Jane Tylus

REFLECTIONS OF AN ITALIANIST

hat are Romance studies in this day and age, and where does my own Wspecialization, Italian, ft into them? Has Italian ever really ft in that well—particularly given the fact that in large Romance language departments, the Italianists are almost always outnumbered by those who teach Spanish and French (if not Portuguese)? And should Italian ft by virtue of its distinctiveness—or by what Paul Ricoeur, in an essay to which I will return, calls its “comparabilities?”1 My brief intervention will suggest that one way to think about “Romance languages” and the often vexed relationships among them is to invoke translation: particularly the history of translation, and particularly a history that focuses on the moment when the vernaculars as we now know them fnally established their hegemony over in the sixteenth century.2 I will confne my remarks to thinking about Italian and French, although the work of Paul Julian Smith among others on Spanish is vital to flling out a picture important for our understanding as to where our increasingly threatened “language and literature” departments have come from, and where they are heading. For those departments to remain vital, they must explore ways of interconnecting with one another—both to understand what their historical relationships have been and to make the case for their necessity in the future.3

1. A very unscientifc survey suggests that Romanic Review itself has had a predomi- nantly French focus over its century-long life, followed by attention to Spanish (par- ticularly in the last two decades) and Italian (particularly in its frst two decades). Few articles, and fewer issues, have been based on comparative discussions, which tended to be more frequent in the journal’s early years. 2. Much of the great comparative work of the past built on the relationship between Ger- manic languages and Romance languages, such as that of E.R. Curtius, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach. One is hard-pressed to identify those who are doing such work today. 3. Romance studies as a discipline has been challenged institutionally by the extent to which “global” language and literature departments have being formed out of na- tional departments at universities such as Stanford, or varied assortments of national languages have been grouped together for fnancial rather than academic reasons, such as at Johns Hopkins. The growth of European studies programs during the 1980s and 1990s, funded in large part by Title VI money, tended to focus more on area studies and the social sciences rather than on literary issues, even as Title VI made available

The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University

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This is why we might consider translation studies as a way to rethink rela- tionships among national languages. Translation has usually been peripheral to the university. Translations don’t count because they’re not refective of “original” work, while translation studies has been perceived, particularly in the United States, as too technical to be a scholarly or humanistic feld. Many of our best translators have not been affliated with universities: Wil- liam Weaver, Electa Arenal, Edith Grossman, and Michael Moore, to name just a few. And yet the study of translation’s history, its theory as well as its practice, is vital to learning about the “particularities” of language—and to impressing upon students the importance of thinking about the way that language works. John Dryden’s claim that he never paid so much attention to Latin as to when he was trying to put it into English epitomizes what the process of translation does: it forces one to consider both the specifcities of individual languages and the relationships between them—and to clarify the extent to which one language can, and cannot, be translated into another. To this extent, translation forms the basis for a truly comparative understanding not only of languages, but of literatures. The early modern period witnessed the triumph of the vernacular as a literary language across eastern as well as western Europe, inclusive of the “Romance languages” to which Romanic Review has been dedicated since its inception. The ensuing contest among different vernaculars as to which would take the place vacated by Latin is felt in a variety of ways throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century struggle for linguistic primacy. Dryden’s sensitivities to Latin may seem to be the reverse of what we fnd in one of the earliest refections on translation and its relationship to emergent vernaculars in sixteenth-century Europe: Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse. As Du Bellay’s most recent translator, Richard Helger- son, has put it, during the prosperous 1540s, Du Bellay wanted “a rebirth of the Roman Empire with France as the new .”4 In this text devoted to exploring the role of the vernacular in a newly-constituted Europe, Du Bellay frst laments the effects of Babel and claims that it is too bad that there isn’t just one language: it takes so many years “pour apprendre des motz!” (349). But he then stumbles onto the key: to translate everything into French, turn- ing it into the vehicle through which one can learn all things. Envisioning a return to the day when Latin was the “universal language,” Du Bellay predicts

a large amount of funding for “less commonly taught languages” such as Portuguese, Italian, and Catalan, among others. 4. Introduction, Joachim Du Bellay: The Regrets, Antiquities of Rome, Three Latin Elegies, and The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language, tr. Richard Helger- son (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006) 1.

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that King François I will be like Augustus and that French will become like Latin—which in any case, Du Bellay observes, “is already dead” (352). Or more precisely, French will become like Greek. In one of the most excit- ing projects in the last several decades, the Vocabulaire européen des phi- losophes: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, Barbara Cassin and her colleagues assembled an encyclopedic list of terms drawn mostly from the discipline of that “resist” translation. As the beginning of the entry on “Tradu- ire” notes, the classical scholar Arnaldo Momigliano observed that the Greeks were “fèrement monolingues.” In the place of speaking their language, “ils laissent leur langue parler pour eux.”5 And we go on to learn in a side bar to the essay “Qu’est-ce qu’un ‘barbare’ pour un Grec?” that barbarizein was onomatopoeia for unintelligibility, the antithesis to hellenizein, which includes within it the sense “of speaking Greek, and of speaking correctly. Given the extent to which the rhetorical body and the historical-political body were tied together, hellenizein signifes to behave like a free, civilized, and cultured man—to be, in essence, a man” (1306). The result, it seems, is that translation was never an alternative for the Greeks. To translate one must have at one’s disposal two languages, and the Greeks recognized no language other than their own. Perhaps the punch line here, to come back to the Italianist in me, is that Du Bellay drew for much of his treatise on an Italian work by Sperone Speroni, Dialogo delle lingue of 1542, making one wonder whether Du Bellay was contending with Rome, or with contemporary Italians. In this dialogue writ- ten several years before Du Bellay penned his work, Speroni positions the university professor Lazzaro Bonamico against the Venetian poet, cardinal, and cultural arbiter Pietro Bembo in a debate as to which language is poised to attain everlasting literary fame. Lazzaro predictably claims that only Greek and Latin are worthy of this status. But Bembo argues forcefully that thanks to Dante and Petrarca, Italian has proven its excellence and durability. Writing after much of had been overtaken by the Spanish in the south and the French in the north, Bembo (and of course, Speroni) nonetheless recognize that despite Italian’s cultural superiority, the current political situation means that the chances of it ever attaining the universal status of Latin are non-existent. Thus does Bembo bemoan his plight as a northern Italian in the mid-sixteenth century: “[È] strana e bella cosa il vederci continuamente vivere e parlare con barbari e non aver del barbaro” (“We live and talk with barbarians without becoming barbarians”)—i.e., the French!6

5. Vocabulaire européen des philosophes: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, general edi- tor, Barbara Cassin (Paris: Le Seuil / Le Robert, 2004) 1305. 6. Sperone Speroni, Dialogo delle lingue, Trattatisti del Cinquecento, ed. Mario Pozzi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1978) I:593.

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Yet before chiding both Du Bellay and Speroni for their apparent provin- cialism, it may be worthwhile situating the issue of “competing vernaculars” in light of the comments from one of the last books Paul Ricoeur wrote dur- ing his very long and productive life, Sur la traduction. Published in French in 2004, translated into English into 2006, this collection of three lectures is notable insofar as it attests to the fact that a scholar frequently called one of the most distinguished philosophers of his generation turned some of his fnal thoughts to translation. The frst lecture focuses on translation as challenge to and source of happiness, a doubleness that all of us who have translated will recognize; the second on the paradigm of translation; and the third and fnal one on translating the untranslatable—this last a play on the title of a work by the classicist Marcel Detienne: “Comparing the incomparable (“Comparer l’incomparable”).7 Detienne’s title was leveled, so Ricoeur tells us, against the slogan “we can only compare the comparable” (35). Thus Detienne talks about “constructive comparative studies”: that is, the way that comparables get constructed and the “incomparable” compared. In the same way, Ricoeur suggests that the work of translation—the source of its pleasure and challenge alike—is that of constructing translatables. Otherwise, one risks being paralyzed by what Ricoeur considers the deconstructive premise of untranslatability: “Either the diversity of languages gives expression to a radical heterogeneity—and in that case translation is theoretically impossible; one language is untranslatable a priori into another. Or else, translation is explained by a common fund that renders the fact of translation possible; but then we must be able either to fnd this common fund, and this is the original language track, or to recon- struct it logically, and this is the universal language track—which can never exist” (13–14). The point, rather, is to plunge in, and therefore “to become sensitive to the strangeness of our own language” (29) as well as to that of the other. Invoking the notion of strangeness and the doubleness of the Greek word xenon, which means both host and guest, Ricoeur goes on to describe the ethics of translation as an interlinguistic hospitality. We seek to construct “translatabilities” in the world of the untranslatable and hence a plurality of meanings, what Richard Kearney calls in his introduction “a methodical appreciation of the complex poetics and rhetoric involved in the interpretation of linguistic meaning (xix). How hospitable, then, have the Romance languages been to one another in the aftermath of Latin’s decline—if not its death—in the sixteenth century? How hospitable are they today, and when were the patterns for such hospi- tability created? Du Bellay paradoxically “opened himself up” to the Italian,

7. On Translation, tr. Eileen Brennan, with an introduction by Richard Kearney (Lon- don: Routledge, 2006) 35.

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importing much of Speroni’s defense of Italian for a defense of French as he recognized in that treatise a possibility for linguistic hegemony that would have far more of a future in France than Italy. Such an opening has the effect of shutting down—and out—not only Speroni, but Italian, which did indeed become marginalized politically as well as culturally in subsequent centuries. At the same time, however, one becomes aware that Du Bellay’s apparent move to linguistic imperialism has its necessary limitations. Thus he is aware at one point that the translator can’t always render work with the same grace the author puts into it, since each language has “je ne scay quoy propre seule- mente a’ elle” (Helgerson 335): the “propre” that defes appropriation. Even as Du Bellay appropriates Speroni’s words, he notes that it is easy to miss “la force des choses.” More importantly, French is revealed in the treatise as a still-impoverished language that is dependent on translation in order to attain the desirable quality of copiousness, the property that defnes excellence more than any other. After alluding to appropriation as a process of “emprunter” or borrowing—one borrows “sentences et motz, et les approprier a la sienne” (341)—Du Bellay notes that one should only borrow from foreign authors, not from those who write in French. “To imitate within the same language, is to give it what it already has,” he says in a remarkably candid moment—and one that reveals Du Bellay’s impatience with contemporary writers such as Marot who sought a purely “French” line of literary descent (340). The theme of the May-November 2006 issue of the Romanic Review—“Italy and France: Imagined Geographies”—speaks to the importance of the topic. It features a suggestive essay by Joseph Luzzi about the polemics inspired by Madame de Staël’s call to Italians to free themselves from their pedantic isola- tion by translating northern European literature, specifcally the new poetry of the Germans and the English.8 In Luzzi’s lucid summation of de Staël’s argu- ment, such “opening” up to languages not their own—non-Romanic tongues, in short—would connect Italians to intellectual currents throughout Europe and place them within the maelstrom of the Romantic idiom. This in turn would lead to the possibility of translating Italy’s own “innovative energies” into and for the rest of Europe. The volume tracks several such examples of inspired translations, ranging in its focus from Italy-Franco exchange during the thirteenth century to Franco Marinetti’s ambivalence regarding the supe- riority of French over Italian culture. Such work, it seems to me, represents the best kind of comparative studies: a comparativism that acknowledges that national languages and cultures do not spring full-grown from Zeus’s head but are the products of ongoing struggles and conversations among cultures. As editor Laura Wittman writes in her introductory essay, there is at once

8. Joseph Luzzi, “Translator’s Introduction: ‘Italy in Translation,’” Romanic Review 97.3–4 (2006): 275–8.

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“renewal and betrayal” in negotiating the tension between national litera- tures,” as exemplifed in the Italian saying, “Traduttore, traditore.”9 Not only translation itself, but the study of translation theory, history, and practices, affords a privileged entrée into the ways that languages “are thought,” into the characteristics that their speakers and writers ascribe to them, into the fantasies they entertain for their futures. The essays in the 2006 volume of Romanic Review are exemplary in their own investigation of the paradoxes that have emerged at the borderlines of French and Italian national cultures and literatures, not dissimilar to those found in Du Bellay’s “translation” of Speroni’s text. As valuable a project as the issue is, however, it omits the moment of Du Bellay and Speroni themselves: early modernity’s articulation of its release from Latinity, the end of a truly bilingual culture that had existed at least through the late ffteenth century, when Poliziano was writing his Stanze per la giostra along with Latin odes, several decades after Leon Battista Alberti wrote De pictura as well as Della pittura. By the early 1500s, in no small part due to Pietro Bembo’s efforts, we have a culture committed almost exclusively to Italian. Additionally, one must include not just the French but the Spanish context for a full understanding of this defnitive exit from a Latin world. With the Sack of Rome in 1527, Spain’s hold on southern and much of central Italy became absolute. As Thomas Dandelet and others have been suggesting, to study Italy—or Italian— without studying Spain and Spanish between 1500 and 1860 is to ignore much of what was both vibrant and problematic about “Italian” culture between the Renais- sance and the Risorgimento.10 The study of translation as an historical and historicizing project offers the possibility of understanding how one language constructs itself in relationship to another. To paraphrase Du Bellay, what is the point of imitating what one already has? This is the advantage as well as the challenge to departments of “Romance languages” and to journals such as Romanic Review. How best to understand the ways those languages have borrowed and continue to bor- row from one another in the creation of their own national literatures and cultures? And what better moment to study than that when Latin receded defnitively from the horizon, inspiring its unruly progeny to grow to adult- hood by comparing themselves not to the language of ancient Rome, but to one another?

New York University

9. “Imagined Geographies,” Romanic Review 97.3–4 (2006): 266. 10. See Thomas Dandelet, Spanish Rome 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000).

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