d) Frontier writers

The conclusions of this discourse are clear. We shall take a model having an opposing value: Italian as the source language, English as the target language, and vice versa. An English translator will tend to break up the Italian discourse, resolving by allusions that which in the source language has a ‘monumental’ character. In fact, English does not have the classical background of Italian. Likewise, an Italian translator will endeavour to erect spans of form where English works on the historical consequences of blank verse. There is a solution: the analysis of 'frontier writers', or writers who, in their work as creators, have worked in adoptive cultural realities. The Pole, Conrad, and the Russian, Nabokov are appropriate examples. Neither ever managed to speak English properly (Nabokov, a university professor, wrote out his lectures word for word; fortunately for us, because the Lectures on Literature - published by Garzanti - are truly enlightening). Therefore, their way of ‘translating’ English from languages with rules extraneous to it is a valuable asset. An opposite case is that of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, a work the Irish writer ‘conceived’ (the mimesis with the foreign tongue is total and extraordinary) and wrote in French. On the other hand, the mimetic capacity of all literary genres is also Wilde’s principal quality. In Italian, ‘frontier writers’ include Ruzante, together with his modern pupil, Dario Fo. In France there is Beckett, whose bilingualism becomes the genesis of another language, with characteristics spanning English and French. In Russian, a singular exercise is the analysis of long passages from War and Peace, conceived and written in French, which show how French was a koine common to the European aristocracy in the nineteenth century, exactly like Latin was until the late Renaissance. Naturally, Tolstoy’s French is a ‘frontier language’. Among cont emporaries, in Italy a particular case is that of Guido Ceronetti: his Come un talismano (published by Adelphi) is a book of translations from Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, as well as from modern languages. Whereas Ceronetti has translated decontextualized fragments of complete works. In other words, he uses ambiguity of meaning to access another meaning, giving a bewildering acceleration to our discourse; in fact, Ceronetti is a ‘frontier writer’ squared. We shall return to similar extreme cases of translation in the last part of our course.