She realised that in the Prologue I was evoking the topos of the Monde renversé, the world turned upside down, through quotations from a medieval text, Carmina Burana, but in prose, as they were cited in Curtius’s seminal book on European literature and medieval Latin. As far as I was concerned I had the Carmina Burana before me, but I had certainly been inspired by Curtius too, so Morana’s insight was good. But she remarked that the Croatian translation of Curtius contained a quotation which is different from both Curtius’s German original and the Latin original, so also different from my quotation in The Name of the Rose. In spite of this she decided to keep the Croatian version, even though non-literal, in order to arouse in her readers’ mind a sort of intertextual (and familiar) connection.
I feel obliged to approve this kind of choice. If the aim of the text was to draw the reader into recognising quotations from other texts, in order to ‘smell’ a sort of archaic flavour, a certain rate of domestication was indispensable. By the way, in my novel I do not say that Adso was literally quoting from Carmina Burana : it is verisimilar that, as a character in the Middle Ages, he was vaguely remembering certain texts and echoing them without any philological preoccupation. In a way the Croatian Adso was more medieval than the Italian one.
Among my translators, Kroeber is the one who has most bravely accepted the necessity of domestication – or, as a good disciple of Luther, of Germanisation.20 He was aware of the syntactic differences between Italian and German and of the fact that many Italian expressions, still used today, can seem archaic to a German reader. When translating The Name of the Rose he decided that many of those sylistic features, typical of a medieval chronicle, had to be preserved. Kroeber was thinking of the style used by Thomas Mann in his ‘Joseph’ trilogy. But Adso was not just a medieval character, he was a German medieval character, and in German such a characteristic had to be evident. Kroeber asked himself how to reconstruct Adso’s stylistic ‘mask’ in a German style. He confesses that when in my dialogues I used dissi or disse (that is, I said and he said), he resorted to the whole gamut of German turn ancillaries like versetze ich, erwirdert er, gab er zu bedenken – ‘because so the traditional German narrator used to do’.
Kroeber admits that when playing such a game one is tempted to overdo things. Thus, in translating the episode of Adso’s dream (see previous chapter) he not only respected all the references to the Coena Cypriani and to various aspects of medieval literature and art, but also referred to some of his personal literary memories: he even inserted vague allusions to Mann and Brecht – this was not unfaithful to my original text, because I inserted allusions to Wittgenstein. Kroeber seems to apologise, in speaking of these solutions, because his translation was ‘belle’ but ‘infidèle’. I think that, if his purpose was to create in the mind of German readers the same effect that I tried to create in the mind of the Italian one, he was not unfaithful at all.
Modernising and making a text archaic
As for the opposition between modernising the text and making it archaic, let us consider various translations of the book of the Bible known as Ecclesiastes. I shall consider the canonical Latin translation, the King James and Luther versions, and some contemporary versions, in French and in Italian (one by Chouraqui, one by Erri de Luca and two different versions by Ceronetti).21
The original Hebrew title is Qohèlèt, which could be a proper name but also recalls the Hebrew etym qahal, assembly. Thus Qohèlèt can even be one who speaks in the assembly of the faithful. The Greek term for assembly is ekklesia, and Ecclesiastes was the title chosen by the Vulgata and still accepted by the King James version. But in King James Qohèlèt is translated as The Preacher, and similarly in Luther’s translation it becomes der Predigter. The English and German translations are clearly modernising.
Let us come to the famous second verse:
Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes. Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas. (Vulgata)
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. (King James)
Es is ganz eitel, sprach der Predigter, es ist alles ganz eitel. (Luther)
Fumée de fumée, dit Qohèlèt: fumée de fumée, tout est fumée. (Chouraqui)
Spreco di sprechi ha detto Kohèlet, spreco di sprechi il tutto è spreco. (De Luca)
Fumo di fumi – Dice Qohélet – Fumo di fumi – Tutto non è che fumo. (Ceronetti 2001)
The invective against vanitas is obviously against what is inconsistent and null, and the words vanitas, vanity, vanità, Eitel suggested the right concept, at least at the time in which the translations were made. Today the original sense has been lost, and readers think of vanity as excessive care for one’s own public image. Thus, working on the original Hebrew metaphor, Chouraqui and Ceronetti speak of fumée, smoke, and De Luca of spreco, waste. Their solution is poetically convincing but they miss the old sense of vanity as void and unreality.
As for the verse Oritur sol, et occidit, et ad locum suum revertitur: ibique renascens (Vulgata), the translations are:
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. (King James)
Die Sonne geth auf und geth unter und läuft an ihren Ort, dass sie wieder dasselbst aufgehe. (Luther)
Le soleil brille, le soleil décline: à son lieu il aspire et brille là. (Chouraqui)
E è spuntato il sole e se n’è venuto il sole: e al suo luogo ansima, spunta lui là. (De Luca)
Corre in un altro punto – In un altro riappare. (Ceronetti 1970)
The solutions of both Chouraqui and De Luca are syntactically tortured (these verses are neither in good French nor in good Italian), in order to convey or suggest the flavour of an exotic poetical style. Both Chouraqui and De Luca are at once foreignising the text and making it archaic.
Mixed situations
The double opposition, foreignising/domesticating and modernising/ making it archaic, can produce a range of possible combinations. In my The Name of the Rose there are frequent quotations and book titles in Latin. I had in mind Western readers who were in some way acquainted with Latin expressions even if they had not studied Latin.
But my Russian translator, Helena Costiukovich, remarked that Latin words (whether or not transliterated in Cyrillic characters) are not only incomprehensible to Russian readers, but also do not convey any religious connotation. Thus Costiukovich decided to render my Latin quotations in the old ecclesiastic Slavonic used by the orthodox Church in the Middle Ages – so that the reader could both vaguely understand their meaning and perceive the same aura of old religiosity. Thus, in order to make the translation very archaic, it was necessary to domesticate it.
Likewise, Venuti22 quotes the debate between Matthew Arnold and Francis Newman (in the nineteenth century) apropos translating Homer. Arnold said that Homer should be rendered in hexameters and in modern English, in order to keep the translation in tune with the current academic reception of the Greek text; Newman, by contrast, not only constructed an archaic lexicon but also used an old ballad meter, in order to show that Homer was originally a popular rather than elitist poet. Venuti remarks that, ironically, Newman was foreignising for populist reasons and Arnold wanted to domesticate for academic and elitist reasons.
A crazy example of both domestication and modernisation is given by the first tentative translation of one of my essays. Happily that translation was corrected before publication.
My text discussed the Ars Magna of Raymond Lull, and the subject was certainly a difficult one. My text was listing a series of Lullian syllogisms on theological matters, among which was All that is magnified by Greatness is great – but Goodness is what is magnified by Greatness – therefore Goodness is Great.
The translator probably thought that the Lullian reasoning was too abstract and that it was necessary to be more friendly to the reader. Thus he translated the above syllogism as All cats are mammals, Suzy is a cat, therefore Suzy is a mammal. It is clear that this translation is not literal at all. Moreover, it does not respect what the original was referring to. To say that a historical figure like Lull said that All that is magnified by Greatness is great is pretty different from saying that he mentioned his pet Suzy. A translator can say that Diotallevi (a ficitonal character) saw a sublime espacioso llano instead of a hedge, but not that Raymond Lull spoke of Suzy instead of God. That is a blatant lie, and the reader becomes the victim of a fraud. Besides Lull was a Catalan and would have never named his cat Suzy.
One could conclude that my translator simply exaggerated in modernisation and domestication. But his misdemeanour was born from an insufficient appreciation of
