Translation is a political act and the texts that are selected to be translated—from stacks and stacks of books appearing all over the world every day—ultimately shape the literary market and conversations within a particular culture. With this clearly in mind, English-to-Italian translator Andrea Sirotti has made a career of translating postcolonial writers, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sujata Bhatt, Lloyd Jones, Margaret Atwood, Karen Alkalay-Gut, Hisham Matar, Alexis Wright, and Arundhathi Subramaniam into Italian, often introducing them to the Italian public for the first time. His translation of Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees, translated with Giorgia Sensi, was awarded the best translation of a foreign work into Italian at the sixteenth Concorso nazionale di Poesia e Narrativa “Guido Gozzano” in 2015. In this conversation with Asymptote’s Copy Editor Anna Aresi, Sirotti talks about his passion for postcolonial literature, giving us precious insights into his translation workshop and the challenges he faces when transposing complex English texts into the Italian.
Anna Aresi (AA): How did your interest in postcolonial literature begin? Was there a particular author that first caught your attention? If so, who and why?
Andrea Sirotti (AS): My interest in postcolonial literature, especially poetry, began by chance. In the mid-1990s I started to collaborate, as a critic and translator from the English, with the Italian journal of comparative literature Semicerchio. Its director, Francesco Stella, asked me to review Sixty Women Poets, an anthology of women poets edited by Linda France and published by the UK-based Bloodaxe. Reading that book was illuminating; from the repertoire of rich and diverse female voices France anthologized, I was struck in particular by authors coming from the ex-Commonwealth, as people called it back then (and this brings another brilliant title to mind—Uncommon Wealth: An Anthology of Poetry in English, an even more specific anthology published by OUP in 1998). The uncommon wealth of these verses, their unprecedented freshness, lead me to deepen [my understanding of] the topic and, thanks to the internet, I read other anthologies and collections, by men and women, migrant or settled, “pioneers” of the English language as well as second- or third-generation speakers in anglophone contexts. I found myself in front of a fantastic poetry world to explore! If I had to name one poet from the group of excellent poets collected by France (among whom were poets of great worth and originality such as Moniza Alvi, Grace Nichols, Jean “Binta” Breeze, Mimi Khalvati, etc.), I would mention Sujata Bhatt. It was with her poetry that I began my career as a literary translator, publishing some of her poems in Italian translation in the journal Testo a fronte in May 1996. It is around her terse and passionate poetry, her ancient and ultramodern English, that I built my anthology of contemporary female Indian poetry, published by Le Lettere in 2000 (with a second edition in 2006).
AA: Have you encountered specific challenges in your translation work? Could you offer one or two examples?
AS: If you are referring to fiction, I would mention two cases: the book Carpentaria by native Australian author Alexis Wright, which I co-translated with Gaetano Staffilano and which was published for Rizzoli in 2008 with a bit of a misleading title, to be honest (I cacciatori di stelle; The Star Hunters). The second example, better known in Italy, is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s masterpiece Americanah, its Italian translation by me published by Einaudi in 2014.
In the first case, the author had “invented” a solemn and epic English, rich in biblical cadences, in order to reconstruct and give voice to the epopee of the native people of North Queensland—the mythical Carpentaria. Their culture, though, was only oral and obviously not anglophone. Such a linguistic and cultural undertaking, then, was carefully crafted and yielded very interesting results: the language Wright invented is close to that of high literature, also because she wanted to oppose this language to the corrupted English spoken by white farmers and miners as well as to the ugly language of those who—guiltily, according to her—aspired to acquire the colonizers’ ways and “vices.” In the translation it was of utmost importance to reproduce that imaginary language and give it the literary dignity to which it aspired, without caricaturizing it and preserving its readability (I must say that the book, aside from its strong political statements, “also” tells a beautiful story).
In Adichie’s case, the difficulty was that of rendering into Italian the incredible variety of idiolects, the different “Englishes” that are present in the book in relation to the three main settings of the story—Lagos, New Jersey, and the UK—especially because Adichie’s refined sensitivity for linguistic nuances is a signature stylistic feature of her works. Here, too, it was a matter of hybridization, and how much, with standard languages (American English and British English), and also a matter of maintaining a balance between readability (avoiding as much as possible the fatal temptation to normalize) and respect for the authorial intention (a “foreignizing” translation, which is usually almost a mandatory choice when dealing with postcolonial literary texts).
AA: What are the main challenges of bringing postcolonial authors to the Italian public? I imagine that the Italian readership has, over time, grown more open to this kind of literature. Is that so?
AS: The main challenge is trying to faithfully reproduce the cultural and linguistic context out of which these works were born. One needs to pay attention to European culture and be aware of its influence, highlight and respect intertextual and intercultural aspects, and make, as I was saying earlier, non-normalizing choices, respecting the original’s characters and tones, its stratifications, idiosyncrasies, and peculiar characteristics. One must avoid a “caricaturizing” translation at all costs, or else the characters will wrongfully sound uneducated and clumsy. The public is beginning to appreciate this faithfulness, without cringing in front of unusual, foreignizing syntax, without letting laziness take the better hand in front of words left untranslated or those so-called “culturemes,” that is all those realia that populate so-called postcolonial novels.
AA: Going back to Americanah and related to what you just said, often in Adichie’s novel the characters or the narrator discuss language explicitly, for instance British vs. American pronunciation, vocabulary, and so on. In your translation, there are instances when you keep the English words, and others when you provide Italian equivalents. I remember while reading the book in Italian, without access to the original in English, I was dying to know what the English behind it was. For me as a reader, it was a slightly uncomfortable reading experience, but also one of trust, of abandonment to the translated word, which in the end felt almost liberating. I was wondering if this is a kind of reaction that you get a lot or even one that you experience as a reader of other translations. I was also wondering if you’ve ever considered using Italian dialects as a resource to render the many idiolects, and what you think in general of the use of dialects or dialectal expressions in translation.
AS: I must say that I decided case by case, avoiding Italian dialects because they would have sounded absurd in this context. I believe that using dialects to render any idiolect or local anglophone speech could be allowed only in certain “authorial” translations, for instance, Shaw’s Pygmalion translated into the Lombardy dialect by Francesco Saba Sardi. For what concerns Americanah, as I was saying earlier, I tried to leave all the realia untranslated, as well as all the expressions in languages other than standard English (Igbo, Yoruba, Pidgin, and Nigerian English). I explained some of them in the footnotes, although in the end the editors decided to limit the footnotes. For the ungrammatical English of certain characters, in particular the hairdressers Aisha and Halima, I tried to use a simplified grammar, with, however, fewer anacolutha than the original, in order to avoid that annoying caricature effect that I mentioned earlier. I especially avoided using the infinitive of the verbs; I took out some articles, simplified some prepositions, and abolished all the subjunctives. For recurrent Nigerian interjections such as “o” and “ahn-ahn” I opted not to translate “o” (occasionally using the Italian interjection “eh” or adding an exclamation mark), whereas “ahn-ahn” systematically became “ah-ha.” The courtesy appellation “ma” (for madam), became “Ma,” always capitalized and italicized to avoid ambiguities (“ma” means “but” in Italian).
I tried to render puns, rhymes, and made-up expressions into Italian equivalents. For instance, Ifemelu’s blog “Raceteenth” becomes “Razzabuglio” (“razza” means “race” in Italian), although I also considered “razzeismo” (a pun on “razzismo,” Italian for racism) and “razzaloquio.” I left in English expressions like “divvy up” and “nuke” in chapter forty-six, giving a bit of explanation in the translation’s text, because, being in a context of criticism of the barbarisms of American journalistic lingo, I found any Italian equivalents to be inappropriate. In other cases of metalinguistic reflections (and, as you noticed, there really are many), I generally tried to translate and clarify the terms of the discussion, respecting the implicit assumption of “let’s pretend that everyone’s speaking Italian,” though also deviating from it here and there. I tried to lighten up the continuous repetitions: for instance, the fact that she never calls the protagonists’ parents by name, but only “Ifemelu’s father” or “Obinze’s mother” makes this very hard; I therefore tried to use personal pronouns and possessives. To stay in the realm of parental relations, I had a hard time with the omnipresent “aunty,” which is a recurrent appellation used to express affection and respect towards adult women. I usually opted for “zia” (aunt) or, at times, when the appellation was used by waiters or subordinates, “signora” (madam). There is, however, the special case of “Aunty Uju,” one of the protagonists, who really is a relative of Ifemelu’s and is always referred to with the complete appellation. For her, I always used “zia Uju” (“aunt Uju”), with no article, switching to “la zia” or simply “Uju” to lighten up the many repetitions.
Another interesting chapter concerns translating the names of American and British identity and work permit documents. I preferred to leave the English originals, such as “Social Security,” “Green Card,” “National Insurante,” unitalicized, because, as they are so culturally-specific, it felt strained to translate them or, worse, naturalize them.
Thinking back to the difficulties and infinite choices that a complex novel such as Americanah presents, the aspect that absolutely gave me the worst headaches (quite literally!) was the “trichological” vocabulary: as a white, middle-aged, and completely bald man, the set of vocabulary concerning young women’s Afro hairstyles and beauty routines was totally unfamiliar to me (attachments, braids, cornrows, relaxers, texturizers, kinky twists, weaves, and so on). This was an instance of how—propelled by genuine curiosity about what’s other from me—finding the right words that would bridge the cultural gap was initially harder, but eventually extremely interesting and stimulating.
AA: You have a special talent for promoting literature and translation, be it by sharing your passion with your students, organizing literary festivals and events, or helping authors and translators find their path. I find this especially admirable and hopeful in a context in which many are frustrated or pessimistic about the fate of literature and, perhaps even more so, its possibility to be an effective agent of change in a society dominated by violence and indifference. What is your “secret”?
AS: There are no secrets, Anna! I’ve always considered literature as a form of curiosity and sharing; since high school I have always talked with my friends about the last book I heard about (or, truth be told, the last rock group discovered!). For sure, the image of the translator as an isolated figure, always in front of a computer screen surrounded by piles of books and dictionaries, does not apply to me. For me, translating means communicating, interacting—with other translators (through mailing lists or forums), with the authors (with whom I always try to establish, whenever possible, a direct contact), with editors and publishers (with whom I try to establish a close relationship of collaboration and exchange). That’s why it’s easy for me to promote the books I love, to do some scouting and consulting, even informally, to organize literary events and festivals. To me, these are only complementary aspects of a job which, at the end of the day, is that of mediator and promoter of literature and poetry. If I discover an author worthy of being read, what’s the point of keeping her/him to myself?
Translated from the Italian by Anna Aresi
Andrea Sirotti was born in Florence, where he teaches English language, literature, and translation to students of all ages, from high school to graduate students. His Italian translations of poetry and fiction by authors such as Carol Ann Duffy, Margaret Atwood, Hisham Matar, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Arundhathi Subramaniam have appeared with major Italian publishers such as Einaudi, Giunti, Rizzoli, and Le Lettere. He serves on the editorial boards of Semicerchio, an Italian journal of comparative poetry, and Interno Poesia, a blog for the promotion and diffusion of poetry. He is the organizer of international poetry festivals, such as the Rignano PIM-fest (Poesia in movimento, Poetry in Motion), and, from 2000 to 2008, together with Vittorio Biagini, he curated the young poet award “Nodo sottile” for the Council of Florence. He co-edited (with Shaul Bassi) Gli studi postcoloniali: Un’introduzione (Le Lettere, 2010). He has recently begun working as a freelance literary scout and editorial advisor.
Anna Aresi is a Copy Editor at Asymptote. Originally from Italy, she’s now based in the United States, where she teaches Italian language and literature, yoga, and translates from and into English and Italian.
*****
Read more interviews from the Asymptote blog: