the deep sense of my text: I was doing my best to initiate the modern reader into the cultural world of Lull, and such a show of goodwill should not be undervalued.

Schleiermacher once said:

The translator either disturbs the writer as little as possible and moves the reader in his direction, or disturbs the reader as little as possible and moves the writer in his direction. The two approaches are so absolutely different that no mixture of the two is to be trusted.23

I repeat that such a severe criterion perhaps holds for translation from ancient or remote literatures, but that it does not hold for modern texts. To choose a target- or source-oriented direction is, once again, a matter of negotiation to be decided at every sentence.

In American crime novels the detective frequently asks a driver to take him downtown or uptown. By a sort of unspoken agreement, all Italian translators have decided to translate these expressions as portami alla Città Alta, that is, to the high or upper city, or portami alla Città Bassa, that is, to the low or lower city. Thus Italian readers get the impression that every American city is like Budapest or Tbilisi, with a district on the hills beyond the river, and a district on the opposite bank.

It is certainly difficult to decide how to translate downtown and uptown, because the sense of these expressions changes according to the city concerned. Normally uptown is north and downtown is south, but in certain cities downtown is the oldest district, in others it is the business area, in others the red-light district. In New York, downtown and uptown are relative concepts: if you are escaping a black gang in Harlem you ask the driver to run downtown in order to reach at least the Plaza; if you are on the verge of being killed in Chinatown, you ask the driver to run as fast as possible uptown, so as to relax at the Plaza. The Plaza is neither uptown nor downtown: which it is depends not on the Plaza’s position but on yours.

A good translator should therefore negotiate the translation according to the city, asking the driver to take him to the business district, or to the red-light one, or along the river or elsewhere, according to the situation. But these decisions require vast extra-linguistic knowledge, and translators of detective novels are poorly paid. My suggestion is that one should foreignise and use downtown, in English, to give the tale an exotic connotation (and the reader will understand later whether it was wise or not to go there).

If you read a criminal story taking place in Barcelona (where you have never been) and you read Take me to the Barrio Gotico, do you really understand what it means? Certainly, there is a great difference between going (especially at night) to the Barrio Gotico or to the Barrio Chino, but too bad. Better to get the exotic flavour of Barcelona than to receive ill-translated information. So, if an English translator finds Take me to the Barrio Chino in a Spanish novel, it is advisable not to translate this as Take me to Chinatown. Exaggerated domestication can bring excessive obscurity.

Besides, translators in every language have their own downtown problems. In his ‘Pendulum Diary’ Bill Weaver reports a similar story.

Thought for the day. Periferia. Outskirts. In most Italian cities, the periferia is the slums. In American cities, nowadays, the slums are downtown, the ‘inner city’. So when you say someone lives in periferia, you have to watch yourself and not translate it as ‘in the suburbs’, making an Italian slum sound like Larchmont. Casaubon lives and works in an ex-factory in periferia. I’ve eluded the problem, I think, by using ‘outlying’.

As a matter of fact in Italy one can live at the periferia of a small non-industrial city and have a comfortable little house with a garden. But Casaubon lived in Milan and Weaver did well in avoiding suburbs. Casaubon was not rich enough.

In conclusion, Montanari24 suggests translating source/target as source/mouth. Perhaps mouth is better than target, which sounds too businesslike, and conveys an impossible idea of optimal scoring. But the idea of mouth also opens a semantic field and suggests the form either of a delta or an estuary. Perhaps there are source texts that widen out in translation, and the destination text enriches the source one, making it enter the sea of a new intertextuality; and there are delta texts that branch out in many translations, each of which impoverishes their original flow, but which all together create a new territory, a labyrinth of competing interpretations.

NOTES

1. Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1960).
2. José Ortega y Gasset, Miseria y esplendor de la traducción, (Obras completa, V), (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1947), pp. 427–48. English. tr., ‘The misery and the splendor of translation’, in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 56–77.
3. ‘Uber die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens,’ (1813), in Zur Philosophie 2 (Berlin: Reimer, 1835–46). English tr., ‘On the different methods of translating’, in Douglas Robinson, ed., Western Translation Theory (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 1997), pp. 226–7.
4. ‘Einleitung’, in Aeschylos Agamemnon metrisch Übersetz (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1816). English tr., ‘The more faithful, the more divergent’, in Robinson, ed., pp. 238–40.
5. George Steiner, After Babel (London: Oxford U.P. 1975).
6. Dante and His Circle with the Italian Poets Preceding Him (London: Ellis, 1908) (originally as The Early Italian Poets, 1861).
7. Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’ (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1973).
8. The Formalist, 1 (1992), p. 73.
9. Gianfranco Contini, ‘Esercizio d’interpretazione sopra un sonetto di Dante’, Varianti e altra linguistica (Torino: Einaudi, 1979), pp. 61–8.
10. ‘Confessioni di un falsario’, in Franco Nasi, ed., Sulla traduzione letteraria (Ravenna: Longo, 2001), p. 68.
11. Martin Luther, Sendbrief von Dolmetschen 1530. English tr., ‘Circular letter on translation’, in Robinson, ed., pp. 83–8.
12. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (London: Routledge, 1995).
13. ‘Circular letter on translation’, p. 87.
14. ‘Einleitung’, p. 240.
15. Thomas L. Short, ‘Peirce on meaning and translation’, in Susan Petrilli, ed., La traduzione, special issue of Athanor x, 2 (1999–2000), p. 78.
16. ‘Pendulum Diary’, in South-West Review, Spring 1990.
17. Antoine Berman, La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge lointain, second edn. (Paris: Seuil, 1999), p. 65, quoting Van der Meercschen, ‘La traduction française, problèmes de fidelité’, in Traduzione Tradizione (Milano: Dedalo, 1986), p. 80.
18. ‘Typhoon di Joseph Conrad nella traduzione di André Gide con versione italiana di Ugo Mursia’, (Torino: Einaudi, 1993); Tifone, tr. Bruno Oddera (Milano: Bompiani, 1986).
19. Morana Čale Kneževic, ‘Traduzione, tradizione e tradimento: in margine alla versione croata de Il nome della rosa’, in Avirovič and Dodds, eds., Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris. Autori e traduttori a confronto (Trieste, 27–8 novembre 1989) (Udine: Campanotto, 1993), pp. 47–53.
20. Burckhart Kroeber, ‘Stare al gioco dell’autore’, in Avirovič and Dodds, pp. 27–30.
21. La Bible, tr. André Chouraqui (Desclée de Brouwer, 1989). Kohèlet. Ecclesiaste, tr. Erri De Luca (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1996). Qohélet o l’Ecclesiaste, tr. Guido Ceronetti (Torino: Einaudi, 1970). Qohélet. Colui che prende la parola, tr. Guido Ceronetti (Milano: Adelphi, 2001).
22. Lawrence Venuti, ‘Strategies of translation’, in Mona Baker, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 240.
23. ‘On the different methods of translating’, p. 229.
24. Frederico Montanari, ‘Tradurre metafore?’, in N. Dusi and S. Nergaard, eds., Sulla traduzione intersemiotica, special issue of VS lxxxv–lxxxvii (2000).

V. To see things and texts

In writing my novels I have always been interested in the description of spaces, so that usually, before writing, I carefully design the world where my story will take place. I want my characters to move within a space that, in some way, I can see. But in order to write about spaces it is not enough to see a space: the real problem is how to render what one sees in words. This is the problem of hypotyposis.

Hypotyposis

Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene. Unfortunately all the rhetoricians who wrote about hypotyposis, from antiquity to the present, have provided only circular definitions. They have said more or less that hypotyposis is the figure by which one creates a visual effect through words – that is, in order to answer the question, they have restated the question as if it was the answer. Requested to say how it happens, they have simply repeated that it happens.

In the past few years I have analysed many literary texts in order to isolate different techniques by which a writer, using sounds, brings images, so to speak, to the reader’s eyes, and I particularly focused my attention on the description of spaces.

Most of these techniques do not require any effort on the part of the translator. The simplest, most immediate and mechanical form is pure mentioning, as when we say that two places are twenty miles distant from each other. The second is detailed description, that is, when a space is described, as when we talk about a square with a church on the right and an ancient building on the left.

The third form is listing. In a list or catalogue space is shown by the accumulation of things it contains. Good examples of catalogues can be found in classical literature: see for instance the description of the armies before Troy in the Iliad, which is a catalogue of names that lasts four hundred verses, or the description of the drawers in Leopold Bloom’s kitchen in the penultimate chapter of Ulysses.

Another technique (which Quintilian suggested in his Institutio Oratoria) is the agitated piling up of events. The events must be either incongruous or extraordinary. Of course rhythm is very important here, and that is how this hypotyposis from Rabelais (Gargantua I, 27) makes us see the scene, which would not be possible with a mere listing device:

He crushed to