Out of my twenty-six years of life, I have lived twenty- four years in Italy, and the last two in Liverpool. It has been a total, radical shift that completely revolutionised my way of living, of relating to people, and most of all, talking – even though I have studied and listened to people speaking English for most of my life. The vast majority of conversations I have are in English, yet in my head they are almost exclusively delivered in Italian. I still find myself shifting from one language to another, sometimes coming up with popular sayings that I would use comfortably in Italian, but would find difficult to convey in English.
“the translator’s job is to simply bet on their own interpretation, and hope it is as faithful as possible to the original text”
Then the other day, while translating an article, a sentence caught my attention: “you gotta make hay while the sun shines” it said, and my mind – as it often does, obviously running amok – started to ponder on the best way to translate it, by wandering on the deepest, evocative meaning of this well-known saying. Think about it: a clear sky, the sun being completely undisturbed by clouds, perhaps the perfect weather; people working in the country, and the plan of trying to get as much work done as possible while the condition is still that favourable.
At this point, my years of experience dealing with words and working as a translator usually lead me to my next thought: how would
I translate that in Italian? Certainly, it would not make any sense if I just started to talk about hay. We do have a similar saying, though: battere il ferro finché è caldo – literally, “work the iron while it is still hot.” The comparison still stands, and if I were to translate the sentence in this way it would technically more or less still work, but the poetry of the English expression is gone, lost forever in the cruel process of translation. Translating is like a tug of war – whenever you give something, you are also inevitably losing something else. As the Italian writer and journalist Umberto Eco famously said, it is “dire quasi la stessa cosa”, literally “saying almost the same thing.” It is a process of negotiation that takes within itself the awareness of its faulty nature.
As a “translator in the making”, this is probably the first concept they teach you; learn how to get to know your text, and then just abandon every hope of getting its translation faultlessly right.
Funnily enough though, when I think back to my university years as a Translation student, the first image that comes to mind is a younger version of myself surrounded by books, dictionaries, and pens, sitting with a slouchy posture and hopelessly struggling to find the right word for the translation I am working on. Years later, with a little bit more experience, I know that there is no such thing
as a right translation. Texts can be interpreted in infinitely different ways, some of which might have not even been guessed by the author. And in this sense, the translator’s job is to simply bet on their own interpretation, and hope it is as faithful as possible to the original text. It might make it sound easier than it actually is, but I promise it is just as fun and exciting.
“translating means recreating an experience, not a tidy series of words”
But then again, if the perfect translation is indeed an impossible desire, something that is out of anyone’s reach, why should we keep wrestling with it? We could fairly say that it is because translating means recreating an experience, rather than a tidy sequence of words from one language to the other. It is about ensuring that the sense of the original text is preserved, without expecting it to be perfectly faithful to the original – because this will sadly never happen, – by keeping that bet that we made with ourselves.
Most importantly though, translating is also basking in the realisation that what is lost is never really lost. Welcoming to our language elements that we would not consider familiar or known is a huge victory on our side. This is where the beauty of translation really shows: it is an act of acceptance, a way to learn more about a different language and culture, a place where to accommodate a concept, a word, a description that we have never heard or seen before, and make it ours – without denying or rejecting it in its dissimilarity.
“what is lost is never really lost”
Many times I found myself talking to people and, right in the middle of a conversation, realising that I am not always able to convey in words what it is in my mind. When I am trying to say something on the lines of “oh, this goes amazingly with it”, my first thought from my Italian nature is to say, “ce dice come ‘l cacio sui maccarò”, literally “it goes like cheese on pasta” – of course I could translate it literally, but it would never be the same for an English-speaker. It will never be able to convey the same love and passion that distinguishes an Italian talking about pasta in their own language. Yet, it does not matter: sure, it will never be the same, but I can explain it to you. And you can make it yours.