Translation #4 – “Tu dai voce a me, io do voce a te,” Intervista ad Anna Nadotti di Susanna Basso – By Anita Hotchkiss
You give me a voice; I’ll give you a voice
I meet Anna Nadotti in a bar in the center of Torino on a clear afternoon in July. I have with me the notes of the questions that I want to ask her about La signora Dalloway, her new translation for Einaudi of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf that Antonella Anedda has characterized with poetic precision as “heroic.”
Let’s start from way back, from the first time you read Mrs. Dalloway. Do you remember when that was? Do you remember your reactions?
I read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time in the middle of 1970, in English. It was summer, the same summer, if I remember correctly, in which I read Una donna, by Sibilla Aleramo, and La Storia, by Elsa Morante. It was the same time that I was reading the books of Simone de Beauvoir. I was reading a lot by woman authors, often in the original language – a habit that I picked up when I was a university student, and that has stayed with me. Reading women writers, I understood that I had a lot to learn – not about the language, but about myself.
What role have existing translations played in the evolution of your own work?
I decided to check two previous translations: Alessandra Scalero’s, that I wasn’t familiar with, and Nadia Fusini’s. I did that, however, only after I had translated about a third of the novel. I wanted to look for my own voice, to be confident enough of it, before confronting theirs.
Was there something in particular that you didn’t want to lose in your translation of Mrs. Dalloway?
I didn’t want to lose anything …… a bit ambitious, isn’t it? But I found it so beautiful, so rich, so cinematic. So incredibly “young.” If there’s one thing I understand about re-translating the classics, it’s that, in making a new translation of them, it’s not about rejuvenating them but about restoring their youth intact.
My experience in translating this interview
In translating this interview, I did not feel quite the same need to be “true” to the original language and style as I do when translating literary works. I believe this is because Basso and, perhaps even moreso, Nadotti are speaking “off the cuff,” as it were. In contrast to literary works, the meaning of their words and thoughts is privileged over the style and the poetry of their language. Their manner of expressing ideas is not something they have labored over for minutes or hours in an effort to convey complex and layered meanings or nuance, as is often the case with literature or even with a scientific work. In addition, the reader of an interview is not likely to be interested in spending time re-reading complex sentences to seek hidden or obscure underlying ideas and meanings as the reader of a novel might be willing to do, even assuming the interview is characterized by such complexity. In an interview, as in most conversations, information and ease of understanding are paramount and, as a result, although I spent some time searching for the best words (in my view) to convey the speakers’ meaning, I did not feel that the interview contained particular punctuation or more than one or two expressions which I needed to convey with incredible fidelity to the original language.
The one word with which I had trouble was “cinematographic.” I could not figure out if Nadotti meant “film-like” (whatever that means in the context of a novel), “theatrical,” “picturesque,” “pictorial,” “detailed,” or something else. Dictionaries were of no help, indicating simply that “cinematographic” is related to film-making and that “cinematic” has multiple meanings. Perhaps if I were more familiar with Mrs. Dalloway, I would have been better able to interpret Nadotti’s meaning and thus convey it more faithfully. In the end, I decided to use “cinematic” and leave the interpretation up to the reader.
In addition, in translating the portion relating to Alessandra Scalero’s translation, as to which Nadotti says “non conoscevo,” I chose “that I wasn’t familiar with” rather than “with which I was not familiar” or “that I didn’t know.” Although my choice is not grammatically correct, it is more commonly used in conversation than “with which I was not familiar.” I decided not to use “that I didn’t know” because, although that translation would also have been consistent with colloquial usage – that is, in English one could say “I didn’t know that translation” – it seemed to me that “I wasn’t familiar with” was a good compromise between the very formal expression and the very colloquial.