mark davie, "traduttore traditore"
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accessible to speakers of another. And because, by definition, this involves finding ways to express alien
concepts from an alien culture, the process is necessarily imperfect, involving a succession of compromis
n the search for an equivalent in the target language. All translators know this from experience, and some
writers on translation have defined it, borrowing an analogy from engineering, as “translation loss.” As
energy loss is an unavoidable fact of mechanics — no mechanism can be 100% efficient, and the best a
esigner can do is manage the loss as productively as possible — so translation loss is similarly
navoidable. A perfect translation is no more attainable than perpetual motion. So the translator’s task is
o attempt the impossible but rather to manage the losses in translation and find compensating gains. In a
terary translation, it’s not hard to see that this might involve sacrificing literal accuracy for the sake of a
more faithful rendering of the style or tone of the original; but a different kind of translator might well make
ifferent choices. A user of a textbook or an instruction manual, for instance, will expect the translation to
clear and unambiguous, and would consider some loss of elegance or succinctness as a price worth payi
These reflections are prompted by my recent experience of translating Galileo, himself famously forthrigh
his inability to settle for bland ambiguities being what got him into trouble with the church. Among all his
other activities he found time to write literary criticism, and he once commented tartly, on a line of verse b
Tasso who had the misfortune to be his bête noire, that “anyone can speak obscurely, but very few clearl
f that isn’t enough of a gauntlet thrown down for his translator, Galileo went one better by becoming, in
effect, the translator of his own work. In 1610 he published in Latin, the international language of science
his account of his observations of the moon and planets through a telescope; but thereafter he wrote all h
major scientific works in Italian, and for the wider, non-specialist public that this implied. The result was a
prose style which had all the colloquial pungency of the vernacular while losing none of its scientific rigouand its impact on Galileo’s contemporaries was profound. It’s a prose which requires the translator to cho
how to highlight these contrasting qualities and to strike a balance between them.
n the end, my experience has been that of every translator — that for every solution that satisfies your
professional pride there will be another compromise where you feel there must be a better answer if only
could find it. Or, to quote another of Giusti’s proverbs, “A tutti i poeti manca un verso.” But that’s another
ranslator’s challenge in itself.
Mark Davie has taught Italian at the Universities of Liverpool and Exeter, and has published studies on
various aspects of Italian literature, mainly in the period from Dante to the Renaissance. He is
particularly interested in the relations between learned and popular culture, and between Latin and the
vernacular, in Italy in the Renaissance. He is the translator of Galileo’s Selected Writings, Oxford
World’s Classics edition.
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