Note on the Translation

Note on the Translation ‘In this year 1858 of the Christian era I am now over eighty years old,’ begins Carlo Altoviti, the narrator of the Confessions, an old man just about ready to ‘dive into that time which is no longer time’, writing his memoirs from his home in the country, where he has ‘watched the last, farcical act of the great drama of feudalism’. Despite the pondered tone, there is something about Carlo that immediately belies his senescence. For Ippolito Nievo was just twenty-six when he wrote his novel, and his octogenarian protagonist can barely contain his young creator’s verve and energy. When the venerable Carlo is not being grave and solemn, he is a sly, witty, cheeky twenty-something. Here, for example, is how he speaks of the Count of Fratta, the precarious patriarch of a tottering mainland Venetian noble family: The Count of Fratta was a man past sixty who always looked as if he had just stepped out of his armour, so stiffly and pompously did he sit in his chair. But his elaborate bagwig, his long cinder-coloured, scarlet- trimmed zimarra, and the boxwood snuff container forever in his hands detracted somewhat from the warrior pose. True, there was a sliver of a sword stuck between his legs, but the sheath was so rusty you could mistake it for a roasting spit, and in any case, I couldn’t swear there was really a steel blade inside, nor had he himself perhaps ever taken the trouble to find out. That witty, first-person voice, the youthful high spirits and pointed comic gift are some of the keys to Nievo’s style, which could not be more different from that of the other great novelist of Italy’s Risorgimento against whom he’s often measured, Alessandro Manzoni. Manzoni, who worked and reworked his masterpiece, The Betrothed, publishing separate versions in 1827 and 1842, is considered the first real stylist of modern literary Italian. The Betrothed’s reputation, however, was not built on its literary merits alone. Manzoni’s pessimism, his conservatism and his Catholicism struck just the right note with the monarchical and conservative side of the Risorgimento that would emerge victorious in 1861. 1 Nievo was in the other camp: a radical, a free-thinker and a democrat. He wrote the way he talked, like a virtuoso conversationalist, and like his vivid, intimate letters. His sentences sparkle with fireworks, but also with dry wit; sometimes he is flamboyant and theatrical, sometimes impish and ironic. The translator’s first task is not to betray that conversational voice (voice being, perhaps, the most important device in persuading us to suspend disbelief). But ‘conversational’ does not mean the writing is either simple or straightforward. To begin with, that voice is by no means always polished on the page. Nievo uses odd turns of phrase and sometimes mixes his metaphors. The language of the Confessions is also studded with archaic verb forms, Venetianisms and colloquial expressions from as far away as Dalmatia. Only some of that idiomatic variety can be conveyed in translation without resorting to hackneyed English vernacular, which is rarely a good equivalent to Italian local speech. And while it seemed right to stay close to the same historical register as Nievo’s in English, too much fussy ‘period speech’ would be jarringly wrong. For Nievo’s spontaneity, his relaxed, immediate, first-person mode, his anti-heroic protagonist and his stormy, half-emancipated first lady, la Pisana, still sound fresh and modern today. (By comparison, the omniscient narrator of The Betrothed has aged greatly along with Manzoni’s good and earnest principals Renzo and Lucia.) If translation is the business (‘sleight of hand’, someone called it) of transferring words, meanings and atmosphere from the ever- changing river of one language to another, then even simple terms can depart from their dictionary definitions as time passes and the two rivers flow at different rates, as they approach or recede. The Italian word patria, which appears frequently in the novel and is not quite the same as what we mean in English when we say ‘nation’ or ‘country’, is often translated as ‘fatherland’ in English. The word ‘homeland’ might also come to mind. Yet both those English terms come with heavy twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideological baggage that prejudice the novel’s great enthusiasm for Italian 2 nationhood. Therefore, this translation sticks with patria, in the hope that the non-English word will sound more neutral in English. The use of the article ‘la’ before a woman’s name was standard practice in Nievo’s time. Although it is disappearing as the Italian language ceases to reflect an exclusively male perspective, I’ve retained it here in English for one character: it marks la Pisana out as special, as a woman who can’t be dismissed, who’s high-handed and demands attention. This is a book of ideas, for Carlo-Ippolito was one of the new men of his times and his views about society, about justice, about men and women, about sex, about science and politics, often rather radical, are expressed with verve in the novel. Ideas and enthusiasms spill out in a hundred convoluted digressions punctuated with all the intellectual references and scientific terminology a new man of his day would pride himself on knowing. Whether the subject was star formation, Roman history, vine blight, Venetian law or dried fruit and nut imports from the Balkans, he was up to date and well-informed. The Confessions is also a tale of emotion and psychology, a treatise on love. And some of its currents are anything but easy to engage with today, great flights of fancy and gusts of feeling. Nievo’s vocabulary of sentiments is especially tricky to translate. While ideas that have become obsolete merely seem quaint, antiquated emotion and sentiment can make us uncomfortable. By the standards of postmodern restraint, the intense and melodramatic pronouncements of a character in a nineteenth-century novel can make us squirm – yet those sentiments and emotions are needed to bind readers to the story. The translator has to negotiate the sensibility gap between those earnest, archaic hearts and souls and the fallible, contradictory human beings we moderns hold ourselves to be. And then there were a few instances where fidelity to Nievo’s style proved a real challenge. One was his passion for triples: he liked his adjectives and participles to come in threes. By the more austere standards of twenty-first-century taste, that is two, perhaps even three modifiers too many. Yet in the end I grew to appreciate all those 3 triplets; for one thing, they provide an unexpected rhythm to Nievo’s prose. The Confessions has never before appeared in English in its entirety, although an abridged English edition was published in 1957, translated by the prolific Lovett F. Edwards, best known for his translations from Serbo-Croatian, especially The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric´. Edwards had come upon the Confessions in a camp library while a prisoner of war at the Castle of Montechiarugolo near Parma in the early 1940s. His translation is lively and a labour of love. But it has aged and the three hundred or so pages cut from the text leave a somewhat distorted idea of what the novel is about. Imagine War and Peace without many of Tolstoy’s asides: such was the 1957 edition. It was given the title The Castle of Fratta, which did justice to Nievo’s marvellous portrait of ancien régime Venice in the shape of one tiny castle, but swept aside the novel’s broader political and historical reach. If there was one aspect of the novel that the earlier translation was often deaf to it was Nievo’s frequent use of free indirect discourse. While the narrative is framed in the first person, Carlo’s reminiscences are so lengthy and extensive that in telling an anecdote he will slip out of his own voice and into the point of view of another character he is telling us about. It is an expedient Nievo uses to good effect, broadening his optic to illustrate the thoughts and prejudices of the many characters that populate his tale, like a dazzling drawing- room raconteur sketching out all the parts in his story. Take away that profusion of voices and not only sense, but much humour and psychological insight, are lost. Finally, a personal note: I am pleased to have brought this book into English not only for its literary qualities, but because I think its spirit and its message (for this is also a book with a message) remain extraordinarily vital. So long as the ideals of liberty and justice have not been fully realized, the Confessions has something to say. And, unfortunately, across Europe and beyond, that is still the case today. This translation is based on the first scholarly edition of Nievo’s novel published in 1952 by Sergio Romagnoli. The Italian editions that post- 4 date Romagnoli differ only very slightly from that standard text, largely in their interpretation of the author’s omissions and errors. I would like to thank Eva Cecchinato of the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, who helped with various historical matters, and David Laven of the University of Nottingham, who was generous with his extensive historical knowledge of nineteenth century Venice. I’m grateful to Alberto Mario Banti, Sara Bershtel, Anne Edelstein, Marion Faber, Adam Freudenheim, Edith Grossman, Eva Hoffman and Lucy Riall for help and encouragement. My editors Jessica Harrison, Anna Hervé and Ian Pindar were all marvellous, both eagle-eyed and sensitive to the novel’s eccentric use of language.

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