in Chapters 3, 4 and 5; on the other, it has practical uses which have only been hinted at in the Introduction, but which the reader may also have gleaned from the theoretical/practical analyses. These ideological implications and practical uses are inextricably tied together. The theory presents translation as something which is done to texts (the performative function) in space and time (the locative function) and involving people (the interpersonal function). Again, while this is apparently obvious – everybody knows that translating is doing something, that translation crosses barriers in time and space, that translations variously involve people – actually looking at translation along these three axes, and along all three axes simultaneously, amounts to a little Copernican revolution. True, that revolution is implicit in the systems-based theories defining the norms according to which source texts are manipulated by and for people across temporal and geographical barriers: but those theories look at translation from the outside and post factum, and have held sway in descriptive rather than applied

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translation studies. Translators and translator trainers – even those who are in the know – continue to apply old tricks and rules which have nothing to do with the latest developments of translation theory, like disciples of Newtonian physics in a relativistic universe. This pragmatic theory aims at adapting relativism for practical uses, at endowing practitioners with a theoretical grid which starts out from the acceptance that translation is manipulation (the performative function) and describes all the ways in which that manipulation can be effected. Conversely, it aims at providing theoreticians with an up-todate definition of translation practice, so that not only translations, but also translating can be looked at realistically in translation studies. The workaday gap between translation theory and practice can be gauged by asking translation trainees about the art in which they are becoming proficient. Three years ago, when I was trying to work out the contours of this theory, I started handing out little slips of paper to MA and PhD students who were writing theses on translation,1 asking them to write sentences beginning with the words ‘translation is’. Most of their definitions were predictably figurative – predictably because the history of translation theory is to a large extent a history of tropes (cf. Morini 2006: 35–61; Tymoczco 2010a; Van Wyke 2010) – and all of them could be labelled as performative and/or interpersonal and/or locative.2 Interestingly, though, most of the students defined translation in either interpersonal or locative terms, or a combination of the two (‘Translation is an interpretation of the text that allows its diffusion’; ‘Translation is the transposition of a text from one language to another’), while those few who provided performative definitions (even if qualified by interpersonal or locative elements) were at pains to point out that source texts must be handled with great care: Translation is being able to express a concept in more than one language without ‘betraying’ the original meaning Translation is rendering the foreign author’s idea in your own language, as faithfully as possible, without thinking too much about it Translating is re-building Translating is digesting a work and recreating it in one’s own language and culture Translating means making a (literary, poetic) text live again in another language, another cultural context, another epoch (if it belongs to the past)

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Bringing a text back to life, re-building it, recreating it as faithfully as possible, without betraying the original meaning: the translator’s sphere of action is greatly restricted by the claims of the original, which has to be wholly transferred into the target language and culture. The process of translation is viewed as producing not a new autonomous text, but a replica – either of a vaguely defined semantic kernel (the ‘author’s idea’, the ‘original meaning’) or of the source text itself. The latter is seen as a live thing, while the target text has no life of its own and only exists to contain (a shadow of) the life of its source. The translator is an expert restorer, whose work begins with the difficult task of removing and re-collocating the source text without damaging it. Or alternatively, the translator must digest the source text (an interesting organic metaphor, with parallels in Renaissance theory) so as to recreate it in another language and culture, miraculously whole. All this must be done with painstaking attention, because the source text or the original meaning bind the translator with invisible ethical ties. For these students, translating clearly means doing nothing or doing as little as possible: it is only unthinkingly, and by a vague disposition to rebuild and recreate, that the source text will cross the language barrier unscathed. We are of course very far from a serene acceptance that ‘Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text’ (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990: preface) – and it is important to note that these students had been told about, and many of them had read, Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, or Lawrence Venuti, or Gideon Toury, or Theo Hermans or all of these scholars. Theoretically, they knew that translation is manipulation, but when asked to give a practical definition they would steer clear of any ‘manipulative’ figures. The problem, of course, is not only that translation trainees and PhD students need to be taught translation theory, though they can certainly profit from having at least a smattering of it (cf. Koskinen 2010; Pezza Cintrão 2010; Gile 2010). The problem is that all the available, up-to-date translation theory around is about existing translations, or about the intersection between translation and culture, and very little if any of it is about the translation act and the translating process.3 Thus, even when they know about Bassnett, Lefevere and the others, translation trainees and PhD students will not apply their insights to practice, and when they translate, they will tend to act and speak according to older descriptions of their craft. Above all, many of them will retain a vague

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idea that ‘faithfulness’ or ‘closeness’ is a desirable quality – to be variously deployed in the fields of lexicon, syntax, stock metaphors and so on: and the myth of faithfulness or closeness, which is every bit as resistant as the myth of invisibility, will produce that effect of ‘immobility’ which Paola Venturi (2009a) has observed in the Italian translations from the classics, and which is the scourge – together with linguistic incompetence – of all translator training courses. Translation trainers, on the other hand, have no reliable weapons against their trainees’ immobility: theory tells them – if they are willing to listen – that all translation is manipulation, but that does not help them to set limits to their students’ manipulations. In the end, most trainers and teachers simply end up defining another kind of ‘faithfulness’, ‘equivalence’ or ‘closeness to the source’, which is usually sounder than the trainees’ (faithfulness to function, equivalence or closeness at sentence level) but no more theory-conscious. At best, such a system spawns translators who are technically valid and have a sizeable bag of tricks at their disposal, but who only know about their craft by habit and instinct. Whenever faced with a new situation, this breed of translators is bound to fall back on old tricks and habits. This theory, by contrast, not only accepts that all translation is manipulation, but looks at manipulation from a translator’s point of view. It tries to define all the kinds of manipulations which are made possible or necessary in a certain textual situation, and the effects produced by all kinds on the interpersonal and locative functions (or conversely, what happens on the performative plane when certain locative elements are translated in a given way / when a certain kind of audience is implicitly addressed). By thus doing, it makes many things explicit which are usually groped at or vaguely defined in translation practice. Translators, for instance, often work with incomplete and somewhat misleading concepts like text-type and genre – whereas by seeing each text as performing a text act, they can look at all the aspects of what a text does or attempts to do. Translators are usually aware of the kind of public they are supposed to be working for – while this theory aims at giving them a sense of their own position as secondary authors as well as of the personal voices inscribed in the source text. Translators may have a number of techniques at their disposal for translating dialects or diachronic variants of the source language – but with this theory, they will be able to look at all the options for their interpersonal and performative value.

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In sum, this theory has the advantage of being practically applicable and theoretically impregnable, because it is descriptive and open-ended in nature: just as pragmatics accepts that there is no stable connection between a given wording and its contextual meaning, so this pragmatic description of translation accepts that there is no stable connection between a given translation problem and its solution – which obviously does not mean that there is no connection at all. Like pragmatics, the theory can be applied to all types of transactions, even those lying outside the province of language – though apart from a couple of sub-sections touching on multimodal genres, this book mainly concerns itself with interlingual translation (cf. Jakobson 1959). Like descriptive translation studies, the theory looks at translation/translating for what it is and not for what it should be: it allows for no ethical considerations, though it accepts that the translator may bring his/her own ethics to bear on his/her work. This open-endedness, above all on the ethical plane, may appear disturbing to other critics engaged with the practical side of translation: in her 1997 monograph on functional theories, Christiane Nord tried to complement the open-ended notion of skopos with the controlling principle of ‘loyalty’, which she applied to the interpersonal relations tying the translator, the source text sender, the target text addressees and all the other interpersonal participants in the interlingual translation (Nord 1997: 126). However, even if one accepted that some sort of loyalty does indeed apply to the process and act of translation – it generally does, in practice – one would also have to admit that this ethical quality is very hard to prescribe, and above all that its forms are historically determined: in the third millennium, university professors do not demand the same kind of fealty owed by the medieval retainer to his feudal lord (or do they?), and nobody would dream of applying the same norms to Biblical translation which were held to be valid in the twelfth century (or would they?). In the end, I owe it to the reader (and to the students I pestered with my slips of paper) to provide my own ‘translation is’ definition: Translation is an operation of interlingual rewriting which affects the performative, locative and interpersonal functions of texts. The definition encompasses each and every kind of rewriting, even though all societies reserve the term ‘translation’ for texts displaying a limited range of performative, locative and interpersonal shifts.

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Notes Introduction 1 This is offered as a self-evident, undemonstrated and undemonstrable postulate. 2 This aspiration probably makes it a ‘missionary’ theory in the sense outlined by Toury (2010) in a recent article on the conflicting communities of Translation Studies. 3 Most recent attempts at bridging the gap between theory and practice have been little more than collective exercises in wishful thinking (Chesterman and Wagner 2002; Fawcett, Guadarrama García and Hyde Parker 2010), with individual contributions often trying to impose very complex theories on rather intractable practices (Calfoglou 2010). 4 The problems raised by any attempt at establishing a consistent evaluation methodology and terminology are best illustrated by the diversity of articles contained in a monographic issue of Meta (Lee-Jahnke 2001); while the contributors in Gambier and van Doorslaer (2009) more generally – but as variously – attempt to tackle the chaos of translational metalanguage. 5 The same holds true for Palumbo’s 2009 list of Key Terms in Translation Studies, though now ‘faithfulness’ has been disowned and newly acquired terms like ‘habitus’ and ‘keystroke logging’ have made their appearance. 6 A very similar problem is faced by historical translation studies, with many scholars still using terms like ‘faithful’ or ‘literal’ (two recent and fairly spectacular examples are Scarsi 2010 and Luteran 2010). 7 In this sense, though the focus here is on interlingual translation or translation ‘proper’, my pragmatic theory could be used for the other two kinds defined by Jakobson (1959/66: 233), as well as for ‘pseudotranslations’ (Toury 1995: 40–52) and all kinds of ‘refractions’ (Lefevere 1982/2004).

Chapter 1 1 Certain studies from that period, above all those produced by German Übersetzungswissenschaft, have come to look like monuments to epistemological presumption (e.g. Kade 1968). 2 The 1966 ALPAC report, commissioned by the US government and claiming that machine translation was not cost-efficient, contributed to create a certain disillusionment.

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3 One could mention a number of general translator’s handbooks (Ulrych 1992; Samuelsson-Brown 1993; Sofer 1996; Owens 1996; Robinson 1997; Osimo 1998; Landers 2001) and guides to using electronic tools (Trujillo 1999; Austermühl 2001; Bowker 2002) in which the description of strategies, aims, social and economic conditions, and translation aids is either unaccompanied by an explicit theoretical framework, or held together by a net of outdated and/or fragmentary theories. There are exceptions to this rule: corpus linguistics, when applied to translation studies and translator training, usually provides a firm connection between theory and practice (cf. Aston 1999; Laviosa 2002); my own manual La traduzione. Teorie. Strumenti. Pratiche is an attempt at using practice to illuminate theory and applying theory to the criticism of practice (Morini 2007a). 4 This is, of course, a pragmatician’s view of the linguistic world (cf. Carnap 1938). My definition of ‘semantics’, in particular, is of a pragmatic nature – semantics being seen as concerned with a-contextual meaning, whereas pragmatics takes the context of situation into account. As Levinson (1983: 32) writes: ‘The most promising [definitions of pragmatics] are the definitions that equate pragmatics with “meaning minus semantics” or with a theory of language understanding that takes context into account, in order to complement the contribution that semantics makes to meaning’. 5 An attempt to teach translation at all levels is, again, Zacchi and Morini (2002), where the decisions of real translators are shown and illustrated on a top-down principle. 6 In other words, pragmatics is used as an interpretive, not as a prescriptive tool (cf. Cacchiani 2009 for a recent but theoretically outdated attempt at using pragmatic analysis to establish ‘equivalence’). 7 Albrecht Neubert can also be mentioned as one of the earliest translation scholars to link text functions and translation methods. In his article on ‘Pragmatische Aspekte der Übersetzung’, he listed four translational categories according to the (actual or potential) functional distance between source and target texts: while in the case of scientific literature that distance is minimal, fiction creates or presupposes a wider gap, and such textual genres as local press articles or advertisements are specifically source-directed (Neubert 1968/81). 8 Cf. House (1997) for a fairly consistent application of Halliday’s theory to the translational field. Also cf. Munday (2010) for a Halliday-based ‘interpersonal’ take on translation in terms of Martin and White’s evaluation theory, and Hermans (2010) for a similar interpersonal view of translation as evaluation. 9 The term ‘bi-text’ was defined by Brian Harris. According to Harris (1988: 8), for the translator and the scholar, ‘a bi-text is not two texts but a single text in two dimensions, each of which is a language’. The present theory studies bi-texts as ‘double units’, in the sense that it can be applied to the whole bi-text, to the relationship between the two halves of the whole, or to the source/target text in isolation. Accordingly, all illustrative examples will be applied to the writer’s or the translator’s sides of the translational divide, or to the whole transaction.

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10 Cf. Hervey (1998: 13): ‘Implicit in what has been said so far is that illocutionary function is a property of “utterances”; this, however, instantly raises the question: utterances of what? In so far as greeting refers to a particular type of illocutionary function (differently conceived and differently performed in different cultures), and because greetings vary in extent from the monosyllabic “Hi” in English to the multi-turn exchanges in Wolof [. . .], it follows that illocutionary function may pertain to a variety of various sizes of linguistic unit. Some of these units clearly consist of a succession of sentences while others appear to fall below what would be consensually recognised by linguists as a “complete sentence”’. Cf. also Ferrara (1980) for a definition of ‘speech-act sequence’. 11 Of course, perlocutionary effects of source texts can influence the way translators work: the fact that a source text has been censored, for instance, can lead the translator to sanitize parts of it. One should also mention that some pragmatists (reproducing an ambiguity already present in Austin’s seminal lectures) tend to blur the barrier separating the illocutionary and perlocutionary levels by distinguishing between ‘real’ and ‘potential’ effects. As Leo Hickey writes: ‘In studying perlocution in translation, let us keep in mind that a translator is not concerned with real effects (if any) produced on real readers (if any), of the TT, but only with the potential effects’ (Hickey 1998: 218). 12 It must be noted that the description of this circle as a cage is mine and mine alone. Spitzer writes that the philological circle ‘is not a vicious one; on the contrary, it is the basic operation of the humanities, the Zirkel im Verstehen as Dilthey has termed the discovery, made by the Romantic scholar and theologian Schleiermacher, that cognizance in philosophy is reached not only by the gradual progression from one detail to another detail, but by the anticipation or divination of the whole’ (Spitzer 1948/62: 19). 13 In Berman’s terms, it is not only the traduction of a text that counts, but also its translation, its reception and resonance (Berman 1995: 17; Whitfield 2006). 14 Bach (1994) calls ‘implicitures’ all those inferences triggered by the lack of a (syntactic, semantic) element which has to be supplied by the receiver. Bertuccelli Papi (2000: 147) defines as ‘subplicit’ all those implicit meanings which ‘may glide into the mind of the hearer as side effects of what is said or not said’. 15 Once again, Leech formulates this principle to account for certain ‘uncommunicative’ features of conversation, but the definition can be easily adapted to the written word: ‘I shall tentatively propose [. . .] an Interest Principle, by which conversation which is interesting, in the sense of having unpredictability or news value, is preferred to conversation which is boring and predictable’ (Leech 1983: 146). 16 ‘But before I lead him further on / so as not to stray from my habits / Since my sheet is full on all sides / I want to stop it here, and have a rest’. 17 Of course, humans will always try to open that little black box: for a few recent examples, cf. Shreve and Angelone (2010) and O’Brien (2011).

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Chapter 2 1 Since Newmark’s starting point is Bühler’s ‘functional theory of language as adapted by Jakobson’ (cf. Jakobson 1960), he distinguishes six main text groups rather than three – ‘expressive’, ‘informative’, ‘vocative’, ‘aesthetic’, ‘phatic’ and ‘metalingual’ (Newmark 1988: 39–44). 2 These dichotomies are revered by scholars on both sides of the traditional literary/ linguistic divide (cf. Snell-Hornby 1996): the poet and translator Robert Bly (1983), for instance, combines a practical approach to translating with a deep sense of the mystery of literary translation. Jean Delisle confines his ‘interpretive approach’ to ‘pragmatic texts’ because literary texts are too evocative, polysemous, individual and form-bound for translation theory to decide on (Delisle 1988: 14–16). Federica Scarpa, an expert on translation for special purposes, posits a distinction between literature and non-literature on pretty much the same grounds. Even though she admits that ‘it is impossible to operate a neat distinction between literary and specialized translation’, she adds: ‘It cannot be denied that [. . .] there is a passage from the problems of one to those of the other field, and that in literary translation [. . .] the texts represents an unicum which must be recreated every time [non è possibile operare una distinzione netta tra traduzione letteraria e traduzione specializzata [. . .] È innegabile infatti che [. . .] si verifica uno spostamento da un ordine di problemi a un altro e che [nella traduzione] letteraria il testo rappresenta un unicum che è di volta in volta necessario ricreare]’ (Scarpa 2001: 69). Among the few translation scholars who speak of translation in practical terms and do not subscribe to this dichotomy one might mention Henri Meschonnic, who always insisted that translating literature is not different from translating non-literature (cf. for instance Meschonnic 1973: 305–23). 3 This, at least, is my interpretation of Swales’ influences. His own list also includes ‘variety studies’, ‘skill and strategy studies’, ‘situational approaches’, ‘notional/ functional approaches’, ‘writing context studies’ and ‘cultural anthropology’ (Swales 1990: 13–20). 4 Even though Swales proceeds from general definition to particular example, it is evident that his general definition is the product of observation, and not vice versa. Swales also offers implicit comment on translation-centred text typologies when he criticizes Kinneavy’s Theory of Discourse (1971) – which ‘classifies discourse into four main types: expressive, persuasive, literary and referential’ – because ‘although such classifications have impressive intellectual credentials and considerable organizing power, the propensity for early categorization can lead to a failure to understand particular discourses in their own terms’ (Swales 1990: 42). 5 Gotti (1991), for instance, distinguishes between ‘specialized’ and ‘special languages’ (linguaggi specialistici / linguaggi speciali), the latter being codes with a restricted

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grammar and lexicon; while Cortellazzo (1994) prefers to discriminate between ‘special languages’ (lingue speciali) and ‘sectorial languages’ (lingue settoriali like the language of journalism, which can absorb various specialized lexicons). Douglas Robinson has written that while ‘there is no substitute for practical experience, and translator training programs should continue to provide their students with as much as they can [. . .] there are ways of accelerating that process that do not simply foster bad habits’ (Robinson 1997: 2). Cf. Lavault-Olléon (2006) for a very similar functionalist analysis of this translational situation leading to different practical solutions, with a much greater emphasis on readability (Lavalt-Olléon 2006: 513). In Italy, Valentina Poggi must be quoted as the greatest champion of Scottish literature. Her monograph Voci da un paese lontano (Voices from a Far Country) contains an extensive section on Gibbon (Poggi Ghigi 1992: 49–71). Admittedly, rather a far cry from the ‘legal linguist’ described or imagined by Goddard (2010).

Chapter 3 1 On a related note, and on an axis joining literary and linguistic studies, the Russian formalists – Shklovsky in particular – maintained that the purpose of literature was to produce an effect of defamiliarization. Much of modern stylistics, taking its cue from these early twentieth-century studies, views literary style as deviant from a linguistic norm (cf. Leech 1969: 36–55; Leech and Short 1981/3). 2 It must be admitted that Robinson’s monograph, informed as it is with the author’s deep and detailed comprehension of poetic and translational activity, sits uneasily with such vague and stereotyping efforts as Iamandi’s and Grossman’s; but though the analytical results differ, the grounding ideology is the same. 3 The idea that every linguistic code is comparable with – but irreducible to – other codes is essentially humanistic. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Italian humanists like Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni had urged translators to reproduce the rhetorical texture of the original. However, while they insisted that no modification in the inventio and the dispositio was to be allowed, they were also conscious that the elocutio had to be recreated rather than simply reproduced (cf. Morini 2006: 8–11). 4 A further (locative) complication has to do with the fact that Watts’ poems are nowadays forgotten by the common reader. In contemporary English-language editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a footnote is needed to explain the inception of ‘How doth the little crocodile’ (cf. Carroll 1970: 38–9). 5 Cammarata (2002) provides a condensed history of the Alice books in Italian translation, but makes no mention of children’s editions.

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6 Curiously, Graffi disperses some of the narrative force of her target poem by anticipating the joke: while the original Alice says that she will attempt to recite ‘How doth the little—’, her Garzanti counterpart announces that she is going to declaim ‘T’amo, o pio coccodrillo—’. 7 With yet another extension of the visual metaphor, it can be said to be the ‘eye’ of the poem (Boase-Beier 2009: 8–9). 8 A very literal back-translation of ‘On a swim on Chenango Lake’ would run as follows: ‘Winter soon will stop the swimmer. / He reads the autumnal hesitations of water / In a wealth of ways: it is troubled, / It is already, in its calm, moving, / Where the first leaves at the first tremor / Of morning air fell / Preceding him, launching their footsteps / In eccentric, overlapping circles. / There exists a geometry of water, because this / Squares off the excesses of clouds / And sends them lower to float in an atmosphere / All angles and stretchings: every tree / By stretching out seems a cypress, / And every bush that betrays the season / A shaft of fire. It is a geometry and not / A phantasmagoria of distorted forms, but every / Liquid variation chimes in with the theme / From which it moves away, and moves in front of it: / It is a consistency, the slant of the pulsating flux. / But he has looked long enough, and now / The body must recall the eye to its obedience / As it scissors the waterscape apart / Dispersing its tatters. The coldness of water / Clasps him, and he returns the grip, / Because swimming is also grasping / The meaning of water, moving in its embrace, / And being, beween clasping and being clasped, free. / He reaches and crosses that space / Of which the body is an inheritor, creating a where / In water, a possession to be renounced / Willingly at each stroke. The image he tore / Flows behind him, heals itself, / Rears up and stretches out, ruffled like the feathers / Of a huge wing whose dark tilting / Follows his solitude like a shadow: he is the only one to lose his name / In this baptism, in which only Chenango has a name / in a lost language he begins to decipher – / A language of densities and derisions, of half / Answers to the questions his body must formulate / By breaststroke in that quasi-penetrable element. / Human he faces it, and human, he draws back / From the inner cold, the mercilessness / that nonetheless, by supporting him, shows a sort of mercy. / The last sun of the year is drying his skin / On a surface that’s a mosaic of tiny fragments, / Where the wind decentres every image in the fluctuating obsidian, / The going elsewhere of ripples taking shape, incessantly.’

Chapter 4 1 While so-called system (Hermans 1999) or ‘polysystem theory’ tends to view translations as produced by a complex net of interlocking forces, another sociologically minded school, mainly of French provenance, takes its cue from Bourdieu to study how the translator, an individual with his/her own educational

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and professional ‘habitus’, acts within the professional ‘field’ of literature and publishing. Although these two schools share an interest in the social interplay which shapes translation, Bourdieu-influenced scholars such as Jean-Marc Gouanvic and Daniel Simeoni are perhaps in a better position than Theo Hermans or Gideon Toury if translators’ individual efforts have to be gauged (cf. Gouanvic 1999; Simeoni 1998; Meylaerts 2008; also cf. Kaindl 1999 – an interesting application to the translation of comics). However, the difference is only one of emphasis – as recently shown by Mirella Agorni’s suggestion that ‘localism’ be used to correct the generalizing habits of system theory (Agorni 2007). A more interesting – and very recent – attempt to combine an awareness of the external forces ‘swaying’ translators’ decision with a strong emphasis on individuality (70 pages are dedicated to the life-work of a single translator) is Douglas Robinson’s innovative, fascinating and almost perversely complex Translation and the Problem of Sway (2011). Rachel Lung (2004) relates an interesting borderline case of ‘translator visibility’ in her essay on the collaboration between oral and written translators in early twentieth-century China. Also cf. Buffagni, Garzelli and Zanotti (2011). While from a completely different point of view, some recent cognitive explorations of translation focus on the ‘creative’ part of the process (Dragsted 2010; Fougner Rydning and Lachaud 2010; Jensen 2011). For a didactic application, cf. Zacchi and Morini (2002), a manual based on the principle that the translator’s ‘stylistic autobiography’ is the only plausible way of transferring a trainer’s competence to the reader-trainee. For an attempt at presenting an ‘interpretational stylistics’, cf. Van Besien and Meuleman (2008). This kind of assertive, ideology-motivated translation has mainly been exercised in the feminist field (by what appears to be a vocal minority). For a comprehensive account of feminist translation in theory and practice, cf. von Flotow (1997). For a comprehensive linguistic theory of foregrounding, cf. Douthwaite (2000). Cf. Shiyab and Lynch (2006: 271): ‘Style determines the form of a specific content but in translation there are always alternatives. [. . .] Some concepts and expressions are somewhat restricted with respect to the choice we have when we want to communicate information, e.g. numerals and numbers do not allow great variation on the phonetic or graphic level without disturbing the message [. . .] Situation and context impose other restrictions, but, within the frames mentioned, there seems to be choice and variation as a matter of principle, and any such choice in expressing some kind of information at any linguistic level involves style’. Cf. also Sjørup (2011) on the cognitive effort required in translating unusual metaphors. The English text is given – with no differences in the passages under discussion – in the two most recent translations.

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10 As for the translations of the first passage, if one had to back-translate them with an (ungrammatical) eye to word-order, one could render them as ‘I am a man rather elderly’. As for the rest: TT1) ‘He’d have a preference not to, eh?’ gritted Nippers. ‘I’d make him preferentiate myself, sir, if I were you’, addressing me, ‘I’d preferentiate him myself proper: I’d give him such preferences, to that obstinate mule! But what it is, sir, let’s hear it, what is it that he has a preference not to do now?’; TT2) ‘– He would prefer not to, eh? – snarled Pince-nez – I would prefer him, if I were you, sir, – I would prefer him, I would give him his preferences myself, to that stubborn mule! What is it, sir, pray, that he prefers not to do now?’; TT3) ‘He prefers not to, eh?’ he gritted, ‘I would prefer him, if I were you, sir’, addressing me, ‘I’d prefer him myself, I’d give him a nice shower of preferences, to this obtuse mule! What’s it, sir, that the fellow now prefers not to do?’ 11 This is as perfect an illustration as can be found of Wilson and Sperber’s definition of irony as ‘echoic language’ (Wilson and Sperber 1992). 12 Mona Baker (2000) has tried to solve the problem of identifying the ‘stylistic print’ of single translators by interrogating a ‘Translational English Corpus’ built by her own research group at Manchester University, but her comparison of a Spanish-English with an Arabic-English translator does not seem to yield significant results; a more recent attempt in a similar direction is Saldanha (2011), which is beset by similar difficulties. For a more interesting ‘monographic’ treatment, cf. Robinson (2011: 41–111). 13 As Stuart Gillespie has recently argued in a monograph on the translation of classical literature in English, any New Literary History of English would have to take translations into account, particularly for the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (cf. Gillespie 2011). 14 In Florio’s case, stylistic consistency can also be observed between his translations from Montaigne and his own original writing. 15 I have tried to show elsewhere (Morini 2002–3) that Venuti’s idea that ‘foreignization’ can do justice to the complexity of the source text is simplistic. Here, I will only add briefly that foreignizing methods – in Italy at least – are often a consequence of the translator trying to hide behind his/her adherence to the source text, rather than a tangible sign of his/her (stylistic) personality (cf. Venturi 2009a). 16 I resist calling this ‘fluency’, as Venuti does, because if the source text is not fluent at all, target plausibility will demand that I produce a non-fluent translation, but in a plausible manner (for a number of practical examples, cf. chapter 6). 17 A back-translation, in this case, is virtually useless: ‘About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to fascinate Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be therefore promoted to the rank of baronet’s wife, with all the comforts and the advantages of a handsome house and a sizable income’.

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18 Again, my back-translations are nearly useless, not least because they cannot fully express the effect of implausibility of their Italian sources (since the translations themselves are close to the original syntax, the back-translations are paradoxically bound to sound well). ‘We would not have for her the affection we have, sir, if we could think it’; ‘Oh, very well’ exclaimed miss Bates ‘then there is no need for me to feel embarrassed. “Three very silly things”. For me it will be perfect, you see, my word, I will say three very silly things as soon as I open my mouth, is that not so?’ looking around with the most benevolent certainty that everybody would agree. ‘Don’t you all think it will be so?’. 19 ‘Emma Woodhouse, of pleasing appearance, rich and clever, endowed with a nice home and a disposition to happiness, seemed to unite in herself some of the greatest blessings of existence; and in nearly twenty-one years of life, she had known very few cares or adversities. / She was the youngest of the two daughters of a very affectionate and indulgent father, and of her father’s house she had found herself a mistress very early, after her sister’s marriage. Her mother had died so long ago that of her caresses only an indistinct memory remained, and she had been substituted by a governess, an excellent woman whose affection went very close to a mother’s.’ 20 The correlation between ‘fluency’, ‘invisibility’, and the translator’s condition as a ‘pariah’ of the publishing industry is by no means universal (cf. Chapter 5).

Chapter 5 1 In the 1980s, a respectable theorist like Peter Newmark could still speak of reproducing the ‘intention’ of the source-text ‘sender’ (Newmark 1982: 37). 2 ‘Uno degli strumenti informatici a disposizione del traduttore per le sue ricerche – che non andrebbe forse utilizzato prima di questa fase – è la posta elettronica, per mezzo della quale è possibile dialogare direttamente con l’autore (se vivente e disponibile) o con persone qualificate che conoscano bene l’autore o il testo, la varietà linguistica usata nell’originale o il campo specifico del sapere cui esso fa riferimento’ (Morini 2007a: 115). 3 As seen at the beginning of this chapter, this neutral view is best summed up in Toury (1995). 4 The allusion is to Miles Smith’s rhetorical question in the introduction to the King James Bible: ‘For is the kingdom of God become words and syllables?’ (The Bible: lxviii). 5 Linn (2003) is an interesting account of how French, English and Dutch translations of the Romancero gitano have been influenced by changing target-culture views of García Lorca’s public and literary image.

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6 Cf. Salmon (2003: 62–3) ‘The text [. . .] only exists in someone’s reading: this text, as it passes through that someone’s reception, becomes that someone’s original, one of many possible originals. This second “subjective original” does not only vary from translator to translator, but also for the selfsame translator in different periods of his/her life [Esiste un testo [. . .] solo nella fruizione di qualcuno: questo testo, passando per la ricezione di quel qualcuno, diventa il suo originale, uno dei tanti possibili. Questo secondo “originale soggettivo” non solo varia da traduttore a traduttore, ma varia per il medesimo traduttore in momenti diversi della sua vita]’. 7 Jerome Rothenberg’s ‘ethnopoetics’, in its adoption of the strategies of visual, concrete and experimental poetry, might provide a fruitful alternative to Malinowski’s technique of double translation (cf. Horáček 2011). 8 ‘Unni Wikan (1993) proposes a translation approach based on “resonance”. She translated the term from a recommendation by her teachers in Bali on how she should translate their words and culture. By “resonance”, Wikan took them to mean the search for those aspects of other people’s experience which had hit a nerve, or struck a chord, with her own experience and feelings. [. . .] Wikan concludes that an orientation on shared ground is the way to translate. Her work traces experiential and ideological overlaps and processes of understanding between local people and anthropologist’ (Sturge 2007: 30). 9 ‘Ma, nei suoi sonetti, Shakespeare intendeva ritrovare proprio un “io” lirico che non fosse una maschera convenzionale, un fittizio contenitore di stereotipi, di bellezze “dipinte” (cioè truccate) e di gonfi paragoni, ma si attestasse come un “io” sincero che sinceramente scriva. Tutto ciò lo dice a chiare lettere già nel sonetto 21 [. . .] E lo ripete, lo rivendica per sé soltanto, in moltissimi altri punti’. 10 In the terms of stylistics or linguistic criticism, one could say that it is (significant) deviation from primary norms (Leech and Short 1981/3), or ‘foregrounding’, which endows the poetic persona with a voice of his own – what Roger Fowler would call a ‘mind style’ (Fowler 1977: 76). 11 Here is my back-translation of the whole target text – inevitably close to the source text, though with some ‘philological’ twists: ‘Will I have to compare you to a summer day? / You are more lovely and more temperate: / rough winds shake the darling buds of may / and summer’s lease lasts too short a time; / sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines / and often the gold of his face is darkened; / and every beauty from beauty sooner or later declines, / stripped bare by chance or by the mutable course of nature. / But your eternal summer will not have to fade / nor to lose possession of that beauty which is yours, / nor death will brag you wander in its shade, / when in eternal lines you will grow in time. / As long as men breathe or eyes see, / that long lives this poem, and that gives life to you’. 12 There is no grammatical resource in Italian for rendering the emphatic use of do (cf. Zacchi 2005: 37).

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13 A very literary use, evoking ‘fintantoché’ (an old-fashioned term for ‘until’) and ‘fino a quando’ (literally, ‘until when’). But judging from the overall style of his poem, Serpieri uses it for the sake of exact reproduction (the meaning is not the same, but this expression counts two short words for the two short words of the original) rather than in the attempt at creating a ‘historicizing’ language (cf. Holmes 1971/88). 14 An interesting though theoretically simplistic excursus on translation as criticism is Gaddis Rose (1997). 15 In this case, the lyrical quality of the translation is lost in my ‘grammatical’ back-translation of the whole: ‘Will I pronounce you identical to a summer day? / More temperance you have, more sweetness: / the tender buds lashes the wind in may / and summer’s deadlines are too brief. / Sometimes the eye of heaven out of proportion / burns, and the golden visage is veiled, / and both by lot and mutable nature / yet declines every beautiful thing, and falls. / But your eternal summer does not bleach / and will not deprive itself of your beauty, / death has no boast over you, nor shade, / when to time you grow in eternal lines. / As long as man has eyes, has breath, / my word lives, and in it you are alive’. 16 ‘Questa traduzione il più vicina possibile al testo inglese mira solo ad essere uno studio comprensibile e facile per chi si avvicina al poeta e si cimenta a leggere i suoi tanto discussi sonetti. Questo è stato il mio intento per il quale mi sono scontrata con le infinite contestazioni causate dall’ambiguità di molti versi, che da secoli fa versare fiumi d’inchiostro. [. . .] La poesia di Shakespeare, come quella di Dante e Michelangelo, è così vasta e risonante che è difficile percepirne la giusta misura e il suono. Io ho cercato di portarne l’eco, con la speranza che non sia troppo discordante’. Marelli’s translations, though more philological than poetical, are halfway between Serpieri’s and Virgillito’s (her version of sonnet 18, for instance, contains a number of mirror-translations, but also old-fashioned ‘poetical terms’ like ‘beltà’ and ‘mutevol’). 17 Initially published in Zacchi (2006: 36), this version has since been included and commented on in a recent anthology of global translations from the sonnets (Tempera 2009: 371, 376). A back-translation might run as follows: ‘Compare you to a summer’s day? / You’re far better, and less cold. / The wind shakes the flowers of may in their cradle / and summer, in arrears already, faces eviction; / sometimes the eye of heaven is there, and shines, / often its complexion is pale, not golden; / all beautiful things become less so in time, / by accident or nature’s whim; / but your eternal summer does not end / and never loses track of your beauty; / death will not boast your capture, / because with these eternal lines you cheat time. / As long as men live and breath, / this lives too, and it gives life to you’. 18 An even more radical example of voice transposition is signalled by Jean-Jacques Lecercle in an article on the translation of nonsense literature: Lecercle compares the Italian version of one of Lear’s limericks with an Italian limerick written by

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Gianni Rodari, and concludes that while the translation bears no aural resemblance to its source, the original poem contains ‘the unmistakable voice of the master’ (Lecercle 2008: 94). Cf. for instance Montale’s versions of sonnets 22, 33 and 48, published in his Translation Notebook (Montale 1990: 731–3). In the English-speaking world, the kind of awed respect for the venerable original shown by heavily source-oriented Italian versions seems to be confined to the (scholarly) paratext (cf. Halliday 2009), barring cases in which the classical text is seen as obscene or pornographic (cf. O’Sullivan 2009: 76–7). Of course, Wickert’s English is very fluent in comparison with my own interlinear version. The adjective-noun inversion, in particular, inevitably reminds one of Obelix’s mimetic linguistic technique in Asterix chez les Bretons (cf. chapter 7). In this sense, translation can be seen as being at the intersection between the source writer’s and the translator’s poetics, as in Henri Meschonnic’s occasionally hazy but thought-provoking theory (Meschonnic 1999; also cf. Mattioli 2001). ‘A sé dunque li chiama, e lor favella: / Stata è da voi la mia sentenza udita, / ch’era non di negare a la donzella, / ma di darle in stagion matura aita. / Di novo or la propongo, e ben pote ella / esser dal parer vostro anco seguita, / ché nel mondo mutabile e leggiero / costanza è spesso il variar pensiero’ (Tasso 1993: V, iii). For an even more extreme foreignizing rendering, cf. Carew’s 1594 translation as compared with Fairfax’s 1600 edition (Morini 2006a: 118–35).

Chapter 6 1 ‘Meines Erachtens giebt es deren nur zwei. Entweder der Uebersetzer lässt den Schriftsteller möglichst in Ruhe, und bewegt den Leser ihm entgegen; oder er lässt den Leser möglichst in Ruhe, und bewegt den Schriftsteller ihm entgegen. Beide sind so gänzlich von einander verschieden, dass durchaus einer von beiden so streng als möglich muss verfolgt werden, aus jeder Vermischung aber ein höchst unzuverlassiges Resultat notvendig hervorgeht, und zu besorgen ist, dass Schriftsteller un Leser sich gänzlich verfehlen’ (Schleiermacher 1816: 152; translation mine). 2 For a detailed account of Scottish/Italian relations on the literary and linguistic planes, cf. McClure (2006). 3 A more graded taxonomy of strategies – rather than techniques – for ‘dialect’ reproduction is given by Ramos Pinto (2009). 4 In a sense, writing in Scots is an inherently ‘estranging’, even ‘foreignizing’ choice, and therefore translating Scots poses the same problems – and entails the same risk of domestication – as translating ‘exophony’, that is, the style of a writer adopting a language which is not his/her native tongue (cf. Wright 2010).

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5 Back-translation: ‘And so in the winter of 1911 no more than nine little houses were still there in the Kinraddie estate, Mains was the bigger, in bygone times it was the Castle home farm. An Irish character, Erbert Ellison was his name, directed it for the trustees, so he said, but if the rumours were to be credited he directed a lot of money into his own pockets and far less in theirs. And what could one expect, when before that he’d been a waiter in Dublin, people said. This before Lord Kinraddie, the mad one, went out of his head completely. He was in Dublin, Lord Kinraddie, to have a good drink, and Ellison had brought the whisky to him, and some said he’d slept in his bed too. But people tell such lies. / And so the madman brought Ellison home with him and hired him as a servant, and sometimes, when he was dead drunk and heard the spirits meowing in the whisky, he threw a bottle at Ellison and screamed Go away, you tramp! so loud that the people in the Manse heard him, and the minister’s wife was terribly scandalized. And old Greig, the last minister, glared at Kinraddie House like John Knox at Holyrood, and said that God’s time would arrive sooner or later. And arrive it did, as punctual as death, they threw the madman in the madhouse, and he went away with a little nurse’s cap on his head and in the street he thrust his head out of the gig and cried Cock-a-doodle-doo to some kids coming out of school, and they ran back home with the jitters. / But Ellison by now had learned an awful lot on farming land and selling beasts and above all on buying houses, so the trustees gave him the Mains to manage, and he installed himself in the Mains farm and started to look around in search of a wife. There were some who would have none of it, a poor Irish devil who couldn’t speak properly and wasn’t part of the Church, but Ella White, she wasn’t so fastidious and she had fairly long teeth too. And so, when Ellison at the harvest dance in Auchinblae went to her and asked Can I walk’ee home tonight, me dear? she said A’right. And on their way home they lay down among the sheafs and maybe Ellison did this and that to secure her, he was desperate by now, any woman would do. / They married on the following New Year’s Day, and Ellison by now thought himself a big man in Kinraddie, maybe he thought he was a gentleman. But the characters in the sheds, the labourers and day-labourers of Mains, they didn’t care a little bit for gentlemen if not to mock them, so the day before his marriage as he go tinto the house they grabbed him and took his breeches away and tarred his buttocks and the soles of his feet and put feathers on him and then he threw him in the trough, as was the custom. And he called them Damned Scottish savages, he was in a terrible rage and by the end of the season he had them sacked, all of that gang, he’d taken it that amiss’. 6 For a definition of the ‘village voice’ in fiction, cf. Morini (2009: 65). 7 For a recent comprehensive study of translations which require locative transference on the temporal, but not on the spatial plane, see Magennis’ monograph on Translating Beowulf (2011). Magennis’ observations show that the problems posed by cross-temporal intralingual translation are of the same nature as the ones discussed in this chapter.

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8 Of course, one might say that immigration is making most Western countries increasingly multilingual – cf. Christine Heiss’ interesting exploration of German-speaking ‘multilingual films’ (Heiss 2004).

Chapter 7 1 Or, as Raskin (1985: 99) would have it, on the immediate retrievability of the two conflicting scripts on which humour is based. An interesting linguistic account of humour is given by Carmen Curcó (1995, 1996). Within the theoretical framework of relevance theory, Curcó describes humour as created by an incongruity between a strongly and mutually manifest assumption and a weaker implicit meaning. While it is uncertain whether this mechanism holds true for each and every kind of humour, it signals the need for mutual and simultaneous decoding/inference. Of course, the ‘click’ of humour can occasionally be delayed – as in the scene in which the dumb character understands the clever character’s joke long after the joke is told. But the fact that such a scene is itself a prototypical sketch highlights its deviance from the ‘normal’ working of humour. 2 The term ‘constrained translation’ was coined by Titford (1982) in connection with subtitling, and was subsequently taken up and generalized by Mayoral, Kelly and Gallardo (1988). Pilar Orero (2004: vii) offers it as one of many names for what she prefers to call AVT (audiovisual translation). In this chapter, it is used as a superordinate term. 3 A whole monograph could be written on the Italian translators’ systematic dismantling of Dickens’ comical effects (for a shorter catalogue of examples, cf. Venturi 2009b). 4 Zanettin (2010: 44) also notes that ‘in longer narrations such as Astérix and Disney stories humour is not only found at specific points in the narration but is more generally a property of the text, both as concerns the drawings, for instance through the use of caricatural rather than of realistic style, and the language, for instance through the use of a peculiar speaking style’. This kind of ‘long-term’ humour may be easier to carry across the language barrier, and is arguably more frequent in an Astérix book than in a Monty Python sketch. 5 When the main outline of this book was already complete, Brigid Maher published a monograph on Recreation and Style: Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and English (2011). While Maher’s book deals with literary rather than audiovisual humour, many of the difficulties/adaptations she describes are very similar in nature to the ones analysed here (and there is even a section on ‘Location, location, location’ (140–4) which details the author’s ‘locative’ choices in her translation of a Sardinian novel). Even more interestingly, most of Maher’s case studies are Italian-English, so that her study makes a very good companion to this chapter.

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6 ‘Normatively’ as well as ‘normally’, of course – in Toury’s sense. For a re-interpretation of ‘translation norms’ in an audiovisual context, cf. Karamitroglou (2000) and Díaz Cintas (2004: 25–8). 7 The term ‘localization’ is borrowed from the terminology of software marketing (cf. Taylor 2006: 39; Zanettin 2008b: 200–2). 8 For the Italian situation, cf. for instance Bovinelli and Gallini (1994); Di Giovanni, Diodati and Franchini (1994); Chiaro (1996b); Bollettieri Bosinelli (2002); Pavesi and Perego (2008); and Maria Pavesi (2008), who sees ‘target language norms’ as dominating dubbed Italian; an extended critical overview of Italy, France and Spain (three countries which a long dubbing tradition) is given in Agost (2004: 70–2). A recent article on how ‘political correctness’ guides audiovisual localization in Spain is Valdéon (2010). Even more to the point of this research, Dore (2010) analyses the ‘Manipulation of Humorous Culture-Specific Allusion in AVT’, and specifically in the Italian translation of American sit-com Friends. 9 Though various references to Italian popular culture appear to point to the early or mid-eighties, and illustrate a typical shortcoming of locative adaptation on the temporal plane: today, the modernized dubbed version sounds much older than the original. 10 They were either modernized or Americanized. The question on Jerry Lee Lewis quoted below, for instance, had been a very British reference to a pair of obscure Eurofestival singers (Teddy Johnson and Pearl Carr) in the original Flying Circus sketch. 11 It can be noted in passing that some of these references are perhaps less generally obscure now than when the show was dubbed. British football, for instance, has ceased being an unknown quantity for Italian football fans. On the other hand, most of the British teams quoted by the Pythons have not been very successful, and therefore popular, after the seventies. 12 The Italian references are themselves rather difficult to decipher and translate: Roberto Pruzzo was a striker for Roma FC (he may be remembered by Liverpool fans for scoring a goal in the 1984 Champions’ Cup final); ‘ahi ahi ahi’ was the trademark exclamation of a very popular Italian quiz presenter, the late Mike Bongiorno; the green-shirted players of Avellino were playing in the Serie A in the 1980s, but have since been relegated to the lower rungs of Italian football; Claudio Villa was a famous singer in the 1950s and 1960s, but his name is now unknown to the younger generations; Trastevere is a neighbourhood in Rome. 13 Once again, this makes for an effect of swift ageing from which the original is largely immune. 14 Two very recent articles on explicitation and amplification in the translation of humour are Asscher (2010) and Hirsch (2011).

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15 The passages included within these symbols () find no acoustic correspondence in the source, and are added by the translators/dialogists/actors. The lines are numbered for the sake of clarity. 16 In his article on ‘The Translation of Comics as Localization’, which analyses a number of instances of locative adaptations in the language, format etc. of comics, Federico Zanettin tells such a story of re-targeted re-translation (Zanettin 2008b: 208–16). 17 In a recent article on ‘Issues of quality in screen translation’, Delia Chiaro advances a number of proposals and suggestions for measuring quality as connected with customer satisfaction. While I obviously have no means of conducting the kind of questionnaire-centred research described by Chiaro (2008: 249–54), and I am not entirely convinced of the feasibility and usefulness of smaller-scale ‘scientific’ surveys as the one detailed in Rossato and Chiaro (2010), I have tried to collect evidence of customer satisfaction in a more empirical way. Thirty-two short buyers’ reviews of Monty Python e il Sacro Graal are available on various commercial websites, and most of these comments register annoyance rather than perplexity: only one viewer ambiguously praises the dubbing as ‘chicca trash’ (trash treat), while all the others use adjectives spanning from ‘discutibile’ (open to question) to, most often, ‘orribile’ (dreadful) and ‘atroce’ (heinous). Of course, those who write customer reviews are normally driven by strong positive or negative feelings, and cannot be made to represent all customers: but even so, it is highly significant that enthusiasm is almost completely absent from these comments, and that the dominant note is one of indignation. 18 When Christ is preaching, two members of the audience speak in a strange mixture of southern dialects; Michael Palin as an ex-leper speaks as a man from Apulia; a man about to be stoned speaks Tuscan; in the ‘What have the Romans ever done for us’ sketch, of Flying Circus Provenance, John Cleese and Eric Idle code-switch to a Sicilian accent for a while; most unacceptably, Balthasar speaks like a black man in old vaudeville. 19 Of course, most of this humour is ‘multimodal’ rather than merely linguistic, as Klaus Kaindl (2004) points out. Some of the examples given below are multimodal as well, inasmuch as a linguistic joke is reinforced by the iconic content of a panel, or vice versa. 20 In the scarce secondary literature on translating comics, very few scholars fail to note the constraint put on the translator by the co-presence of words and images (cf. for instance Delesse 1998; Scatasta 2002). Grun and Dollerup (2003) explicitly link the translation of comics with the theoretical concept of ‘constrained translation’. In his introduction to the first-ever collection of essays on comics in translation, Federico Zanettin generally accepts the definition, only to note the different limitations posed by moving/speaking and still images (Zanettin 2008b: 20–1). Incidentally, in his invaluable annotated bibliography, Zanettin laments the tendency for scholars in the field to concentrate their efforts on Astérix and/or Tintin (Zanettin 2008c: 270) – a tendency that this chapter does nothing to correct.

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21 Fein and Kasher analyse the relationship between words and gestures in comics, and propose the terms ‘gesticulary’, ‘ingesticulary’ and ‘pergesticulary act’ for a pragmatic description of gestures. Taking – of course – the Astérix books as their basic research material, and asking 26 volunteers to identify a number of ‘gesticulary’ photos and comics, these two pragmaticians conclude that it is very easy to identify gestures in (these) comics. Quite against the grain of their own analysis, or even common sense (but the result is probably due to their choice of the photographic medium), they also conclude that there are no ‘notable differences’ between ‘understanding of comic gestures as compared to “real life” gestures’ (Fein and Kasher 1996: 807). 22 The reverse of what Dickens did in his Tale of Two Cities, in which the French (rather absurdly, for no comic effects are intended) speak a Gallicized version of English. 23 These two ‘double translations’ illustrate Luciana Marconcini’s abilities and limitations: on the one hand, the mechanisms of the source text are understood; on the other, small details are added or changed which do not seem justified by those very mechanisms. ‘De la magique potion’, for instance, becomes ‘dello magico pozione’ (male gender, wrong preposition – it should be ‘del magico pozione’) rather than the more lexically correct ‘della magica pozione’ (female gender; the English ‘ghost original’ is obviously non-gendered). ‘il a un état normal, a-t-il?’ becomes ‘È mai egli in uno stato normale, lo è mai egli?’ which is more wooden than its source and re-constructs the English non-existent original with a word-order mistake (‘Is ever he in a normal state, is ever he?’). 24 A less justifiable mistake occurs a couple of panels later, when a hangover-tormented Obélix responds to Relax’s proud shout of ‘Nous ne parlerons pas’ by covering his face with his right hand and pleading ‘Ne crions pas, surtout’ (‘don’t let’s shout, anyway’, as the English translators have it): the polysemous nature of ‘crier’, or perhaps a conviction that there may be an English ‘cry’ lurking behind Obélix’s text, betrays the Italian translator into writing ‘Soprattutto non piangiamo’ (‘Let’s not weep, above all’), which sits strangely with Obélix’s gesture and the multicoloured stars appearing around his head (Goscinny and Uderzo 2008: 29; Goscinny, Uderzo, Bell and Hockridge 2004: 29; Goscinny, Uderzo and Marconcini 1986: 28). 25 As Gino Scatasta (2002: 102–3, 110–12) reminds us, translating comics is often a ‘serial’ job. 26 One must note, however, that neither the Monty Python dubbers nor the Astérix translators aim at giving a faithful representation of the Romanesco dialect – or, for that matter, of the other dialects and accents employed in Monty Python e il Sacro Graal. Their purposes are humorous, and for humorous purposes a selection of stereotypical traits, sanctioned by a myriad other audiovisual productions (original

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or translated; in this sense, the Italian version of Astérix derives from Italian cinema and television), is more than enough. The same, or something very similar, might apply to Scots as used in Asterix in Britain (see below). A standard-English back-translation might run as follows: ‘I don’t know, by Mercury! They dump us in the quick of the fight! You can’t do that, I say!’. An analogous problem is analysed by Dirk Delabastita (2002: 326–38) for theatrical translation, with reference to the French versions of Henry V; and cf. also Patry (2001). Nadine Celotti (2008: 38) borrows this definition from Margarito (2005), and defines the linguistic paratext as all ‘the verbal signs outside the balloon and inside the drawing: inscriptions, road signs, newspapers, onomatopoeia’. While translation scholars tend to concentrate on the linguistic content of balloons, Celotti notes that linguistic messages are also contained in ‘captions’, ‘titles’ and paratext. Most of the names in Astérix are puns. The English translators tend to translate them, unless they belong to very important and universally known characters (like Astérix and Obélix, who only lose their accents), and except when the pun survives the interlingual crossing. The Italian translator, by contrast, is rather conservative in this domain – an attitude which has to do with linguistic closeness, but which sometimes produces incomprehensible conundrums like Assourancetourix or Abraracourcix. Cf. Delesse (2008: 257–62) for a discussion of proper names in Astérix and their counterparts in the main languages of Europe (as well as in the American English edition, which is not considered here). Unsurprisingly, Anthea Bell herself has defended the virtues of ‘invisibility’ in more than one article. Bell’s terminology tends to be a little outdated, but her aims are clearly stated: ‘Most of the verbal humour had to be rethought almost from scratch, because if you translate a pun straight it is no longer a pun. I have been amazed to find that some people – perfectly intelligent and well-educated people – didn’t actually realize that Astérix was not originally written in English, although one would have thought it had this is French written all over it. With these books, the spirit clearly had to take precedence over the letter of the translation’ (Bell 2006: 63). As a trial balloon, one might quote Fuentes Luque’s (2010) study on the Spanish translations of the Marx Brothers, and compare Spanish literalism with Italian interventionism (cf. for instance Chiaro 2010: 6). This is particularly true of the British translations, which for obvious reasons have been studied more closely than any others. Cf. for instance Delesse (1998: 277), who notes that while one should speak of adaptation rather than translation (‘On peut parler d’adaptation plutôt que de traduction’), the English translation often seems more motivated than the French original, and quite as often produces better jokes (‘la traduction anglaise semble plus motivée que l’original français

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ou que la traduction/transposition améne des plaisanteries meilleures que celles de l’original’). Among other things, the scientific prestige of these translations is attested by the participation of one of its authors in a number of academic projects (cf. Bell 1996, 2006). 34 An interesting but very sketchy first attempt at gauging humour transfer in translation is Fuentes Luque (2003), which maps viewers’ reactions to the dubbed and subtitled Spanish versions of the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup. 35 For a few cases in which there is some modification in comics, cf. Jüngst (2008), Zanettin (2008b), Zitawi (2008).

Conclusion 1 At the universities of Udine and Urbino. 2 Indeed, so can most of the figures used historically to define the nature, aim or process of translation. A recent, balanced, interesting combination of all three axes is realized in Ubaldo Stecconi’s image of translating as a wave (Stecconi 2010). 3 I am speaking, of course, of general translation theories, of theories which provide general definitions of translation. There are dozens of theoretical books on corpus-based translation, computer-assisted translation and other practical aspects of the craft (cf. Chapter 1), but these do not affect the basic terminology practitioners use.

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Index Agorni, M. 2, 166n. 1 Agost, R. 174n. 8 Alighieri, D. 99, 170n. 16 Angelone, E. 162n. 17 Ariosto, L. 18, 23, 26, 105 Asscher, O. 174n. 14 Aston, G. 161n. 3 Austen, J. 21, 37, 76–82, 87 Austermühl, F. 161n. 3 Bach, K. 95, 162n. 14 Baker, M. 68, 167n. 12 Barthes, R. 84 Bassnett, S. 4, 8–9, 64, 67, 86, 157 Bathia, V. K. 31, 33 Beardsley, M. C. 84 de Beaugrande, R. A. 15, 25 Bell, A. 67, 149–52, 177–8n. 33, 177n. 31 Berman, A. 102, 162n. 13 Berna, L. 72–5 Bertuccelli Papi, M. 162n. 14 Van Besien, F. 166n. 5 Boase-Beier, J. 70, 85–6, 165n. 7 Bollettieri Bosinelli, R. M. 174n. 8 Bovinelli, B. 174n. 8 Bowker, L. 161n. 3 Brown, P. 19–20 Bruni, L. 7, 164n. 3 Buffagni, C. 166n. 3 Bühler, K. 12, 29, 163n. 1 Buonarroti, M. 99, 170n. 16 Bush, P. 67 Busi, A. 53–5 Cacchiani, S. 161n. 6 Calfoglou, C. 160n. 3 Cammarata, A. 164n. 5 Carnap, R. 161n. 4 Carroll, L. (C. L. Dodgson) 49, 50–6, 63 Catford, J. C. 8, 30, 76 Cavalcanti, G. 27, 112 Celati, G. 72–5

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Celotti, N. 177n. 29 Chapman, G. 85–6 Chesterman, A. 9–10, 160n. 3 Chiaro, D. 133, 174n. 8, 175n. 17, 177n. 32 Cicero, M. T. 7, 30, 92 Colapietro, V. 88 Coleridge, S. T. 46, 48, 49 Cormier, M. C. 3, 84 Cortellazzo, M. A. 163–4n. 6 Cortese, G. 41 Coulthard, M. 131 Covito, C. 54 Cowley, A. 48 Croce, B. 46 Cronin, M. 66 Curcó, C. 173n. 1 Darbelnet, J. 117 De Palma, L. 76 Delabastita, D. 118, 177n. 28 Delesse, C. 135, 147, 175n. 20, 177nn. 30, 33 Delisle, J. 3, 84, 112, 163n. 2 Denham, J. 48–9 Derrida, J. 130–1 Di Giovanni, E. 174n. 8 Díaz Cintas, J. 174n. 6 Dickens, C. 134–5, 173n. 3, 176n. 22 Diodati, F. 174n. 8 Dolet, E. 7 Dollerup, C. 175n. 20 Dominguez, V. 91 Van Doorslaer, L. 160n. 4 Dore, M. 174n. 8 Douglas Brown, G. 37, 40, 116–17 Douthwaite, J. 166n. 7 Dragsted, B. 166n. 3 Dressler, W. U. 15, 25 Dunbar, W. 125–8, 129 Eco, U. 9, 83 Eliot, T. S. 25

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198

Index

Esolen, A. M. 103–9 ethnography 88–92 Even-Zohar, I. 6, 8, 64 Fairfax, E. 26, 103, 171n. 24 Fawcett, A. 160n. 3 Fawcett, P. 22 Fein, O. 176n. 21 Ferrara, A. 162n. 10 Fishman, J. A. 114 Florio, J. 47–8, 73, 85–6, 88, 111, 167n. 14 von Flotow, L. 166n. 6 Folena, G. 70 Fowler, R. 169n. 10 Fowler, W. 128–30 Franchini, G. 174n. 8 Frank, M. E. 85 Fuentes Luque, A. 177n. 32, 178n. 34 Gaddis Rose, M. 170n. 14 Gallardo, N. 173n. 2 Gallini, S. 174n. 8 Gambier, Y. 160n. 4 Garzelli, B. 166n. 3 genre theory 31–3 Giachino, E. 72–5 Gibbon, L. G. 17, 37–41, 121–5, 134, 164n. 8 Gile, D. 3, 157 Gillespie, S. 167n. 13 Goddard, C. 164n. 9 Goscinny, R. 146–54 Gotti, M. 163n. 5 Gouanvic, J.-M. 2, 165–7n. 1 Graffi, M. 52–4, 165n. 6 Grice, P. 11, 19–20 Grossman, E. 47, 48, 56, 164n. 2 Grun, M. 175n. 20 Guadarrama García, K. L. 160n. 3 Gutkowski, E. 87 Halliday, I. 171n. 20 Halliday, M. A. K. 13–14, 62, 161n. 8 Halverson, S. L. 10 Harington, J. 18, 23–4, 26, 73, 88 Harris, B. 161n. 9 Hatim, B. 15, 20–1, 34–5, 118 Heiss, C. 173n. 8 Hermans, T. 2, 6, 8, 64, 87, 112, 157, 161n. 8, 165–6n. 1

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Hervey, S. G. J. 162n. 10 Hewson, L. 68 Hickey, L. 162n. 11 Hirsch, G. 174n. 14 Hockridge, D. 149–52 Holmes, J. S. 1–2, 6, 8, 9, 27, 97, 104, 112–13, 125, 126, 170n. 13 Hönig, H. G. 31 Horáček, J. 169n. 7 Horner, W. B. 34 House, J. 161n. 8 Hunston, S. 15 Hyde Parker, R. 160n. 3 Iamandi, P. 47, 164n. 2 Ishiguro, K. 14–15 Izzo, C. 81 Jakobson, R. 10, 49, 117, 147, 159, 160n. 7, 163n. 1 Jensen, K. T. H. 166n. 3 Jüngst, H. E. 178n. 35 Kade, O. 160n. 1 Kaindl, K. 166n. 1, 175n. 19 Karamitroglou, F. 174n. 6 Kasher, A. 176n. 21 Katan, D. 85 Kelly, D. 173n. 2 Koller, W. 12–13 Koskinen, K. 157 Krouse, C. 84 Kussmaul, P. 31 Kwieciński, P. 86 Kyritsi, M.-V. 83 Labov, W. 15 Lachaud, C. M. 166n. 3 Lambert, J. 68 Landers, C. E. 85, 161n. 3 Lavault-Olléon, É. 164n. 7 Laviosa, S. 22, 161n. 3 Lecercle, J.-J. 170–1n. 18 Lee-Jahnke, H. 3, 84, 160n. 4 Leech, G. N. 19–21, 70, 74, 120, 162n. 15, 164n. 1, 169n. 10 Lefevere, A. 4, 6, 8–9, 26–7, 64, 85, 86, 92, 112–15, 125, 157, 160n. 7 Levinson, S. 4, 11, 19, 20, 161n. 4

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Index Linn, S. 168n. 5 Lochhead, L. 40, 117–19 Lung, R. 166n. 2 Luteran, P. 160n. 6 Luther, M. 7 Lynch, M. S. 166n. 8 McClure, J. D. 171n. 2 MacDiarmid, H. 37–8, 40, 115, 120–1 Magennis, H. 172n. 7 Maher, B. 173n. 5 Maier, C. 67–8, 69, 86 Malinowski, B. 90–1, 169n. 7 Malmkjær, K. 10, 69, 70, 85 Marco, J. 68 Marconcini, L. 148–52, 176n. 23 Marelli, M. A. 99–100, 170n. 16 Margarito, M. G. 177n. 29 Martin, J. R. 15, 161n. 8 Mason, I. 15, 34–5, 118 Mattioli, E. 171n. 22 Mayoral, R. 173n. 2 Melville, H. 72–5 Meschonnic, H. 163n. 2, 171n. 22 Meuleman, C. 166n. 5 Meylaerts, R. 165–6n. 1 Mira, A. 67 de Montaigne, M. 47, 73, 85, 88, 111, 167n. 14 Montale, E. 128, 171n. 19 Monty Python (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin) 135–46, 149, 151, 152–4, 173n. 4 Muir, E. 115 Munday, J. 67, 161n. 8 Murray, L. 40 Negru, I. D. 42 Neubert, A. 29, 161n. 7 Newmark, P. 12, 29, 30, 47, 56, 112, 115, 163n. 1, 168n. 1 Nida, E. A. 8 Nikolau, P. 83 Nord, C. 29, 36, 81, 83, 159 Novalis (G. F. P. F. Von Hardenberg) 46 O’Brien, S. 162n. 17 O’Sullivan, C. 171n. 20

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199

Oettinger, A. G. 7–8 Orero, P. 173n. 2 Osimo, B. 161n. 3 Owens, R. 161n. 3 Palumbo, G. 160n. 5 Patry, R. 177n. 28 Pavesi, M. 174n. 8 Perego, E. 174n. 8 Petrarca, F. 94, 126, 128–30 Pezza Cintrão, H. 3, 157 Phiz (H. K. Browne) 135 poetic discourse 46–9 Poggi Ghigi, V. 164n. 8 Pommer, S. E. 31 Pound, E. 6, 27–8, 112–13 pragmatics 4, 11, 13–28, 147, 159 Prunč, E. 65 Pym, A. 6 Ramos Pinto, S. 171n. 3 Raskin, V. 173n. 1 Reiss, K. 2, 12–13, 15, 18, 29–32, 34, 49 Remotti, F. 89 Robinson, D. 44, 65–6, 68, 85, 161n. 3, 164n. 6, 165–6n. 1, 167n. 12 Robinson, P. 47, 164n. 2 Rooryck, G. 49 Rossato, L. 175n. 17 Rushdie, S. 19 Rydning, A. F. 166n. 3 Saldanha, G. 167n. 12 Salmon, L. 169n. 6 Samuelsson-Brown, G. 161n. 3 Sánchez, M. T. 114 Sassi, C. 39 Scarpa, F. 163n. 2 Scarsi, S. 160n. 6 Scatasta, G. 175n. 20, 176n. 25 Schleiermacher, F. 7, 65, 111–12, 115 Sela-Sheffy, R. 65 Sengupta, M. 84 Serpieri, A. 93, 95, 96–9, 105, 109, 170nn. 13, 16 Shakespeare, W. 84, 87, 88, 92, 93–101, 102 Shiyab, S. 166n. 8 Shlesinger, M. 65 Short, M. 70, 74, 120, 164n. 1, 169n. 10

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200

Index

Shreve, G. M. 162n. 17 Sidney, P. 46, 93 Simeoni, D. 2, 165–6n. 1 Sjørup, A. C. 166n. 8 Snell-Hornby, M. 1, 12, 13, 29, 30–1, 41, 163n. 2 sociolinguistics 114, 131 Sofer, M. 161n. 3 Sperber, D. 19, 20, 167n. 11 Spitzer, L. 16, 162n. 12 Spizzotin, P. 55–6 Stecconi, U. 178n. 2 Steiner, G. 86 stylistics 23–4, 68–82 Sturge, K. 88–92 Swales, J. M. 31–3, 49, 163nn. 3, 4 Taft, R. 85, 114 Tasso, T. 26, 92, 102–9 Taylor, C. 174n. 7 Tempera, M. 99 Tenniel, J. 52, 55 Thompson, G. 15 Thomson, C. C. 115 Titford, C. 173n. 2 Tomlinson, C. 56–62, 63, 134 Tonkin, H. 85 Toury, G. 2, 3, 6, 9, 18, 22, 23, 31, 36, 37, 64, 65, 83, 157, 160n. 2, 165–6n. 1, 168n. 3, 174n. 6 translation terminology 3–4, 10 translation theory audiovisual 135–6 descriptive 1–2, 6, 7–8, 18, 28, 64, 112, 155–6, 159 functionalist 11–13, 29–31 linguistic 3–4, 7–8, 112 translator training 2–3, 71–2, 153, 156–9

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Trosborg, A. 31, 33–4, 35 Trujillo, A. 161n. 3 Tymoczko, M. 86, 156 Tytler, A. F. 7 Uderzo, A. 146–54 Ulrych, M. 161n. 3 Valdéon, R. A. 174n. 8 Venturi, P. 86–7, 92, 102, 158, 167n. 15, 173n. 3 Venuti, L. 6, 9, 18, 22, 44, 62, 65, 66, 68, 82, 83, 86, 109, 113, 157, 167nn. 15, 16 Vermeer, H. 2, 12–13, 15, 17–18, 29, 31, 35, 49 Vinay, J.-P. 117 Virgillito, R. S. 97–9, 102, 170n. 16 Wagner, E. 9–10, 160n. 3 Wandruszka, M. 47, 56 Watts, I. 51–4, 164n. 4 White, P. R. R. 15, 161n. 8 Wickert, M. 103–9, 171n. 21 Wilson, D. 19, 20, 167n. 11 Wimsatt, W. K. 84 Wordsworth, W. 46, 48, 57, 63 Wright, C. 171n. 4 Van Wyke, B. 156 Xie, G. 68, 86 Zacchi, R. 81, 99, 161n. 5, 166n. 4, 169n. 12, 170n. 17 Zanettin, F. 146, 173n. 4, 174n. 7, 175nn. 16, 20, 178n. 35 Zanotti, S. 166n. 3 Zazo, A. L. 77, 81 Zitawi, J. 147, 178n. 35

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