Humboldt14 proposed a difference between Fremdheit (which can be translated as foreignness, unfamiliarity, strangeness, alienness) and das Fremde (usually translated as the strange or the unfamiliar). Maybe the two terms were not so well chosen, but the concept is clear: readers feel Fremdheit when the translator’s choice sounds strange, as if it were a mistake; they feel das Fremde, that is, an unfamiliar way of showing something that is recognisable, when they get the impression they are seeing it for the first time, under a different guise. I think that this concept is not so different from the notion of ostrannenija or ‘defamiliarisation’ proposed by Russian Formalists: a device by which an artist succeeds in persuading his readers to perceive the described object under a different light and to understand it better than before. The example provided by Humboldt supports my reading:
A translation cannot and should not be a commentary . . . The obscurity one sometimes finds in the writings of the ancients, most especially the Agamemnon, is born of the brevity and the boldness with which, scorning connective clauses, they string together thoughts, images, feelings, memories and intuitions as they arise out of a profoundly agitated soul. The more thoroughly one penetrates the mood of a poet, his period, his characters, the more the obscurity vanishes and is replaced by a high clarity.
These problems are crucial in the translation of remote texts. As far as modern literature is concerned, the options can vary. Should an English translation from a French novel speak of the Left Bank or la rive gauche? Short15 finds a funny example in the tender French appellation mon petit chou. If one translates literally as my little cabbage the expression could sound insulting. Short suggests sweetheart but admits that this misses the humorous contrast, the affectionate nuance and the sound of chou (‘or even the way the lips must be shaped to make that sound’). Certainly sweetheart is a good example of domesticating translation, but if the scene takes place in France I think that one should preserve the French expression. Perhaps the reader will not understand the right meaning of those sounds but they will probably detect something very French-like, and would guess that this is how French people speak when they are in love.
Sometimes domestication is unavoidable. Bill Weaver has written a ‘Pendulum Diary’, reporting day by day the problems he met in translating my Foucault’s Pendulum.16 One of his recurrent problems concerned tenses.
When the narrator intervenes, Umberto uses regularly – or rather, irregularly – the pluperfect (‘he had gone’) when in English, it seems to me, the past (‘he went’) is more likely. As always in translating Italian narrative, and especially Eco’s, the various layers of the past have to be rethought. Just as some of the future verbs have to be altered, usually to conditional.
Thus Weaver was obliged to reconsider the various temporal levels of my stories, especially when, in the Pendulum, he was facing a character who remembers different temporal phases in a continuous interplay of embedded flashbacks.
There are cases in which Weaver, to make something evident to his target reader had to change the text – as happened with Dotallevi’s hedge (mentioned in my chapter 3). Weaver cites chapter 107 of the Pendulum where, during a nightmarish car trip through the mountains with his lover Lorenza, Belbo – passing through a lost village – runs over a dog. Nobody knows to whom the poor animal belongs and Belbo and Lorenza are obliged to waste the whole afternoon trying to assist the unfortunate beast, without really knowing what to do.
At a certain point, Belbo and Lorenzo having looked impotently at the moaning creature for more than an hour, my text says: Uggiola, aveva detto Belbo, cruscante . . . Uggiola means whimpers but it is certainly not such a common word in ordinary Italian. That’s why I added cruscante – which means that Belbo followed the classical prescriptions of the Crusca Dictionary, which for centuries represented and still represents a model for the Italian language.
Bill Weaver realised this point and in fact he comments.
Belbo says Uggiola, using an arcane, literary word. But in English ‘whimper’ is not arcane at all. So to maintain the à toujours litteraire character of Belbo, I make him quote Eliot. ‘“He’s whimpering,”’ Belbo said, and then, with Eliot-like detachment: “He’s ending with a whimper.”’
I approved Bill’s choice. Now, on second thoughts, and after having just read Weaver’s comments, I realise that my erudite allusion was very light (the reader could overlook it) while the English text makes the allusion much too evident. If I had to advise my translator now I would suggest to him to translate only: He’s ending with a whimper, Belbo said . . . – without any explicit reference to Eliot. If the reader catches the reference, it couldn’t be better; if not, too bad. But I shall speak more on similar problems in one of my next essays, apropos intertextual irony.
Another interesting case concerns chapter 66 of Foucault’s Pendulum where – to make fun of the occultists and their inclination to interpret any word, image, event or thing of this world as a hermetic allusion to a Secret – Belbo shows Casaubon that it is possible to identify mystic symbols even in the structure of a car. So he interprets the axle of a car as an allusion to the Sephirotic Tree of the Kabbalah.
For the English translator the game was not so easy, because in Italian we use the word albero, tree, both for the Kabbalistic symbol and for the axle of a car – while in English the verbal analogy disappears. Happily, consulting technical dictionaries, Weaver found out that even for cars it is technically possible to speak of an axle-tree. Thus he could translate this parodistic allusion in a way that created a similar effect. However, he encountered an embarrassing problem when he met the line:
Per questo i figli della Gnosi dicono che non bisogna fidarsi degli Ilici ma degli Pneumatici.
Here my play was perhaps too sophomoric and rather difficult to understand, even for an Italian. In the Gnostic tradition there is a distinction between Hylics and Pneumatics, that is, between material and spiritual people. By a happy coincidence in Italian pneumatici also means tyres (which is etymologically correct, since tyres are inflated with an aerial essence). In this way my joke was acceptable and allowed Belbo to demonstrate once more that a car can be seen as an encyclopaedia of occult wisdom. But in English the joke was absolutely untranslatable.
As Weaver says in his diary, while together having a sort of brainstorming about a possible solution, he mentioned a famous tyre brand, Firestone, and I reacted – by phonic association – with philosopher’s stone. That was the solution, and the line became:
They never saw the connection between the philosopher’s stone and Firestone.
The choice between foreignising or domesticating is really a matter of careful negotiation.
Sometimes Weaver’s solutions were the result of curious discussions with my wife (who is German-born):
At one point in the novel Belbo says to Casaubon, in English: Good for you. In his instructions to translators Umberto gives strict orders against the solution of an asterisk and ‘English in the original’ . . . I suggested changing Belbo’s line to Bon pour vous. After a moment’s thought, Umberto said: ‘Put Wunderbar.’
I was not convinced – and I tell this to Renate, who says: ‘No, no. Put bon pour vous. No Italian publisher would have said Wunderbar in those days.’
In Gide’s translation of Conrad’s Typhoon, in the second chapter a character says He didn’t care a tinker’s curse. Gide translates Il s’en fichait comme du juron d’un étameur. This is more or less literally correct but does not recall any known French idiom. In the sixth chapter a character utters Damme, if this ship isn’t worse than Bedlam! Gide, consistently with his foreignising project, translates Que le diable m’emporte si l’on se croyait pas à Bedlam!
Berman17 quotes an objection that it would have been better to say Il s’en fichait comme d’une guigne, hence using a typical slang French expression, and to substitute Bedlam with Charenton (a French asylum), but he remarks that it would be strange if British characters were to use French idioms.
Certainly Charenton would be an excessive case of domestication, but I do not know if a French reader would have felt a reference to guigne too ‘local’ or ‘national’. I cannot but praise two Italian translators (Ugo Mursia and Bruno Oddera)18 who respectively chose for the first case Non gli importava un cavolo and Non gli importava un fico secco – two very slang expressions that say the same thing and that the reader does not feel are too Italian – and for the second case, Maledizione, se questa nave non è peggio del manicomio di Bedlam and Il diavolo mi porti se questa nave non è peggio di un manicomio – the first one specifying that Bedlam is a mental hospital and the second mentioning only an asylum in general, without any further reference.
An interesting case of domestication in order to foreignise
