21st century best-sellers

I would like to show you the 21st century best-sellers of Italian literature.

1. 'La rabbia e l'orgoglio' is a book written by Oriana Fallacci. Controversial commentary on Islam and European Muslims, originally published as a series of articles in the Correre della Sera. 'La rabia e l'orgoglio' (The Rage and the Pride) have been translated into idiosyncratic English by Fallaci herself

2. 'Io non ho paura' by Niccolò Ammaniti. Someday a boy finds a kidnap victim in an old farmhouse and then discovers his parents are in on the sercret. Ammaniti got the idea for the book during a road trip to Apulia in the late 1990s. The story is based on a true story of a kidnapped boy from Milan drugin the Anni di Piombo in the 1970s, a time of terrorism in Italy. At the time, it was common to kidnap people from the North and transport them to the South, where they would be hidden and sametimes killed inless the ransom was paid.

3. 'Senza sangue' by Allesandro Baricco. A young girl hides from the muderers of her parents, but grows up to avenge their deaths.

4. '100 colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire' by Melissa Panarello. Blockbuster diary of a schoolgirl's sexual odyssey. Melissa's secret life is concealed from family and friends, revealed only in her diary entries.

5. 'La pazienza del ragno' by Andrea Camilleri. The eighth in the wildly popular Insepctor Montalbano series of crime novels.

6. 'Gomorra' by Roberto Saviano. A frightening non fiction novel about the Camorra, the Naples mafia. The author lives in hiding following death threats. In this book Saviano employs prose and news-reporting style to narrate the story of the Camorra, exposing its territory and business connections.

Ferdydurke - translation problems

Gombrowicz's language is very difficult because the Polish author used several types of idiomatic Polish-colloquial, the language of Polish peasants and the literary language. Difficult words to translate is Polish exclamations like "Jakże!". It was trasnlated by Danuta Borchardt as "Oh, sure!". The same problem is with the word "onegdaj" as "once" and "chłystek" like "a juvenile". Another problem is the Polish prefix "niedo" which was trasnlated as "not quite" - "niedoświadek ludzi niedoludzkich" as "the little not-quite world of the not-quite humans".
Moreover, the use of diminutives is very pervalent in Polish. Gombrowicz used them in the service of the ridiculous. The sentence "noga stała się nóżką, ręka - rączką, istota - stotką, dzieło - dziełkiem, ciało - ciałkiem" was translated by Danuta as "my leg became a little leg, my hand - a little hand, my persona - a little persona, my being - a little being, my oeuvre - a little oeuvre." Another problem is inversion which in Polish appears and changes style. As an example is "Słowacki wielkim poetą był" - Danuta, in order to make it more similar to the Polish original, translated it as "Because Słowacki - oh, what a great poet he was". The novel is really challenge for translators.

Ferdydurke

Ferdydurke - the work of Gombrowicz was considered to be an untranslatable work, just like other him's novels. The specific vocabulary and long, complicated sentences made the novel very difficult in reading and understanding. Ferdydurke is a book about a 30-year-old man, who finds himself imprisoned in the world of schoolboys by a professor who whises to reduce him to childhood. The novel was published in Poland in 1937 and made young Gombrowicz famous.


Ferdydurke translated in 1961 by Eric Mosbacher was insufficient because it was not translated directly form Polish into English, but form French. The first translation seemed to be very poor because of lost of fragments missing. In 2000 Danuta Borchardt has finished a direct translation of novel. In 1961 the work of Gombrowicz was also translated from French into Italian by Sergio Miniussi. The first Italian version of Ferdydurke was very ungainly so in 2004 the work was translated by Vera Verdiani once again. In Ferdydurke there are two main metaphors, very difficult to translate. One of them is "pupa" and the other one "gęba". "Gęba" is a metaphor for a kind of disguise. Danuta Bortchardt translated it as "a mug". In Italian version "gęba" is "muso". Moreover, "pupa" is the symbol of childhood. In English "pupa" can be translated as buttocks or backside, but Danuta Bortchardt decided to leave this word. In Italian translated as "culetto". Gombrowicz's language is complicated because he describing the world and a certain process used synonyms which cause problems during translation. For exemple "wewnętrzne rozdarcie, rozproszenie i rozproszkowanie" was translated by Danuta Bortchardt in descriptive way:


                       "disintegration when all would be blown to pieces and scattered to the winds".


I postawił mu kica.
E con sommo rammarico gli mise un bell’uno sul registro.

Widzieliście, jak złośliwie dydaktyczny Pimko mnie upupił.
Avete visto come quel malignazzo di pimko mi abbia cuculizzato con la sua pedagogia.

... że co najwyżej, w obecnej fazie waszego rozwoju jesteście li tylko półszekspirami i ćwierćszopenami.
In questa fase del vostro sviluppo siete a malapena dei mezzi Shakespeare e dei quarti di Chopin.

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
Wielka poezja, będąc wielką i będąc poezją, nie może nie zachwycać nas, a więc zachwyca.



The final fragment of Ferdydurke is very funny. However is also very difficult to translate. Eric Mosbacher, the first author of English version, omitted "koniec i bomba, kto czytał ten trąba". Maybe it proved to be too difficult to translate. Danuta Borchardt translated it successfully:


It's the end, what a gas,
and who's read it is an ass!


Vera Verdiani in Italian:


Termine ho messo,
chi legge è flesso!

              

Translation of neologism. Part one

  

Neologism can be defined as newly coiled lexical units or existing lexical units that acquire a new sense (Newmark). Neologisms are the biggest problems for the professional translators. Newmark, in his book A Textbook of Translation, proposed some types of neologisms:


- old word with new senses; 

- derived words. Neologisms of derived words can be coined by the adding of suffixes, prefixes;
- Abbreviations;
- Collocations;
- Transferred words
- Acronyms


In the next post I will try to show the methods of translations of neologisms on the example of Ferdydurke.

Even-Zohar - polysystem theory

In the 1970s, a new stage of translation theory, scholars began focusing on translation from the perspective of the target text and culture and the communicative process as a whole. Itamar Even-Zohar, an Israeli culture researcher and professor at Tel Aviv University, since the 1970s had been working on developing theoretical tools for dealing with the complexity of socio-cultural system. Moreover, Itamar Even-Zohar, influenced by Russian formalists, developed a theory of translation based on a conception of literature as a system. However, he showed how translations can occupy a primary or secondary position in the literary system. The term polysystem means a layered conglomerate of cohesive elements that changes and mutates while these elements are in interaction with one another. Itamar Even-Zohar offered a comprehensive theoretical framework on how literary system function and develop and also how translated literature affects the national literature or is affected by the nation literature. His polysystem theory moves the study of translation out of a purely linguistic analysis.

Untranslatability - part two

Next example of untranslatability is the case of the Italian word in the sentence 'C'è stato un tamponamento'. The sentence seems fully translatable, because English and Italian are sufficiently close to follow a loosely approximate pattern of sentence organization with regard to word order. The conceptual level is also translatable, because an event occorring in time past is being reported in time present. The difficulty concerns the translation of Italian word tamponamento, which emerges in English as a noun phrase:

Italian version: C'è stato un tamponamento.

English version: There has been / there was a slight accident (involving a vehicle). 

The word tamponamento is a sign that has culture-bound or context meaning, which cannot be translated even by an explanatory  phrase. Tamponamento is considered as a whole, so the term cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of Italian driving habits and the frequency with which 'slight accident' occur and the weighting and relevance of such incidents when they do occur.

Methods of translation

                                                             Methods of translation

Adaptation (free translation) is a translation method in which the translator replaces references to the source society or culture with corresponding features of the target society or culture which are more appropriate for readers of the target text.

Loan translation is a translation method whereby the translator translates a phrase literally into the target language (know as word for word translation).

Compensation is a method of translation whereby the translator can get around stylistic difficulties in the source text by introducing similar stylistic effects at other points in the target text. For example, many languages use two different second-person pronouns, one formal and one informal (French tu and vous, Spanish tú and Usted, Italian tu e Lei). Only English very rarely makes this distinction, so the translator must convey this in another way, using first names or nicknames, or through syntactic constructions which are seen as informal in English (I’m, you’re, gonna, dontcha).

Borrowing is a method of translation in which the translator uses a word or phrase from the source text in the target text without changing it. Borrowed words are normal printed in italics if the word is not regarded as having been integrated into the vocabulary of the target language.

Paraphrase  is a method of translation in which the translator renders one term in the source text using several words or an entire phrase.

Translator’s note is an explanation, usually a footnote, which the translator inserts to give details about the either the limitations of a translation or the source culture or any other information he or she feels is useful.