However, Monte-Cristo is linguistically sludgy and gasping. The reasons Dumas impudently waters down his discourse are well known: he was paid so much per line and he repeats himself so often because the story was published in instalments and it was useful to remind his readers what happened before. But should we take these reasons into consideration when we translate for a modern reader? Is it not possible to do as Dumas would have done if he were paid according to the lines he saved?
I started calculating. Dumas always says that Monsieur So-and-So rises from the chair he was sitting on. That sounds boringly redundant. It would be fine to translate as He stood up or something similar, thus saving many words. Dumas writes:
Danglars arracha machinalement, et l’une après l’autre, les fleurs d’un magnifique oranger; quand il eut fini avec l’oranger, il s’adressa à un cactus, mais alors le cactus, d’un caractère moins facile que l’oranger, le piqua outrageusement.
It would be tolerable to translate:
He pulled out, mechanically, the flowers of a magnificent orange tree, and when he finished he turned to a cactus that, more aggressive by nature, bit him offensively.
Such a translation makes three lines instead of four, twenty-eight English words instead of the forty-three French ones: I would have saved (and I assure you that in Italian it would be the same) more or less twenty-five per cent of the whole text. Considering that the novel, in the Pléiade edition, is 1,400 pages, I would have saved 350 pages!
This is to say nothing of the temptation to cancel all the Monsieurs. In French one says monsieur much more than in English and Italian. Even today two neighbours entering an elevator say bonjour, monsieur, while in English it would be enough to say Hi or Good morning. Should one translate monsieur every time it is uttered in a nineteenth-century novel?
I must confess that I had a crisis at this point. The presence of all those monsieurs not only gave the novel its French and nineteenth-century flavours, but also created conversational strategies that were essential in order to understand the mutual relationships between the various characters.
Thus I realised that all the prolixity that I had tried to avoid, as well as those 350 pages that I considered useless, had a fundamental strategic function: they contributed to create expectation, they delayed the crucial events, they were fundamental in order to stage that epiphany of revenge.
At this moment I gave up the idea of translating Monte-Cristo. I realised that this novel was, if not well written, at least written as it should have been, and that it couldn’t be written differently. If The Three Musketeers had to go quickly, Monte-Cristo had to go slowly because it covered a lifetime of events. Dumas realised that a few pages were sufficient to recount that Jussac was defeated at a duel (because no reader would ever unsheathe a sword at the White Friars), but that many were necessary to represent a whole lifetime of frustration.
Perhaps one day I shall change my mind and try a new and pseudo translation of Monte-Cristo. But it will be an adaptation or a transmutation (see chapter 7). If I reduce the book, my readers should already know the original and accept the idea that their historical and cultural situation is different from that of Dumas’s original readers. They shouldn’t still be taking part in Edmond’s vicissitudes, they should look at his deeds with the sceptical and ironical eye of a contemporary reader who wants only to discover how many moves Edmond had to make in order to win his game.
Effect
All the above examples tell us that the aim of a translation, more than producing any literal ‘equivalence’, is to create the same effect in the mind of the reader (obviously according to the translator’s interpretation) as the original text wanted to create. Instead of speaking of equivalence of meaning, we can speak of functional equivalence: a good translation must generate the same effect aimed at by the original.11
Obviously this means that translators have to make an interpretative hypothesis about the effect programmed by the original text, or, to use a concept I like, to remain faithful to the intention of the text. Many hypotheses can be made about the intention of a text, so that the decision about what a translation should reproduce becomes negotiable.
Partial rewriting
Let me consider now cases in which the translator, in order to produce the same effect as intended by the original text, partially rewrites it.
A nice example of emphatic rewriting is given by the Spanish translation of The Island of the Day Before. I told my translators that I used a Baroque language, and often my characters indirectly quoted pieces of Italian Baroque poetry. See this passage from chapter 16 (where all the quotations I put in bold are a collage from verses of Giovan Battista Marino, the famous Italian Baroque poet):
Da quel momento la Signora fu per lui Lilia, e come Lilia le dedicava amorosi versi, che poi subito distruggeva temendo che fossero impari omaggio: Oh dolcissima Lilia, / a pena colsi un fior, che ti perdei! / Sdegni ch’io ti riveggi? / Io ti seguo e tu fuggi, / io ti parlo e tu taci . . . Ma non le parlava se non con lo sguardo, pieno di litigioso amore, poiché più si ama e più si è inclini al rancore, provando brividi di fuoco freddo, eccitato d’egra salute, con l’animo ilare come una piuma di piombo, travolto da quei cari effetti d’amore senza affetto; e continuava a scrivere lettere che inviava senza firma alla Signora, e versi per Lilia, che tratteneva gelosamente per sé e rileggeva ogni giorno.
Scrivendo (e non inviando), Lilia, Lilia, ove sei? ove t’ascondi? / Lilia fulgor del cielo / venisti in un baleno / a ferire, a sparire, moltiplicava le sue presenze. Seguendola di notte mentre rincasava con la sua cameriera (per le più cupe selve, / per le più cupe calli, / godrò pur di seguire, ancorché invano / del leggiadretto pié l’orme fugaci . . .), aveva scoperto dove abitava.
Bill Weaver, in order to make English readers feel the perfume of time, has chosen a lexicon and an orthography from the seventeenth century but has translated the original verses literally. I suppose that he feared that if he resorted to examples of English euphuism he would have given his English readers a sense of exaggeration, while the verses of Marino still sound not only comprehensible but also gracious and tender to the contemporary Italian reader. In any case here is Weaver’s translation, faithful enough in saying more or less what the Italian original says:
From that moment on the Lady was for him Lilia, and it was to Lilia that he dedicated amorous verses, which he then promptly destroyed, fearing they were an inadequate tribute: Ah sweetest Lilia / hardly had I plucked a flower when I lost it! / Do you scorn to see me? / I pursue you and you flee / I speak to you and you are mute . . . But he didn’t speak to her, save with his gaze full of querulous love, for the more one loves, the more one tends to rancor, shivering with cold fire, aroused by sickly health, the soul uplifted like a leaden feather, swept away by love’s dear effects without affection; and he went on writing letters that he sent unsigned to the Lady, and verses for Lilia, which he jealously kept for himself, to reread them every day.
Writing (but not sending) Lilia, Lilia, where art thou? Where dost thou hide? / Lilia, splendour of Heaven, an instant in thy presence / and I was wounded, as thou didst vanish, he multiplied her presence. Following her at night as she returned to her house with her maid (Through the darkest forests / along the darkest streets, / I shall enjoy following, though in vain / the fleeting prints of thy airy foot . . .), he discovered where she lived.
The Spanish translator, Helena Lozano, on the contrary, had in mind the Spanish literature of the Siglo de Oro, in many ways similar to Italian ‘concettismo’, but (if possible) richer in witticisms. In a commentary on her translations she notes: ‘the model reader of The Island, and of Eco in general, is a reader who has a special taste for discovery and for whom the identification of the literary source provides an immense source of pleasure. The construction of such a reader would have been impossible without resorting to texts of the Siglo de Oro.’
She has thus decided to rewrite. In a passage which expresses, as this one does, uncontrolled ardours, what the lover said was relatively important, but the fact that he said it according to the style of his time was more relevant. ‘The choice of the texts has been made taking into account the re-creative character of the translations of that time: they isolated a functional core (be it a content or a form) and developed it in their own way. In our case the relevant isotopies were the identification Lilia/flower, the loved one who escapes and her anxious pursuit. With the help of Herrera and scarcely known verses by Góngora, and some contamination by Garcilaso, I tried to realise my purpose.’12
Lozano’s translation thus reads:
Desde ese momento, la Señora fue para él Lilia, y como Lilia dedicábale amorosos versos,
