Mission Impossible

By James Marcus

http://harpers.org/blog/2015/12/mission-impossible/

Years ago, browsing in a Roman bookstore, I bought an Italian translation of Lolita, bound in green pleather. It seemed, as I flipped through it, like a pretty decent job, capturing at least some of the author’s suavity and syntactical brio. Then I came to the scene where the inept, pistol-packing narrator finally hits Clare Quilty with a bullet, and his victim leaps from his chair like (as Nabokov originally put it) “old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old Faithful.” The translator got the basics down just fine—but in a footnote, he helpfully elucidated the meaning of Old Faithful for his Italian readers: “A name used by Americans for a certain type of airplane.”

I bring this up not to ridicule the translator, who certainly had his work cut out for him. What I mean to stress is that translation is a perfectionist’s nightmare—a process almost diabolically engineered to generate mistakes. Translators have too much to do at once. They are literalists, chained to the dictionary, and poets, slipping the shackles of exactitude at every opportunity. They are dual nationals of a kind, declaring their loyalty to one language while treacherously dallying with another. They transport the biggest possible things—meaning, feeling, art, ethics—in the smallest possible containers, and inevitably there is some spillage along the way.

Primo Levi was well aware of these rigors, having produced Italian versions of Claude Levi-Strauss’s The View from Afar and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. (Regarding his struggle with poor, persecuted Josef K., he wrote, “I emerged from this translation as if from an illness.”) So it should surprise nobody that The Complete Works of Primo Levi, a 3,008-page leviathan just published by Liveright, includes a smattering of mistakes. Having done the honors myself on seven Italian books, I blanch at what might emerge from a careful scrutiny of those doubtless error-flecked texts. But here as elsewhere, our mistakes can be as illuminating as our triumphs—especially the squishy ones, neither completely wrong nor completely right, which tend to take us down a variety of cultural and linguistic rabbit holes.

In the first chapter in The Periodic Table, for example, Levi discusses his Italian-Jewish ancestry. He concludes with a description of his boyhood visits to his grandmother, who always presented him with a decayed, inedible chocolate. Ann Goldstein, whose translation appears in the Complete Works, calls the chocolate “moth-eaten,” while Raymond Rosenthal, whose 1984 version introduced Levi to many American readers, opts for “worm-eaten.” Which is it?

Some might call this entomological hairsplitting. Not, I would argue, Levi, who was fascinated by such details and devoted entire essays to beetles, butterflies, crickets, fleas, and other insects. The word in Italian is tarlato, whose most literal meaning is “worm-eaten”—it’s derived from tarlo, meaning a woodworm. And the woodworm seems to have been a strikingly resonant creature for Levi. In The Search for Roots, he described himself (with dubious accuracy) as an intellectual stay-at-home, most comfortable on familiar terrain, and went on to declare: “I prefer to play it safe, to make a hole and then gnaw away inside for a long time, maybe for all one’s life, like the woodworm when he has found a piece of wood to his liking.” Elsewhere, in The Drowned and the Saved, the common pest becomes a figure for a bad conscience, for survivor’s guilt. The thought that we may have usurped another human being is a “supposition, but it gnaws at you; it’s nesting deep inside, like a worm.” (Michael F. Moore, who translated the version in the Complete Works, uses the more generic term, but the Italian word in the original text is tarlo.) It doesn’t seem like a word Levi would use casually, even in its derivative form, all of which argues for Rosenthal’s version.

Wait, I hear you saying. The woodworm eats timber, furniture, fencing, plywood—but not moldering pieces of chocolate. Isn’t Goldstein right after all? Maybe. The pest in Nona Màlia’s cupboard was likely an Indian meal moth, Plodia interpunctella, which does indeed dine on such foodstuffs as chocolate. Game, set, match! But wait again: it is not the moth itself that consumes these delights, but the icky-looking larvae, wingless and persuasively wormlike. Well, let’s call this one a draw.

“Chromium,” from the same book, offers another example—not so much a mistake as a small, insoluble dilemma. Recalling one of his early industrial gigs, Levi describes chemical analysis as a sort of gladiatorial contest between man and matter: the adversary is “the non-me, the Big Curve, Hyle.” Now, hyle, an ancient Greek word for primordial stuff, is not exactly common but long since naturalized in English. But what the hell did Levi mean by the Big Curve? In Italian, he used the phrase il Gran Curvo, so Goldstein’s translation was literally correct, but still puzzling. A brief session with Google clarified nothing. Was the author referring to a certain portion of the Palmetto Expressway near Miami Lakes, Florida, or to those berry-and-cream-swirl-colored bowling balls you can order online? Neither. When I consulted Rosenthal’s version, I saw that he had translated the phrase as “the Button Molder,” and added a footnote: “A character in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.”

This solved some problems while creating others. Levi was indeed referring to a character in Peer Gynt—but not to the Button Molder (whoops). He meant what is usually called the Great Boyg, a monster encountered in the wilderness by the play’s titular hero. The creature is formless, foggy, menacing, and responds to Peer Gynt’s provocations with riddling ease: “The Great Boyg conquers, but does not fight.” Now, here is where things get complicated. Boyg, meaning an amorphous obstacle, has also been absorbed into English. But it comes from a Norwegian word meaning “to bend,” which explains why in Italian, anyway, Ibsen’s misty monster has become strangely curvaceous. What is the translator to do? Respect Levi’s original formulation, as Goldstein has done, or use the accurate but opaque Boyg? And in either case, should the reader be given a leg up via a footnote or artfully inserted parenthetical by the translator, or is that messing with the purity of what Italo Calvino called the author’s “most Primo-Levian book”?

I’ll conclude with one final example: an actual mistake. Stuart Woolf translated If This Is a Man during many long, whiskey-fueled sessions with the author. For that reason, the book was not retranslated from scratch for the Complete Works, but corrected by the original translator. Most of Woolf’s fixes make complete sense: the language is more colloquial, more precise. But in at least one case, he has introduced a blooper. Describing Auschwitz just moments before an Allied bombardment, Levi writes: “In the distance photoelectric beams were visible.” This makes no sense at all. (For starters, most of the photoelectric beams used in security and manufacturing systems are infrared, and therefore not visible.) And indeed, in Woolf’s original 1958 translation, the sentence reads: “One could see the searchlight beams in the distance.”

So what happened? Woolf clearly went back to the Italian text, encountered the word fotoelettrici, and set out to sharpen his earlier, fuzzier formulation. The problem is that Levi meant something else: a fotoelettrica is a searchlight mounted on a military vehicle, and that’s clearly what the Germans would have been pointing up at the distant Allied bombers. It’s an obscure term, a piece of military jargon, and since Levi incorrectly assigned it a masculine gender, he mussed the trail for any future translator. So Woolf got lucky: he can blame the author.

And so it goes. Goldstein is a superb translator, who has brought Elena Ferrante to the English-speaking multitudes (not to mention another favorite of mine, the brilliant miniaturist Aldo Buzzi). Woolf’s version of If This Is a Man is essentially a collaboration with the author. No matter. The problems, the potholes, the pratfalls, are baked into the very process of translation. The original text is a kind of Boyg itself, a formless foe that resists any attempt to subdue it completely. Indeed, Peer Gynt’s cries of frustration will sound familiar to any longtime translator:

Backwards or forwards it’s just as far,
out or in, it’s just as narrow.
He’s here, he’s there, he’s all about me!
When I’m sure that I’m out, then I’m back in the middle!

I have had many of those claustrophobic, tongue-tied moments myself—when the English words seem to float just tantalizingly out of reach. (I’m still losing sleep over a foul-mouthed phrase of Oriana Fallaci’s, cazzo d’un cazzo stracazzo, which the author was very proud to have added to the Italian language.) Luckily, however, there is one last resort when it comes to conquering the Boyg, unknown to Ibsen’s knight errant. It’s called a deadline.

Note: Bài này tuyệt lắm. Người viết là Trùm tờ Harper's, chuyên gia về tiếng Ý, đã từng được giải thưởng dịch thuật. Cái tít mới chướng, mới gây sự làm sao, free, có giấy ra trại [Lò Thiêu, Lò Cải Tạo], nhưng chưa được cứu rỗi.
Cho đọc free.
GCC mua tờ báo rồi mới biết!



To the Editors:

Tim Parks’s engaging review of The Complete Works of Primo Levi [NYR, November 5] is satisfying on a number of levels, but I was disheartened to see the piece bookended by the “suicide.” Parks’s phrase that Levi “threw himself down the stairwell to his death” is not, in any case, an accurate way to describe a tumble over a railing. But the larger issue is that thoughtful and important people close to Levi, who first thought it was a suicide, have reconsidered the event. These people include his cardiologist and friend David Mendel, his lifelong friend Nobel laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, and Fernando Camon. Levi was in a whirl of activities—he’d scheduled an interview for the following Monday, he was considering the presidency of the publishing house Einaudi, he’d just submitted a novel, and that very morning he mailed a plan-filled letter. Add to that the tight dimensions of the stairwell, a railing lower than his waist, recovery from surgery (lowered blood pressure), the number of people who survived Auschwitz and did not kill themselves, and a number of other factors, and the suicide doesn’t make sense.

It has been a useful symbol for critics and other writers to hold on to as they imagine the why and how, but it is grossly unfair to the man and to his work. If this crutch is removed, his material can be examined in fresh light—an examination that he deserves.

I hope the editors of The New York Review will help discourage the story, which, in the cycling of Internet sites, already holds a terrifically strong grip. I would strongly urge you to see this 1999 essay, “Primo Levi’s Last Moments” by Diego Gambetta.

Carolyn Lieberg
Washington, D.C.
Tim Parks replies:

“1987—April 11: Levi dies, a suicide, in his apartment building in Turin.”

I quote not from a rogue website but from the author chronology provided in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, the book under review. These words, in turn, are a translation of the chronology prepared by Il Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin, the most authoritative source of information on Levi; they were actually written by Ernesto Ferrero, for many years Levi’s editor at Einaudi, a close friend who knew the author well and spoke to him regularly right through to the end.

The three biographers—Ian Thomson, Carole Angiers, and Myriam Annissimov—who worked intensely on Levi’s life, interviewing most of those who knew him, all speak of his suicide as fact. The police on the scene concluded that the death could only have been suicide, this for the simple reason that one does not take a “tumble over a railing” in a Turin apartment block. The Turin law court that heard the evidence surrounding the death agreed and gave its verdict accordingly. In any event it is unthinkable that Levi, a cautious man, would have brought up children and maintained his infirm mother in a building where one could simply tumble over bannisters.

Diego Gambetta’s Boston Review article, to which Carolyn Lieberg refers me, is an extended exercise in wishful thinking, sometimes disingenuous (as when it claims, for example, that the biographies do not back up their claim that the death was suicide, or omits to mention the family’s immediate acceptance of the suicide verdict, or suggests that the height of the railing was abnormally low), sometimes plain wrong, as when it claims that Levi never wrote in favor of suicide. In the story “Heading West” (published in 1971, but interestingly republished shortly before the suicide in 1987), he sympathetically describes a remote tribe who refuse a drug that will put an end to an epidemic of suicides. The chief of the tribe writes, and they are the final words of the story, that the tribe’s members “prefer freedom to drugs, and death to illusion.” Freedom is always a positive word for Levi.

As early as 1959 Levi had written to his German translator, Heinz Reidt, that “suicide is an act of will, a free decision.” In 1981 when Levi’s German teacher, Hanns Engert, hanged himself, Levi was asked to sign a petition claiming it was murder. But the evidence was so overwhelming that he refused: “Hanns killed himself,” he said. “Suicide is a right we all have.”

This brings us to the moral issue at stake here. Levi was a sworn enemy of denial in all its forms. In If This Is a Man he is dismayed when at Auschwitz his friend Alberto convinces himself that his father, just “selected,” will not actually be sent to the gas chambers. It is a renunciation of reality, of sanity. Later, he would be equally dismayed that Alberto’s parents continued to deny the obvious truth that their son had died in the march away from Auschwitz, preferring to believe that he was somehow safe and well in Russia. In The Drowned and the Saved Levi attacks all attempts to find solace in pieties and “convenient truths,” in particular the notion that Auschwitz victims, himself included, were somehow sanctified by their experience, their courage and goodness becoming almost a consolation for the awfulness of what had happened: “It is disingenuous, absurd and historically false,” he writes, “to argue that a hellish system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims.”

Given that Levi’s instinct was always to encourage the reader to confront the hardest of facts and not take refuge in any comfort zone, we owe it to him to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of the way he died. His suicide does not diminish his work or his dignity. He was not obliged to his readers to behave in a reassuring way or protect the illusions they had built around his person. “In my work I have portrayed myself…as…well-balanced,” he remarked. “However, I’m not well-balanced at all. I go through long periods of imbalance.”

Whatever his reasons for doing what he did, and clearly in the last months of his life he oscillated between deep depression and rare moments of enthusiasm for new projects, Levi was a free man, exercising “a right we all have.” “He’s done what he’d always said he’d do” were reportedly his wife’s words on returning home to discover what had happened.