REVIEW: Translating Style: The English Modernists and their Italian Translations by Tim Parks

Cassell, 1998; £25.00

ISBN 0-304-70098-3

The principal authors whose works are considered are (in the order of the chapters devoted to them) D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Barbara Pym and Henry Green. In each case he takes one or more novels and compares the original with (usually) a commercially published Italian translation.

It must be said at the outset that some of the finer points that Parks makes cannot be fully appreciated by someone who, like this reviewer, does not know Italian, though some familiarity with French or Latin or with the derivation of English (and Italian) words in general will undoubtedly help. Indeed, it is unclear how much familiarity with Italian Parks himself assumes in the reader: perhaps he (or his publisher) is deliberately vague on the matter for understandable commercial reasons. Nevertheless, the main concern here must be with the treatment of Barbara Pym and the light that is shed on her work. For this, a lack of Italian (or other languages) is a less crucial, though still limiting, factor.

Whilst one could, on obtaining this book, just read the chapter on Barbara Pym, ignoring what precedes it, one would undoubtedly lose some of the context and thus some of the meaning by doing so. It would be better to read the whole book. I shall take the equivalent approach here, though naturally I will not deal with aspects which are specific to the other authors.

The emphasis of the book is on practical analysis rather than on theory which, Parks says in his introductory note, is the bane of the literature on translation. His approach is thus to leave theory alone and see what can be learnt both about translation and about works of literature themselves by looking at passages in English and Italian. "Taking as a starting~point the idea that much can be learnt about a work of literature by considering the problems involved in its translation ... [the book] shows how divergences between original and translation tend to be of a different kind for each author and to point to the peculiar nature of his or her style and the overall vision it implies. Criticism and translation are thus seen to be mutually enlightening."

The first chapter introduces the reader through examples taken from various sources, not all literary, to the sorts of problems that arise: not only simple grammatical mistakes by the translator (which any professional should have avoided), but also differences between the two languages in the range of meaning of words that superficially are translations of each other, and equivalent differences of register where phrases which may seem appropriate translations by other criteria are found to be inappropriate because of differences between or within the cultures involved. (For example, what may be straightforward in one language might seem extravagantly flowery in the other; similarly, a form of words might have particular associations in one language which its equivalent lacks in the other.) A particular problem, which will be mentioned throughout the book, is that of rendering the intended departures from normal usage introduced by an author: if the translator notices these at all, there is still the danger either of deliberate normalisation (sometimes, it would seem, at the behest of the publisher of the translation) or of inability to find an equivalent in the second language.

It is within the context of considerations such as these that Parks goes on to consider passages from Women in Love, ‘The Dead’ from Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, and various works of Beckett (with Beckett’s own original writings in and translations from or into French adding another interesting factor), before coming to Barbara Pym. The work under consideration is A Few Green Leaves (Qualche Foglia Verde, translated by Frida Ballini, La Tartaruga Edizioni, Milan, 1989). It is not made clear whether this, her last novel, is the only one to have been translated into Italian, though it seems unlikely.

Parks begins his chapter, ‘Barbara Pym and the Untranslatable Commonplace’, with these words: "Since the revival of Barbara Pym’s fortunes in 1977, it has been generally acknowledged that she was a novelist of some stature, yet a certain unease and confusion remain as to the exact nature of her achievement." Both this sentence and the title of the chapter indicate something of the argument which will follow. After a reference to the book on Pym by Michael Cotsell’ (to which I will return) Parks considers the reception of her books in different countries, stating that her "success in the UK has been matched and even surpassed only by success in the USA, while in Europe the translation of her novels has not brought Pym any particular acclaim, or sales, and even less has she entered into the canon of English literary novelists of her time" exemplified by Greene, Powell and Bowen. Only in the original English, then, have her novels been "widely read and loved". Further, he suggests that the American response has more to do with the perception of a particular sort of English "quaintness" which appeals to them, rather than of the actual complexities that Pym conveys to a British audience.

Parks then offers this hypothesis, on the examination of which the rest of the chapter is essentially based: "that there may be something in the poetics that informs Pym’s novels, which is not only difficult to convey in translation, but perhaps not even properly understood outside the country (if not the milieu) in which she was writing."

There is, Parks says, in this book (perhaps more than in any other of Pym’s novels) "a cheerful willingness repeatedly to frustrate the expectations it so rapidly and traditionally sets up.... [W]hat is disconcerting in A Few Green Leaves is not the subversion of a traditional plot, but the almost disappearance [sic] of any plot at all[.] [Nb sooner has she set up what appears to be the traditional romantic storyline than this breaks down into apparently insignificant scenes full of banal or quaint minutiae and culture-specific bric-à-brac. What is it then that the book ‘means’ which the author hopes will make up for ... our thwarted expectations (whether of romance or satire)?"

Parks then begins to examine passages from the text, following his usual procedure of looking at the Italian translation, making such conclusions as are possible from it alone, and then comparing it with the original to see what further may be learnt. Extensive quotation would perhaps have to be replaced by complete quotation to do justice to this aspect of the chapter, so I will confine myself mostly to his conclusions.

He finds various discrepancies which might just be put down to poor translation, were it not that the translator elsewhere shows herself capable of translating complex English into "fairly polished Italian". He concludes that the discrepancies are due to a strategy or vision of Pym’s which the translator has failed to appreciate: the nuances of language are designed to indicate the divergences at any moment between the different points of view (a) of the character concerned, (b) of social convention (usually expressed in a stock form of words) and (c) of the narrator.

An amusing, if comparatively straightforward, illustration of some of these matters can be achieved by imagining the task of translating into Italian for an Italian audience

Emma’s mother had told her that before his present job he had been an Anglican priest who had ‘gone over to Rome’ 11.11

As Parks says, "‘Gone over to Rome’ is a standard and dismissive expression, registering an Anglican’s sense of disdain for another’s betrayal." The use of ‘Rome’ itself in this way, and the whole Anglican context, social and historical, are "necessarily lost in the straightforward and colourless ‘passato alla chiesa Cattolica"’ with which the Italian version of the passage ends. Since this is precisely the sort of fictional territory with which Pym deals, the difficulty of presenting her work to other audiences is highlighted. Indeed, it is hard to see how even a translator completely at home in Pym’s world could convey such matters without a barrage of footnotes (which are hardly acceptable in non-academic presentations of fictional works).

Parks argues that "Pym’s achievement lies not just in her presentation of this very particular world, but in the way she suggests how it is the contingent conventional represented by the pressure of detail, language and convention which suffocates, or is allowed to suffocate, personal initiative and thus smothers the plot, while at the same time being the source of much of the book’s fun and irony. As such, one begins to get a sense of local detail and conventional idiomatic expressions as sources simultaneously of pleasure and frustration. To put it another way, one cannot have Pym’s richness of detail without her sense of futility, they operate together in a reciprocally tensing relationship."

But this richness of detail "is never extraordinary detail, even though it may seem so to those not familiar with the society she describes. Pym never seeks to see objects under unusual lights, or to uncover the exotic in the familiar, typical strategies of modernism and indeed [of] all the other writers [in the book.] ... The problem for the translator is that not only does Pym’s detail seem somewhat bizarre when transferred into another language (as indeed it may seem bizarre when read in New York or San Francisco), but its attachment to stock phrases and thought patterns is undermined because of the inevitable difficulties of maintaining the same semantic content while finding equivalent idioms in Italian. What is lost, then, is the English reader’s sense of immediate recognition, of harmony between language and detail, a recognition that validates the humour and irony but at the same time calls the reader’s own way of thinking into question. If I recognize this so immediately, do I myself not act, or fail to act, in this way? Pym’s prose is challenging."

After quoting the list of jumble sale items from the novel, Parks goes on to question whether "[p]erhaps Pym is not, after all, so far away from the modernist credo: ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’." The difference, however, is that these fragments do not come from a shattered and diversified set of cultures, as might be suggested by the Eliot quotation, but represent details of a precise set of social situations linked by a common, if fugitive, and more domestic culture. This bleak look at discarded everyday objects leads, perhaps at first somewhat surprisingly, to a comparison with Beckett (also a manipulator of such objects) and to Michael Cotsell’s thought that "although ‘Pym’s presentation has nothing in common with a writer like Beckett’, she is nevertheless fascinated by the same themes of ‘pointlessness and futility"’ [Cotsell as quoted by Parks]. But Beckett is able (in his own translations) to play mainly within language because his work is largely and increasingly free of culture-specific detail. Pym is precisely the opposite in this respect, as we have seen. She does indeed play with language but within a specific cultural context. In translation, one loses both the cultural context and the language use based on it. Parks concludes this comparison by asserting that Beckett, "of all people, cannot be mistaken, even by the most workman-like translator, for what he is not. Part of the charm of Pym, on the other hand, is her apparent willingness to be misunderstood, to be seen for what she is not, or not entirely, a traditional writer of upmarket, genteel romance fiction, and this in order to remain passionately attached to the one small milieu which happens to be her particular consolation.... Ultimately, it is in her apparent closeness to, but crucial distance from, the traditional genre that much of the pleasure of reading Pym lies. Unfortunately, the distinction is too subtly generated for the Italian translation ... [which by] translating only the plot ... does [however] show us quite convincingly that Pym is not a traditional novelist. For in the Italian version the book offers very little pleasure at all."

After the treatment of Henry Green which concentrates mostly on Doting (the only one of his novels to be published complete in Italian translation), the final chapter offers six unidentified pairs of texts in Italian and English with no indication of which is the original and which the translation: the reader is invited to identify which is which as a means of sharpening perceptions which will have been gained from the book as a whole; five of these books are eventually identified and one left unidentified. This exercise largely replaces any formal conclusion to the book by itself bringing its general themes into play. The book ends with these words: "Nobody, I suspect, is ever closer to a text, than he who wrestles with the problem of how to rewrite it with all its layers and nuances in another language. An analysis of that rewriting is the next best thing."

Returning to the chapter on Barbara Pym, we come, after the comparison with Beckett, to the final paragraph in which is asked "a final and curious question: is it possible that a writer might be truly great, but truly untranslatable, un-exportable? If Pym is to be considered great it is in the way she uses the claustrophobia of a particular milieu and its language to express a common human condition." Her "untranslatability" is reiterated in terms of the difficulty, as we have seen, of recreating in Italian (or, by extension, any other language) "a convincing wealth of recognizable commonplaces while remaining within the limits of the semantic content," and secondly "in the way unfamiliarity with the milieu Pym describes, and with its idiom, may distract attention from her underlying vision." Parks ends with the view that "The question as to greatness and translatability, however, brings us, I suspect, into the realm of the imponderable."

Michael Skaife d'Ingerthorpe

^tMichael Cotsell, Barbara Pym, Macmillan, London, 1989.