An outsider's guide to Italy: translating an Englishman's Italy into Italian
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13645145.2012.682818
ISSN1755-7550
Autores Tópico(s)European Cultural and National Identity
ResumoAbstract Outsiders’ autobiographical reflections on Italy and Italians often seek to ‘translate’ the country for anglophone readers, helping them to get to know and make sense of a foreign culture. Such texts are rarely translated into Italian and thus do not generally reach readers in the country of which they speak. Two contemporary English authors whose writings on life in Italy have been translated into Italian are Tim Parks (Italian Neighbours) and Tobias Jones (The Dark Heart of Italy). This article analyses textual and paratextual features of these works in English and in Italian translation, in order to identify the kinds of changes in content, presentation and perspective that take place as the books travel ‘back’ into the Italian context. Audience expectations and sensitivities, as well as the writers’ bicultural expertise and authority, are negotiated in a complex process of repackaging and rewriting. Keywords: travel and translationcultural translationlife writinglong-term settlementcontemporary Italian politics, culture and societyTobias JonesTim Parks Notes 1. James Moran (writer) and Colin Teague (director), ‘The Fires of Pompeii’, Doctor Who (BBC, series 4, episode 2, 2008). 2. See, for example, Susan Bassnett, ‘When Is a Translation Not a Translation?’, in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), 25–40 (33–6); Michael Cronin, Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 100; Mirella Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: Women, Translation and Travel Writing 1739–1797 (Manchester: St Jerome, 2002), 90–5. 3. Loredana Polezzi, Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 79. 4. In her case study of Louise Hamilton Caico's Sicilian Ways and Days Giorgia Alù describes a somewhat similar case of a work of travel writing being translated ‘back’ into the language and culture from which it originated, and subsequently leaving traces in the culture it described. See Giorgia Alù, Beyond the Traveller's Gaze: Expatriate Ladies Writing in Sicily (1848–1910) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 161–7. 5. Beppe Severgnini, La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind, trans. Giles Watson (New York: Broadway Books, 2006), 2–3. 6. See, for example, Manfred Pfister's edited collection of five centuries of British writing about Italy, The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers: An Annotated Anthology (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). 7. Manfred Pfister, ‘Introduction’, in The Fatal Gift of Beauty, 2–21 (3); Agorni, Translating Italy, 101–5. 8. Tim Parks, Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona [1992] (London: Vintage, 2001). The book has a different subtitle in US editions: Italian Neighbors, or, A Lapsed Anglo-Saxon in Verona. 9. Tim Parks, An Italian Education (London: Minerva, 1996); A Season with Verona (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002). Both these books have also been translated into Italian, but for reasons of space, they are not examined here. 10. Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy [2003] (New York: North Point Press, 2005). 11. Tobias Jones, ‘My Italian T.V. Hell’, Financial Times, January 28, 2003, 1. 12. Tobias Jones, The Salati Case (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) and White Death (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). 13. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1 (original emphasis). 14. Keith Harvey, ‘“Events” and “Horizons”: Reading Ideology in the “Bindings” of Translations’, in Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology – Ideologies in Translation Studies, ed. María Calzada Pérez (Manchester: St Jerome, 2003), 43–69. Other studies of paratext in the context of translation include Michael Haase, ‘Framing the Brothers Grimm: Paratexts and Intercultural Transmission in Postwar English-language Editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen’, Fabula: Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung / Journal of Folktale Studies 44, no. 1–2 (2003): 55–69; Urpo Kovala, ‘Translations, Paratextual Mediation, and Ideological Closure’, Target 8, no. 1 (1996): 119–47; Carol O'sullivan, ‘Translation, Pseudotranslation and Paratext: The Presentation of Contemporary Crime Fiction Set in Italy’, EnterText Supplement 4, no. 3 (2004/05): 62–76. 15. Harvey, ‘“Events” and “Horizons”’, 68–9. 16. Tim Parks, Italiani, trans. Rita Baldassarre [1995] (Bologna: Bompiani, 2002). Throughout this article, translations and back-translations in square brackets are my own. 17. Gustav Ineichen, ‘Considerazioni sulla traduzione dei titoli’, in Retorica e scienze del linguaggio, ed. Federico Albano Leoni and M. Rosaria Pigliasco (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979), 185–91. 18. Tobias Jones, Il cuore oscuro dell’Italia: un viaggio tra odio e amore, trans. Chicca Galli (Milan: Rizzoli, 2003). 19. Only two years earlier, on 26 April, 2001, The Economist had created a stir in Italy with a cover image bearing the headline ‘Why Silvio Berlusconi is unfit to lead Italy’. By eschewing explicit visual clues as to this aspect of the book, the cover design also helps avoid provoking Italian scepticism or discomfort about yet another foreigner condemning Berlusconi and – by implication – the Italian voters and political system that allowed him to be elected. 20. Indeed, Mark Chu has observed that even works of fiction by Parks and other expatriate anglophones in Italy tend to be accorded a degree of truth when it comes to setting simply because of the authors’ apparent bicultural expertise. See Mark Chu, ‘Someone Else's Southerner: Opposed Essences in the “Italian” Novels of Michael Dibdin, Magdalen Nabb, and Tim Parks’, in Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture Since 1945, ed. Anne Mullen and Emer O’Beirne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 75–87 (77). 21. The word paese can mean either ‘country’ (nation) or ‘village’. Here it is likely Parks intends ‘country’, but the ambiguity is not out of place given the textual changes discussed in the next section, whereby comments about Italy as a whole are made more localised in the translation. 22. Pfister, ‘Introduction’, 4. 23. Alù, Beyond the Traveller's Gaze, 249. 24. Chu, ‘Someone Else's Southerner’, 85. 25. Cronin, Across the Lines, 18. 26. In fact, when I purchased these two translations from the Feltrinelli bookshop in Bologna, a staff member told me somewhat resentfully, ‘These people go to Parma or Verona and they think they can write a book about the whole of Italy!’. 27. Paul Hofmann, ‘Not Quite at Home on the Via Colombare’, New York Times, July 26, 1992, Books, available online at http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/books/not-quite-at-home-on-the-via-colombare.html (accessed November 25, 2010). 28. For a collection of studies of the various agents involved in the circulation of translated writing, including translators, editors, publishers, patrons and politicians, see John Milton and Paul Bandia, eds., Agents of Translation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009). 29. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens’ [1923], trans. Harry Zohn, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2004), 75–85. 30. The concept of cultural key words is explored in detail by Anna Wierzbicka in Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German and Japanese (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 31. Bassnett, ‘When Is a Translation’, 33–36; Cronin, Across the Lines, 42. 32. Polezzi, Translating Travel, 83. 33. For a discussion of how Parks seeks – not always successfully – to reflect on both Italian cultural values and his own Anglo-Saxon cultural background in An Italian Education, see Mary Besemeres, ‘Language and Emotional Experience: The Voice of Translingual Memoir’, in Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation, ed. Aneta Pavlenko (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006), 34–58 (44–47). 34. Agorni, Translating Italy, 95. 35. It has been observed that Peter Mayle, too, uses ‘excessively direct or arcanely idiosyncratic translations’ to make his subjects, the people of Provence, comprehensible to Anglophone readers of his travel writing. See Joanne P. Sharp, ‘Writing over the Map of Provence: The Touristic Therapy of A Year in Provence’, in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. James Duncan and Derek Gregory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 200–18 (204). 36. Michael Cronin, ‘Knowing One's Place: Travel, Difference and Translation’, Translation Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 334–48 (347). On the ‘space in-between’ occupied by both travel writing and translation, see also James Duncan and Derek Gregory, ‘Introduction’, in Writes of Passage, 1–13 (4–5). 37. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 4–5. 38. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995) on the pervasive preference in Anglophone publishing for a ‘fluent’ and ‘invisible’ style of translation that masks the very presence of translation. 39. For a discussion of the reception of an Italian migrant's memoir about Australia translated ‘back’ into (Australian) English, see Brigid Maher, Recreation and Style: Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and English (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 21–49.
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