Early Monday morning, having had a sleepless night due to the anxieties produced by his new undertaking, he presented himself to the foreman in his work uniform: a severe case of bedhead, velvet pants, and a shirt that said “Legalize Pot, Jail Prime Minister Craxi! Now is our time to rise up!”
“Nice to see you ready for work, kid,” scolded the foreman, noting the massive bags under Lu Purk’s eyes: “What happened? No sleep last night?”
“Relax, man. I’m charged to 1000!” he lied. “I just can’t wait to start work! Let’s go!” he said. “Just pass me that bucket over a-that-a-way.” He gestured vaguely toward the top of the scaffolding; one of the young workers on the roof saw him, and responded with a wave. “Well, I’m here, man, so I can ‘lend a hand’” he spluttered anxiously. “Are you joking, kid?” said the foreman, with a hint of annoyance in his voice. “We agreed that you’d work the buckets. It’s no place for you, up there—it’s dangerous” he warned seriously. “You’ll work the cement mixer and give a hand to the cripple with the buckets, end of story.”
“Whatever you say, Sir” said Lu Park, extending an olive branch. “Don’t get all worked up now. I’ll watch over that goddamn cement mixer through hell or high water.”
“Of course you will,” agreed the foreman. “If you want to make some money here, and avoid me regretting hearing you out, you will give me the divine pleasure of being obeyed, understood?”
“Yup,” said Antò Lu Purk. “I wouldn’t want to give you trouble for nothing in the world,” he added.
I think the most important part of translating this excerpt is nailing the relationship between Antò and the foreman. The foreman obviously has serious doubts about Antò‘s work ethic, and talks down to him, calling him “ragazzo” and “figliolo.” Meanwhile, Antò tries to be deferential to his new boss, attempting to us the “voi” form (though he constantly slips up and uses “tu”), and obeying the foreman’s orders, but is too much of a young, left-wing goofball to be entirely formal—he comes to work looking slovenly, curses, constantly uses slang and casual speech, and calls the foreman “cumpà”.I think the foreman’s dislike of Antò was easy to translate, because it is entirely in his words—he’s not very subtle about his disdain. The one thing I did change with him was the words he uses to address Antò, Rather than “ragazzo” and “figliolo”, I had him say “kid” for both. “Boy” and “son” in modern English would not realistically be used in the way. “Boy,” beyond the literal meaning of a male who’s not an adult, is used to refer to animals (like saying “come here, boy,” to a dog), or, historically, was used by southern whites to refer to black men. “Son,” beyond the literal meaning of male offspring, can be a mild term of endearment an older man gives to a younger man. Because in English these terms don’t provide the same condescension and disdain that they do in Italian, I changed them to “kid,” which works better in this context. In translating Antò‘s mixture of formality and informality, I mostly used titles—I had Antò alternate between calling the foreman “man”, and “Sir”, depending on the sentence. This, in addition to his generally informal speech, succeeds in translating his tone in the source text.
Something I changed just to make it more clear to an international audience was the motto on Antò‘s shirt, “Craxi in galera”. I chose not to replace this with an equivalent 1980s American left-wing motto, because I respect the audience’s intelligence. “Craxi in galera” is surrounded by other left-wing political slogans, and the audience knows this is an Italian story, so anyone can intuit that it’s a left-wing political statement. I added “Prime Minister” simply to clarify that Craxi is a person, since “Craxi” by itself would be confusing and vague.
Something I didn’t know how to translate was “i lividi preoccupanti che gli cerchiavano gli occhi.” The literal translation—“The worrying bruises that circled his eyes”—sounds like a black eye, but the foreman sees this and infers that Antò had no sleep the night prior. This makes no sense, however, since a black eye is an injury, not the result of sleep deprivation—so I changed this to “massive bags under Lu Purk’s eyes,” since that is seen as a sign of tiredness. Perhaps I failed to understand the original Italian, or perhaps this would be explained if I read the entire novella.