{"id":705,"date":"2019-11-19T20:09:29","date_gmt":"2019-11-19T20:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/italian-translation\/?p=705"},"modified":"2019-11-19T20:09:29","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T20:09:29","slug":"translation-as-a-practice-of-acceptance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/italian-translation\/translation-as-a-practice-of-acceptance\/","title":{"rendered":"Translation as a Practice of Acceptance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I will analyze the essay \u2018Translation as a Practice of Acceptance\u2019\u00a0 <\/span>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\u2019s article, who is also the translator of this text from Italian. Folkoff writes in her essay\u2019 To translate is to betray\u2019,\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cI wouldn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Anita Raja, translating literature \u201cmeans 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She talks about this intense relationship between the original and the translation with a vocabulary\u00a0 <\/span>that borders\u00a0 <\/span>on a description of a romantic\u00a0 <\/span>love:\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cthe translator…offers her own language with love, with passion, with admiration, and even with devotion.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>But the relationship is characterized by inequality.\u00a0 <\/span>The word \u201cinequality\u201d is repeated at least 7 times in this essay. If I may stretch the point, the\u00a0 <\/span>translator takes on the traditional female role in this relationship. She \u201dmust retreat to accept the language of the other to allow herself to be invaded by it so as to accommodate it\u201d; \u2018to surrender to the text\u2019s needs\u201d; \u201csubmit to the author\u2019s will\u201d; \u201cto willingly let ourselves to be trapped in its web\u201d;\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cto accept that the other\u2019s word is stronger than one\u2019s own.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, the original text is paramount but it also has the power to inspire, to exert an influence, to \u201cjostle the language of the translator, creating friction, producing a new text in its image and likeness.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201clexical, syntactic and grammatical structure of the German language\u201d, she discovers\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

that by \u201cchallenging the very limit of the language\u201d it led her on a path that she would never had the courage to take on her own.<\/p>\n

Raja concludes the article that the complexities of literary text should not discourage the translator.\u00a0 <\/span>Above all, a translator has to be a good reader, able to \u201cpuzzle over the complexities of the text, line after line and to piece it together in a new language\u201d.\u00a0 <\/span>She poses the question: what happens if something is \u201cuntranslatable\u201d such as a wordplay. Raja doesn\u2019t accept the notion of untranslatability.\u00a0 <\/span>It is the duty of the translator to find a way to resolve it.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cThe translator\u2019s greatest resource must be her inventiveness,\u201d Raja writes, but she still has to be devotedly faithful to the original.\u00a0 <\/span>This reconciliation might result in an unattractive language which, according to her, is acceptable.\u00a0 <\/span>As we have seen in Stephen Sartellis \u2018 smooth\u2019 translation of Montelbano, Raja urges the translator to resist the publisher\u2019s pressure to render everything into \u201cgood Italian\u201d. She ends the article, stating that \u201cthe original text is not produced by a single translation, but by many series of translations.\u201d A similar opinion was expressed by Jhumpa Lahiri in her recent speech at Rutgers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If Ferrante wrote this article, the dynamics between the original and the translation would have a different coloration.\u00a0 <\/span>This article was published in 2015 after the success of the Neapolitan quartet that appeared in many languages.\u00a0 <\/span>The insistence\u00a0 <\/span>on fidelity to the original would be seen now from the author\u2019s point of you.\u00a0 <\/span>Also, Ferrante\u2019s themes are lurking imbedded in the text: the inequality between two friends; Wolf\u2019s\u00a0 <\/span>writing \u201ca person is now unitary, now appears split into an\u201dI\u201d, a \u201cyou,\u201d or a \u201cshe,\u201d depending on her stage of life\u201d; one woman acting upon the destiny of the other \u201cbecause 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\u201d; quoting Wolf talking about Ingeborg Bachmann\u2019s poetry– \u201cthe most precise indefiniteness, the clearest ambiguity\u201d; list of the characteristics themes in\u00a0 <\/span>Buchmann\u2019s poetry \u201cthe loss of the distance between I and the other\u201d.<\/p>\n

One person wrote this article. The question is: does she have a dual identity? Is she a translator who with devotion accepts her \u2018inequality\u2018? 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?\u00a0 <\/span>Did the works she translated have an impact on her own fiction?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I will analyze the essay \u2018Translation as a Practice of Acceptance\u2019\u00a0 from two different points of view: one accepting that it was written by Anita Raja, a well known translator … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":588,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTranslation as a Practice of Acceptance - Italian in Translation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/italian-translation\/translation-as-a-practice-of-acceptance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Translation as a Practice of Acceptance - Italian in Translation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I will analyze the essay \u2018Translation as a Practice of Acceptance\u2019\u00a0 from two different points of view: one accepting that it was written by Anita Raja, a well known translator … Read More\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/italian-translation\/translation-as-a-practice-of-acceptance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Italian in Translation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-11-19T20:09:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Erika P. 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