The first is a research seminar tomorrow, which looks fascinating and is free and open to all:
When Translation Multiples Tell Their Own Story
Dr Kasia Szymanska, Oxford University
Tuesday 17 April
16:00 - 17:30 | LR2, 43 Woodland Rd, University of Bristol
Kasia Szymanska is a Junior Research Fellow in Modern Languages at Oxford University, where she is a member of the committee of the Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre. Her research lies in literary translation thought, experimental translations, and multilingual poetics - especially with reference to the East European context. She was awarded the 2015 EST Translation Prize and is currently serving as one of the judges of the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
*****
The second event is an ultra-rare 35mm film screening on Sunday 22 April:
Treasures from the Turin Film Museum
The silent period was a golden era for Italian cinema, with pioneer directors like Giovanni Pastrone, whose 1914 epic Cabiria influenced filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith. Historical epics were particularly popular. This event features five restored films from the collections of the Turin Film Museum, all with a classical theme. They include Pastrone’s Fall of Troy (1911) and The Last Days of Pompeii (1910), from the novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which was the first Italian historical epic. The programme also includes Hero and Leander and Dido Abandoned from 1910; and Judas from 1911.
Followed by a Q&A featuring Stella Dagna from the Turin Film Museum, Professor Maria Wyke from UCL, Dr Pantelis Michelakis from the University of Bristol, and our distinguished accompanist Mr Stephen Horne.
For the feast of St. Valentine this year I thought I would share a real treat: Nicola Gardini's beautiful poetry collectionTradurre è un bacio [Translation is a kiss]. Here is a sample:
A (very) rough translation would be:
FRENCH KISS
Translation is a kiss.
It is to have not one, but two tongues
In the mouth
At the same time,
Like Ruggero and Alcina.
[It is] to compose saliva.
For this reason lots of people
Are bad at it and even
Montale doesn't find it easy.
(Ruggiero and Alcina are two characters from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso).
I went to a splendid showing of Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Roma, città aperta on Friday night, courtesy of the Italian Department at the University of Bristol and the InsideArts festival. We saw a restored print with English subtitles credited to the festival Il cinema ritrovato, where the restoration was done.
The subtitles on this version were good and often funny, with smart and unobtrusive solutions for many very Italian turns of phrase. It made me wonder about the first English subtitled version of this film in the US, which opened, according to David Forgacs, on 25 February 1946 at the World Theater on 49th St., and ran there for nearly two years. It had subtitles by Pietro di Donato and Herman Weinberg. Herman G. Weinberg worked as a subtitler and film critic from the early 1930s to the early 1970s and pioneered subtitling in the United States; more on him in a future post, perhaps.
Are di Donato and Weinberg guilty of perpetrating the "bad and frequently missing" subtitles mentioned above? Bosley Crowther in the New York Timesdoesn't comment. I wonder what the local newspaper files of newspapers.com may be able to tell us.
The Winnipeg Tribune of Friday 18 April, 1947 closes a long review by naming and praising the subtitlers:
In a slightly later review on Tuesday 17 June, 1947, the Sandusky Register in Sandusky, Ohio, comments that
We do, however, get a hint in the Winnipeg Tribune review that these subtitles might have been the rather selective subtitles which were typical of the period. And lo, the Gazette and Daily, of York, Pennsylvania, on 11 February 1947 indeed had some reservations about the completeness of the subtitles:
The subtitles must have really been quite bad to trigger this return to the 'transcending the limitations of language' shtick, so prevalent fifteen years previously. It looks likely that these subtitles may indeed be the ones referred to so bitterly by the disenchanted Netflixer above.
Interestingly, subtitles still seem to have been rather strange to a proportion of the film-going audience, or why does the Daily Times-News of Burlington, NC have to explain, on 12 July 1947, what subtitles are?:
But the award for the most comprehensive comment on the film's translation (or at least the most comprehensive that a evening's energetic keyword searching could provide) must go to a columnist on the Daily Tar Heel, student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has this to say on May Day 1947 (I give it in extenso, so that you get the full flavour):
Mr Allen expends much of his creative energies on describing the subtitles:
Setting aside the author's unendearing linguistic shtick, this review gives us a rather clearer picture of how selective Mr Weinberg's and signor di Donato's subtitles really were. It offers an intriguing research line to follow. How much was this viewer exaggerating the selectiveness of the subtitling? To what extent were other reviewers just grinning and bearing it - or, indeed, so riveted by the film's acting and storyline that they did not fully notice the subtitles? Only a close comparison against a copy of this version of the film can begin to tell us.
It becomes clear in the closing paragraphs of the review that Mr Allen's disappointment in Open City stemmed from the mismatch between the advertising and the product:
This seems to have been the kind of advertising that Allen was talking about:
Tino Balio's informative book The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946-1973 has much to say about the way this film was marketed:
Realizing
it would take time to cultivate an audience for foreign films, [the
distributor, Joseph] Burstyn used venerable exploitation techniques to
attract attention. [...] Although the New York Board of Censors passed
the film "with but insignificant scissorings", according to Variety,
Mayer-Burstyn decided to bypass the Production Code Administration
(PCA) to avoid having to make further cuts. The same article continued:
"Its got plenty to make [Hollywood censors] blanch if and when it is
shown them. Principal sympathetic femme character speaks openly of her
pregnancy, although she's not wed, and the traitoress who leads to the
capture and death of the partisans betrays them for a combination of
cocaine and the love of a lesbo German spy. That's just a sample of the
angles for the PCA to mull, while the handling of the priest will no
doubt make the Legion of Decency gulp hard, although the film has been
okayed by the Vatican." Unlike the Vatican, the Legion of Decency found
much to fault in the film and gave it a condemned rating. Lacking the
Production Code seal and the C rating meant that Open City would not be booked by the major theater chains.
The Mayer-Burstyn partnership made the best of circumstances. First,
it released Roma, città aperta, the original title of the film, as Open
City. The original referred to Rome's protected status during the war
as a historical city. Burstyn's title suggests something quite
different - a wide-open city where anything goes. In line with this title change, Mayer-Burstyn promoted the film as "Sexier than Hollywood ever dared to be!" and ran ads with fake publicity stills, one showing "two young ladies deeply engrossed in a rapt embrace" and another of "a man being flogged", both of where were "designed to tap the sadist trade", according to Mayer. As Variety explained, two types of audiences existed for foreign films: the "fairly discriminating filmgoers", who were taken with the "raw, unvarnished approach to sex" in the films, and the "transients, the misfits...and the loose-jawed brethren" who normally got their thrills vicariously from exploitation films". At first Open City played in art houses and independent theaters. Mayer-Burstyn later toned down the torture scenes and removed an offending shot of a toddler on a potty to secure a coveted code seal and entrée to mainstream theaters. (pp.41-42)
There's much to mull over here, including the existence of multiple cuts of the film, and the questions that remain over which version of the film a given audience might have seen. I like very much Samuel Wilson's comment, in his review of Balio's book and the film, that the Burstyn-Mayer release is an important version (or, I guess, versions) in its own right, which deserved to be given greater prominence in the Criterion edition. In the same vein, I would argue that di Donato and Weinberg's subtitles, patchy as they were, are also a significant factor in the film's reception in the United States, and deserve to be represented, even in the form of a clip for purposes of comparison, on a future DVD.
N.B. Post updated after publication to reflect the fact that di Donato and Weinberg's subtitles seem to be available in all their patchiness and elegance of typeface, on the TCM website:
Post-post-scriptum: Updated once again on finding out from colleague and Italian film scholar Catherine O'Rawe that Pietro di Donato was in fact a somewhat well-known literary figure. There is an essay by Loredana Polezzi about his novel Christ in Concretehere.
OK, silent film translation time. I just came across two different language versions of Kid Speed (Semon, 1924), a comedy short featuring one Oliver N. Hardy. One version is in English; the other is in Italian, from an off-air recording from RAI television.
The English version can be found here:
The Italian version, entitled Ridolini e il suo bolide, is here
La pellicola è una versione della Rai, probabilmente databile
negli anni '70: ad un certo punto si può ascoltare una versione del
brano "Il re del piffero", sigla della serie "Le simpatiche canaglie",
ovvero i corti delle "Our Gangs" trasmessi dalla Rai nella seconda metà
degli anni '70. Altra chicca è il cappello introduttivo del
cortometraggio che viene presentato come comica americana presentata da
Jean Gaborit e Jaques Durant [sic], due amanti del cinema famosi per le
ricostruzioni e le riscoperte di pellicole storiche; loro è infatti la
ricostruzione della versione originale del 1939 de "La regola del gioco"
di Jean Renoir.
[The film is a RAI version, probably dating from the 70s; at a certain point you can hear a version of the song 'Il re del piffero', the theme song of the series 'Le simpatiche canaglie', which were the Our Gang shorts broadcast by RAI in the second half of the 1970s. Another nugget is the intro to the short which is presented as American funnies presented by Jean Gaborit and Jaques Durant [sic], two film lovers famous for reconstructing and rediscovering old films: it was they who reconstructed the original version of Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game from 1939.]
The English version runs slightly over eighteen minutes; the Italian
clip less than fourteen, but it's typical of these broadcast versions to be quite cut about. What's interesting is to look at which bits have been maintained and which have been lost. The English-language version has a lot of verbal as well as visual humour. The scene is set in rhyme:
There are some quite marked shifts in register between the titles:
(I can't work out why the two different typefaces and layouts.)
Some of the titles introduce the characters and the actors who play them:
(The writer seems temporarily to have run out of rhymes here.)
(I am embarrassed to say that the penny took a few minutes to drop with 'Phil O'Delfya'.)
(btw any readers know what the 'million gate' is?)
The Italian credits don't introduce the characters like this, and the full cast list in the opening credits is missing too. Instead they give us an opening credit for Semon, and one for Hardy and a 'Patty Alexander':
This is a bit mystifying, since the only actress in the film is Dorothy Dwan, and on checking, she doesn't seem to have masqueraded at any point as Patty Alexander, though she did start out in life as Dorothy Illgenfritz. There is a Frank Alexander, but...? Mystery unresolved. (For more on mysteriously differing character names in Italian film versions, see old post 'Who is Fred?').
The Italian clip blithely ignores all the scene-setting and verbal dexterity of the original. It has many fewer titles - is, in fact, positively laconic:
[Ridolini, with his help, is fine-tuning the meteor/vehicle he will drive in the Grand Prix.] (I'm not sure who 'suo' refers to here.)
[The philanthropist who organised the race pays a visit with his daughter to the main contestants.]
[The day of the race.] Note that this title corresponds to the following title in English:
The Speed Kid (Semon) and Dan McGraw (Hardy) are rivals for the affections of Avery DuPoys' daughter Lou, played by Dorothy Dwan. Her father promises that whoever wins the race can date her:
Dan McGraw gets very excited about this, and tries to get his goons to sabotage his rival:
But in Italian, he only seems to be interested in the race:
[Get rid of that Ridolini! The Grand Prix will be mine!]
The clips raise lots of questions. Are these two versions in themselves complete, or have they lost other bits along the way? Are these Italian titles the earliest available titles, or were there at any point earlier, perhaps more fully translated titles? Can we in any sensible way consider these two films as original and translation?
It's clear that even if silent film *can* lay claim to being easy to translate because the titles in the target language can just be refilmed and substituted, it doesn't mean that silent film *is* translated in so straightforward a manner. The whole texture of the film has changed. Taking out the wordy English titles changes the nature of the comedy, rebalancing the film in favour of the slapstick. Paratextually, it's reframed as a nostalgic pleasure, rather than for a contemporary audience. And the Italian titles are poorer not just semantically, but aesthetically; the two typefaces used in the original (for reasons which aren't clear to me, since they don't seem to correspond to any distinction between, say, narrative and dialogue titles) are reduced to one very functional one. And that's of course without even considering all the other ways in which the film could have been recut, which is beyond the scope of this little post.
The whole question of what actually constitutes 'part of the film' for the purposes of translation is at issue. But more on the (para)textual status of intertitles in a future post.
I was watching the guilty pleasure that is Austenland last night, dubbed into Italian. (I'd previously seen it in English). Austenland is a romcom about a group of misfits who sign up for an 'immersive Austen experience'. Much of the broad comedy plays on accent: Jennifer Coolidge perpetrating a series of appalling come-back-Dick-van-Dyke-all-is-forgiven outrages on received pronunciation; Georgia King channelling Miranda Richardson's Queenie; Bret McKenzie not trying particularly hard to disguise his New Zealand accent, presumably on the grounds that his employer's usual clients wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.
How can one badly fake an English accent in Italian? I wish my Italian was good enough to get a real sense of this from the dubbed version. But I could at least see how they manage the moment near the end of the film where Jane discovers that 'Lady Amelia Heartwright', played by Georgia King, is actually American too.
The English script goes more or less:
"Amelia Heartwright": Farewell! [sinking back into her seat in the carriage] God, that was the best time so far. Except for the eye gouging.
Jane: You're not British??
AH: Yeah, I know, right?! Well, that's what two years of private drama tutoring will get you.
(Austenland)
The information that Heartwright is American is only conveyed here through accent. Of course the accent doesn't really come across (sorry, I couldn't find the clip itself online). The Italian script goes:
AH: Alla prossima! Dio, questa è stata la migliore di tutte le volte! Sì, a parte l'occhio, certo...
Jane: Ma tu stavi recitando??
AH: Sì! Sono bravina, vero? Be', due anni di lezioni di recitazione private sono serviti...
(Alla ricerca di Jane)
[AH: Goodbye! God, this was the best time of all! Yes, apart from the eye, of course...
Jane: You were acting??
AH: Yes! I'm pretty good, right? Well, two years of private acting lessons worked...]
The difference is that in English, Jane is astonished that Amelia has turned out not to be British. Since Amelia doesn't do a bad job of channelling Miranda Richardson, and since any British accent at all sounds great beside the efforts of Lady Elizabeth Charming (Jennifer Coolidge), this works OK.
In Italian, Jane is just astonished that Amelia was putting on an act - which is much less plausible. I couldn't find any more suitable footage on Youtube than the gag reel, but to get an idea of Lady Amelia Heartwright's acting style, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4s2fGMA69Q#t=2m53s.
Having said that, metalingual comments must be among the most difficult things to translate, and I don't easily see how else the dubber could have done it. How was it done in other languages? All comments from people who've seen the Italian, or any, dubbed version are very welcome...
(entrance via 3-5 Woodland Road for external visitors)
Wine to follow.
This research seminar will also be part of an Open Day for postgraduate study (taught and research degrees) in the School of Modern Languages. Prospective applicants are welcome to come and see what life in a postgraduate university programme is about, and meet staff and students. Everybody welcome, venez nombreux!
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a long-standing love of Dante's Comedy and the problems of its translation (see Dante in Leicestershire and Dante in Essex) so I thought a return to Dante was appropriate. Here is Caroline Bergvall's procedural poem 'Via', which began life as a live performance, then later a recorded performance and printed poem. It consists of 47 translations of the first tercet of Dante's 'Inferno', accompanied by the translators' names and years of publication.
Can we really call it a poem about translation, made up as it is of other people's translations of the tercet? Yes, absolutely, because it's not just a list, it's an ordering of the translations. In a more conventional list one might expect the translations to be ordered chronologically, or perhaps by surname of translator, but Bergvall orders them alphabetically by the first letter of the first line. The full audio recording of Bergvall's poem can be listened to here.
There is a very interesting discussion of the poem in the PoemTalk podcast which suggests some of the angles from which the poem can be approached (the circularity generated by the three lines of terza rima; the intensification of the poem's opening scenario by repeating it over and over again; Dante is in the dark wood and he's not getting out anytime soon). The way in which the poem multiplies translations, some of which are quite laboured (e.g. the egregious padding of 'the right road lost and vanished in the maze' in James Romanes Sibbald's 1883 translation) underlines the directness and simplicity of the Italian.
It's also a reflection on retranslation. The constant repetition-with-variations of the translations underlines the way the translations seem to require constant renewal while the source text remains unchanging. The non-chronological presentation warns the reader against reading retranslation as improvement; instead, the poem fluctuates between the diction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, creating an echo chamber of consonances and divergences. Sets of translations cluster around the same opening word or phrase. The poem throws up apparently random and paradoxical effects: six of the last seven translations in the poem finish with 'stray' or 'astray'; only one other version in the rest of the poem does. Some poets' attempts to vary the expected rhymes
do not end happily: Binyon's 'aware' and 'not anywhere'; Bickersteth's 'life' and
'strife'.
I really want to read this poem as a creative proliferation of translations showcasing the individual interpretation of each poet, but this inclination is undermined by Bergvall's deadpan vocal delivery and the subject matter of the tercet. Her poem seems to invite a more pessimistic reading, in which retranslation dooms the poem to eternal and cyclical repetition where innovation is stifled and variation muffled by poetic consensus.
I was intrigued when I saw that one of the translators appears twice: Seamus Heaney, who appears at no.6 and no.16:
6. HALFWAY on our life’s journey, in a wood,
From the right path I found myself astray.
(Heaney, 1993)
16. In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road had been lost sight of.
(Heaney, 1993)
This is in fact a typo, because translation number six is in fact by Parsons from 1893. But it feels like a happy error, because it's perfectly possible for a poet to translate the same poem twice, or revise a previous translation; it only underlines the multiplicity of possible readings of a text - even the same translator may not read the same source text the same way twice.
Postscript: For an enjoyable reflection on why infidelity in a translator can be a virtue, see this LRB review by Matthew Reynolds of Carson's Inferno. I couldn't resist adding Carson's, and three other translations which don't appear (for various excellent reasons) in Bergvall's poem.
In the midway of this our life below
I found myself within a gloomy wood
No traces left the path direct to show (Ichabod C. Wright, 1833)
Halfway through the story of my life
I came to in a gloomy wood, because
I'd wandered off the path, away from the light. (Ciaran Carson, 2002)
At the mid-point of the path through life, I found
Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. (Clive James, 2013)
Halfway through a bad trip I found myself in this stinking car park, Underground, miles from Amarillo… (Philip Terry, 2014)
I'm excited about taking part in the upcoming 'Authors and the World' workshop in Lancaster on Discourses of Literary Celebrity Across Genres (see here for more information). I'll be talking about literary celebrity and subtitling, which are two things that don't really seem to go together.
Well, nearly never. Every now and then, a subtitler makes a name for themselves, like Mai Harris, Herman Weinberg, Linda Hoaglund or Lenny Borger. There is even the rare 'celebrity' subtitler like Anthony Burgess for Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac. When the 1941 Universal comedy extravaganza Hellzapoppin was released in France after the end of the Second World War, it was advertised as a 'version originale sous-titrée par LES ROIS DES LOUFOQUES Pierre Dac and Fernand Rauzéna'. Dac was a comedian who broadcast for the French resistance from Radio Londres during the war. Fernand Rauzéna was an actor whose work included dubbing Stan Laurel and who worked with Dac on the Société des Loufoques radio show in the second half of the 1930s.
(Thanks (again) to Sam B. for pointing this one out). As you can see from the poster, the French subtitler writers' names are bigger than those of the film's stars.
I haven't seen a French version of this film yet, but I'm curious to see how they manage the zany humour of the original film. ("May I take your picture?" says a keen photographer, before removing a framed canvas from the wall and running off with it.) Unfortunately, as I understand it, the DVD of the film released in France doesn't have these much-trumpeted subtitles, but a well-received new subtitle translation by Michelle Nahon.
I do, however, have an Italian dubbed version of the film and I can see already that some of the humour seems to have dissipated in translation. (For one thing, the whole sequence containing the line quoted above has disappeared in the television broadcast version I have so I can't see how they would have done that in Italian.) My current project focuses on written text on screen, so I'm most interested in the credits, insert shots etc. The English credits for Hellzapoppin' finish with a devil (seen below in the far left of the image) pulling down a title card saying:
The camera then zooms in on the card and the film's title. In Italian this insert is reshot, but as is fairly standard when inserts are reshot in translation, instead of reproducing the sequence they simply provide the text, superimposed on the same background as the rest of the credits. Alas, the Italian translators (not credited anywhere on my copy) don't seem to have read the text very closely: the Italian text is a standard disclaimer of the type "any similarity with actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental".
(Screenshots prepared by the indefatigable Sina Stuhlert, to whom all thanks.)
For a longer preview of what I'll be talking about in Lancaster (with added stats!) see here.
To my great excitement and anticipation, I have research leave coming up in 2016, and I'm planning a series of archive trips to view prints of re-titled and subtitled films of the 1920s and 1930s. This is for a research project on translation in the silent and early sound periods. The compilation of the corpus so far has been a fun and rewarding experience, with helpful and much-appreciated support from the BFI where I found the first few prints for my study. Translated versions by their very nature aren't the versions of films that tend to be preserved (spoiled as they are by the target-language titles); the aspiration of distributors seems always to provide the 'best', most definitive version, and variant versions don't have high status. I've come across lot of the films in my corpus in more or less degraded versions available online, or DVDs and VHS tapes of eclectic provenance.
One of the films is Siliva Zulù (in English, Siliva the Zulu). I came across this via a splendid screening at the Watershed in Bristol on 1 November 2014, with a live accompaniment by Juwon Ogungbe, who had composed a new score for the film.
The film is a fascinating interplay of fiction and documentary - a sort of docudrama - with an entirely African cast shot by an Italian director, Attilio Gatti, an anthropologist, Lido Cipriani, and an Italian crew in Eshowe, South Africa in 1927. Some useful information about the filmmakers and the problematic production context of the film can be found here.
I was particularly struck by the title cards. They are in English, and look of the period, though a colleague from Bristol Silents in the audience commented that they had more of a look of the 1930s than the 1920s. The title cards are distinguished by a series of line drawings, almost cartoons, which have a very contrapuntal relationship with the footage of the characters/actors. The live action footage has an apparent preoccupation with 'accurate' ethnographic representation, and frequently foregrounds the physical attractiveness of the characters. My memory of the cartoons, on the other hand, was that they have a comic and irreverent tone at odds with the rest of the film. If they were produced at the time of the film's original release then they constitute interesting evidence of the complexity of the attitudes of the filmmakers to their ethnographic subjects.
The images on the title cards have traces here and there of Italian language, suggesting that they were copied directly from the Italian print of the film while the titles themselves were redone in English. My understanding is that there are versions of this film extant with Italian and with Spanish title cards, which I look forward to running to earth during my archive trips.
I thought I would use this chance to try out Lantern, the search tool of the wonderful Media History Digital Library, in the hope of finding reviews of the film from the time of its release. It came up with two results, only one of which was a review, from La revue du cinéma of February 1928:
The review doesn't mention language anywhere, nor the title cards with their equivocal comic drawings, and doesn't give any indication of where A.D. saw the film, but it might be worth keeping an eye out for a version with French titles too...
as part of the British Academy Guardian Language Festival and the Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo 2014
Tuesday 21 October 2014
at The British Academy, 10–11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH
9.30 a.m.–5.45 p.m.
Speakers include: Jacob Blakesley (Leeds), Nadia Cannata and colleagues (Sapienza Università di Roma), Daniela Caselli (Manchester), F.M. Federici (UCL), Paul Howard (Cambridge), Daniela La Penna (Reading), Matthew Reynolds (Oxford), Claudia Rossignoli (St Andrews) and Nigel Vincent (Manchester)
at the Italian Cultural Institute, 39 Belgrave Square, London, SW1X 8NX
6.30 p.m.
Matthew Reynolds will introduce readings by Philip Terry (Essex) from Dante’sInferno
Marina Warner will introduce Jamie McKendrick’s new translation of the poetry of Antonella Anedda
I'm now back from my rain-washed and internet-deprived summer in Italy and blogging may resume, hurray.
We've had Dante in Leicestershire on the blog before, and now it's the turn of Essex. Before the summer we had the great pleasure of welcoming to Bristol Philip Terry, author of a recently published translation of Dante's Inferno, who was the guest at a round table and reading hosted by Dr Ellen O'Gorman of the Department of Classics and Ancient History.
Terry's Inferno takes a completely brilliant slant on a text that has already been translated scores of times by transposing the action to the present day and the University of Essex campus (of which I have bitter memories, having once got totally lost there). The opening tercet pretty much sets the scene:
Halfway through a bad trip
I found myself in this stinking car park,
Underground, miles from Amarillo.
Virgil becomes Ted Berrigan, ex-writer-in-residence at the University. The intertextual references throng thick and fast. It is not Beatrice who urges Berrigan to rescue the poet, but 'Marina':
I come from a place I must quickly return to,
For I need to give a talk at the
British Library, this same afternoon,
Where there is a symposium on the sonnet,
With Jeff Hilson and Paul Muldoon -
When I return there, often will I sing your praise."
She was silent then, so I began:
"Oh Lady of Grace, aren't you that
Lady writer on the TV Talking about the Virgin Mary
Celebrated in that Dire Straits song?
Part of the purpose of the translation is to offer a commentary on UK higher education today. (The choice of text already gives us a great honking clue as to what Terry thinks of that.) A 'digital display / Above the entrance to the Knowledge Gateway' reads:
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE DOLEFUL CAMPUS,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL DEBT,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE FORSAKEN GENERATION.
You can find Canto 13 of Terry's translation, with a few words about the concept behind the translation here. Readers with a London Review of Books subscription can read Canto I here. Excerpts from Cantos 1 and 18 can be read here. A bit of Canto 33 can be read here. Truly the internet is a marvellous thing. But what you should really do is just go buy the book.
Readers near London may be interested in these free public events which are part of the
summer school, Translate in the City, organised in collaboration with
City University:
TRANSLATE IN THE CITY OPEN EVENTS: FREE TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC
TUESDAY 24TH JUNE at 5pm. BIRLEY LECTURE HALL
TRANSLATION SLAM FOR ITALIAN/NON-ITALIAN SPEAKERS ALIKE!
Two
well-known Italian translation slammers will compete to produce the
most popular version of La Madre (the Mother) by Natalia Ginzburg.
Shaun Whiteside:- His translations from Italian include
Venice is a Fish and Stabat Mater (commended for the 2013 John Florio Prize) by Tiziano Scarpa,
The Legend of Redenta Tiria by Salvatore Niffoi and The Solitude of Prime Numbers
by Paolo Giordano, as well as four novels by the Luther Blissett/Wu Ming writers’ collective:
Q (shortlisted for the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), 54,
Manituana and Altai. He lives in London.
Kevin Halliwell:-Throughout
the 1980s to the mid-1990s, Kevin
lived and worked in Milan where – in addition to teaching at the
Catholic University and the School for Translators and Interpreters – he
started to work as a translator, specialising in History of Art texts.
He then relocated to Brussels, where he spent the
following 14 years translating/revising EU documents, mainly from
Italian, French and Swedish. A freelance translator since 2008, Kevin is
the recipient of the Gate Theatre Translation Award and his most recent
Italian translation for the theatre is
Otto by Roberta Calandra, which premiered earlier this year in Rome.
Chaired by Professor Amanda Hopkinson
THURSDAY 26th JUNE at 5pm BIRLEY LECTURE HALL
KEYNOTE LECTURE BY PROF. SUSAN BASSNETT ON
THE MAKING & TRANSLATING OF MEMORY
Is
fact stranger than fiction, remembering more truthful than invention?
How do writers translate their recall of reality into a new world of the
imagination,
and what is the role of the translator in capturing their memories of
the past for an audience in the future?
Susan
Bassnett is a writer, translator and academic. Her latest books are the
4th Edition of her best-selling Translation Studies (2013) which is
used by students
all over the world, and Translation (2014) in the Routledge New
Critical Idiom series. She is Professor of Comparative Literature and
Special Advisor on Translation at the University of Warwick and is also
Honorary Director of the Translation Studies Centre
at the University of Birmingham.
A snippetlet for those of my readers who enjoy film translations of yore. This clip is from an Italian release of the 1947 musical extravaganza Variety Girl,
directed by George Marshall and starring just about everybody who was anybody:
In this
sequence Pearl Bailey, in her first film role, part-speaks, part-sings
the song 'Tired':
Italy is so well known as a dubbing territory - indeed, almost *the* dubbing territory par excellence - that nobody
talks much about the role of subtitling, particularly in the first decades of sound. I did
not know that Italian distributors of the 1940s ever subtitled songs, but shall be keeping an eye out from now on.
And look at the font! The size of it! The lovely clean lines
of it! As the kind poster of the clip, EmeliusBisestile, observes wistfully, and as I have
mentioned before, fonts from the 30s and 40s offer a kind of viewing pleasure which is lacking in resubtitled versions with more functional, modern fonts, for all their legibility and fancy dropshadows, etc.
And yet - I feel that such fonts are wonderfully charming, but I am uncomfortably aware that I cannot say what and wherefore. Are there any font nerds sorry, typeface experts out there who could do a font
identification on these subtitles for me? I can just about identify it as sans-serif, but I would love to know more - what it's called, where else it was used, how it evokes that sense of period...? If print texts are multimodal in their use of typeface, and therefore typeface itself is an element of the translation of printed texts (see here for some more thoughts on this) then what's the role of the subtitle typeface, superimposed on the image, as an element of translation? What kind of meaning-making potential does it have (apart from inspiring hopeless nostalgia in geeks like me)? Comments welcome.
Well what do you know, more random thoughts about form in translation...
This spring I read David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - absorbing, absolutely unputdownable book by a preposterously gifted writer - and as I laid into chapter 39, I found this:
Gulls
wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch,
snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens,
spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables,
creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells
and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by
mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of
clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches
of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high,
stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over
kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile
patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives
dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs;
woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed
officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise
soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped
calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books;
ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks;
sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping
malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses;
heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives
and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits;
firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased
judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding
powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns;
nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo
anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters;
barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers;
bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers;
cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing;
the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first
from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the
end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began,
over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from
last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama
observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This
world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.
The rhyme sneaks in so sweetly that it was several lines before I realised what I was reading. And then it disappears again as seamlessly as it appeared. The use of rhyme in the passage doesn't seem structurally or thematically motivated, as far as I can see - it is not repeated elsewhere in the novel, it apparently just happens, because of reasons.
I am curious to know how the translators rendered this amazing passage.
If any well-disposed readers of this blog happen to have a copy to hand of the French translation by Manuel Berri (Éditions Alto, 2012)
or of the Italian translation by Maurizio Bartocci (Frassinelli, 2010) (not that I would know the translator's name from the publisher's website because it appears not to be listed, tsk)
or of the German translation by Volker Oldenburg (Rowohlt, 2012)
or of the Spanish translation by Víctor V. Úbeda (Duomo Ediciones, 2011) (not that I would know the translator's name from the publisher's website because, grrrrrrrrr, etc......)
please feel free to get in touch with a comment about it - or better yet, share it. Indeed, if you have access to any translation of this passage please do feel free to write in; although I would need a back-translation into English to make any sense at all of translations into other languages, I am still curious.
