William Weaver and the Art of Translation Joan Winterkorn – March 1St at 11.20 Am
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Spreading the Word: William Weaver and the Art of Translation Joan Winterkorn – March 1st at 11.20 am In 1994 I was invited by William Weaver to look at and value his papers. At that time Bill was still living in Italy in a beautiful stone house he had built just outside Monte San Savino in Tuscany, so it wasn’t a difficult invitation to accept. But I hadn’t worked on the papers of a translator before, and wasn’t sure what I would find. William Weaver is the outstanding translator into English of post-war Italian literature. He has translated Giorgio Bassani, Roberto Calasso, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Carlo Emilia Gadda, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Italo Svevo and many others. If the names of these authors are familiar to an international English-speaking audience, and if their works are widely read and celebrated, at least some of the credit is due to his translations. Weaver is an American, from Virginia, who was an undergraduate at Princeton when America entered the war at the end of 1941. He left Princeton to become a Field Service ambulance driver in Africa and then in Italy. He fell in love with the country and after the war, and the completion of his degree, he returned. Bill befriended a dynamic group of young writers and filmmakers, taught himself Italian, and became a sort of ‘accidental’ translator. Italy remained his home for half a century. But what of the manuscripts? Among the first I looked at were his translations of Calvino, and I particularly loved the Marcovaldo stories. They are small jewels, seldom longer than 4 or 5 pages, and yet conveying in that brief space entire worlds and life histories. Reading the first draft of a Weaver translation of a Marcovaldo story it seemed perfectly judged and right. And then I went through the second, third, fourth and subsequent drafts and saw how the rhythm as well as the language changed. By the time I finished the last draft I could return to the first and begin to see the infelicities, the dialogue that didn’t quite work, the expressions that jarred. At dinner that night we talked of Calvino and the challenge he presents to the translator; Bill has also written about this: ‘With [Calvino] every comma and sound has an importance and it isn’t only a question of getting the word right. It’s a question of not spoiling the rhythm, of getting the cadences and the tone exactly right.’ Bill was also very amusing on his work with Umberto Eco and kept a diary when he was translating Foucault’s Pendulum. Weaver worked with Eco, as he had with Calvino, discussing all aspects of language as well as specific queries. He records in his diary: ‘Working on an Eco text [more than the texts of any other writers], I frequently think: “I’ll ask Umberto,” because I know that he could provide solutions – or suggest avenues towards solutions – of most, if not all of my problems of sheer ignorance. And, at the end, I will go to him with a long list of queries, then show his a quasi-final draft that we can then discuss and revise together. But at this early stage, I resist temptation and try to deal with as much as I can on my own. It is not only pride ... it is more the determination to get as firm a grip as possible on the text.’ Weaver seems particularly drawn to writers like Eco and Carlo Emilia Gadda who both love to play with language and dialect. In the ‘Translator’s Foreword’ to Carlo Emilia Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, Weaver discusses the author’s personal qualities and how they relate to the novel: ‘There is hardly anything about Carlo Emilia Gadda that is not contradictory. Stately and courtly, he lives in a lower-middle-class apartment house is Rome, where the yelling of children, the clatter of dishes, and the laundry hanging on the balconies contrast violently with the cloistral austerity, the shy solitude of the writer’s quarters. And this solitude, the timid elegance of his speech and manner are, in turn, a surprise to one who has read his most famous book, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via merulana, a teeming canvas of Roman life, many of whose characters speak the city’s expressive, but not always elegant dialect. The contrasts are, to a supreme degree, present in the book itself, a pastiche – as its title implies – of languages and dialects that has been compared to the work of Joyce.’ It was a challenging book to translate, and the question of ‘rendering dialect in another language is a particularly tormented one’. As Weaver notes, this ‘is not a dialect novel’. Gadda uses the language of his characters to help portray them: his detective, Ingravallo, speaks a mixture of Roman and Molisano; the Countess Menegazzi lapses frequently into her native Venetian. The author himself, when writing from his own point of view, uses all of these but also uses Neapolitan, Milanese, and occasional French, Latin, Greek, and Spanish expressions. At the same time he exploits all the levels of Italian, spoken and written: the contorted officialise of the bureaucracy, the high-flown euphemisms of the press, the colourful and imaginative spiel of the vendors in Rome’s popular market in Piazza Vittorio. And at the same time, Gadda’s vast erudition, in such disparate and recondite fields as philosophy, physics, psychology, and engineering, is frequently evident – all of this fused into a single, difficult, rich, yet flowing style.’ How does all this relate to the diasporic literary archives we are considering? When a translator works with a living writer, when he or she has the opportunity to discuss the text being translated, question and clarify meaning and intention, draw on personal knowledge of the writer and the world he inhabits, the resulting translation manuscripts are a vital reflection on, and addition to, the author’s own archive. The correspondence from an author to his translator can also be richly revealing. Authors responding to questions from critics and reviewers about the meaning of a passage or a character may suggest that the questioners draw their own conclusions; when the translator asks such questions, writers generally offer detailed explanations. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Tin Drum, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, publishers throughout the world commissioned new translations of Gunter Grass’s masterpiece. The translators had the opportunity to meet and work with one another, and Grass himself oversaw the project, meeting with the translators. He was closely involved with the new English translation by Breon Mitchell, professor, translator, and now-retired librarian of the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana. ‘Given Grass’s close involvement with this new translation’, one reviewer wrote, ‘it is fair to call it the definitive version of arguably the most important German novel of the postwar era.’ There is still much to be done in exploring the links between the papers of writers and those translators with whom they have worked. The potential for international cooperation is great, and collaborative work will lead to a better knowledge of how the original word is understood, or mis-understood, and disseminated throughout the world. Diffondere la parola - William Weaver e l’arte della traduzione Joan Winterkorn – 1o marzo alle 11:20 Nel 1994 sono stata invitata da William Weaver per vedere e per valutare le sue carte. A quel tempo Bill viveva ancora in Italia, in una bellissima casa di pietre poco lontano da Monte San Savino in Toscana, quindi non è stata una scelta difficile quella di accettare il suo invito. Ma non avevo mai prima d’ora affrontato un lavoro sulle carte di un traduttore e non ero certa di quello che avrei trovato. William Weaver è il traduttore inglese per eccellenza della letteratura italiana postbellica. Ha tradotto Giorgio Bassani, Roberto Calasso, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Carlo Emilia Gadda, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Italo Svevo e molti altri. Se i nomi di questi autori sono noti ad un pubblico anglofono internazionale, e se i loro lavori sono letti e celebrati in tutto il mondo, una parte del merito va senz’altro alle sue traduzioni. Weaver è un americano che proviene dalla Virginia ed era uno studente a Princeton nel 1941 quando l’America entrò in guerra. Lasciò Princeton per fare l’autista di ambulanza sul campo, dapprima in Africa e poi in Italia. Si innamorò del paese e dopo la guerra, quando ebbe terminato i suoi studi, tornò. Bill fece amicizia con un vivace gruppo di giovani scrittori e registi, apprese l’italiano da autodidatta, e divenne una sorta di traduttore ‘per caso’. L’Italia rimase la sua patria per mezzo secolo. Ma cosa ne fu dei manoscritti? Tra le prime traduzioni che vidi c’erano quelle di Calvino, e apprezzai particolarmente quelle delle storie di Marcovaldo. Si tratta di piccoli gioielli, raramente più lunghi di 4 o 5 pagine, ma capaci di concentrare in questo breve spazio interi mondi e storie di intere esistenze. Quando lessi la prima bozza di una traduzione di Weaver di una storia di Marcovaldo, mi sembrò che tutto quadrasse. Ma poi cominciai a leggere la seconda, la terza, la quarta e le bozze seguenti e mi resi conto di come erano cambiati sia il ritmo che il linguaggio. Una volta arrivata all’ultima bozza ripresi la prima e iniziai a rendermi conto delle scelte infelici, del dialogo che non funzionava bene, delle espressioni stridenti.