I’m just reading a fiction novel, the protagonist is a translator struggling to translate Dante faithfully from Italian to English. The book is so-so, but I found a passage that resonates with me so much:
“I’d once loved translation, before I got all complicated about it. Weighing poetic elements, deciding which to highlight, which to sacrifice – because not everything can survive translation. The eleven-syllable Italian line doesn’t transfer easily to our English pentameter: you’d think it would exceed the capacity of our ten-syllable line but, being syllable rich, Italian condenses at the rate of four English feet per line. What’s a translator to do? Preserve the length of the original line by padding the translation? Sacrifice meter for concision, semantic accuracy, the original line breaks? It’s something of a lose-lose situation. Hence the age-old notion that she who translates is both translator and traitor: traduttore e traditore“.
“Good on Paper”, Rachel Cantor
Touche! So true… Whoever translates knows.