Silvia, rimembri ancora
Quel tempo della tua vita mortale
Quando beltà splendea
Negli occhi tuoi ridenti e fuggitivi,
e tu, lieta e pensosa, il limitare
di gioventù salivi?
Sylvia, te souvient-il encore
Du temps de cette vie mortelle,
Quand la beauté brillait
Dans tes regards rieurs et fugitifs,
Et que tu t’avançais, heureuse et sage,
Au seuil de ta jeunesse?
Orcel has inevitably missed the relation between Silvia and salivi. He has succeeded in putting quite a few is in his texts, but the ratio of French to Italian is ten to twenty. Moreover, in the original text these is are easy to notice because they are repeated six times in the body of a single word, while in French this happens only once. As a final defeat in the course of a brave contest, the Italian name Silvia, with its accent on the first i, protracts the subtle fascination of the name as well as of the named person, while the French Sylvia (since the lack of the tonic accent in French inexorably obliges the speaker – and the reader – to stress the final a) transforms a sigh into a lash.
To conclude, (i) a text is the manifestation of a substance, either at the content or at the expression plane, and (ii) translation is not only concerned with such matters as ‘equivalence’ in meaning (or in the substance of the textual content), it is also concerned with the more or less indispensable ‘equivalences’ in the substance of expression (as we shall see more clearly in the following essays). In translating we must isolate various substantial levels. An insensitive, inattentive or superficial reader may miss or disregard many of them: one can read a fairy tale to enjoy the story without paying attention to its moral meaning, one can read Hamlet purely in order to see if Hamlet will succeed in avenging his father, one can read ‘A Silvia’ simply in order to know if the poet married the girl in the end or found another sweetheart. Translators are in theory bound to identify each of the relevant textual levels, but they may be obliged to choose which ones to preserve, since it is impossible to save all.
If we consider that in poetic texts it is crucial to render a strict relationship between given levels of the expression substance and given levels of the content substance, translators are challenged on their ability to identify them, to save all of them (or some, or none), and to put them in the same relationship with each other as they are in the original text.
In this game, translators may miss a lot, but can also make up for some of their losses.
NOTES
- See for instance Werner Koller, ‘Equivalence in Translation Theory’, in Chestermann, A., ed., Readings in Translation Theory (Helsinki: Oy Finn Lectura AB, 1989).
- My references to Peirce will always be to Collected Papers (Cambridge U.P., 1931–58).
- As a matter of fact I gave the English sentence to AltaVista and received as an output: John, un célibataire qui a étudié à Oxford, a écrit maintenant une dissertation de Ph.D. sur les célibataires de Pôle du nord.
- Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge U.P., 1960), vol. II, p. 16.
- Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (Madison: Wisconsin U.P., 1943).
- Cf. Algirdas J. Greimas and Joseph Courtés, eds., Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1982).
- G. Leopardi, Les chants, tr. Michel Orcel (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1982).
II. Losses and gains
There is no exact way to translate the Latin word mus into English. In Latin mus covers the same semantic space covered by mouse and rat in English – as well as in French, where there are souris and rat, in Spanish (ratón and rata) or in German (Maus and Ratte). But in Italian, even though the difference between a topo and a ratto is recorded in dictionaries, in everyday language one can use topo even for a big rat – perhaps stretching it to topone or topaccio – but ratto is used only in technical texts.
LATIN ENGLISH FRENCH GERMAN ITALIAN
Mouse Souris Maus (Topo)
mus topo
Rat Rat Ratte (Ratto)
Thus, a comparison between French and Italian linguistic systems tells us that the Italian topo can cover the semantic spaces of both the French souris and rat. It is an interesting piece of linguistic information, but what happens when we find the word topo in an Italian translation of a French text? Does it translate back as rat or souris?
Take the first chapter of Camus’s La peste in the Italian translation by Beniamino dal Fabbro. It states that one morning Doctor Rieux found, on the stairs of the building, un sorcio morto. Now sorcio is like topo, and like mouse in English, and if one knows that mouse in French is souris one can infer that the Italian translator chose sorcio instead of topo because he was phonically influenced by the French souris. In spite of these obvious assumptions, one is tempted to reflect on the fact that Camus’s novel is telling the story of a terrible epidemic, and the plague is not usually carried by mice but by rats.
Thus, not because of one’s linguistic competence but by virtue of a general knowledge concerning the world we live in, one is encouraged to suppose that the translator made a mistake. As a matter of fact, if you check the French original, you will see that Camus does not mention a mouse but un rat. This is an instance in which the Italian translator should have stressed the difference and mentioned, if not a ratto, at least a grosso topo or a topo di chiavica.
Now let us suppose that one has to translate How now! A rat? from Hamlet (Act III, scene iv) into Italian. As far as I know, every Italian version translates it as Cosa c’è, un topo? or Come? Un topo? A rigorous translator should check in an old dictionary whether in Shakespeare’s time rat meant, as Webster’s says today, ‘any of numerous rodents (Rattus and related genera) differing from the related mice by considerably larger size and by structural details’, adding that a rat can also be ‘a contemptible person’ (and that to smell a rat means to realise that there is a secret plot).
In fact Shakespeare, at least in Richard III, used rat as an insult. However, in Italian the word ratto has no connotation of ‘contemptible person’, and rather suggests (though improperly) speed (ratto as an adjective means ‘speedy’). Moreover, in every situation in which someone is frightened by a rodent (when, according to a vaudeville tradition, women jump upon a chair and men grasp a broom to kill the intruder) the usual scream is un topo! and not un ratto!
I decide that Hamlet, in order to kill Polonius, did not need to know if there was a mouse or a rat behind that arras, and that the word topo accurately suggests surprise, instinctive alarm, and an impulse to kill. For all these reasons I accept the usual translation: Cosa c’è? Un topo?
If in Camus’s case it was indispensable to make the size of that rodent clear, and it had to be a rat, for the imagined animal in Hamlet it was more important to stress its sudden passage and the nervous reaction it elicited (and justified).
In making my decision I have not only relied upon definitions, contextual selections or long lists of interpretants provided by dictionaries and encyclopaedias. We have negotiated which portion of the expressed content was strictly pertinent in that given context.
This notion of negotiation will dominate my next essays. Between the purely theoretical argument that, since languages are differently structured, translation is impossible, and the commonsensical acknowledgement that people, in this world, after all, do translate and understand each other, it seems to me that the idea of translation as a process of negotiation (between author and text, between author and readers, as well as between the structure of two languages and the encyclopaedias of two cultures) is the only one that matches our experience.
When speaking of negotiation I do not mean to suggest a sort of deconstructionist idea according to which, since translation is a matter of negotiation, there are no lexical or textual rules that can be used as a parameter for telling an acceptable from a bad or incorrect translation.
The possibility, and even the advisability of a negotiation does not exclude the presence of rules or of conventions. One can negotiate the price of a carpet in an Oriental bazaar and succeed in paying half of the requested sum just because both the seller and the buyer know that a carpet does not cost more than X or less than Y. If the seller asks ten thousand pounds for an apple or the buyer offers one pound for a car, then there will not be any bargain. But if in Hamlet I need a rodent that generally makes people scream, a topo or a mouse is enough even though I lose other properties (size, for instance, or risk of plague) that on the contrary should be
