Continuing with the theme of translation, today I share the work of another friend, Jenna Weiner, and the translations she has worked on by Primo Levi. Her own words introduce her work better than I ever could and her prose following the poem offers sharp insight into the process and challenges of translation.
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As my final project, I chose to translate some poems by Primo Levi. Aside from being attracted to the original language of his poems (I am an Italian minor, after all), I was compelled by his experience in Auschwitz and the powerful role of bearing witness in his life and his works. While watching the documentary film about him, I was particularly struck by the urgency with which he wrote “Se Questo è un Uomo” (“If This is a Man”) upon returning from Auschwitz. A friend of his interviewed in the documentary said that Levi spoke for days and days after his return, explaining to his friends and family that he had been waiting for so long to tell everyone what he experienced. After he finished talking, he sat down to write “Se Questo è un Uomo.”Although I am not translating that book, I can see the same sentiment carry over into his other works. I found his poems to be simple yet powerful—the language of someone who wants you to sit down and hear his incredible story. Discussing love, life, suffering, his specific experiences and the concept of bearing witness, all of Levi’s poems are marked by a kind of questioning for meaning or answers, either directly or implicitly. Searching within himself, society, the external world and God, his poems are extremely powerful and perceptive.
Regarding the classic dilemma of translating — the question of whether to make the translated poem the priority or to make the faithful translation a priority — I chose the latter. I was struck by the simplicity and effectiveness of Levi’s words, and I believe that he made the choices he did for a reason, so I tried to honor his choices as much as possible.
I have accompanied my translations with the original poem and the translations by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, for comparison. I have also followed the first two poems with explanations of the decisions I made while translating, to give you a sense of my thought process. It is safe to say that I continued translating the rest of the poems in the same way.
Cantare
by Primo Levi
… Ma quando poi cominciammo a cantare
Le buone nostre canzoni insensate
Allora avvenne che tutte le cose
Furono ancora com’erano state.
Un giorno non fu che un giorno:
Sette fanno una settimana
Cosa cattiva ci parve uccidere;
Morire, una cosa lontana
E i mesi passano piuttosto rapidi,
Ma davanti ne abbiamo tanti!
Fummo di nuovo soltanto giovani:
Non martiri, non infami, non santi.
Questo ed altro ci veniva in mente
Mentre continuavamo a cantare;
Ma erano cose come le nuvole,
E difficili da spiegare.
3 gennaio 1946
Singing
translated by Jenna Weiner
... But then when we started to sing
Our beautiful senseless songs
It just so happened that everything
Was still like it always had been.
A day was nothing more than a day:
Seven make a week
Killing seemed evil to us;
Dying, something distant.
And the months pass rather quickly,
But there are still so many left!
We were again only young men:
Not martyrs, not infamous, not saints.
This and other things used to come to mind
While we kept singing;
But they were like the clouds,
And difficult to explain.
3 January 1946
Singing
translation by Feldman and Swann
… But then when we started singing
Those good foolish songs of ours,
Then everything was again
As it always had been.
A day was just a day,
And seven make a week.
Killing seemed an evil thing to us;
Dying – something remote.
The months pass rather quickly,
But there are still so many left!
Once more we were just young men:
Not martyrs, not infamous, not saints.
This and other things came into our minds
While we kept singing.
But they were cloudlike things,
Hard to explain.
3 January 1946
In the first line, I used “sing” instead of the “singing” that Feldman and Swann used (the infinitive can be translated either way), because I thought it sounded better with “songs” in the next line. In the second line, I used “senseless” instead of Feldman and Swann’s “foolish,” because that’s literally what insensate means, and I thought it had a nice alliteration with “songs.” “Buone” can mean either good or beautiful (which speaks to the Italian culture), and I thought “beautiful senseless” had a nicer sound than “good foolish.” “Then everything” loses the “avvenne” in the Italian, which means “to happen,” so I thought a nice balance was “It just so happened that everything.” (It literally translates to “it happened that everything,” but I wanted a longer sentence to balance the rhythm.) I do not agree with Feldman and Swann’s decision to change the line break from the original (which translates to “everything / was”); I think it stands just fine as is.
In the first line of the second stanza, I stayed true to the original poem, which translates to “a day was not but a day.” I think that structure is more powerful than Feldman and Swann’s “a day was just a day.” In the next line, I stayed true to the original and did not add “And” as F&S did. In the last line of the stanza, I translated “lontana” as “distant” rather than “remote” because it has alliteration with “dying.” I did not think the change from the comma to the dash (as seen in F&S) was necessary.
In the next stanza, I kept the “and” at the beginning of the line, because clearly Levi put it there for a reason. I used “again” instead of “once more,” because it has nice internal rhyme with “men.”
In the next stanza I used “used to come to mind” to convey the imperfect verb tense (which suggests a continued or often-repeated action) of “to come;” something that “came” does not reflect. I did not see the need to turn the simple analogy of “they were things like clouds” (which is the original translation) into “cloudlike things.” I stayed with the literal translation of “difficult,” because I thought it balanced out the line length better than “hard” did.
Unfortunately, I was not able to preserve the rhyme of the original poem, which was really beautiful in the Italian.
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