I had a beautiful Italian title, La Nautica Rilucente by a certain Rosa, but I realised that it was unknown and untranslatable. I suggested Arte del Navegar (by Medina), and General and Rare Memorial pertaining to the perfect Art of Navigation (by John Dee), and in German Narrenschiff. For Diverse e Artificiose Macchine by Ramelli I recommended a German translation from 1620, and for the French I proposed Théâtre des Instruments Mathématiques et Mécaniques, by Besson. Instead of Teatro d’Imprese by Ferro I picked many other emblem books such as, for instance, Philosophie des images enigmatiques, Empresas Morales, Declaración magistral sobre los emblemas, Delights for the Ingenious, A Collection of Emblems, Emblematisches Lust Cabinet, Emblematische Schatz-Kammer.
Another piece of instruction I gave was that the whole travel of Amarilli was a collage of intertextual allusion to famous persons and islands. Mas Afuera was the island of the Juan Fernandez archipelago where Robinson Crusoe (the historical one, that is, Selkirk) was shipwrecked. The unnamed island where they arrived after the Galapagos was Pitcairn, and the Bounty Mutiny was evoked there. The next island was Gaugin’s one. When the knight reaches an island where he tells the natives fascinating stories and they call him Tusitala, there is a clear mention of Stevenson. When the knight suggests Roberto slide into the sea (at that moment we would know everything), there is a direct quotation from Martin Eden’s suicide. The sentence by Roberto, ma appena lo sapessimo, cesseremmo di saperlo, is a quotation from the first Italian translation of the last sentence of Jack London’s novel (and at the instant he knew, he ceased to know). Obviously Bill Weaver got the allusion and translated ‘Yes, but at the instant we knew it, we would cease to know.’
When a text is based on double coding, however, the possibility of a double reading depends on the size of the encyclopaedia of the reader. When playing dialogism, it is difficult to resist the fascination of intertextual reverberations. Linda Hutcheon2 finds on page 378 of the English version of my Pendulum: ‘The Rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect’, and identifies a clear quotation: Connect, only connect, from E. M. Forster. She is prudent enough to observe that this ‘ironic play’ appears in the English version. As a matter of fact the Italian original text (and I do not know if Hutcheon had it in front of her when making this remark) does not display such an intertextual connection, because it reads sospettare, sospettare sempre (suspect, always suspect). The explicit reference has been introduced by the translator – consciously, I suspect. This demonstrates how every translation can either weaken or reinforce a strategy of double coding.
At one stage in chapter 30 of the Pendulum, my protagonists get lost in reverie and think that the whole story told by the Gospels could be the effect of an invention, like the Universal Plot he and his friends are concocting. Since a fake Gospel is by definition apocryphal, Causaubon sophomorically comments: Toi, apochryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère. When writing I would have been satisfied if the reader caught the reference to Baudelaire (toi, hypocrite lecteur . . .), but Linda Hutcheon sees my quotation as a ‘parody of Baudelaire by Eliot’ (in fact, Eliot quotes Baudelaire in The Waste Land).
This way my game becomes wittier than it was intended to be. Fortunately, if Hutcheon had translated my book, her astute interpretation could not have changed the translation (it was obviously mandatory to keep the quotation in French). In any case Hutcheon’s suggestion posits a nice problem for the poetics of double coding. Should we split the readers between those whose encyclopaedia includes only Baudelaire and those who are also conscious of the Eliot–Baudelaire relationship? And what to say about possible readers who found the quotation in Eliot, ignoring that it was referring back to Baudelaire? Should we deny them the membership in the club of intertextuality?
In The Island of the Day Before there are some coups de théâtre in Dumas’s style. I was ready also to accept readers unable to identify the quotations and eager to enjoy certain situations for their cloak-and-dagger flavour, irrespective of the source. In chapter 17, when Mazarin dismisses Roberto de la Grive after having entrusted him with a secret mission, the voice of the Narrator says:
Piegò un ginocchio e disse: ‘Eminenza, sono vostro.’
O almeno così vorrei, visto che non mi pare costumato fargli dare un salvacondotto che reciti ‘C’est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l’état que le porteur du présent a fait ce qu’il a fait.’
The English translation reads:
He bent one knee, and said: ‘Eminence, I am yours.’
Or at least that is what I would have liked to happen, for it does not seem to me civil to give him a safe-conduct that says, ‘C’est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l’état que le porteur du présent a fait ce qu’il a fait.’
Bill Weaver identified the quotation, respected it and, to make it recognisable as a quotation, followed me and left it in French. Respect for double coding overcame need for literal comprehensibility.
It is interesting to notice that Weaver’s solution has been adopted by the translators in Slovak, Finnish, Swedish, Romanian, Czech, Serbian, Polish, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese (in both the Portuguese and Brazilian versions), Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Latvian, Norwegian and Greek. But the Russian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Macedonian and Hungarian translators put the quotation in their own language. In the German case I would say that Kroeber was sure that the original text would be recognised in any case, because there are many German translations of Dumas. Probably Chinese and Japanese translators were not sure that their readers could identify such a culturally remote source (I do not know, it may also be that Dumas is so well known in Japan that every Japanese reader can find the right track). Perhaps they found it disturbing to insert a quotation in Latin characters. But it seems to me that problems of alphabet are scarcely relevant, otherwise Serbian and Greek versions would not have used the original quotation.
I think that in each of the above cases the translator has negotiated, deciding whether it was more convenient to miss the intertextual link for the sake of comprehensibility or whether on the contrary it was necessary to risk a poor literal understanding in order to stress the link.
Note that there is a double textual play in this short passage. First, the intrusion of the Narrator who apologises for having avoided the quotation of a famous line (a case of praeterition or paraleipsis, since while apologising for non-quoting in fact he quotes). Second, the textual quotation of the safe-conduct that Richelieu gives Milady, Athos purloins from her and at the end d’Artagnan shows to Richelieu. Here naive readers seem to be left without any help. They understand that Mazarin did not give Roberto a safe-conduct (if they do not know French they ignore what it is about), and worry about why the Narrator feels compelled to say that something irrelevant did not happen. But, since the quotation is in another language, they are in some way pulled to suspect that there is a quotation.3
So much for double coding. Once again it is a case where translation is not only a linguistic but also, or mainly, a cultural affair.
NOTES
- Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988), chapter 7.
- ‘Eco’s echoes: ironizing the (post)modern’, in N. Bourchard and V. Pravadelli, eds., Umberto Eco’s Alternative. The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 166.
- In at least two English translations I consulted, the safe-conduct reads ‘It is by my order that the bearer of this paper has done what he has just done,’ a version which contains two mistakes. First, it does not translate that all this happened for the State’s sake, and second this translation uses the masculine pronoun he, while the French original remains uncommitted. So it remains difficult to understand how a safe-conduct given to Milady could have been used by d’Artagnan, or why (vices of an old-fashioned sexism) a letter given a woman should use the pronoun he.
VI. From rewording to translating substance
If in order to translate one must make a series of hypotheses about the deep sense and the purposes of a text, then translation is certainly a form of interpretation – at least insofar as it depends on a series of previous interpretations. However, to say that translation is a form of interpretation does not imply that interpretation is a form of translation. No logically educated mind would say so.
Here I feel embarrassed, because I have to criticise one of the scholars I have most admired in my life, and whom I still consider a master and an unforgettable friend – the late Roman Jakobson. But Jakobson was once responsible for a possible confusion.
Translation and interpretation
In his essay on the linguistic aspects of translation, Jakobson1 (1959) suggested that there are three types of translation: intralinguistic, interlinguistic and intersemiotic.
Intralinguistic translation, or ‘rewording’, is ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other
