Translation #4 \u2013 \u201cTu dai voce a me, io do voce a te,\u201d Intervista ad Anna Nadotti di Susanna Basso <\/u>– By Anita Hotchkiss<\/p>\n
You give me a voice; I\u2019ll give you a voice<\/u><\/p>\n
I meet Anna Nadotti in a bar in the center of Torino on a clear afternoon in July.\u00a0 I have with me the notes of the questions that I want to ask her about La signora Dalloway,<\/em> her new translation for Einaudi of Mrs. Dalloway <\/em>by Virginia Woolf that Antonella Anedda has characterized with poetic precision as \u201cheroic.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start from way back, from the first time you read Mrs. Dalloway. <\/em>Do you remember when that was?\u00a0 Do you remember your reactions?<\/strong><\/p>\n I read Mrs. Dalloway <\/em>for the first time in the middle of 1970, in English.\u00a0 It was summer, the same summer, if I remember correctly, in which I read Una donna, <\/em>by Sibilla Aleramo, and La Storia, <\/em>by Elsa Morante.\u00a0 It was the same time that I was reading the books of Simone de Beauvoir.\u00a0 I was reading a lot by woman authors, often in the original language \u2013 a habit that I picked up when I was a university student, and that has stayed with me.\u00a0 Reading women writers, I understood that I had a lot to learn – not about the language, but about myself.<\/p>\n What role have existing translations played in the evolution of your own work?<\/strong><\/p>\n I decided to check two previous translations:\u00a0 Alessandra Scalero\u2019s, that I wasn\u2019t familiar with, and Nadia Fusini\u2019s.\u00a0 I did that, however, only after I had translated about a third of the novel.\u00a0 I wanted to look for my own voice, to be confident enough of it, before confronting theirs.<\/p>\n Was there something in particular that you didn\u2019t want to lose in your translation of Mrs. Dalloway?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I didn\u2019t want to lose anything \u2026\u2026 a bit ambitious, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 But I found it so beautiful, so rich, so cinematic.\u00a0 So incredibly \u201cyoung.\u201d\u00a0 If there\u2019s one thing I understand about re-translating the classics, it\u2019s that, in making a new translation of them, it\u2019s not about rejuvenating them but about restoring their youth intact.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My experience in translating this interview<\/u><\/p>\n In translating this interview, I did not feel quite the same need to be \u201ctrue\u201d to the original language and style as I do when translating literary works.\u00a0 I believe this is because Basso and, perhaps even moreso, Nadotti are speaking \u201coff the cuff,\u201d as it were.\u00a0 In contrast to literary works, the meaning of their words and thoughts is privileged over the style and the poetry of their language.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n The one word with which I had trouble was \u201ccinematographic.\u201d\u00a0 I could not figure out if Nadotti meant \u201cfilm-like\u201d (whatever that means in the context of a novel), \u201ctheatrical,\u201d \u201cpicturesque,\u201d \u201cpictorial,\u201d \u201cdetailed,\u201d or something else.\u00a0 Dictionaries were of no help, indicating simply that \u201ccinematographic\u201d is related to film-making and that \u201ccinematic\u201d has multiple meanings.\u00a0 Perhaps if I were more familiar with Mrs. Dalloway, <\/em>I would have been better able to interpret Nadotti\u2019s meaning and thus convey it more faithfully. In the end, I decided to use \u201ccinematic\u201d and leave the interpretation up to the reader.<\/p>\n In addition, in translating the portion relating to Alessandra Scalero\u2019s translation, as to which Nadotti says \u201cnon conoscevo,\u201d I chose \u201cthat I wasn\u2019t familiar with\u201d rather than \u201cwith which I was not familiar\u201d or \u201cthat I didn\u2019t know.\u201d Although my choice is not grammatically correct, it is more commonly used in conversation than \u201cwith which I was not familiar.\u201d\u00a0 I decided not to use \u201cthat I didn\u2019t know\u201d because, although that translation would also have been consistent with colloquial usage \u2013 that is, in English one could say \u201cI didn\u2019t know that translation\u201d –\u00a0 it seemed to me that \u201cI wasn\u2019t familiar with\u201d was a good compromise between the very formal expression and the very colloquial.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"