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Translating Style: The English Modernists and Their Italian Translations
A work of literary criticism, this text provides both an analysis of the literary style of some of the 20th century's leading writers as well as an insight into the art of translation. Tim Parks is a novelist and professional translator and seeks to show through detailed analysis what it really means to translate literary style. Combining literary and linguistic approaches, the book proceeds, through a series of interconnected chapters, to analyze Italian translations of the works of Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym.
- GenresNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
3 people are currently reading
81 people want to read
About the author
Tim Parks
121 books585 followersBorn in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work.
Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.
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September 2, 2017
Not so much a review as a collection of random notes and quotes:
''[Kundera] speaks of a tendency among translators to reject repetition, to use literary vocabulary where the original text was spare and simple; in short, to prefer belles lettres to 'stylistic transgression'. Their 'supreme authority', Kundera insists, should be the author's 'personal style'. But most translators obey another authority, that of the conventional version of 'good French'.
''The translator will often find that normalizing the text is the only way forward. Obsessed with the importance of maintaining his identity across the globe, Kundera, one has to feel, is being ingenuous about the possibilities of translation.''
''I have found over the years that the tendency to sacrifice semantic precision and above all stylistic provocation in translation is almost universal and probably inevitable.''
''Elfrieda Jelinek [...] remarked that she could not understand how her writing could work in translation, so heavily does it depend on puns and intertextual references that only German speakers could catch.''
Yet having said all that, Parks goes to a great deal of effort to analyse numerous cases where the translator has 'normalized' idiosyncratic language, long after the reader has ‘got the point’. What seems clear is that below a certain threshold of clarity and intelligibility the translator has to make do and mend one way or another. And yet I found that the option of compensation, (e.g. representing one untranslatable pun or idiolectal utterance with another one elsewhere in the same passage) remains relatively unexplored in this book.
Still the reader does not need a profound knowledge of Italian (thanks to the back translations) to obtain numerous practical tips from this book, not to mention a deeper appreciation of modernists like Lawrence, Woolf and Joyce.
"If there is one thing that is astonishing in translation studies, it is its tendency to concentrate on linguistic theory or publishing politics, or to focus on single, separate and usually insuperable translation problems, while forgetting how literature works, as a gathering web of implication and suggestion where everything qualifies everything else. Hence every decision must be taken with the whole in mind."
"The translator must read with the sensibility of the very best literary critic to have any chance at all of capturing the essential traits of a complex text."
"Once he or she has fully grasped the impossibility of the translator's task, [the translator] is free to fail gloriously.”
"In translation the very element that most distinguised [...] authors, the linguistic individuality ('idiolect', Steiner says) that provoked their critics and electrified their readers, that friction between individual expression and collective language, is [...] largely and inevitably lost. The book becomes something else, something understood with in the values and dynamics of another language and culture. Even the best translation is a total transformation.''
Unhousedness:
“In a statement as arrogant as it is stimulating, George Steiner, in After Babel, remarks: ‘The principal division in the history of Western literature occurs between the early 1870s and the turn of the century. It divides a literature essentially housed in language from one for which language has become a prison’. Developing his argument, Steiner claims: ‘A classic literacy is defined by this “housedness” in language, by the assumption that, used with the requisite penetration and suppleness, available words and grammar will do the job’. Concluding, he says of the situation post-1870: ‘When literature seeks to break its public linguistic mould and become idiolect, when it seeks untranslatability, we have entered a new world of feeling’. Important for our purposes here is Steiner’s perception that idiolect is necessarily untranslatable.”
“Lawrence’s position here would seem to confirm Steiner’s intuition: the author is telling us that publicly approved literary language will no longer do for him. But given that any move towards private forms of expression is a move towards untranslatability (as we have already seen with an expression like ‘shut himself together’), what of the translator? Can Lawrence’s stylistic idiosyncrasies be translated? Can one establish in another language the same and specifically ‘Lawrentian’ distance between individual voice and ordinary usage, a distance that contemporary critics certainly noted, otherwise they would not, almost unanimously, have complained of it. Or, alternatively, is this a problem the translator can safely ignore? Perhaps these idiosyncrasies do not mean anything. Perhaps, given that Lawrence was so frequently criticized for his style, the translation may be better than the original to the extent that it eliminates individual tics and returns the text to a publicly approved style. Certainly the early Italian translator Vittorini frequently chose to ‘improve on’ what he felt was Lawrence’s inelegance”
“There is a danger of translating very local vocabulary with equally local vocabulary in the target language (‘hornpipe’ becomes ‘tarantella’ on the first page, a specifically southern European dance with various connotations not there in the English). But in general Pavese avoids this trap, for culture-specific language in the translation would make us start thinking of Naples or Rome, rather than Ireland, whereas the experience described is an Irish experience not an Italian one.”
“It is normal practice in translation to look for the way something ‘would be said’ in one’s own language. The process often involves the introduction or omission of small pieces of information of the ‘tra poco’ (soon/in a short while) variety, perhaps in order to establish a desired rhythm. However, we may Tim Parks 113 note that the balder English more strongly foregrounds the symbolic gesture of the removal of the doors, while the lack of precise information helps to give the impression of a mind (Mrs Dalloway’s) at work on its own, rather than a narrator attentive to the reader’s need for information.”
Semantic segmentation -- some very Italian issues?
“The translation of ‘romance’ as ‘avventura’ (affair/adventure) is the result of a real problem of semantic segmentation. Italian just does not have such a strong and at the same time innocent word as the English ‘romance’. Obliged to choose between ‘passione’ (passion), ‘storia’ (affair), ‘amore’ (love) and ‘avventura’ (affair, with a lighter sense than ‘storia’), the translator is forced to interpret the nature of that relationship and in so doing certainly shifts the tone a little, but it is hard to see how this could have been avoided (perhaps the word ‘amore’ might have been preferable to the potentially squalid ‘avventura’ – affair).”
An interesting point on biblical allusions in Italian. There is a lack of a “recognizable biblical style”. “ Such associations are not readily signalled in a language whose translations of the Bible are not so well-established and never had an important influence on Italian literary style. It’s worth remembering that as recently as the 1860s a man was condemned to death in Rome for reading the Bible in Italian rather than Latin”
''[Kundera] speaks of a tendency among translators to reject repetition, to use literary vocabulary where the original text was spare and simple; in short, to prefer belles lettres to 'stylistic transgression'. Their 'supreme authority', Kundera insists, should be the author's 'personal style'. But most translators obey another authority, that of the conventional version of 'good French'.
''The translator will often find that normalizing the text is the only way forward. Obsessed with the importance of maintaining his identity across the globe, Kundera, one has to feel, is being ingenuous about the possibilities of translation.''
''I have found over the years that the tendency to sacrifice semantic precision and above all stylistic provocation in translation is almost universal and probably inevitable.''
''Elfrieda Jelinek [...] remarked that she could not understand how her writing could work in translation, so heavily does it depend on puns and intertextual references that only German speakers could catch.''
Yet having said all that, Parks goes to a great deal of effort to analyse numerous cases where the translator has 'normalized' idiosyncratic language, long after the reader has ‘got the point’. What seems clear is that below a certain threshold of clarity and intelligibility the translator has to make do and mend one way or another. And yet I found that the option of compensation, (e.g. representing one untranslatable pun or idiolectal utterance with another one elsewhere in the same passage) remains relatively unexplored in this book.
Still the reader does not need a profound knowledge of Italian (thanks to the back translations) to obtain numerous practical tips from this book, not to mention a deeper appreciation of modernists like Lawrence, Woolf and Joyce.
"If there is one thing that is astonishing in translation studies, it is its tendency to concentrate on linguistic theory or publishing politics, or to focus on single, separate and usually insuperable translation problems, while forgetting how literature works, as a gathering web of implication and suggestion where everything qualifies everything else. Hence every decision must be taken with the whole in mind."
"The translator must read with the sensibility of the very best literary critic to have any chance at all of capturing the essential traits of a complex text."
"Once he or she has fully grasped the impossibility of the translator's task, [the translator] is free to fail gloriously.”
"In translation the very element that most distinguised [...] authors, the linguistic individuality ('idiolect', Steiner says) that provoked their critics and electrified their readers, that friction between individual expression and collective language, is [...] largely and inevitably lost. The book becomes something else, something understood with in the values and dynamics of another language and culture. Even the best translation is a total transformation.''
Unhousedness:
“In a statement as arrogant as it is stimulating, George Steiner, in After Babel, remarks: ‘The principal division in the history of Western literature occurs between the early 1870s and the turn of the century. It divides a literature essentially housed in language from one for which language has become a prison’. Developing his argument, Steiner claims: ‘A classic literacy is defined by this “housedness” in language, by the assumption that, used with the requisite penetration and suppleness, available words and grammar will do the job’. Concluding, he says of the situation post-1870: ‘When literature seeks to break its public linguistic mould and become idiolect, when it seeks untranslatability, we have entered a new world of feeling’. Important for our purposes here is Steiner’s perception that idiolect is necessarily untranslatable.”
“Lawrence’s position here would seem to confirm Steiner’s intuition: the author is telling us that publicly approved literary language will no longer do for him. But given that any move towards private forms of expression is a move towards untranslatability (as we have already seen with an expression like ‘shut himself together’), what of the translator? Can Lawrence’s stylistic idiosyncrasies be translated? Can one establish in another language the same and specifically ‘Lawrentian’ distance between individual voice and ordinary usage, a distance that contemporary critics certainly noted, otherwise they would not, almost unanimously, have complained of it. Or, alternatively, is this a problem the translator can safely ignore? Perhaps these idiosyncrasies do not mean anything. Perhaps, given that Lawrence was so frequently criticized for his style, the translation may be better than the original to the extent that it eliminates individual tics and returns the text to a publicly approved style. Certainly the early Italian translator Vittorini frequently chose to ‘improve on’ what he felt was Lawrence’s inelegance”
“There is a danger of translating very local vocabulary with equally local vocabulary in the target language (‘hornpipe’ becomes ‘tarantella’ on the first page, a specifically southern European dance with various connotations not there in the English). But in general Pavese avoids this trap, for culture-specific language in the translation would make us start thinking of Naples or Rome, rather than Ireland, whereas the experience described is an Irish experience not an Italian one.”
“It is normal practice in translation to look for the way something ‘would be said’ in one’s own language. The process often involves the introduction or omission of small pieces of information of the ‘tra poco’ (soon/in a short while) variety, perhaps in order to establish a desired rhythm. However, we may Tim Parks 113 note that the balder English more strongly foregrounds the symbolic gesture of the removal of the doors, while the lack of precise information helps to give the impression of a mind (Mrs Dalloway’s) at work on its own, rather than a narrator attentive to the reader’s need for information.”
Semantic segmentation -- some very Italian issues?
“The translation of ‘romance’ as ‘avventura’ (affair/adventure) is the result of a real problem of semantic segmentation. Italian just does not have such a strong and at the same time innocent word as the English ‘romance’. Obliged to choose between ‘passione’ (passion), ‘storia’ (affair), ‘amore’ (love) and ‘avventura’ (affair, with a lighter sense than ‘storia’), the translator is forced to interpret the nature of that relationship and in so doing certainly shifts the tone a little, but it is hard to see how this could have been avoided (perhaps the word ‘amore’ might have been preferable to the potentially squalid ‘avventura’ – affair).”
An interesting point on biblical allusions in Italian. There is a lack of a “recognizable biblical style”. “ Such associations are not readily signalled in a language whose translations of the Bible are not so well-established and never had an important influence on Italian literary style. It’s worth remembering that as recently as the 1860s a man was condemned to death in Rome for reading the Bible in Italian rather than Latin”
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