4/28/2024 0 Comments Russian to english translation![]() When I left Rome in August of that year, I took the notebook with me. As with most projects, in the beginning, I had no sense that the words I was scribbling in a notebook would develop into a book. I had been living in Italy for three years, but I had already made the anguished decision to return to the United States. I began writing Dove mi trovo in the spring of 2015. My center of gravity had shifted or at least, it had begun to shift back and forth. I had gone too deep into Italian, and so English no longer represented the reassuring, essential act of coming up for air. Even before I decided to translate Dove mi trovo myself, I knew that the idea of “coming home” was no longer an option. This idea is false, and it was also not my objective. When an author migrates into another language, the subsequent crossing into the former language might be regarded, by some, as a crossing back, an act of return, a coming home. Leonora Carrington, whose first language was English, had also left the messy business of translating many of her French and Spanish stories to someone else, as had the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi in the case of Requiem, the great novel he wrote in Portuguese. Another Argentine, Borges, who had grown up bilingual in Spanish and English, translated numerous works into Spanish, but left the English translation of his own work to others. Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, an Argentine whose major works were composed in Italian, had been more “faithful” when rendering his texts into Spanish. Brodsky, too, took great liberties when translating his Russian poetry into English. Beckett had notably altered his French when translating himself into English. Had they translated their own work? And if so, where did translation taper off, and the act of rewriting take over? I was wary of betraying myself. I thought back to other authors who had migrated into different languages. The responsibility of translation is as grave and as precarious as that of a surgeon who is trained to transplant organs, or to redirect the blood flow to our hearts, and I wavered at length over the question of who would perform the surgery. Another image, perhaps jarring, comes to mind: that of the burial plot of a surviving spouse, demarcated and waiting. Everything I write in Italian is born with the simultaneous potential-or perhaps destiny is the better word here-of existing in English. And so, if I choose to write in Italian, the English version immediately rears its head, like a bulb that sprouts too early in mid-winter. The dangers, for the writer as for the driver, are obvious.Īnd yet, even as I was writing, I felt shadowed by two questions: 1) when would the text be turned into English and 2) who would translate it? These questions rose from the fact that I am also, and was for many years exclusively, a writer in English. While writing, one must keep one’s eyes on the road, straight ahead, and not contemplate or anticipate driving down another. But when it came to replicating this particular book, conceived and written in Italian, into the language that I knew best-the language I had emphatically stepped away from in order for it to be born in the first place-I was of two minds.Īs I was writing Dove mi trovo, the thought of it being anything other than an Italian text felt irrelevant. I was not apprehensive when translators began turning the novel into other languages-into Spanish or German or Dutch, for example. ![]() Naturally it could be translated any text can, to greater or lesser degrees of success. Having written my novel Dove mi trovo in Italian, I was the first to doubt that it could transform into English.
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