Breaking a lance in the wordlists: a defence of illiteral translation

Asterix, Jemima Puddleduck, Chingachgook, and even the ass Bottom, might agree that there are at least three factors that fecundate a language and make it bloom: first of all the delight that language takes in hearing something new said to it; then, perhaps in historical order, trading - with its crossing-plank - almost tautological for translation; and then the movement of peoples, invasion passive and active, suffered or inflicted; and most folks have been either side the border, when not astride. It is fortunate in all this transhumance that "poets have been the shepherds of being since we have been a conversation".

The unsaddled, gap-worded, translator must from beginning to end use the mounting-block, the dictionary. One I have to hand is the "Dizionario etimologico siciliano" by Salvatore Giarrizzo, where in the list of abbreviations we find, among others, antico alto tedesco, algerino, arabo, aragonese, basso latino, bizantino, castigliano, celtico, dorico, ebraico, eolico, francese, gallico, germanico, gotico, greco, guascone, irlandese, latino, lettone, lituano, neogreco, normanno, occitano, olandese, osco, peligno, persiano, portoghese, prussiano, romeno, sabino, sanscrito, slavo, spagnolo, tedesco, turco, umbro. An odd little window on history. Few of the people who spoke these languages were neighbourly and where the list suggest a geographical closeness, no love was lost: between arabo and aragonese came the reconquista, and between normanno and occitano the Cathars were lost. One can deduce that the list is alphabetical and not stratigraphic: otherwise Oscan, Pelignan and Umbrian would come before neo-Greek.

What I was, and am, looking for, and which should exist somewhere because the need for it is pressing, is the word “illiteral” to describe a certain type of translation. Unfortunately it sounds like “illiterate”, which certainly is not what I need. I must therefore proceed in zigzag fashion and by indirection find direction out, or follow the method praised and practised by Conrad in which what is visible of the the object of interest is only the halo surrounding it.

Here I should spend a word or two on the history of the English language and translation, on Bede of Northumberland, Alfred of England and Marie de France, instead I shall stilt ahead because I must get as soon as possible to the seventeenth century, to 1693 to be precise.

In the first great post-Chaucerian period of translation and imitation when Middle English had been adopted, the language that resulted was most hospitable to foreign writers, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Germans, Italians, French. Like Sicilian, English has been run over by much traffic. Three of the literary translators on whom I shall dwell were literary translators in a particular sense: they interested themselves in dictionaries. They are, in order of publication: George Chapman, John Florio (who published in the same year, 1598), and Thomas Urquart (1652), helped into the stirrup by the Randle Cotgrave of 1611.

Chapman, poet, translator, playwright, rendered Ovid, Hesiod, Museus, Juvenal. Though Eliot thought highly of his poetry, Chapman is perhaps best known for his translations of Homer, to whom he did not hesitate to add descriptive details and philosophical comments of his own invention. To list these inventions and deviations would be interesting, we are told by Allardyce Nicoll, one of his great editors, but would take too much space. The best known case of the influence of one English poet on another is perhaps the sonnet On first looking into Chapman's Homer, a poem written overnight by John Keats in 1816, four years, that is, before Keats met Giuseppe Gioachino Belli in the novel ABBA ABBA by Anthony Burgess, the best known translator of the latter.

In the year in which Chapman began to publish his Homer, John (Giovanni) Florio published A world of words, the first bilingual Italian-English dictionary. It takes little, I believe, to see why the first dictionaries are not monolingual. Literati take themselves to have or be the measure of the sheep-talk of their own pagus or demesne, who if not they? What they need help to, and offer, is a mastery of the bleating of barbarians, chanting of d'oc, the drintling of Turkey, the curring of pidgin. It requires the sedimentation of time, seepage, creepage, slippage, before the notion that the meaning of a word of one’s own tongue might require a stratigraphic survey. In England, after certain inadequate efforts in the seventeenth century, it was not until the mid-eighteenth that Samuel Johnson girded himself up to the obdurate and lasting work of an etymological dictionary.

By chance and not by chance Johnson, like Chapman, translated Juvenal, and where Juvenal opens his tenth satire with: Omnibus in terris quae sunt a Gadibus usque// ad Auroram et Gangem, Johnson translates: Let Observation with extensive View//Survey Mankind from China to Peru. Johnson clearly knows that his world is larger than Juvenal’s and that, to be faithful, account must be taken of the fact and the imagination expanded.

With the known pungent self-irony Johnson defined the lexicographer “a harmless drudge”. Such would not be true of John Florio who elbowed his way sharply upwards in the world. The revised edition of his dictionary: A world of words to which is annexed the Garden of Recreation, yielding six thousand Italian proverbs emerged in 1611. Six thousand is an enormous contribution, and left their mark. In 1603, the year in which the First Folio of Hamlet was printed and Shakespeare was working on Othello, Florio published his translation of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne. Eliot, who though authoritative is not the Bible, describes this work as a classic: not a classic of translation, but a classic of English literature, formative of the language and its literature like the King James Bible, the authorized version published, as it happens, in 1611.

Other critics and scholars instead believe that the earlier versions of Wycliffe, Tyndale and Coverdale had greater influence. David Crystal, for instance, finds little novelty in the Authorized Version in terms of proverbs and sayings. The Geneva version published in 1650 has a certain interest for my argument. Known as the Breeches Bible, it has Adam and Eve covering their shame not with aprons but britches.

But let me close with Florio. His rucking was rewarded and he made his way at court and in Elizabethan and Jacobean literary circles. We know from a dedication made to Florio, that he knew Ben Jonson. It is not known whether he knew Shakespeare also. It is nevertheless curious that certain Italian critics, in particular Santi Paladini during the Fascist period, claim that he knew him intimately, given that Giovanni Florio was Shakespeare. Sufficient to remember how many of the plays have an Italian setting; and, then, there is the decisive argument: did not Leonardo Florio, Giovanni’s father, a proponent of freedom of conscience in an age of auto da fe, bring the family to England to live on its wits, and was not his mother a Sicilian née Crollalancia? The plays, written by the father in Italian, translated by the son into English, are attributed to a version of the mother. John Florio, as editor of the First Folio, has recently been re-encountered at yet another turning of the Stratford byway.

It was again in 1611 that Randle Cotgrave published his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. From certain words that have remained hapax in English, it is clear he had read Rabelais, the fifth book of whose Gargantua et Pantagruel (if it be authentic) was published in 1562-64. And from other words from the dictionary adopted by Thomas Urquart one can see that the latter made use of Cotgrave in his translation of Rabelais (in brackets, an author much admired by Van Veen in Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor).

The first two volumes of what, with Florio’s Essays, and Thomas Sheldon’s Don Quixote, remains one of the masterpieces of seventeenth century translation, were published in 1652. Urquart, a Scottish nobleman and staunch supporter of the Stuart cause, died in 1660, suffocated, it was said, by his otherwise unquenchable laughter on hearing of the restoration of the monarchy.

The third volume, which is of interest here, was printed from his papers in 1693, along with the fourth and fifth volumes, by Peter Antony Motteux, and the translation is known as the Urquart and Motteux.

In chapter thirteen of volume three Rabelais tells of the philosopher who, to have peace for thinking, withdraws from the world and finds himself where abeyent les chiens, ullent les loups, rugient les Lyons, hannissent les chevaulx, barrient les elephans, siflent les serpens, braisient les asnes, sonnent les cigalles, lamentent les tourturelles. What does Thomas Urquart do at this point? Naturally, as translator, he is loyal, and the philosopher is assailed by the barking of curs, yelling of wolves, roaring of lions, neighing of horses, crying of elephants, hissing of serpents, cigling of locusts, wailing of turtles. Loyal, certainly, but not exact, because, as you will have noticed, he has skipped les asnes, the donkeys.

A moment of distraction, perhaps, an oversight. Yet Urquart manages to make good the number of beasts listed. That cigling, borrowed from Randle Cotgrave, with the first syllable of cigala, acts to multiply the locusts and turtle is both the dove and the sea creature. Indeed, he has already made good the number, has bettered it by far, for between the curs and the turtles he has plundered his rattle bag for the names and cries of sixty different animals. The outcome is a bewitching list of seventy-one, a syllabic poem held together by a cunning use of alliteration and vowel scheme, which distinguishes the nuzzing of the Bactrian camel from the buzzing of the dromedary, the mioling of the tiger from the pioling of the pelican, a treasure of new coinages for whoever, after Urquart, should put them into circulation. But to whom does this treasure belong? Urquart concedes it to Rabelais, but, for us epigoni, is this not a case of the impertinence of which Carol O'Sullivan accuses Burgess translator of Belli? Whatever the reply, it can certainly be seen as un embarass de richesse.

Translators have their diverse strategies. There are those, and perhaps the finest, who, to translate one work, read all the author’s works, the lives, the correspondence, the commentaries, the critics. Others like myself - I cannot be the only one - begin at word one line one, in my case because, of all things I fear, boredom is the Boojum, and I begin where I do so that the text may, for me, retain surprise. One may learn, hence adjust a version, and develop criteria retrospectively.

For with Belli I was already in medias res when I began. Stanford University asked me to translate a work of Armando Petrucci’s, Le scritture ultime, in which he quotes in full 816 Li morti de Roma. I made several prose versions of the sonnet, none of which were remotely satisfactory: they all, of course, lacked the music and compactness of the original. I was, however, not altogether without experience of translating Italian poetry since some few years previously I had published fifty or so of the Rime of Michelangelo as The love sonnets and madrigals... to Tommaso de’Cavalieri, and now I wondered if it were a transferable skill. So I set to work.

In the summer after the publication of writing Writing the dead, on holiday, to wile the time, I translated three or four more of those sonnets constellated around 816. From them I learned several things that were to become criteria for future sonnets: the firmness of Belli’s adherence to schemes of the Petrarchan sonnet, the need for a particular, individual voice for each speaking figure, the fact that Belli’s semantic unit is the single strophe. When the translated sonnets had become ten, I went back to the beginning to read them in chronological order, still without any notion of how many I might translate (the final figure is 429) or any thought of publication. The criteria could now be subsumed under feasibility. Since the sonetti were intended for recitation, crucial was the finding of a voice and idiolect for the individual speaker.

Obviously the language could not be Standard English. Belli’s highly coloured language and the status of his figures determined that from the outset, but would Cockney do, London as locale of Belli’s Roma? Garioch had chosen Edinburgh, and Burgess Lancashire. Would not the range need to be wider to embrace, for example, mention of relics, popes and saints, or should such be excluded? That would be to exclude too much. However, given the nature and status of religious belief in the British Isles, an Irish accent might yet prove accommodating for such content, as for priestcraft, superstition and blasphemy. And what of the pervasive aggressivity? Though there is no lack of East End gangsters and hoodlums, the promptness, the sudden acceleration of violence in Belli has, for me, more of the savour of Glasgow or Belfast.

So my strategy became the spell of reading, re-reading, again re-reading again, until the original structure held stable, though infested now with the mowing, voiceless ghosts of possible versions, doppelgangers from the ABBAtoir drifting piecemeal along passages, unfurling through grids, teased apart by a balustrade, in chipped mirrors reflected piebald, pointing empty sleeves at the volta, until one stiffened in a concrete gesture, spoke a word in a known accent. As if put to the question; “Who can say this (unspecified) in English?” and the answer had come: “I can specifically say this in this voice”.

Another analogy to that of the haunted house would be that of auditioning actors for a play when the playwright has given no extratextual indication of the nature of his dramatis personae, rarely even a name, occasionally that of an interlocutor, only once a precise age, miscalculated (267 Er conto dell’anni), and on more than one occasion even the sex of character is undetermined. One after another the aspirant actors shuffle in from the wings, clear their throats, loosen their shoulders, and try the part; are thanked, and stride off - it wasn’t for them in any case! Sometimes someone clicks. Surely this rubicund, overweight blusterer, dressed more like a farmer than a townsman, is truer than his downtrodden wife for the part of speaker of 1294 La mi’ nora, with that hint of jealousy of the son’s achievements both as soldier and wooer?

The accent settled the idiolect, the word thus spoken generally occurred as the last foot or syllable of a line that I had decided was the hinge of the octet or sextet, sometime of the whole sonnet, and thus determined some of the rhyme scheme. It was then a matter of fitting in with it. The subsequent effort was often enough vain: I have in manuscript thirty to forty sonnets complete except for one line which must rhyme X, which X I cannot come upon.

Apart from finding a voice for the speaker and rhymes, there were/are two other large problems: the nature and extent of quotation and imitation in the sonnets, and the cultural differences between 19th century papal Rome and, for me, the England in which I grew up and live. As for the first, much work has been and is being done by Belli scholars to trace and clarify reference, but can and should the translator incorporate this, and if so how? There was a possible analogous strategy: should a phrase of Belli’s stir a memory of a parallel in an English poet, I would shamelessly borrow the English phrase. So some of the speakers in my translations, unawares, quote, among others, Shakespeare, Browning, Eliot, Auden, et Alvarez. The well-read English reader may pick them up, but I do not think that the quotations disturb their context; they do not upstage the original.

What then of the second problem: the vast difference between the socio-cultural world of Belli’s Roman speakers and the England of my day? Between a priest-ridden absolutist state, that made use of the whipping-horse and brain-hammering mallet, and a modern parliamentary democracy that has legalised intra-sex marital union? Since I wanted the sonnets to have a life of their own, to contain within themselves the reason why they were such and not otherwise, I decided to do without explicative notes, even where Belli uses them in creative rapport with his sonnet. This obviously curtailed the choice of possible sonnets. Many I have admired I find too local, inward, or ad hominem - a list of churches, for example, menus and their cost, Giovannino (a pope’s barber), the corrupt Cardinal Zurla, the skills of the public executioner Mastro Titta, all would have required extended commentary. It was the proleptic lack of such that prompted and enabled the shift of context and geography, the “actualisation” (a description I owe to Pietro Gibellini) of the sonnets. Papal Rome has been dispersed throughout the British Isle; there is mention of HIV, trams, tasers, spin doctors, a thug from Trastevere may find himself in Glasgow, a credent whore become a Dubliner, a pope ignorant of archaeology become Prince Charles at the Roman villa, or indeed become PM and be called David Cameron.

Lists, of which Belli gives us many a splendid one, are a topos and trope of literature. Everyone will have their preferences in English: from the ships that sailed for Troy, to the lineage of Jesus in Luke 3, the 19th century tranche of the Index librorum prohibitorum, in which works of Leopardi, Dumas père et fils, Flaubert, are banned, the reading of Eugene Onegin (22/7 and 2-6/35/8) [in relation to Onegin numbers refer to Nabokov's translation], the guests at Gatsby's parties. There is no prize for noticing that Vivian Darkbloom, listed among Lolita's classmates, is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov.

Here I'd like to propose a couple of Bell sonnets, not entirely lists as some are, and my translation in which certain of the points set out so far are exemplified, and, although evident, underline an impertinence. They are the sonnets L'inzoggno d'una regazza 1 and 2, sonnets 2252 e 2253 in Marcello Teodonio's edition of the Sonetti romaneschi.

2252

L’inzoggno d’una regazza  1

Me sò ddunque inzoggnata un ber cestino

pien de scetroli e cco un uscello rosso,

che mme guardava e ddiventava grosso

come cressce in dell’ojjo uno stuppino.

Poi me veniva a svolazzà vviscino:

e a l’improviso me zzompava addosso

e mme fischiava poi drento in un fosso

che nun era ppiú ffosso, era un giardino.

E me pareva poi d’avé mmagnato

queli scetroli e avé la panza piena

e de sentì la vosce der curato.

Allora me svejjai co ttanta pena

che nun potevo ripijjà ppiú ffiato.

Che vorà ddì st’inzògno, eh sora Nena?

The girl’s dream  1

In me dream it's a gradely trug Ah's got,

wi cucumbers an’ this red cockerel

an’ ’e looks at me an’ begins to swell

like a wick does in tallow when it's 'ot.

An’ ’e comes featherin’ close to me spot

an’ jumps me suddener than Ah can tell

an’ ’e’s apipin' me in this ’ere dell

wan’t a dell no more, a garden plot.

An’ it 'en seemed wot Ah ’ad gone an’ ate

'em cucumbers an’ me belly were full

an’ Ah thort Ah ’eard voice o’ t'curate.

Then Ah woke up an’ it were that painful

Ah cun’t breathe Ah were in such a state.

Wot can this dream mean, eh, Missus Turnbull?

2253

L’inzoggno d’una regazza  2

Eh ffijja mia, pe cquer che cce sbologgno,

co cquelli tu’ scetroli e cquel’uscello,

questo te posso dí, vvacce bberbello,

e nnun te sce fissà ttanto er cotoggno.

E ssi averai ggiudizzio in ner cervello,

credeme, fijja mia, nun c’è bbisoggno

d’ariccontanne un ètte de st’inzoggno

a ttu’ padre, a ttu’ madre e a ttu’ fratello.

Pe ssolito st’uscelli e sti scetroli

quanno ggireno attorno a una regazza

a la longa nun vengheno mai soli;

ché appress’a llòro in capo a cquarche mese

comparisce un pupazzo o una pupazza

a spiegà cquel’inzoggni in ner paese.

The girl’s dream  2

Well, me chucky, as far as Ah'm let see,

wi these cucumbers an’ a cock wot’s red,

this Ah can tell 'ee: dainty where tha tread,

don’t tha go dwell on it, take it easy.

An’ if tha’s got an 'appoth in yer ’ead,

there’s no need, me chucky, believe you me,

to tell 'o this dream to not nobody,

yer uncle, fother, aunt, mither, nowt said.

These roosters an’ cucumbers, it’s well known,

once round a girl they starts their ’avokin’,

in the long run they don't come on their own:

’cos close on their ’eels in a month or twa

up pops this doll, girleen or mannikin,

wot’ll make this dream clear to wun an’ a'.

What I believe I as reader would notice are the kin in line 8 of the second sonnet: father, mother, brother in Belli; uncle, father, aunt, mother in the translation. I could have written: to yer fother, mither, brother, nowt said, and kept the metrical scheme and the rhyme: why not? The answer is indicated in the first line: "pe cquer che cce sbologgno", as far as Ah'm let see. The pronunciation and the eye give Hamlet, and the phrase uncle-father, aunt-mother, uncle hyphen father, aunt hyphen mother ‒ hyphens that link where they should distance – express without formulating openly the incestuous love-hate that maddens Hamlet in his kin. Here I have brought two families together in an admonition against revealing the sexual content of a dream. An impudicity rather than an impertinence, but, as I see it, it does not glare.

At all events I gave readers an admonition of the strategy I was to adopt in my translation in the note to Belli's first sonnet in romanesco; untititled, I call it Belli's exordium. In that sonnet Belli used the term "memoriale" in the now obsolete meaning of plea, asking his audience for "benigna perdonanza". I wanted to see in it an appeal to the Muses, or at least to memory, their mother, similar to that made by other great poets in the proemium of their epics. Does the word "memorial" have any nuance of supplication in English? I find none. I did find that I could compact my intention by using the word apollogia, written with two ls (misprinted in the text), in homage to Apollo. The note, the caveat lector, reads: "Belli makes a plea to Apollo, who did indeed respond benignly".

I considered, in short, that a semantic discrepancy, or what would be a metrical gap in the English, should be filled. For an example of the latter one can look at La morte der rabbino, number 1546.

La morte der rabbino

È ito in paradiso oggi er Rabbino,

che ssaría com’er Vescovo der Ghetto;

e stasera a li Scòli j’hanno detto

l’uffizzio de li morti e ’r matutino.

Era amico der Papa: anzi perzino

er giorn’istesso ch’er Papa fu eletto

pijjò la penna e jje stampò un zonetto

scritto mezzo in ebbreo mezzo in latino.

Dunque a la morte sua Nostro Siggnore

cià ppianto a ggocce, bbe’ cche ssia sovrano,

e cce s’è inteso portà vvia er core.

Si ccampava un po’ ppiú, tte lo dich’io,

o nnoi vedemio er Rabbino cristiano,

o er Papa annava a tterminà ggiudio.

And the translation:

Ve death of ve Rabbi

Today ve Rabbi took off fer ’eaven –

ve Bishop of the Ghetto in ’is way –

an’ tonight vey packed the schulen to say

ve office fer ve dead an’ ve Matins.

Pope’s pal ’e vere – ven ’e got foted in

’e penned ’im, an’ printed, vat same day,

a sonnet vent rhymin’ ABBA.

'arf writ in 'Ebrew, an’ 'arf in Latin.

So now vot ’e dead, vif Our Lord the Pope,

vo’ infalappable, it’s cry an’ cry

as if ’e felt ’is ’eart ’ad lost all ’ope.

’Ad ’e lived much longer, let me tell you,

eiver ve got a Christian Rabbi,

or ve Pope vud ’ave ended up a Jew.

The spelling of the English is to be explained by the fact that I chose to make the speaker an East End Jew. The neologism infalappable is a portmanteau word, combining unflappable and infallible. The solution I adopted to get over over the repetitious filler and unwarranted enjambment - anzi perzino//er giorn’istesso - enabled me, in illiteral fashion, to say something of the rhyme scheme of the sonnet written by the Rabbi and pay homage to another translator of Belli, Anthony Burgess. I bowed in tribute to Robert Garioch in 815 The phisolophic caffy-owner in Vol. 2.

It is almost embarrassing to say that Belli plays in the Sonetti, so obvious is it. He is playful, and he must have taken, practically daily over twenty-eight years, delight in his rich creation, though it is often said that his playfulness hides a desperation. But what if, among his other games, he plays with, and despairs of, us, the reader? He declares quite plainly in the Introduzione that the folk (the word popolo indicates commoner status but also suggest a race apart), the popolo he prompts into speech is ignorant, that what it has to say it says in an "idiotism", and he persuades us. But here we can make a check. Here is a speaker who knows that the (chief) Rabbi is equivalent to a bishop. Not quite: "ssaría", it's debatable. He knows of the "Scòli", maybe he knows there are five of them and even their names. He knows of the Office of the Dead, he does not say Kaddish, perhaps not to embarrass us with our ignorance. He knows that a sonnet is a poem, he knows of bilingualism. And this smarty-books is by no means the only one in the Sonetti. In number 1573, Lo scordarello, two men who have been at school together have difficulty remembering the content of a lesson, but with effort one of them manages to recall Cola di Rienzo, and also his historical role. There are others such, and one in particular, before turning to glance at a great, but ambivalent, defender of literalism.

1706

L’oppiggnone diverze

Quante disputerìe! Senti che gghetto

per un gnente! Me pare la questione

de fra Ccucuzza e ’r vecchio Simeone.

Er fatto eccolo qui ssémprisce e schietto.

Jer ar giorno, Taddeo, Pio e Leone,

tutt’e ttre sse s’annàveno a bbraccetto,

quann’ècchete una tevola da un tetto

che tt’acchiappa Taddeo sur coccialone.

Leone sartò indietro e ddisse a Ppio:

“Attaccàmosce er voto tutt’e ddua,

ch’è stato un gran miracolo de Ddio”.

Taddeo, allora, che ffasceva un sguazzo

de sangue, repricò ppe pparte sua:

“Sì, è stato un ber miracolo der cazzo”.

Different views

Wot a row! Just listen to this squabble

abart nowt! Minds me o’ that quarrel once:

Winnie an’ Attlee, ’oo’s pimp an’ ’oo’s ponce.

’Ere is all the facts, an’ this ain’t no bull.

Yesterday, Tod, Matthew an' young Lawrence

is roamin’ arm-in-arm wi ne’er a wobble

when this slate drops. Do it hit the cobble?

Not on yer life, it ’its Matt on the bonce.

Larry, wot’s Carflick, ’e says to Tod:

“We should go light a candle, you an’ me,

becos that were a great marvel o’ God”.

An’ so Matt then, wot is standin’ in a pool

o' blood, ’e comes out wi’ this repartee:

“Yeah, marvel o’ God, aimless fuckin’ fool”.

Carflick, Catholic, at line nine serves to explain "voto", obviating the need for a note. When at the close my Matthew says aimless, he means not merely futile but incapable of hitting the target.

In his note to lines 2 and 3 – "la questione // de fra Cucuzza e 'r vecchio Simone" – Marcello Teodonio speaks of "anecdotes on the quarrel between a friar and and old Jew, become proverbial", and cites Vigola, who refers to L'Anticristo by Giovanni Battista Casti. It is not clear if the saying, if it be such, is known in a context that does not derive from Belli or Casti. The speaker of the sonetto, however, mentions "disputerìe... ghetto... questione", quarreling, rowing, issue. Fra Cucuzza and Simeon must have squabbled seriously, to become proverbial.

Thanks to the work of Pietro Gibellini and others we know that Belli had read L'Anticristo, a novella in ottava rima included by Casti in his Novelle Galanti (1804). The span of time between 1804 and 1835, the year of this sonnet, might even have allowed a quarrel in verse to become proverbial, to move out of the learned realm of the book and be voiced by an ignorant mouth… had the quarrel in question ever taken place. And Belli, who had read Casti, knew it never had, and is making fun of us.

Casti writes:

“E finalmente fece il paragone

Di fra Cucuzza e il vecchio Simeone”.

Fra Cucuzza compares himself, awaiting the birth of the Antichrist, to Simeon who in the Temple welcomes the Christ Child into his arms. The comparison does not set one against the other in an argument, indeed it brings them together in a truculent irony. Is this Belli engaging in illiteral transcription? How does one make a literal translation of such a jest? The ignorant speaker – who, rather than ignorant turns out to be witty and sharp, as Belli also says of his folk – or Belli himself, is playing with us. One may, perhaps, translate literally il dicibile, but not the literally undecidable.

Vladimir Nabokov, already mentioned as novelist, is for our times the best known and most severe proponent of literal translation. It was the path he chose in his translation of Eugene Onegin, a work in four volumes. Having no Russian, I am quite incapable of judging the success, or not, of that intention. It is, nevertheless, easy to remain disappointed, as are many of his critics, with his translation, in prose. Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse written in a stanza of fourteen lines with a fairly complicated rhyme scheme, also known as the Pushkin or Onegin sonnet. Nabokov is well aware that his prose misses much, not least the delight he finds, and of which he persuades us, in the original. As he notes at 1-2/1/8: "There is a beautiful buzzing alliteration in these verses", something he does not attempt to reproduce, and there are various such refusals, as in 8/32/6: "Even a professed literalist is stopped by 'played life, boiled blood'". In his commentary – in two volumes, the translation itself requires less than one – he is often forced to recognise the inadequacy of literalism. He writes, for example, in the note to line 5 of stanza 13 of chapter 6: "There is an obvious case in which literalism must yield (and settle for an exhaustive gloss): when the phrase concerns national gestures or facial movements". Or, for instance, he writes in the note to 3/21/6 : "Quite literally, 'Whither, whither have you receded', but I have preferred to echo the cry so often heard in English seventeenth-and eighteenth century poetry". There are multiple occasions when he gives the literal a fillip, as in 13/15/7 where "'I do not go,' 'I do not accept'", becomes "'I'll not marry him'". He does not hesitate to lay hands on the text, such as when in 10/13/6 he takes out half a line of Pushkin's because he judges it a "filler". And in at least one case he chooses to use a French word, framboise in 9/17/8, because the English raspberry does not evoke for him the vivid red he sees in both the Russian and the French word. At times it is the English language itself that is at fault: 5:2:7/ "tenderness/ [Russian term]: The word can be accurately rendered only by the French attendrissement".

Elsewhere Nabokov does not demand literalness for himself or others. In an article in "New Republic" of August 1941 he confesses that, in the attempt to translate certain Russian poets and, in particular a line of Pushkin's, he had discovered that “the expression ‘a literal translation’ is more or less nonsense”.

In an article published in e Samizdat 2005 (XXX) 2-3, Anna Valerio offers a scrutiny of three texts that are essentially one, what she calls Nabokov's autobiography, written in English, translated by him into Russian, then translated by him from Russian into English. Her conclusion is: "In short, Nabokov tends to personalize his own translation, thinking perhaps in two languages rather than translating in the strict sense of the word, so that the choice of a word or expression may depend on personal background". The translator who translates himself is a limiting case, but there must be many translators who think in two languages.

More comfort for the "illiteralist" comes earlier in the article where she writes: "translation, in fact, is not only a linguistic operation that entails the transposition of a text from one language to another; the concept of translation embraces a more ample and complete definition which includes the passage from one cultural world to another".

From its title I had hoped more from an article by Paul Howard published in the Modern Language Review in July of 2013. The article, in fact; is titled: 'All right, that's not a literal translation': Cribs, Licence and Embellishment in the Burgess Versions of Belli's Sonetti romaneschi. The opening words are a quotation from the Burgess translation of La scèna de Bbardassarre, number 1166, one of the few sonnets we have both translated. Despite the title of his article, however, Howard largely shares the view of Carol O'Sullivan: the metatextuality of Burgess distorts the figure of the speaker of the sonetti, the commoner becomes the learned translator conscious of his art. Just here and there, however, Howard suggests more tolerance should be shown for the eventual contribution made by Burgess to a Belli sonnet.

For true comfort one must turn back to Nabokov. Although the erudite and exhilarating commentary to his Eugene Onegin is also an anthology of scorn from which few escape – Racine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Manzoni, Dostoevski, Dryden ("ridiculous"), Sheridan ("stupid", "inept") would have vanished beneath the surface of Amazon.com had they not known how to yell for themselves and wave – and vitriol is thrown in the face of his predecessors, the translators of poets who instead of using "precise and omnipotent prose for the rendering of foreign verse" shackle themselves "with trivial and treacherous rhyme" (4/21/6), he is pleased to quote an annotation of his poet, though made in pencil and in the margin: "Translators are the posthorses of enlightenment".

Yet in Nabokov's imaginative prose translators have a privileged position.

In the novel Bend Sinister, the great friend of Krug, the protagonist and philosopher of genius, is Ember, a theatre director and translator, of Shakespeare in particular. In chapter 3, Ember is striving to translate two lines of verse from Shakespeare's greatest play. Let's call it Hamlet. He cannot manage it because the word rack, whisp of cloud and instrument of torture, is in his language an anapaest. But for any translator of Nabokov's English original,

follow the perttaunt jauncing ’neath the rack

with her pale skeins-mate.

there is a greater difficulty. I have checked with other readers: the lines create an immediate thrill of recognition, then puzzlement. Where does this (nordic?) image, of the playful jostling in a V-formation of geese, the plump, precisely come from? From precisely nowhere. The two lines cannot be found in Hamlet, nor elsewhere in Shakespeare. Nabokov is playing with us, with Shakespeare and with us, in the manner of Belli with Casti. To fashion his lines he has taken two notorious linguistic cruxes - perttaunt from Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.78 (Quarto) and skains-mate from Romeo and Juliet 2.3.116 - the former at least conjectured to be a bird - the partlet - and the latter a cut-throat or his moll. And it is Richard II who is “tired by jauncing Bolingbroke”. At such a point the translator might well settle for an exhaustive gloss.

Translation is a leading thread in Nabokov's last, pre-posthumous, novel Ada or Ardor. The central figures, Van and Ada, incestuous oathbreakers both, pass a good deal of their time innocently, amusing themselves and the reader with versions from and to English and French. The peak of this "illiterary" art is what Ada calls "my revised monologue of the mad king", referring to the line never, never, never, never, never from King Lear 5, 3:

Ce beau jardin fleurit en mai,

Mais en hiver

Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais,

N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert.

Not just an exact version of the English, but the sound in the original of the top-spun volleys is loebbed back to us with a French lilt. A miraculous jeu d'esprit.

But to clip this concatenation of tendentious contrasts between literal and "illiteral" fidelity we must go back to a sentence in chapter 6 of Bend Sinister. Keep in mind the tines of the ys and the oozing egg-yolk. The sentence is this: "when Krug once mentioned that the word 'loyalty' phonetically and visually reminded him of a gold fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of yellow silk, Maximov replied somewhat stiffly that to him loyalty was limited to its dictionary denotation".

Thus Nabokov, as novelist. And among his critical writings one should not forget the slim masterpiece on Gogol, animorum auditor, who first recognized, in a language not his own, the genius of Belli.