A cura di Marco Sonzogni
Questa rubrica de La Libellula accoglie riflessioni sulla teoria e pratica della traduzione (letteraria) in forma di commento o appunti in margine a nuovi orientamenti teorici o traduzioni appena completate o ancora in progress. Questo spazio è nato in omaggio a uno dei più grandi traduttori di letteratura italiana, William Weaver (1923), che teneva un “diario di bordo” per ogni suo lavoro (memorabile quello relativo ai romanzi di Eco, soprattutto Il nome della rosa). M.S
The colour of Politics and the Politics of Translation: Shades of Black in Finnegans Wake
Marco Sonzogni
in memoriam Gus Martin (1935-1995) and Luigi Schenoni (1935-2008)
«My father wanted me to take Greek, my mother German, and my friends Irish. Result I took Italian»
James Joyce
«The understanding of the task of the translator and the practice of the craft are related but different»
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
«The truth is that Joyce didn’t give a damn about all our problems of translation»
Umberto Eco
A cliché of translation is that the translated text, in one way or another, is inevitably worse than the original. I believe that there are exceptions: sometimes at macro-level and more often at micro-level – a passage, a sentence, a single word even. By way of introduction to a discussion of literary translation in connection with colours and politics, let us look at the English original of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. In one of the several passages where the dialogue is in Italian, Robert Langdon and his female companion, Vittoria Vetra, encounter «a cloaked couple»: two elderly women, irate that they had to leave early the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome because «some man had appeared and told them the church was closing early». When Vittoria asks them whether they knew the man, they shake their heads and explain that the man was «a straniero crudo», which literally means ‘an uncooked foreigner’. In the Italian translation of the novel, however, we read the correct «uno straniero maleducato» (‘a rude foreigner’) – an example where the translation of Dan Brown’s original idea of an ill-mannered stranger into nonsensical Italian has been rectified by the conversion of the whole text into Italian. Never mind, let us turn to a different brown altogether…
* * * * *
So let us look at the etymology, meanings and uses of the adjective brown. The Oxford English Dictionary, states that the etymology of brown bridges Germanic and Romance languages, from the Old English brún to the modern German braun; from the Latin brūnus to the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese bruno. In terms of meaning, brown may be used 1) as poetic synonym of dusky and dark; 2) as the proper name of a composite colour produced by a mixture of orange and black (or of red, yellow, and black), and varying greatly in shade according to the proportion of the constituents (brown is the colour produced by partial charring or carbonization of starch or woody fibre, as in toasted bread or potatoes, peat, lignite, withered leaves); 3) to denote racial characteristic, describing the colour of the skin; 4) with reference to the sword, steel, etc., meaning burnished, glistening. Composite words include the alliterating ‘brown bastard’, which is a variety of sweet wine, and above all «brown bag», which is a plain brown paper-bag used especially to lack and carry lunch into a work-place or meeting (a chiefly N. Amer. usage). In fact, we are now going to deal with «brown envelope» and «brown paper».
«The “brown envelope” culture in Irish politics» – writes Conor O’Cleary in an article titled
Will corrupt leaders get their due? and published in
The GlobalPost – «was an open secret in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s but the parties were protected by a culture of
omertà». The significance of the use of the Italian word
omertà is self-evident: as a synonym of what can be loosely translated as ‘convenient silence’ – usually associated with knowing about, or having witnessed, an unlawful or dubious activity (especially linked to the operations of the mafia) – its meaning is now universal and so there is no need for translation.
For the sake of argument, let us imagine that this passage were to be translated into Italian. How would one render «brown envelope»? This expression is used in government, business and popular culture to refer to the delivery of ‘concealed material’ – be it bribe money, top-secret documents or any kind of ‘under the table’ exchange. In the 1980s BBC television sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, for example, Sir Humphrey Appleby makes use of it.
Now, looking at the last thirty years of Italian politics, up to and including the present day, the word tangente is the obvious choice. Yet its geometrical connotations do not really make it the perfect translation. As explained in the Dizionario etimologico italiano, tangente derives from the Latin tangens, tangent-em, pr. pple. of tangĕre, which means to touch and is used to describe «a straight line which touches a curve (or curved surface), i.e. meets it at a point and being produced does not (ordinarily) intersect it at that point». The word bustarella is, to my mind, a better option. A diminutive form of busta – linked by some to the Greek word for bag, bustra, and by others to the Greek word for box, búxida – bustarella literally means ‘little envelope’ and refers especially to an envelope stuffed with money (English dictionaries translate it as ‘bribe’ or ‘backhander’)… Then again, I don’t think bustarella captures ‘brown envelope’ perfectly, because it lacks a colour.
Never mind the brown envelope, let us turn instead to brown paper and consider the following lines:
Buy a book in brown paper
from Faber and Faber
to see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper
sevensins in her singthings
Plurabelle on her prose
seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.
James Joyce wrote this text in 1930 as a ‘publicity jingle’ for Faber & Faber’s publication of Anna Livia Plurabelle – the fluvial instalment of his new work in progress, which would come out in its entirety almost a decade later, with the same publisher but with a new title: Finnegans Wake (1939). As one can infer from the last line, the pre-text of these lines is the lyrics of an English nursery rhyme, Ride a cock horse:
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
to see a fine lady upon a white horse
with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
she shall have music wherever she goes.
Joyce cleverly parodies this nursery rhyme to celebrate his Irish «donniccioula» – as Joyce himself refers to Anna Livia Plurabelle in his 26 March 1940 letter to one of his Italian translators, Ettore Settanni – in place of an English lady, Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth I of England.
Now, I have only recently come across this jingle reading John Mullan’s article on T.S. Eliot’s editorial career at Faber & Faber, titled Style Council and published in The Guardian. When archival and bibliographical research did not produce any reference to existing Italian translations of it, I decided that this would be my first foray in translating Joyce – immediately feeling the pressure of joining a long list of skilful translators like Carlo Linati, Cesare Pavese, Luigi Schenoni, Daniele Benati.
For the moment, I would like to consider the first line (I will return to this poem later). In the first draft, I translated «a book in brown paper» as «un libretto marrone». As it happened, browsing in a Dublin bookshop some years ago, I came across and bought the book in question: Faber & Faber’s first edition of Anna Livia Plurabelle in the Criterion Miscellany Series (No. 15): 32 pages in total, A5 format, red ink on brown cover, originally sold at one shilling net (a figure that in the intervening years had soared to four hundred euro…). The brown paper Joyce refers to, is that used for the covers – the colour of the paper on which the text is printed is the traditional cream-white. So I felt justified in making a number of adjustments in my translation: change libro to libretto, so as to reflect the actual size; do away with carta and simply juxtapose the adjective marrone. I felt that the literal translation – un libro in carta marrone – would have given an inaccurate description in terms of both size and colour. Then again, that is what Joyce wrote, I reminded myself, and so I begun to reconsider my decisions, even though I didn’t really see many alternatives apart from adopting a literal translation. One possible change was to replace carta with copertina: Un libro dalla copertina marrone, which would make the first line not only longer (in the original this line is quite short and direct) but also slower because of the cumbersome dalla. In the end, I decided to keep carta (half the number of syllables) and try bruna instead of marrone (one syllable shorter): Un libro in carta bruna. For some reason, the adjective bruno – though acoustically (and etymologically) close to the English brown – did not convince me. But it took little to persuade me of its legitimacy.
Bruno, in fact, has a powerful literary pedigree. Dante uses it in Canto XXVI of Purgatorio. The setting of this canto is the Seventh Terrace, where Dante and Virgil encounter the spiriti of the Lustful. Divided into two groups, those who pursued natural lust and those who instead indulged in unnatural lust, these souls are attracted to Dante because, being still alive, he leaves a shadow as the sun strikes him. Two of them, the Italian poet Guido Guinizzelli and the Provençal poet Daniel Arnaut, converse with him. Dante likens the Lustful and their movements to a flock of migrating cranes and to a brown file of ants: «così per entro loro schiera bruna | s’ammusa l’una con l’altra formica, | forse a spiar lor via e lor fortuna» (Purg XXVI 34-36).
Now, the image of the schiera bruna is borrowed by Primo Levi, who quotes Dante verbatim in his 1980 eponymous poem:
Schiera bruna
Si potrebbe scegliere un percorso più assurdo?
In corso San Martino c’è un formicaio
a mezzo metro dai binari del tram,
e proprio sulla battuta della rotaia
si dipana una lunga schiera bruna,
s’ammusa l’una con l’altra formica
forse a spiar lor via e lor fortuna.
Insomma, queste stupide sorelle
ostinate lunatiche operose
hanno scavato la loro città nella nostra,
tracciato il loro binario sul nostro,
e vi corrono senza sospetto
infaticabili dietro i boro tenui commerci
senza curarsi di
non lo voglio scrivere,
non voglio scrivere di questa schiera,
non voglio scrivere di nessuna schiera bruna.
13 agosto 1980
For over a year I have been working with the American literary translator Harry Thomas on a daunting project: to produce a new English translation of Levi’s Collected Poems (an incomplete selection of Levi’s poems in Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann’s translation was published by Faber & Faber in 1988). When we came to translate this poem (not included in Feldman and Swann’s selection), we were mindful of the presence of Dante (which is referenced in a note at the bottom of the page in the Einaudi edition of Levi’s Collected Works but omitted in the Garzanti edition of Ad ora incerta). So much so that not only did we consider inserting an established English translation of the quotation from Purgatorio but also making it visible as a quotation by writing the lines in italics, and thus alerting the reader to the intertexual reference. We looked at two (complete) American translations of the Commedia, separated by over a century: Allen Mandelbaum’s (1982) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1867). In Mandelbaum’s translation, schiera bruna is given as «dark company»; in Longfellow’s, as «brown battalions». Now, both are powerful and evocative, but Longfellow’s is ominously poignant.
«Brown battalions» appears in the lyrics of a German song,
Die Fahne hoch!: «Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen | Die Straße frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann!». Penned in 1929 by
Horst Wessel – a Nazi activist and local commander of the Nazi militia, the
SA, in the Berlin district of
Friedrichshain – this
lied, also known with its opening line, was the anthem of the
Nazi Party from 1930 to 1945. When the Nazis came to power in 1933,
Die Fahne hoch! or
Horst-Wessel-Lied was declared by law (
May 19,
1933) a national symbol and was used as co-national anthem. Thus Nazi Germany had effectively a double anthem: the first verse of the
Deutschlandlied was followed by the
Horst Wessel-Lied. The printed version of the
Horst Wessel-Lied in 1934 was accompanied by a directive requiring that the right arm be raised in a ‘
Hitler salute’ when the first and fourth verses were sung (top Nazi leaders are seen singing the song at the end of
Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film
Triumph of the Will). Following the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945, the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ was banned and its tune and lyrics are illegal in Germany and Austria to this day (except for educational and scholarly uses under sections 86 and
86a of the
Strafgesetzbuch, Germany).
It is plausible that Levi knew (heard?) the Horst-Vessel Lied – whether before, during or after his imprisonment at Auschwitz does not really matter. And even though he admitted to knowing ‘little German’ when he entered the camp, Levi also stated that he ‘made an effort to learn it as well and as quickly as possible’ because survival could depend on speaking the language. Thus braunen Battaillonen may have come to share the same space in Levi’s memory as Dante’s schiera bruna (what the image represents, however, is likely to differ greatly from both sources: in the poem, in fact, Levi talks about a file of ants dangerously marching on the tracks of Turin’s tram-tracks in Corso San Martino; besides, who do these sisters – described by Levi as «stupid», «nervous», «obstinate», «industrious» and «indefatigable» – actually represent? Do they stand for the Jewish people or any persecuted people waiting to meet a cruel destiny…?).
Now, back to the translation, in the end we decided to follow Levi and fully integrate the reference to Dante in the text. Thus we came up with our own translation instead of inserting an existing one. For schiera bruna, however, we opted for Longfellow’s version. So here is our translation:
Brown Battalion
Is it possible to adopt a more absurd route?
In San Martino Street there is an anthill
half a meter from the streetcar line,
and right there at the base of one of the rails
a long brown battalion of ants is unwinding.
Muzzle to muzzle one ant meets another,
perhaps to learn news of their journeys or fortune.
In short, these stupid sisters
nervous obstinate industrious
have excavated their city inside our city,
mapped out their line of tracks beside our tracks.
and they run over ours without suspecting,
taking no notice…
I don’t want to write it,
indefatigable in their precarious business,
I don’t want to write about this brown battalion.
I don’t want to write about any brown battalion.
August 13, 1980
The translation of brown envelope and brown paper, by comparison, suddenly seems a trivial matter. Yet it has triggered a course of intertextual associations and readings whereby two great authors of the twentieth century, Joyce and Levi, have been linked to one of the greatest masters of the past, Dante, through a seemingly unimportant adjective of colour. This illustrates how literary translation should always be approached as an exercise in comparative literature and how scholarship and creativity, intertextuality and individuality are indissoluble as well as indispensable.
* * * * *
As Michael Cronin convincingly argues throughout Translation and Globalisation (2003), «a primary function of literary translation in a global age is to replenish the intertextual resources of a culture». Thus the purpose of comparative literature should be precisely to inform literary translation – and also literary theory – of every opportunity to engage in a cross-cultural dialogue and through it to enhance the capital of intertextual resources that source and target systems can share.
During the last decade or so, debates on cultural politics have insistently questioned the nature and purpose of comparative literature. According to Spivak, comparative literature is a dying discipline in need of a makeover. To this topic she has dedicated a series of lectures in critical theory (The Wellek Library Lectures), published under the ominous title Death of Discipline (2003). Moving from Bernheimer’s Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (1995) and from Volkman’s Revitalizing Area Studies (1997), Spivak calls for a renewed commitment to comparative literature and proposes up-to-date guidelines to reformulate the domain(s) and function(s) of the discipline. The content of her arguments is more encouraging that the title would lead to believe. Deeply rooted in post-colonial theory, militant gender studies and cultural politics based on the notions of «crossing borders», «collectivities» and «planetarity», the range of Spivak’s analysis is challenging. The scope and implications of her understanding of comparative literature – from Dante to Derrida; from Democracy to Doctors without Frontiers – go beyond the present discussion. Instead, I would like to discuss three other contemporary scholars who have remapped the subject and functions of comparative literature in general and in particular its political perspective. These scholars are Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch and Franco Moretti. Their considerations affect, albeit indirectly, translation.
In La république mondiale des lettres (1999), the French scholar Casanova identifies nationalism as the virus responsible for the flaws of comparative literature. She claims that it is necessary «to change our ordinary way of looking at literary phenomena», arguing that «as a result of the appropriation of literatures and literary histories by political nations during the nineteenth century», even though one is not always aware of it, «our literary unconscious is largely national» and therefore the «instruments of analysis and evaluations are national». Casanova concludes that «the study of literature almost everywhere in the world is organized along national lines». It follows that translations too are to be domesticated so as to be fully integrated in the national canon.
Now, lifting this national bias in favour of a world republic of letters has its own limits. As the American scholar David Damrosch points out in What is World Literature? (2003), «a-national ambitions» can backfire. Some scholars maintain that literary works across cultures exemplify what Northrop Frye defines as «archetypes» or «invariants», using the term recently proposed by the French comparatist Étiemble. In his polemic Ouverture(s) sur un comparatisme planétaire (1988) Étiemble suggests that common literary patterns must provide the necessary basis for any truly global understanding of literature. Yet, argues Damrosh, «such universals quickly shade into vague generalities that hold less appeal today, at a time when ideals of melting-pot harmony have faded in favour». Scholars of world literature, Damrosh warns, run the risk of becoming «little more than the literary eco-tourists described by Susan Lanser, who dwell mentally in one or two (usually Western) countries, summer metaphorically in a third, and visit other places for brief interludes». In this context, foreignised translations can become privileged sites of literary ecotourism.
In La letteratura vista da lontano (2005), the Italian scholar Franco Moretti has outlined an alternative approach to literature, which he refers to as distant reading (as opposed to close reading). Contrary to New Historicism and Cultural Studies, which turned to other domains, the object of this alternative way of reading, argues Moretti, remains literature, which is seen from the distance. What this means is that close reading is replaced with reflections on artificial objects: charts, maps, trees. Now, these different objects are all the result of a deliberate process of reduction or abstraction: in other words, of a detachment from the text in its concreteness. Moretti refers to this method as distant reading, where distance is not an obstacle to knowledge but one of its specific forms. And if on one hand distance blurs details, as Moretti candidly admits, on the other it enables one to better understand «the relationships, the patterns, the forms».
The awareness that distant reading can come at the expense of the detail, in my opinion, signals the limit of this theory of comparative literature. The most worrying consequence, I would argue, is the progressive departure from the primary text and neutralisation of its specific linguistic and cultural markers in lieu of an abstract interpretative model based on historical, mathematical and statistic readings derived from an ever-expanding network of secondary texts. Consequently, translation itself becomes, to a certain extent, unnecessary: an accessory meaningful only insofar as it provides information to be input into a pre-determined, pre-constructed paradigm.
Yet literature, as Spivak shrewdly observes, «contains the element of surprising the historical» and a literary text «produces the effect of being inevitable» and «the effect is what provokes reading, as transgression of the text». The generic morphology of Moretti’s distant reading ultimately underestimates, not to say overlooks, the surprising and the transgressive, which often act as important indicators of cultural difference and artistic individuality.
It is crucial that these opposing reading strategies and interpretative models – to put it bluntly, the French tradition of philosophy of text versus the German tradition of philology of text; the new school of distant reading versus the old school of close reading – come to converge rather than drive one another the opposite ends of the interpretative spectrum. As already remarked, literary translation is, in my opinion, the domain where this convergence is not only desirable but possible and necessary. All the more so if one deals with a writer like James Joyce.
* * * * *
Some books are translated once; some books are translated several or many times; some books resist or even defy translation. The works of Joyce fit into all of these categories. In most European languages, including Italian, there are different translations of Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Dubliners; Ulysses too has been translated in full, at least once; and so have his poems and his play. Finnegans Wake however – not surprisingly perhaps, in spite of the recently increased number of versions – has few complete translations. The actual translatability of this modernist masterpiece Finnegans Wake has been, and still is, the subject of heated debates among scholars. For my part I agree with those who believe that one can indeed attempt to climb the «turrace of Babbel» that is Finnegans Wake precisely because it is multilingual. Others, of course, like Susan Sontag, maintain that Finneagns Wake is «perhaps the only important book that can’t be translated… for the reason that it is not written in only one language». Then again, «despite its wealth of languages» as Eric Bulson claims on the basis of Joyce’s own observations, «Finnegans Wake is an Italian text». This assertion, as convincingly argued by Corinna Del Nero, is particularly true of Anna Livia Plurabelle (I viii), for which there exist three translations into Italian. The first two, done in 1938 and published in 1940, are partial and involved Joyce himself and two co-translators, Nino Frank and Ettore Settanni. The third, published in 1995, was painstakingly penned by Luigi Schenoni, who for over thirty years heroically worked on the first full translation of Finnegans Wake into Italian. His death has left the endeavour of a lifetime unfinished and big shoes to fill (as the growing number of undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Italy and elsewhere illustrate).
The charm of Finnegans Wake rests precisely in its inexhaustible and unsolvable multilingualism – a code that proved daunting even for the author himself (Joyce argued that an attempt at translating Finnegans Wade had to be made while he was still alive) and that calls for, but ultimately seems to elude, every effort to crack it. My own experience of this book – an intimidating and bewildering presence since 1996, when I first attempted to read it in tandem with Ulysses as a student of University College Dublin’s MA in Anglo-Irish Literature & Drama – is one of short-lived successes and long-lasting failures. Yet even the glimpse of an interpretative breakthrough calls for an unyielding commitment to every word, every letter even, of this impenetrable fortress.
The following incident shows how rewarding this endeavour can be, and how crucial to translation. These days, I often take Finnegans Wake on long distance travels precisely because its multilingual mayhem is a bounty of interpretative conundrums and consequently an endless reservoir of near-impossible challenges for the prospective translator. Now, on a recent flight I re-read once again ALP (I viii). When I read the menu, I noticed that the wine list included an unusual Italian wine from the Salento region in Puglia, southern Italy: namely, a Negroamaro (Niruamaru in the dialect of the region). This type of wine is produced from the darkest of grapes: its very name, in fact, is the combination of the Latin and Greek word for black: nigrum and maurós. Now, this Greek word immediately reminded me of an exclamation in ALP, «Mavro!»:
Dell me where, the fairy ferse time! I will if you listen. You know the dinkel dale of Luggelaw? Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his riverend name, (with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!) and one venersderg in junojuly, oso sweet and so cool and so limber she looked, Nance the Nixie, Nanon L’Escaut, in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown. By that Vale Vowclose’s lucydlac, the reignbeau’s heavenarches arronged orranged her. Afrothdizzying galbs, her enamelled eyes indergoading him on to the vierge violetian. Wish a wish! Why a why? Mavro!
Schenoni has translated «Mavro!» with the legitimate – but limited, in my opinion – «Mavriavvero!». The word «Mavro», in fact, contains a number of allusions which are missing from Schenoni’s translation. If the exclamation mavrone – from the Irish mo bhrón, which expresses sorrow or regret and can be loosely translated as ‘alas’, used for instance by W.B. Yeats in Countess Kathleen (iii 64: «The treasure-room is broken in | the door stands open and the gold is gone») as well as by Joyce himself, in Ulysses (II 191: «He waited: – And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst») and indeed in Finnegans Wake (II 232: «Stop up, mavrone, and sit in my lap») – is somehow preserved, the reference to the colour black is not. Right from the beginning of the ALP episode of Finnegans Wake, in fact, as the two washerwomen are washing, literally and metaphorically, their dirty clothes, black appears to be the dominant colour: «He has all my water black on me». And in the paragraph under scrutiny we have a progressive darkening of colours: «her singimari saffron strumans of hair»; «that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown»; «orranged her». The hues of red and orange could take us back to brown… but let us leave it and stick with black instead. The English words Mavron, Mavrud and Mavrodaphne designate varieties of blackish grapes, grown in Bulgaria, the Balkans, Cyprus and Greek respectively and producing different kinds of red wine.
A fuller translation of «Mavro!» could be a word like ‘Mavanerovinoso!’ – playing on two idiomatic exclamations of surprise and wonder: ma va! (no way!) and ma davvero? (really?), and including the words nero (black), vino (wine) and the suffix -oso, making this invented word sound very close to another adjective of exclamation: meraviglioso! (wonderful!).
In addition, the word mavro echoes a Māori word, mawaro, which refers to a charcoal stream. What is more, waro, in mythical terms, is Death, or the darkness of death personified. A far-fetched association, even for an author like Joyce and a work like Finnegans Wake? Not at all. So let us go further into this black shade.
According to Michael Cronin, «translingualism and the embedding of indigenous words and phrases in writing from the post-colonial world constitute an ironic undoing of the fluency fetish in translation-resistant Anglophone culture». The presence of te reo Māori – the language of the indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand – in the «polyglot boarding house» of Finnegans Wake is an excellent as well as unexpected example of this.
There was a very direct, personal link between Joyce and New Zealand. Sister Gertrude, born Margaret Alice ‘Poppie’ Joyce (1884-1964), was Joyce’s favourite sister. In 1909 Jim returned to Dublin from Trieste to see her off as she left Ireland to go to New Zealand – «God’s farthest outpost» as the late New Zealand historian Michael King put it – where she would spend the rest of her life as a nun and teacher in the order of the Sisters of Mercy, first in Greymouth and then in Christchurch. Because she attracted so much notice from Joyce scholars, she was sheltered and protected from them by the other members of her order. Poppie gave only three interviews, all towards the end of her life; the content is very similar, not to say identical.
Anyway, the only certainty seems to be that, shortly before her death, Sister Gertrude gave instructions for the destruction of all the letters and photographs in her possession, including those from her famous brother. Some doubt that this destruction was actually carried out and a hunt for these precious documents continues. What evidence we may have of the two siblings communicating from one end of the world to the other – apart from a brief telegram sent by Joyce to his sister after the strong Murchison earthquake of 1929 – is thus to be found in Joyce’s works. There is a passage in Finnegans Wake (2 iii) that appears to substantiate this:
“Let us propel us for the frey of the fray! Us, us, beraddy!
Ko Niutirenis hauru leish! A lala! Ko Niutirenis haururu laleish! Ala la! The Wullingthund sturm is breaking. The sound of maormaoring. The Wullingthund sturm waxes fuercilier. The whackawhacks of the sturm. Katu te ihis ihis! Katu te wana wana! The strength of the rawshorn generand is known throughout the world. Let us sau if we may what weeny wunkeleen can do.
Au! Au! Aue! Ha! Heish! A lala!”
The excerpt in question is a typical Joycean pastiche and it involves the text of the haka, the traditional war-challenge which the All Blacks, New Zealand’s rugby team, perform at the start of major matches. The text of the haka incorporated by Joyce in Finnegans Wake is that written specifically for the 1924-5 European tour of ‘The Invincibles’, the name given to the team led by Cliff Porter and including George Nepia, the legendary Māori fullback. ‘The Invincibles’ beat France on 11 January 1925 at the Colombes stadium in Paris. Was Joyce present at this match? It seems possible. And if he did not go the game – on 29 November 1924 Joyce had another operation, the sixth, to remove a secondary cataract from his left eye; in January 1925, according to his biographer Richard Ellmann, «the sight had not much improved» and a seventh operation was performed on 15 February – he could have read (or had read to him) comment about the haka in contemporary newspaper reports of The Invincibles. Joyce’s ‘Kiwi’ sister, though, remains the most likely source of the text used by Joyce. This text was published in New Zealand in 1928 in Masters’s Book which dealt with the rugby tour and references to the «Maori warcry» and to the haka appear in handwritten and typescript drafts of work in progress from the mid-1930s. Sister Gertrude’s role is mentioned in her obituary in the New Zealand Tablet, a Catholic weekly; the obituary stated that Joyce had written to his sister seeking the original text and a translation of the haka (the obituary, published a month after Sister Gertrude’s death in 1964, was unsigned but is likely to have been written by Sisters of her order or at the least after consultation with them).
There is a further point of interest about the haka in Finnegan’s Wake and the years between 1925 and 1938. Mixed up in the Joycean babble of words in Māori are two ‘foreign’ exclamations, as it were: Ala lala and A lala! (repeated twice). Moreover, the Māori language does not have the letter l. Now, Alalà! is the final word in the chorus of Giovinezza, the anthem of the National Fascist Party. So far as I can ascertain, Joyce’s use of this song here has not previously been noticed. Between 1925 and 1938 Joyce drafted and redrafted Finnegans Wake; in the same period Mussolini began his dictatorship with his famous speech to parliament on 3 January 1925 (a week before the Kiwi-French game) and by 1938 his chickens were coming home to roost. Was it that Joyce deftly linked the black jerseys and sporting belligerence of the NZ rugby team with the black shirts and the distinctly unsporting aggression of the fascist regime? It should be noted, that the haka in the 1920s and 1930s as the All Blacks performed it, did not have the same intensity as today – re-energizing the haka, in fact, has been part of the Māori cultural renaissance. This canny association, however, seems to imply that Joyce had some sense of the visual impact of the chanting and gesturing of the All Blacks, a perception which can hardly be acquired through reading a newspaper… More importantly, how should one translate into Italian this excerpt that combines two very distant cultural references?
These examples from Finnegans Wake remind us that the reading and translating are indeed experiences in comparative literature where distant reading and close reading come together in cycles of interpretations. These cycles of interpretations are reformulated and refocused according to changing times and changing readerships. The primary text itself, on one hand, remains the same and on the other constantly evolves as it undergoes interpretation, which can bring it back to itself as much as pull it away from itself. I will now return to Joyce’s ‘publicity poem’ to illustrate this.
* * * * *
Buy a book in brown paper
from Faber and Faber
to see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper
sevensins in her singthings
Plurabelle on her prose
seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.
This was my translation in progress:
Un libro in carta bruna comprate lettori
da Faber & Faber Editori
e dell’erinondanzioni d’Anna Liffey siate spettatori
plenipeccaminosa in ogni sua cantacosa
Plurapulcra sulla sua prosa
maremusica fiumunque lei si posa.
I have already discussed the first line and in particular the choice of bruno for brown. In the second line Joyce mentions the publisher of his work, Faber & Faber. The words «Faber & Faber» had to stay in order to retain the factual context of these lines. However, there is an Italian publisher whose name is almost identical: Fabbri. This simile encouraged me to consider and attempt a fully domesticated translation – which called for more modifications. The third line, in fact, presented two challenges. The first is the name of Joyce’s female protagonist, Anna Livia, which in this text becomes «Annie Liffey». For the affectionate form «Annie» I opted for Annetta: like bruno, Annetta has an established literary pedigree, as it is the name of one of Montale’s muses, present in some of his earlier and later poems. Indeed, the link between Joyce and Montale is particularly pertinent. For a number of circumstances, Anna Livia Plurabelle was published by Adrienne Monnier in «Le navire d’argent» at the end of 1925; at the beginning of 1926, Montale read it and promptly reviewed it:
Il Navir ha legato il suo nome alla pubblicazione di una completa bibliografia della letteratura inglese, e, in ultimo, di quella tedesca, tradotta in francese. In una rubrica di pagine ha dato testi tradotti di John Donne, Bacone, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Disraeli e Washington Irving. Fra i moderni, Joyce ha figurato con lo scabroso frammento d’una sua work in progress.
He also read Dubliners and Ulysess in French translation, encouraged by Italo Svevo and Valery Larbaud. More importantly, in the same year Montale wrote a sequence of Joycean poems: I morti, Delta (a text that shares a number of striking similarities with Anna Livia Plurabelle, including the title, the Greek letter chosen by Joyce to name the manuscript of the fluvial segment of what was to become Finnegans Wake) and Arletta (=Incontro), a poem written in memory of a childhood friend: Anna (Arletta/Annetta) degli Uberti. These three poems were published in the same issue of «Il Convegno» in which the first excerpts of Ulysses in Linati’s Italian translation appeared: it is likely therefore, that Joyce and Montale read each other’s work at the same time.
Going back to the translation, Liffey is the name of the river that winds its way through Dublin. Livia was the logical choice: partly because Joyce borrowed it from Livia Veneziani, Italo Svevo’s wife; partly because the Italian name of this idiosyncratic Irish washerwoman has always been Anna Livia. However, upon checking the list of all the Italian rivers, torrents and streams whose name begins with L, I could not help choose a torrent in Liguria – Montale’s native region, by the way, in north-western Italy – called Lavanestro, the beginning of which alludes to the verb lavare, to wash, and thus a very fitting surname.
The second challenge in this line was the triplet of verbs «trip, tumble and caper». Given that the Italian version of the line was already quite long, I decided to rely on Wakese and create a word to include all the allusions evoked by those three verbs. So I came up with erinondanzioni, which contains a number of words and references: er for errare, to err, in the sense of both making mistakes and wander; erin for Erin, Ireland; onda for waves; danz for danza, dance; and finally the addition of abstract suffix -zioni, making the invented word sound like a blurred mixture of esternazioni (outbursts) and osservazioni (observations), which appropriately describe the lively ruminations of Anna Livia.
The last three lines seem harder to translate than they actually were. All puns, including the parody of the nursery rhyme in the last line, could be recreated with identical effectives, gaining an extra wordplay – the Latinate Plurapulcra for the literal Plurabella, which mirrors plenipeccaminosa for «sevensins» in the line before – as well as an extra rhyme – cantacosa («singthings»), prosa («prose») and si posa («she goes»).
So here is my final translation:
Un libro in carta bruna comprate lettori
da Faber & Faber Editori
e dell’erinondanzioni d’Annetta Lavanestro siate spettatori
plenipeccaminosa in ogni sua cantacosa
Plurapulcra sulla sua prosa
maremusica fiumunque lei si posa.
Though obviously insufficient to allow me to claim my space among the list of Italian translators of Joyce, this translation was certainly enough to give me the thrill of practising Wakese.
This experience was immediately renewed and retested when I came to translate a botanical reference, ‘Robin-run-the-hedge’, and the colour, ‘Lincoln green’, contained in an unpublished text by another Irish, Seamus Heaney.
Now, the Latin name of Robin-run-the-hedge, commonly know as vetch, is Galium aparine, belonging to family of the Rubiaceae. I felt that the Rob-/Rub- correspondence had to be exploited in some way, so I have decided to Italianise Rubiacea as Rubiaccia. The sound -accia, in fact, not only echoes the common name of the plant, veccia (vetch in English, as already noted), but is contained in caccia, the third person singular of the verb cacciare, which means to hunt, to chase and thus a good option to render ‘to run after’ the ‘hedge’. Rubiaccia-caccia-siepe, therefore, seemed an earnest rendition of ‘Robin-run-the-hedge’ in describing a plant that trails itself along and wraps itself around other plants.
Translating «Lincoln green» was also problematic: in fact, this association would not make any sense in Italian, other than to those very familiar with colours (painters, designers, tailors…). Now, Lincoln green is the colour of Robin Hood’s outfit. So I turned to a table of colours in Italian which listed the following hues of green:
Verde oliva chiaro, verde oliva, verde oliva scuro, verde pallido, sedano, verde menta, verde foglia, verde fluorescente, verde chiaro, verde, verde prato o pisello, verde scuro, smeraldo, smeraldo scuro, verde pavone, foresta scura o seppia scuro, verde bambù, giada, verde acqua pallido, verde pastello, verde acqua chiaro, verde acqua, verde bottiglia, verde mare, verde acqua o bottiglia scuro, malachite, sempreverde, pino scuro, antracite scuro, grigio verde, grigio verde scuro.
Verde foresta, ‘forest green’, seemed a good option, as it can be read in connection with the Forest of Sherwood and hence with the green-dressed, good-hearted hero that inhabited it. Having (partly) lost Robin in the translation of the opening line, however, I thought it would be nice to reintroduce him in the text: most people in Italy, young and old alike, are familiar with Robin Hood and his legendary green outfit.
Like brown, green too is a colour charged with political meaning – think of Green Parties, of environmental issues… Perhaps Lincoln green could become the colour of tax. A year or so ago, in fact, the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that he would tax wealthy oil companies to fund cheaper electricity, food and medicine for Italy’s pensioners. «Italy», explained Malcolm Moore in The Telegraph, «is the first European country to try to help its citizens cope with the effects of fast-rising fuel and food prices». Moore’s article and other articles in British newspapers talked about a «Robin Hood tax». However, as the Italian left-wing lawmaker, Pino Sgobio, pointed out, Berlusconi «behaves like the opposite of Robin Hood». Easy to believe, easy to translate I suppose…
Anyway, in conclusion I would like to turn briefly to Oliver Scharpf, an original and talented Swiss poet writing in Italian. Born in Lugano in 1977, he studied Performing Arts in Milan. His poetry has received several prizes, including the prestigious Premio Montale for an unpublished collection (published by Moby Dick with the title Uppercuts in 1999), the Premio Città dell’Aquila and the Premio Schiller. In 2007 peQuod published Scharpf’s second collection, which is titled La durata del viaggio dell’oliva dal martinicocktail and which includes his first book Uppercuts, and a new sequence of poems, Uppercuts 2. The two poems presented here have been chosen not only because they, too, contain a reference to green, but also because they are vivid examples of the author’s poetics and of interesting translation issues:
[57]
all’inizio dell’estate una modella a milano
sale su le scale della fermata porta genova
seguendo il corrimano verde franco albini
ecco, ancora un verso, la svolta di un respiro
che so, ma siamo in ritardo, non c’è verso
[57]
at the start of summer a top model in Milan
goes up the stairs of the metro station porta genova
following the franco albini green handrail
there, one more line, the turn of a breath
or what, but we are late, out of line
[61]
un operaio del comune a metà luglio
vicino al chioschetto di parco ravizza
si occupa di ridipingere di verde perrier
una di quelle fontane chiamate drago;
un collega dice dai, vabene, andiamo
invece lui continua, con estrema cura
per la sua parte di splendore in questo schifo
[61]
a city council workman in mid july
near the little kiosk in parco ravizza
is busy repainting in perrier green
one of those dragon fountains ;
one of his colleagues tells him come on, ok, let’s go,
but instead he carries on, meticulously,
for his share in the glory of this crap
In the first poem, there are actually two types of green: one denotes the second line of Milan’s underground (the colour of the first is red; the colour of the third is yellow) and the other to the Italian Neo-Rationalist architect and designer, Franco Albini. In the second poem, green is bottle green: more precisely, Perrier bottle green. Perrier is a brand of bottled mineral water made from a spring in the South of France called Les Bouillens. The spring, which was used as a spa since Roman times, was bought by a local doctor, Louis Perrier, in 1898, who started to bottle the water for sale and then sold it to a wealthy British visitor, Sir Saint-John Harmsworth, who renamed it Source Perrier and begun to use the distictive, Indian club-shaped green bottle.
As these references to the colour green illustrate, Scharpf’s poetry is very distinctive. A sequence of expanded haiku describing physical and emotional journeys, his poems have a colloquial diction, a sort of noisy stream of consciousness established by unorthodox syntax, sparse punctuation and frequent resort to verbalisms (including the deliberate phonetic misspelling of foreign place names). Scharpf’s poetry engages the reader with vivid snapshots of situations and emotions and involves the reader in the resonance of the poet’s experience. In spite of their deceiving simplicity, Scharpf’s poems challenge the translator to match his brevity and his colourful Italian from the resources of such a rich and flexible language as English. Poetry is not always lost in translation, after all.
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