{"id":296356,"date":"2014-01-29T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-29T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/01\/29\/sticking-with-the-italian-theme\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:44:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:44:27","slug":"sticking-with-the-italian-theme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/01\/29\/sticking-with-the-italian-theme\/","title":{"rendered":"Sticking with the Italian Theme . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve published two Italian books at Open Letter—Aracoeli<\/i> by Elsa Morante, translated by William Weaver, and more recently, This Is the Garden<\/em> by Giulio Mozzi, translated by Elizabeth Harris. <\/p>\n

Since we’ve already posted about Weaver today, it only seems appropriate that we should write up this interview between Aaron Westerman and Elizabeth Harris.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

AARON<\/span> WESTERMAN<\/span>: What\u2019s your particular process like and is it ever difficult to separate the way you feel about a piece when you read it from the actual work of translating it for another audience?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

ELIZABETH<\/span> HARRIS<\/span>: My process of translating is ridiculously slow and perhaps reflects the fact that I don\u2019t earn my living at translating. Up until only a few years ago, I didn\u2019t have any deadlines, either, because I\u2019d chosen the works and had no publishers for them (this was the case with the Rigoni Stern and also with Mozzi\u2019s This Is the Garden<\/i>). So I could take my time. And I definitely did. Now I actually have a contract for the Tabucchi and a deadline, but I\u2019m still very slow. A good workday for me will be an eight-hour session starting at around eight in the morning. I\u2019ll take a look back at what I translated in the previous few days, do some revising of that, and then move on to the new material (this is with a novel; if I\u2019m translating a story, I\u2019ll start from the beginning of the story before moving on to new work). I might translate two pages or so a day. This is too slow\u2014I know it. But what I come up with isn\u2019t rough; it\u2019s worked and reworked, has gone through numerous drafts. And then, of course, I revise it yet again when I get started the next day, as I ease myself back into the book. Perhaps it would be better to get through a very rough draft\u2014skip over the tough stuff, just keep going, and then go back. But for me the real pleasure of translating is finding a voice for the work and really laboring over the nuances of the sentences, and creating the piece\u2019s characters, its imagery, and so on. If I were to rush through in a very rough draft, I just wouldn\u2019t get the same pleasure out of the work\u2014I don\u2019t think I could work that way, and lucky for me, I don\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

As for the second part of your question about reading the text versus translating it, I think you might be asking if I sometimes read something that I don\u2019t like but have to translate anyway; the answer, so far, is no. I have had the experience, however, of reading things that have disturbed me and then translating them: disgusting moments in a text, sad passages\u2014I recently translated the suicide of a character. My goal with these passages is to recreate the upsetting experience that\u2019s there in the original. Is that upsetting for me? Absolutely. But it\u2019s exciting, too, and tremendously moving.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Your question has got me thinking about how translators approach reading the original text. I\u2019ve heard some translators say that they don\u2019t read a work ahead of time; they read it as they translate, perhaps because they find there\u2019s a freshness to the prose if they\u2019re discovering it along the way. Other translators read a book carefully ahead of time, take notes, get through to the end so they know how the entire book informs all its parts. I think I might fall somewhere in between. I read the book I\u2019m going to translate ahead of time, but, honestly, until I\u2019m translating the book, I\u2019m not really reading it at all. Let me explain. Some say that translation is the closest form of reading. But the act of translating, of writing a text as you read a text, is much more than reading. It involves going over every last nuance of the original, down to the punctuation. It\u2019s more like swallowing the book. I don\u2019t feel that I really know a book until I\u2019m actually translating it. I might know what happens in the work, the basics of the plot and character, but I only discover the book, its voice, its music, its characters, its meaning, as I\u2019m creating the book in English.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

\n

AARON<\/span> WESTERMAN<\/span>: Mozzi\u2019s writing has been described as \u201ccrisp and straightforward\u201d (Kirkus<\/em>). Did his particular style and use of language help or hinder the translation process in any way?<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

ELIZABETH<\/span> HARRIS<\/span>: That Kirkus Review<\/em> quote is something to linger on. The reviewer attributes this \u201ccrisp and straightforward\u201d style to Mozzi. But the collection is in English, and I\u2019m the one who wrote it in English. So the style isn\u2019t Mozzi\u2019s. It\u2019s my interpretation of Mozzi. I took what I found in the Italian and interpreted it, created a style in English. Really, when a reviewer comments on style in a translated book, he or she shouldn\u2019t just refer to the author; that author has been interpreted and rewritten by a translator, so the \u201cstyle\u201d is now the work of two authors: the original writer and the translator. As for your question: Mozzi\u2019s original style is what made me want to translate the book in the first place. Did his style hinder the translation process? His style was challenging because it was so beautiful and precise, and so I wanted to get it right. I hope I did.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve published two Italian books at Open Letter—Aracoeli by Elsa Morante, translated by William Weaver, and more recently, This Is the Garden by Giulio Mozzi, translated by Elizabeth Harris. Since we’ve already posted about Weaver today, it only seems appropriate that we should write up this interview between Aaron Westerman and Elizabeth Harris. AARON WESTERMAN: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[54946,53056,53046,1646,53036,53706],"class_list":["post-296356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-aaron-westerman","tag-elizabeth-harris","tag-giulio-mozzi","tag-review","tag-this-is-the-garden","tag-typographical-era"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317766,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296356\/revisions\/317766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}