Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato:
era il rivo strozzato che gorgoglia,
era l’incartocciarsi della foglia
riarsa, era il cavallo stramazzato.

Bene non seppi, fuori del prodigio
che schiude la divina Indifferenza:
era la statua nella sonnolenza
del meriggio, e la nuvola, e il falco alto levato.

At a few decades’ distance, I can’t possibly reconstruct the reasoning that lay behind each verbal choice I made. I remember I proceeded intuitively for the most part, seizing upon what seemed effective in producing an English poem but consulting dictionaries to establish a correspondence that was lexical and, as far as possible, syntactical. Prosody was clearly important to me. Although I made no deliberate attempt to reproduce Montale’s stanzaic structure, rhymes fortuitously emerged in my version, and sound effects proliferated. I marveled at the appearance of the slant rhyme, “life”/”leaf,” and at how the roughness of the Italian phrase “il rivo strozzato che gorgoglia” was intensified in my English, in the dense clustering of consonants and stressed monosyllables: “the gurgling, choked brook.” My departures from the Italian unexpectedly resulted in iconic alliteration and rhythm. The word “l’incartocciarsi” might be rendered as “the shriveling,” but since “incartocciare” can mean “to put in a paper bag,” I experimented and happened upon a sonically rich line that caught a more comprehensive sense of the Italian: “the papery wrinkling of the parched leaf.” With “stramazzato” I went farther afield. The verb “stramazzare” means “to fall heavily,” but I made explicit the suggestion that the horse had been injured or killed, and the position of the word in the last line of the stanza invited a more climactic treatment. I recall hearing at the back of my mind Keats’s ballad stanza in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” particularly the abbreviated fourth line where the rhythm evoked an abrupt finality: “And no birds sing.” This became the metrical model for “the horse felled harshly,” although again the last unstressed syllable in my line turned out to be a surprise, an echo of a fall.

After I wrote my draft, I consulted a published version to see how far off I was: George Kay’s 1964 selection of Montale’s poetry for Edinburgh University Press. Kay’s “Translator’s Note” describes his translations as “faithful mirrors.” Here is his version of the first stanza from the text I translated:

Often have I met the ill of living:
it was the choked stream that gurgled,
it was the parched leaf’s curling
tight, it was the horse that fell to lie.

This can serve as a guide to the Italian insofar as it adheres to Montale’s word order right down to the repetition of “era” (“it was”). It even inverts the verb phrase in the first line (“have I met”) as if to imitate the poet’s positioning of the object (“il male di vivere”) before the verb (“ho incontrato”).

But I found Kay’s rendering distasteful. Although we had chosen some of the same words, in my view he showed no interest in writing a translation that might stand as a poem on its own: his version seemed not only unconcerned with rhythm and sound, lacking in music, but clumsy in phrasing. It was of course my own choices that had exposed these limitations in his work, and in hindsight I would say that we just had different ideas of what a poem is. But as a beginning translator, insecure in my knowledge of Italian yet bold enough to tackle the work of a great Italian writer, I couldn’t grant that, couldn’t allow another translator his own interpretation. I much preferred a modernist economy of means--pared-down language, taut rhythms--a decision that seemed far from arbitrary with a modernist poet like Montale. And I took Kay’s rendering as incontrovertible proof that I was on the right track. His was a text to translate against.

I also questioned his assertion that “where I have taken liberties it has been for a truer correspondence.” Typical of literary translators, he didn’t bother to explain what concept of equivalence might be capacious enough to encompass “liberties” or what he meant by “a truer correspondence.” Besides, I thought, how could he believe that his slack, ham-fisted lines corresponded to Montale’s stylistic elegance? I was acutely aware that while I had tried to stick to the meaning and word order of Montale’s lines, my choices reflected a purely English-language poetics, even an ensemble of ideas that much occupied me at the time, drawn from my reading of anglophone texts.

I had grown obsessed with the question of point of view, not only in fiction as with free indirect discourse or with narrators possessed of varying degrees of reliability, but also in poetry that foregrounded a speaker’s visual perceptions or the projection of a psychological state onto a setting. Examples seemed to occur in every period of British and American literatures, although given the course of my doctoral study I dwelt on seventeenth-century poets, like Andrew Marvell. In his poem “The Mower Against Gardens,” the title character complains about lecherous “man” who “to bring his vice in use,/Did after him the world seduce,” corrupting “plain and pure” nature through the art of gardening, growing plants by grafting, for instance, so that they propagate without seeds. Yet the very lines where the Mower voices his complaint display an intriguing--and contradictory--artfulness through a metaphorical representation of gardening:

His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,
    Lest any tyrant him outdo;
And in the cherry he does Nature vex,
    To procreate without a sex.

The Mower, it turns out, is just as corrupt as the gardener he condemns, except that it is his sexualizing perceptions, his dirty mind, that he imposes on the landscape instead of gardening techniques.
   
I had read Montale’s second stanza in similar terms. Instead of rendering the phrase “era la statua” closely as “it was the statue,” I wrote “it was sculpted,” making explicit the poet’s own creative imagining, his revelation of “divine Indifference” in a set of images that he had selected. In a sense, my rendering questioned the notion that any divinity, let alone an indifferent one, might exist apart from poetic invention. It rather suggested that the very idea of god was conceived by human art, and it was only the “somnolence” of the moment that colored the idea with “Indifference.”

Montale won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975, the very year that I initiated my apprenticeship as a translator. Do all such initiations involve an act of aggressive interpretation such as I performed, strongly rewriting the text of a canonical writer? Or perhaps a gendered dynamic was at work here. Was I professing a love for my mother tongue and its literature in striking out against a foreign poet, father-like in his literary authority?

≈

An editor’s approach to a translator’s choices, regardless of how reflective or calculated they may be, can vary widely from unquestioning acceptance to intransigent opposition. Put a page before most editors, of course, and you can expect it to be altered. Still, translations seem to invite the most extensive sort of editing. When my version of Melissa P.’s 2003 memoir, Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire, had been copyedited, I received back a manuscript that was heavily marked up, almost every page containing some change. The editor at Grove/Atlantic spelled out her agenda in a cover letter: everything must be made “smooth and natural for the American/English reader.” I was shocked that she would describe her editing in these terms. Her experience with translations was limited, since she had spent most of her time selling foreign rights. Worse, she hadn’t a clue that her approach was now regarded as disreputable.

For the Italian title she preferred a virtual word-for-word rendering: 100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed. “It feels a bit more evocative,” she explained, “perhaps slightly more poetic” than “brush strokes.” Yet since the title refers to hair-brushing, her preference is surely poetical rather than poetic, a straining for effect that suits only one aspect of the Italian text: an adolescent self-absorption that romanticizes banality as well as degradation. Did my editor share the author’s sensibility?
   
Melissa is more sophisticated. Her book, which she published at age seventeen, is a sexual coming-of-age narrative. Presented as the diary of a Sicilian teenager called Melissa, it deploys various genres, notably the Bildungsroman and the fairy tale, Gothic and romance. It alludes to classics from the Odyssey and Caesar’s Gallic Wars to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Nabokov’s Lolita. Given this literary self-consciousness, it can only be read as a fictionalized memoir, perhaps “ninety percent real,” as Melissa told interviewers. The desire she depicts is tricked-up, at once naïve and decadent, spontaneous and narcissistic, etherealized and sordid, expressive of teen angst and derived from erotica.

Why translate this book? I was attracted by its status as a pop-culture phenomenon. With over one million copies sold in Italian, it was saying something about Italy, even if that something was up for interpretation. The controversy aired in reviews, on chat shows, and across internet blogs dredged up a tangle of ideas about youth and sex, women and writing. The most telling refrain: the book couldn’t (read a subliminal shouldn’t) have been written by a girl. Popular literature can offer a revealing glimpse of a foreign culture. Yet until very recently anglophone publishers customarily neglected it in preference for the elite aesthetic. I wanted to confront readers with a current craze that, for Italians at least, was rivaling the value assigned to high-brow works.

Melissa’s writing uniquely suited this task. The shifts in style and genre allowed me to depart from standard English, the most familiar form of the language and the most likely to foster the cherished illusion that the translation isn’t a translation, but the foreign text. Melissa’s Italian ranges from slang and obscenities to purple prose and poeticisms to porno cliché. Mimicking these nonstandard forms promised to frustrate any reader’s expectation for transparency. I aimed to foreground the strangeness of the book, calling attention to its artificiality, although the titillating material guaranteed that my choices would not be unpleasurable.

My editor thought otherwise. I had to use “beautiful” instead of “lovely,” since “American teenagers generally don’t use this word to describe things.” Likewise “pants” instead of “trousers,” “crying” instead of “weeping,” “totally” instead of “utterly.” Archaisms provoked disagreement, even in a Gothic sex dream in which the cold enters the “finestrello” (embrasure) of the castle cell where Melissa lies naked, and she smells her “umori” (humors) on her monkish companion’s face. Ethnic dialects were out. For the “sugo” on the spaghetti eaten by Melissa and her parents I chose “gravy” precisely because the word is Italian-American for this meal. It was changed to “sauce.”

Occasionally my choices met with obtuseness. “Some people have plans that are linear and orderly,” Melissa is told at an orgy, “while others prefer a rococo caprice.” That curious phrase is my calque of the Italian (“un capriccio rococò”). My editor judged it “so obscure as to be meaningless,” so she consulted colleagues at Grove/Atlantic, who concurred. Yet Melissa is simply using an art historical metaphor to distinguish between conventional sex and kinkiness. Amazing that a publisher of erotic classics doesn’t employ editors who could get the point.

The drive to naturalize foreign texts in translation, to rewrite them in a language that is the lowest common denominator, is not new in English-language translation. It has long been motivated by commercialism, a bid to appeal to the widest possible readership. When I told my editor that her changes amounted to no less, she took offense. Her “concerns with this translation,” she insisted in an email, “have to do with the text itself, its literary value, and whether or not the voice is being successfully replicated.” Did she really believe that Melissa’s voice was an American teenager’s?

The translation became an arena where my editor and I applied conflicting standards of equivalence. She believed that, to be readable, a translation must hold up a mirror to the language with which readers identify at a deep, unconscious level. I rather sought a readability that enabled a compelling engagement, faithful to the spectrum of styles and genres in the foreign text but also to a broader representation of the foreign culture that included its pop fascinations. I wanted the mirror of my translation to reflect my reader’s taste too, although bent into an unusual shape, occasionally with the kind of distortion encountered in a funhouse. The translator can’t ever bring it all back home, I reasoned, so why not try to send readers abroad by tampering with their images of Italy, even with their own identities as anglophones, especially when these have grown so comfortable as to pass for common sense?

The publisher of Serpent’s Tail, who bought the British rights to my translation, was quite clear about his commercial motives. He told me that he had recently made money with his edition of Catherine Millet’s memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., and he hoped for the same success with Melissa’s book. His motives underlay his editing as well. He altered one account of a sexual act by mistaking Melissa’s “dentro” (inside) for her “dietro” (behind), crossing out my correct rendering and scribbling in his error. When money is involved, some books can’t be sexy enough.

Reviewers were quick to acknowledge the shock value of Melissa’s memoir, but they didn’t care much for her style or my attempt to develop an English analogue for it. “Cringe-inducing euphemisms abound here,” wrote the reviewer for The New York Times, who then supplied a list that documented Melissa’s familiarity with pornography as well as my scrupulous adherence to her lexicon: “lance, stake, scepter, Secret, River Lethe, erupting volcano.” Inevitably I was faulted too. “Perhaps these words are more euphonious in Italian,” the reviewer added, “than in Lawrence Venuti’s translation.”

Fortunately, the great majority of readers are not reviewers. Since 2004 my translation has sold over 100,000 copies while most translations are lucky enough to approach 5,000. Sex undoubtedly sells books, as the publishers knew when they made their investment (their commercialism seems the only explanation for their refusal to pay me a royalty). Nonetheless, my choices have apparently not stood in the way of a readerly pleasure, whether the source of that pleasure was sympathetic identification or masturbatory fantasy, moralistic pity or voyeuristic gawking. Did any response realize my aim of defamiliarizing representations of Italian culture as well as the anglophone reader’s relation to English? I can’t be certain, but I think it improbable. For the fact is that mere translating can’t teach readers how to read a translation as a text in its own right, different from the foreign text it translates. And that, finally, is why I have decided to write about my work.