The cases of Joyce and Queneau raise another problem, concerning the adaptation of a text, born in a given cultural milieu, to the spirit and possibilities of comprehension of readers belonging to another culture.
NOTES
- See chapter 6 in my Kant and the Platypus (New York: Harcourt/ London: Secker, 1999).
- Peter Strawson, ‘On referring’, Mind lix (1950).
- Helena Lozano Miralles, ‘Comme le traducteur prit possession de l’Ile et commença à traduire’, in Jean Petitot and Paolo Fabbri, eds. Au nom di sens. Autour de l’oeuvre d’Umberto Eco. Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle 1996 (Paris: Grasset, 2000).
- ‘Anna Livia Plurabella’, Prospettive iv, 2, 11–12 (1940). This version contained interpolations by Ettore Settanni. A first version, which sprang from the collaboration between Joyce and Nino Frank, dated 1938, was edited by Jacqueline Risset in Joyce, Scritti italiani (Milano: Mondadori, 1979). The Italian version, the French one, the original text and other subsequent versions are now in Joyce, Anna Livia Plurabelle, edited by Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli (Turin: Einaudi 1996), with my introduction.
- ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, La Nouvelle Revue Française xix, 212 (1931). Even though the French translation was from the 1928 version of ‘Anna Livia’ and the Italian one from the final 1939 version, there are no important variations regarding the points I shall mention.
- Finnegans Wake, tr. Luigi Schenoni (Milano: Mondadori, 2001), p. 198 bis.
- Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style, tr. Barbara Wright (New York: New Directions, 1981).
IV. Source vs target
In his essay on ‘The misery and splendor of translation’, Ortega y Gasset says that, contrary to Meillet’s opinion, it is not true that every language can express everything (as mentioned, Quine1 said that in a jungle language one cannot translate the phrase neutrinos lack mass). According to Ortega:
The Basque language . . . forgot to include in its vocabulary a term to designate God and it was necessary to pick a phrase that meant ‘lord over the heights’ – Jaungoikua. Since lordly authority disappeared centuries ago, Jaungoikua today directly means God, but we must place ourselves in the time when one was obliged to think of God as a political, worldly authority, to think of God as a civil governor or similar. To be exact, this case reveals to us that lacking a name for God made it very difficult for the Basques to think about God. For that reason they were very slow in being converted to Christianity.2
I always feel sceptical about this sort of naive Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. According to Ortega’s argument, English-speakers should have an incorrect idea of God since they also call him Lord. Schleiermacher in his On the Different Methods of Translating3 remarked that, obviously, ‘all humans are under the sway of the language they speak; they and their entire thinking are a product of that language, so that it is impossible to think with a complete clarity anything that lies beyond its boundaries.’ But a few lines later he added: ‘On the other hand, all free-thinking people with any mental initiative at all also play their part in shaping their language.’ Humboldt4 was the first to speak about the way in which translations can ‘augment the significance and expressivity of the native language’.
In spite of such a confidence in the dynamic capacity of languages to evolve when exposed to a foreign challenge, we still have some difficulty in deciding if the Elohim who shows (or show) up at the beginning of the Bible can be truly translated as God.
Understanding Dante
As has been said, translation is always a shift, not between two languages but between two cultures – or two encyclopaedias. A translator must take into account rules that are not strictly linguistic but, broadly speaking, cultural.
As a matter of fact the same happens when we read a text which is centuries old. Steiner, in the first chapter of his After Babel,5 shows very well how certain texts of Shakespeare and Jane Austen are not fully comprehensible to a contemporary English reader who does not have an understanding of the vocabulary and the cultural background of their authors.
Starting from the principle that Italian, in the course of the last seven centuries, changed less than other European languages, every Italian student is convinced they perfectly understand this famous sonnet by Dante:
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare
la donna mia, quand’ella altrui saluta,
ch’ogne lingua deven tremando muta,
e li occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare.
Ella si va, sentendosi laudare,
benignamente d’umiltà vestuta;
e par che sia una cosa venuta
da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.
The common way of understanding these lines could be rendered in English as ‘My woman, when she greets a passer-by, looks so courteous [or polite] and so honest that every tongue can only babble and our eyes do not dare to look at her. She walks hearing people praising her, benignly and dressed in all humility, and truly seems a thing come from the skies to show a miracle on earth.’
There are three English translations. The first is from a Pre-Raphaelite author, Dante Gabriel Rossetti:6
My lady looks so gentle and so pure
When yielding salutation by the way,
That the tongue trembles and has nought to say,
And the eyes, which fain would see, may not endure.
And still, amid the praise she hears secure,
She walks with humbleness for her array;
Seeming a creature sent from Heaven to stay
On earth, and show a miracle made sure.
A contemporary translator, Mark Musa,8 reads:
Such sweet decorum and such gentle grace
attend my lady’s greetings as she moves
that lips can only tremble in silence
and eyes dare not attempt to gaze at her.
Moving, benignly clothed in humility,
untouched by all the praise along her way,
she seems to be a creature come from Heaven
to earth, to manifest a miracle.
Marion Shores translates:8
My lady seems so fine and full of grace
When she greets others, passing on her way,
That trembling tongues can find no words to say,
And eyes, bedazzled, dare not meet her gaze.
Modestly she goes amid the praise,
Serene and sweet, with virtue her array;
And seems a wonder sent here to display
A glimpse of heaven in an earthly place.
But, as Contini has explained,9 all the terms I put in bold in the original had, in Dante’s time, a different meaning, and a more philosophical one. Gentile did not mean, as in modern Italian, courteous, and in a way was closer to gentle, but in the sense of coming from a noble family. Onesto did not correspond to honest and meant rather full of decorum and dignity (in this sense Musa was ‘honest’). Donna did not mean woman but domina, in the feudal sense, and in this context Beatrice was the domina of Dante’s heart (My lady suggests something similar). Pare did not mean she looks like or it seems that but rather that the virtues of the Lady are manifested evidently, or that Beatrice is the visible manifestation of a miracle. Being a cosa Beatrice was not a thing but a being that produced sensations and emotions (in this sense two English translations employ creature, which is less philosophical but works pretty well, and Shores anticipates the final effect of that cosa saying that it is a wonder).
To conclude, according to Contini these lines should be paraphrased as ‘Such is the evidence of the noble status and dignity of the person who is my Lady [. . .] She is going on, listening to words of praise, showing her own benevolence, and her nature of a being come from heaven to represent directly the divine power becomes evident.’
This is an instance in which readers of a modern translation can in some way understand the old sense of the poem a little better than modern Italian readers who believe their language has not changed since Dante’s time. To take Dante as a contemporary could be to do seriously what Tony Oldcorn10 tried as an intentional provocation:
When she says he, my baby looks so neat,
the fellas all clam up and check their feet.
She hears their whistles but she’s such a cutie,
she walks on by, and no, she isn’t snooty.
You’d think that she’d been sent down from the skies
to lay a little magic on us guys.
Translating Averroes
One of the most blatant examples of cultural misunderstanding, which has produced for at least some centuries a chain of further misconceptions, is that of Averroes’ translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. Averroes did not know Greek and hardly knew Syriac, and therefore read Aristotle through a tenth-century Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of the Greek original. To increase this mish-mash, Averroes’ commentary to the Poetics (1175) was translated from Arabic into Latin by Hermann the German in 1256. Only later, in 1278, did William of Moerbeke translate the Poetics from Greek. As for Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in 1256 Hermann the German translated it from an Arabic translation, mixing up the Aristotelian text with Arabic commentaries. Only later was there a translatio vetus directly from Greek, probably due to Bartholomew of Messina, and in 1269 or 1270 came the one by William of Moerbeke.
Aristotle’s text is full of references to Greek theatre, as well as of poetical examples that Averroes and his forerunners had tried to adapt to the literary Arab tradition. Imagine how a Latin translator might picture the original sense of these two works. We are close to the situation of an English version of Genesis translated from a bad German translation translated in its turn from an incorrect Spanish version. But there is more than that.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story ‘The
