PART ONE

Like temple ruins, artefacts and myths, words are no less "historical monuments" of national cultures, given that they preserve traces of vanished customs and traditions and ¾ more importantly ¾ through their shape and semantics they reveal the psychology with which every culture, in its own peculiar way, sees the outside world. In German, for example, words used to indicate abstract concepts end in -heit and -keit, the former relating to a collection of concrete objects, a "category" of the material, and the latter to something intangible, a "category" of the spiritual. In short, one of the ways in which thought is articulated: Ewigkeit, for example, meaning Eternity... The German language tends to conceive the world in categories a priori; it is in Kant that one sees the culmination of this, as it were, abstractive ascensional perspective, exploring and at the same time reflecting on its own nature. In German, therefore, greater attention is given to the position of the individual in space and time than to bodily qualities, to attributes perceived through the senses. Colours in German are perceived on the basis of their capacity to reflect light, and not of mutual contrast as in French. The German blau is a deep and transparent colour, not a nocturnal colour. Blue in English is associated with the soul, a colour that can serve as the very symbol of meditative and melancholic introspection. Indeed in English any abstract category is the fruit of perception, and traceable back to an original insight. If Kant is the "national" philosopher in the German language, then Hume is his counterpart in English. It is no accident that Poe, in The Raven, conveys the idea of eternity by conscious repetition of the word Nevermore. In French, every character is seen in relation to a different character. Everything is, so to speak, d'après or selon. Subjectivity of interpretation is the only perceptive category possible. When Proust begins his Recherche - "longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure", what interests him is the level of attraction and repulsion, semantically, between longtemps and de bonne heure: a paradoxical combination which in the dialectical and "dramatic" sense effectively precludes the possibility of slumber; and indeed the whole idea of the Recherche is inextricably linked with this insomnia.

Every language subtends a tradition. The game of recovering, alluding and parodying indulged in by a writer tends invariably to appear as shadows cast on the elastic skin of the language. Accordingly, translators need first of all to be historians of their languages ¾ their own languages and the languages from which they translate. Hovering around every writer there will be a crowd of alter egos, examples and models from which he or she borrows in order, perhaps by some Freudian process, to "kill fathers". Just so, in Ulysses, Joyce has Stephen Dedalus sustain the hypothesis that in Hamlet Shakespeare projects some kind of death wish onto his own father...To ensure, using an image from Plato, that the shadows of the past cast onto the cave wall of literary time do not become the ghosts of real time, the translator must be fully conversant with the various linguistic "levels" of both the source and the target language. To this end, a fundamental distinction must be made between different "national" languages. There are inclusive languages and exclusive languages, and a given language will fit into one of these categories only insofar as allowed by the relationship between this same language and the stock from which it originates. In relation to the Saxon language, for example, English is inclusive and German exclusive. In the case of English, the syntactical structures make up a code emerging as an alternative to the neo-latin model, whereas in the case of German it is Latin style articulations that provide the material used to construct the meaning. In English, consequently, it is everyday language that gives shape to literary language whilst in German, as in Italian, the opposite is true. This explains the fact that in English writing, exception and transgression are features of literary style, whereas in German, apart from a few shining examples (Jean Paul, Hoffmann, Kafka) this is not the case. A translator therefore needs to understand what in each language is "the norm" and what is "artifice", remembering that art, semantically speaking, is always artifice. Exclusive languages tend to see archaisms as certifying linguistic nobility. The Saxon elements surfacing in modern German always take on connotations of nobility, victory, heroism ¾ generally romantic to a greater or lesser degree. In Italian the opposite occurs, and this will be confirmed readily by anyone familiar with the farces of Giulio Cesare Croce, creator of Bertoldo, or anyone who has read Tassoni's Secchia Rapita... And the rule is confirmed in English too: Tristram Shandy, for example, is a web of parodies on the classicist models of Elizabethan tragedy, which the author Sterne saw as an elaborate and pompous dressing-up of pure Englishness.

This is the aspect of translation which ¾ being the most mundane ¾ is the most laborious: reading, reflecting, and building up an index of terms, an archive of semantic registers, and matching the expressions found in different languages. An archaism used, say, by Gadda, a writer given to Dantesque turns of phrase, must be matched in the target language with an archaism that is either similarly evocative or has the same distortion of meaning. A useful exercise in the case of English is to take the chapter of Ulysses in which Joyce recites the entire history of the English language, from Chaucer to himself as Dedalus, in a verbal image of the library where the action takes place. To translate this chapter into Italian, one would need to start with the Sicilian poets and work through to the semantic experiments of, say, a Sanguinetti (Laborynthus). There are shortcuts available nonetheless. In effect, every narrative experience is by nature an archetypal experience. That is to say, one can find thematic affinities and analogies of intent common to different cultures. The case of Stefano d'Arrigo in post-war Italy closely resembles that of later Joyce. Horyncus Orca is a metanovel in which archaisms, regional idiolects, technicalisms, burlesque parodies and overlayered registers are jumbled together and "redeemed" as modes of expression in the same way as attempted by Joyce in Finnegan's Wake. Accordingly, d'Arrigo can provide the key to unlock the impossible puzzle posed by the late work of Joyce. In the same way, the ironic and autoreferential syntax used by Macchiavelli in Belfagor and Clizia, or the "heroically frenzied" style of Giordano Bruno's writing will provide invaluable guidelines for anyone translating Marlowe's Faust into Italian.

The problem is the same for theatre: in the Elizabethan masque one has a tradition based on a fusion of words and music, with prosodists adopting metres and rhythms in which devices such as the play on words and the nonsense lyric are taken to the limit. In Germany on the other hand, the prevailing form is the Puppenspiel: the puppet theatre, dominant since the Baroque era; consequently, the linguistic context reflects an experimentalism involving the exploration of many and various idiolects, often as a vehicle for caricature. Lessing would attempt to restore order to the situation, but Goethe's Urfaust with its cheerful linguistic anarchy shows how, for a German writer, the approach to drama could be one of drinking anew from the untainted springs of nature. In France, by contrast, the theatre is courtly, academic, with linguistic connotations centred on the tradition of lively debate, propositions, and the conversation of amorous intrigue ¾ a language characterized by elision: that whole ritual whereby words serve as status symbols and at the same time as instruments of consensus, a ritual parodied by Molière in his Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Along with the problems relating to differences between national traditions, one has the problem of codes in an overall sense. Not even punctuation marks are subject to universal rules. The translator taking on Nietzsche comes up against a whole system of "unwritten" language, a proliferation of abstruse indications that include double dashes, and single words stranded between full stops, or left as if to vibrate between two sets of suspension periods... Another example: in translations of Kafka, the short and figurative sentences of the original are often merged to produce a more fluid and "neo-latin" form, perhaps on the basis that the German used by the praguian Kafka was not a living language but a jumble of bookish substrata. True enough, but Kafka gives expression to that power which is the history of language: the high-sounding tones of "sublime" utterance are bent to serve the purposes of caricature, "concealed by too much light", that produces the sulphurous aftertaste of his prose. Kafka's punctuation includes commas placed to interrupt the continuity of his prosody, and semicolons that introduce no new clauses but leave inert descriptions of enclosed places hanging in the air: devices used as if colours by a painter, or rests by a composer, a medium for countless moods and figures employed in connotation which ¾ if we acknowledge that literature is the art of the unsaid ¾ is far more important than denotation. Now, given that German had its origins in the translation of the Bible, undertaken by Luther while hidden away in the castle of Warburg to escape being burned as a heretic, it is clear enough that this sententiously economical procedure adopted by Kafka is designed, as Luther would have it, to "paint the devil on the wall"... Hemingway too, in The Old Man and the Sea, plays with the style of biblical sayings, suspended out of time, using caesurae and scansions in such a way that punctuation marks become tone colours, like the voices of organ pipes. The level of connotation is altogether different, however. In this instance we are presented with an Ethical notion ¾ the Calvinistic idea of sacrifice, in the contact between hands and hard matter as conduit to a state of grace ¾ and at the same time with an Aesthetic notion of the sea as a mother gathering up tears and redeeming them from their insignificance, quite the opposite of that Gnostic challenge directed at God-the-Father by Kafka.