Messaggi magari misteriosi

Su «Repubblica» di oggi, in occasione dell’anniversario della morte di Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, avvenuta il 15 marzo del 1972, compaiono stralci di un suo scritto del 1967 che da domani si potrà trovare gratuitamente nelle librerie in un volume a lui dedicato.

«Un editore può cambiare il mondo? Difficilmente: un editore non può nemmeno cambiare editore. Può cambiare il mondo dei libri? Può pubblicare certi libri che vengono a far parte del mondo dei libri e lo cambiano con la loro presenza. Questa affermazione può sembrare formale e non corrisponde in pieno a quello che penso: il mio miraggio [...] è il libro che mette le mani addosso, il libro che sbatte per aria, il libro che “fa” qualche cosa alle persone che lo leggono, il libo che ha “l’orecchio ricettivo” e raccoglie e trasmette messaggi magari misteriosi ma sacrosanti, il libro che nel guazzabuglio della storia quotidiana ascolta l’ultima nota, quella che dura una volta finiti i rumori inessenziali».

Il libro degli errori

Su «Alfalibri», allegato ad «Alfabeta2», n. 17, marzo 2012, si legge una conversazione fra Andrea Cortellessa e Gianni Celati sulla nuova traduzione dell’Ulysses cui quest’ultimo sta lavorando per Einaudi. Non cercatela in rete, la rivista va comprata in edicola o in libreria.

A Ulysses era dedicata la tua tesi di laurea, a Bologna nei primi anni Sessanta, vero?

Sì, ed è stato un lavoro durato per quasi tutto il mio periodo universitario, capendo veramente poco del testo [...]. La mia copia dell’Ulysses l’avevo comprata di seconda mano in un negozietto di Tottenham Court Road, ed era zeppa di errori tipografici. Per molto tempo ho preso quegli errori come intenzionali aspetti modernistici. E tutto era incerto in quel mio primo avvicinamento a Joyce, ma per me la scelta di quella tesi era come un’adesione alle forme d’arte moderna più avanzate.

Perché chi legge sia libero di scegliere

«El que traslada ha de ser fiel y cabal, y si fuere posible, contar las palabras para dar otras tantas y no mas, de la misma manera, qualidad, y condición y variedad de significaciones que las originales tienen, sin limitallas á su propio sonido y parecer; para que los que leyeren la traducción, puedan entender la variedad toda de sentidos, á que dá ocasión el original si se leyese, y queden libres para escoger de ellos el que mejor les pareciere.»

Traducción literal y declaración del libro de los cantares de Salomón, Salamanca, Francisco de Toxar, 1798 (prima ediz. a stampa), pp. XII-XIII.

«Chi traduce deve essere fedele ed esatto e, possibilmente, contare le parole in modo da scriverne altrettante e non di più, della stessa maniera, qualità, e condizione e varietà di significati che posseggono quelle originali, senza in questo limitarsi al loro suono o apparenza; affinché chi legge la traduzione possa intendere l’intera varietà dei significati cui dà luogo l’originale quando viene letto, e rimanga libero di scegliere fra essi quello che reputa migliore.»

Traduzione mia.

Effetti diversi

J’ai lu qu’autrefois en Amérique les Indiens, voyant l’effet étonnant des armes à feu, ramassaient à terre des balles de mousquet ; puis les jetant avec la main en faisant un grand bruit de la bouche, ils étaient tout surpris de n’avoir tué personne. Nos orateurs, nos musiciens, nos savans, ressemblent à ces Indiens. Le prodige n’est pas qu’avec notre musique nous ne fassions plus ce que faisaient les Grecs avec la leur ; il serait, au contraire, qu’avec des instrumens si différens on produisît les mêmes effets.

Essai sur l’origine des langues, xii, 1781.

Ho letto che un tempo gli indiani d’America, vedendo l’effetto sorprendente delle armi da fuoco, raccoglievano da terra le pallottole di moschetto; poi, gettandole con le mani e con un gran rumore della bocca, rimanevano stupefatti di non avere ucciso nessuno. I nostri oratori, i nostri musicisti, i nostri studiosi, assomigliano a quegli indiani. Il prodigio non è che con la nostra musica noi non riusciamo più a fare quello che facevano i Greci con la loro; lo sarebbe, piuttosto, se con strumenti così diversi si producessero i medesimi effetti.

Traduzione mia.

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«To read is to have read»

Dice el maestro Leo Spitzer que «leer es haber leído», y esta afirmación parece un punto de partida adecuado para hablar de esa modalidad de lectura que llamaremos literaria o metaliteraria, po estar directamente relacionada con la Historia de la literatura en general y con la historia lectora de cada lector en concreto. Mientras lee, cada lector proyecta la lectura de la narración textual y concreta sobre aquellas lecturas literaria que acumula y que conforman lo que podemos llamar su biografía literaria. Y así, un lector que lee La regenta «relee» mentalmente aquellas otras novelas que, como Anna Karenina o Madame Bovary, mantienen concomitancias, al menos temáticas, con la lectura que está llevando a cabo. Del mismo modo que un lector que está leyendo Al faro de Virginia Woolf «relee», vía identidad de recursos técnicos, como el monólogo interior, el Ulises de Joyce o Mientras agonizo de Faulkner, u otro lector encuentra ecos de El rojo y el negro de Stendhal mientras lee Últimas tardes con Teresa de Juan Marsé. La lectura crea ecos de otras lecturas. Tal personaje nos recuerda a tal otro. Tal recurso narrativo nos remite a tal novela donde había una utilización semejante. Tal descripción nos hace evocar aquella otra. La frase corta y seca presente en la obra que leemos nos recuerda el tipo de frase de aquel otro autor. Cada lectura se mueve en una constelación de lecturas previas.

Constantino Bértolo, La cena de los notables, Periférica, Cáceres, 2008, pp. 61-62. La citazione è tratta da Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History. Essays in Stylistics, Princeton University Press, 1948.

Le disavventure della virtus

Claude Habib ricorda con umorismo che, quando aveva l’età delle versioni di latino, aveva imparato a tradurre virtus in due modi diversi a seconda che si parlasse di un uomo o di una donna: coraggio nel primo caso, pudicizia nel secondo.

Monique Selz, Il pudore. Un luogo di libertà (La Pudeur, un lieu de liberté, 2003), Einaudi, Torino,  2005, p. 99. La citazione fa riferimento a Claude Habib, Vertu de femme ?, in  La Pudeur : La Réserve et le trouble, Autrément, Paris, 1992.

Translator’s note di Leon S. Roudiez

When the original version of this book [Pouvoirs de l'horreur] was published in France in 1980, critics sensed that it marked a turning point in Julia Kristeva’s writing. Her concerns seemed less arcane, her presentation more appealingly worked out; as Guy Scarpetta put it in Le Nouvel Observateur (May 19, 1980), she now introduced into “theoretical rigor an effective measure of seduction”. Actually, no sudden change has taken place: the features that are noticeable in Powers of Horror were already in evidence in several earlier essays, some of which have been translated in Desire in Language (Columbia University Press, 1980). She herself pointed out in the preface to that collection, “Readers will also notice that a change in writing takes place as the work progresses” (p. ix).

One would assume such a change has made the translator’s task less arduous; in one sense it has, but it also produced a different set of difficulties. As sentences become more metaphorical, more “literary” if you wish, one is liable to forget that they still are conceptually very precise. In other words, meaning emerges out of both the standard denotation(s) and the connotations suggested by the material shape of a given word. And it emerges not solely because of the reader’s creativity, as happens in poetic language, but because it was put there in the first place. For instance, “un être altéré” means either a changed, adulterated being or an avid, thirsty being; mindful, however, of the unchanged presence of the Latin root, alter, Kristeva also intends it to mean “being for the other.” This gives the phrase a special twist, and it takes a reader more imaginative than I am to catch it.

As Kristeva’s writing evolves, it also displays a greater variety in tone. In this essay it includes the colloquial and the formal, the lyrical and the matter-of-fact, the concrete and the abstract. I resisted the temptation to unify her style and tried as much as possible to preserve the variety of the original. Only in a few instances, when a faithful rendition would in my opinion have sounded incongruous (e.g., translating pétard, which she borrows from the text of a Céline novel, as “gat” or “rod”), did I consciously neutralize her prose.

A particularly vexing problem stems from the nature of the French language and its limited vocabulary as compared to English; words tend to point in a greater number of different directions. Usually, in expository prose, the context removes the ambiguities that poetic language thrives on. Kristeva is not averse to using polysemy to her advantage, as other French theorists like Derrida and Lacan have also done. The French word propre, for instance, has kept the meaning of the Latin proprius (one’s own, characteristic, proper) and also acquired a new one: clean. At first, in Powers of Horror, the criteria of expository prose seemed to apply, but in several instances I began to have my doubts about this. When I asked Kristeva which meaning she intended the answer was, both. As a result I decided to use the rather cumbersome “one’s own clean and proper body” to render the French corps propre, sacrificing elegance for the sake of clarity and fullness of meaning.

Examining my translation carefully, one is apt to notice anomalies in the text of the quotations. There are two reasons for this. When the original is not in French, Kristeva cites a published French translation and I refer to a published English one when available. Discrepancies are inevitable and for the most part inconsequential. In the case of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, however, the French version, in the excerpts quoted here, contains a couple of mistranslated words: Inzestscheu becomes “phobie de l’inceste” instead of the more accurate “incest dread,” and genussgefahig [sic] gets afflicted with the connotation of “objets comestibles” that belongs to geniessbar instead of the more general and accurate “capable of enjoyment” of the English version. While this has required some vocabulary adjustment, it does not affect Kristeva’s argument. Where Hegel’s for discrepancies between French and English translations are considerable. Referring back to the German text of Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I find that the English text is faithful to it. What apparently happened is that the French translation was made from an earlier version of the Lectures, which, like Saussure’s famous Cours de linguistique générale, was published by Hegel’s students after his death. The second edition, on which the English version is based, is presumably an improved one—but that need not concern us here. In the excerpts quoted by Kristeva, the meaning is essentially the same even though the wording differs and in one instance a metaphorical development has been eliminated.

When several translations are available, as they are for Sophocles, I used the one that seemed closest to the one used by Kristeva. For the Bible, I relied on the King James version; minor differences between biblical and anthropological terminology should pose no problem, and the reader will readily see that the latter’s pure/impure distinction corresponds to the biblical contrast between clean and unclean.

For an original quotation from the French, I have also used available published translations. Working with Céline’s novels, however, translators have endeavored to produce effective English-language fiction. As a result they were occasionally led to stray from a literal version of the text—and rightly so. On the other hand, for the purpose of Kristeva’s analysis, there are times when close attention to material details of the text is essential. I have therefore, in a number of instances, had to modify the published translation—but that should not be seen as a reflection on their quality. On a few occasions, though, especially where the early novels are involved, translators have tended to be squeamish; thus, in Journey to the End of the Night, the statement pertaining to women in wartime, “la guerre porte aux ovaires,” becomes, “war goes straight to their tummies.” I naturally put the ovaries back in.

Throughout this essay, Kristeva plays with the titles of Céline’s novels (and a few others: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities makes a fleeting appearance toward the end).

Journey to the End of the Night is easily recognizable; the title From Castle to Castle, in this connection, needs to be changed to the more literal, “From One Castle to an Other,” which produced the title of an earlier essay, “From One Identity to an Other” (collected in Desire in Language); I have rendered the untranslated Féerie pour une autre fois as “Enchantment for Some Other Time”. For some features of her terminology, readers should consult the “Notes on the Translation and on Terminology” that appeared in Desire in Language. Here, however, instead of invariably rendering “écriture” as “writing,” I have attempted to distinguish between the weak and the strong meanings of the French word. For the latter I used the term “scription,” which I had introduced in my French Fiction Today (Rutgers University Press, 1972). There are in Powers of Horror a few additional items of Lacanian vocabulary that the context should clarify. The object a is mentioned twice, and it could be puzzling. A few lines from Stuart Schneiderman’s Returning to Freud (Yale University Press, 1980) might prove helpful: “For the psychoanalyst the important object is the lost object, the object always desired and never attained, the object that causes the subject to desire in cases where he can never gain the satisfaction of possessing the object. Any object the subject desires will never be anything other than a substitute for the object a“.

I should like to thank those who have given assistance in areas I am less familiar with: Stuart Schneiderman for the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, Robert Austerlitz for that of linguistics, Marvin I. Herzog for Hebrew terms, Robert D. Cumming for philosophy, and of course Julia Kristeva herself for clarifying a number of difficulties. I should point out, however, that while I sought assistance whenever I realized I had met with a problem, there may well have been problems I did not identify and on which I foundered. In such instances and in all others where mistranslations occur the responsibility is mine alone.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection, 1980), Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

Sui dizionari

2206. I dizionari vanno continuamente corretti come le carte geografiche.

Note azzurre, a cura di Dante Isella, Adelphi, Milano, 1964. Ora nella collana “Gli Adelphi”.

L’articolo e l’avverbio

«Non mi sprofondo negli abissi. Rifletto sull’impiego dell’articolo e dell’avverbio. È un sistema più sicuro, sebbene anch’esso possa condurre con molta dolcezza negli abissi.»

Poétique de Saint-John Perse, Paris, 1954. Citato in Hugo Friedrich, La struttura della lirica moderna (Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik,1956), Garzanti, Milano, (1956) 2002, p. 161.

Una teoria della traduzione?

EH: I want to ask you more about the question of a unified theory of translation, a theory that would accord with the practice of translators and present an imaginative confrontation of the possibilities. What you were telling me about your own practice is very close…

JH: Well, the theory of translation would have to be a theory of literature in general.

EH: Yes, all right.

Intervista in Edwin Honig, The poet’s Other Voice. Conversations on Literary Translation, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1985, p. 35.

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