I will analyze the essay ‘Translation as a Practice of Acceptance’ from two different points of view: one accepting that it was written by Anita Raja, a well known translator of German fiction into Italian; second, that Raja has a second identity as Ferrante the writer. The suspicion of dual identity was awakened in me by Rebecca Folkoff’s article, who is also the translator of this text from Italian. Folkoff writes in her essay’ To translate is to betray’, “I wouldn’t always be so quick to believe the words of a disreputable gossip blog, but the more I read about Raja, the more convinced I become that she is indeed Ferrante.”
According to Anita Raja, translating literature “means establishing an intense relationship which unfolds entirely within the written word,,,,,a relationship between two modes of writing, between two utterance that are by nature strongly personal.”
She talks about this intense relationship between the original and the translation with a vocabulary that borders on a description of a romantic love: “the translator…offers her own language with love, with passion, with admiration, and even with devotion.”
But the relationship is characterized by inequality. The word “inequality” is repeated at least 7 times in this essay. If I may stretch the point, the translator takes on the traditional female role in this relationship. She ”must retreat to accept the language of the other to allow herself to be invaded by it so as to accommodate it”; ‘to surrender to the text’s needs”; “submit to the author’s will”; “to willingly let ourselves to be trapped in its web”; “to accept that the other’s word is stronger than one’s own.”
In other words, the original text is paramount but it also has the power to inspire, to exert an influence, to “jostle the language of the translator, creating friction, producing a new text in its image and likeness.”
Raja goes on, giving specific examples of the difficulties she encountered from her translations. For example, translating Christa Wolf, an East German writer who experimented with the “lexical, syntactic and grammatical structure of the German language”, she discovers
that by “challenging the very limit of the language” it led her on a path that she would never had the courage to take on her own.
Raja concludes the article that the complexities of literary text should not discourage the translator. Above all, a translator has to be a good reader, able to “puzzle over the complexities of the text, line after line and to piece it together in a new language”. She poses the question: what happens if something is “untranslatable” such as a wordplay. Raja doesn’t accept the notion of untranslatability. It is the duty of the translator to find a way to resolve it. “The translator’s greatest resource must be her inventiveness,” Raja writes, but she still has to be devotedly faithful to the original. This reconciliation might result in an unattractive language which, according to her, is acceptable. As we have seen in Stephen Sartellis ‘ smooth’ translation of Montelbano, Raja urges the translator to resist the publisher’s pressure to render everything into “good Italian”. She ends the article, stating that “the original text is not produced by a single translation, but by many series of translations.” A similar opinion was expressed by Jhumpa Lahiri in her recent speech at Rutgers.
If Ferrante wrote this article, the dynamics between the original and the translation would have a different coloration. This article was published in 2015 after the success of the Neapolitan quartet that appeared in many languages. The insistence on fidelity to the original would be seen now from the author’s point of you. Also, Ferrante’s themes are lurking imbedded in the text: the inequality between two friends; Wolf’s writing “a person is now unitary, now appears split into an”I”, a “you,” or a “she,” depending on her stage of life”; one woman acting upon the destiny of the other “because it acted upon my poorer, more common labor of finding words, leading me along paths that I never would have dared to take on my own”; quoting Wolf talking about Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry– “the most precise indefiniteness, the clearest ambiguity”; list of the characteristics themes in Buchmann’s poetry “the loss of the distance between I and the other”.
One person wrote this article. The question is: does she have a dual identity? Is she a translator who with devotion accepts her ‘inequality‘? Or has the challenge of translating led her to take a path she would not have dared to take on her own and create the original text? Did the works she translated have an impact on her own fiction?