Writing and translating: two arms for swimming

"Translating is rediscovering writing" reads a line by Nicola Gardini from Tradurre è un bacio (Ladolfi, 2015), a collection of poems in which the author investigates what it means to transpose a literary work into another language, a reflection that becomes the driving force behind many others, on poetics, language, love... analogies and metaphors blossom repeatedly. "Translation has transformed my relationship with writing" we read in another elegant, surprising book, this time in the form of a collection of essays by Jhumpa Lahiri: Perché l'italiano. Storia di una metamorfosi. Here, too, translating and reasoning about translation becomes an excellent angle to try to understand what literature, poetry, authorship is. "I think that writing and translating are two aspects of the same activity, two sides of the same coin, or perhaps two arms that, exerting distinct but complementary forces, allow me to swim covering greater distances, and more abysmal depths, through the mysterious element of language," notes the author.

Born in London to Bengali parents and brought up in the United States, she describes herself as a linguistic 'orphan' and - after spending a lifetime translating, almost unconsciously, between the culture of her parents and that of her country - she decided to start writing in Italian, a language she loved without possessing it (and thus was in a position to really love). An experience that was an opportunity for freedom and the discovery of a potential self. "Why Italian?" To open doors. To see differently. To graft myself into something else. That's all,' she replies, using the beautiful metaphor of grafting: 'a language, even a foreign language, is something so intimate that it enters inside us anyway. It becomes a part of our body, of our soul. It takes root in the brain, it comes out of the mouth. Over time it takes root in the heart. The grafting I did puts a new idiom into circulation, new thoughts inside me'. A metaphor that also has a political value: grafts are also the immigrants who contribute to creating a new society. "The concept of grafting is a way of understanding a human, universal impulse. It explains why each of us seeks more and more, and it also explains the mechanism. One can change city, citizenship, body, face, sex, family, religion. Through grafting we can reject our origins, today more than ever. Although grafting is a natural process, the result can be perceived as forced, inauthentic. Those who undergo it or those who perform it (even on themselves) are viewed with suspicion'. However, Lahiri observes, to move forward, to develop a civilisation, 'it is necessary to change the source of nourishment'.

Surprised by the Italian writers of the last century who have devoted much time to practising and promoting the art of translation, "also to uphold a crucial aesthetic and political mandate, that of opening linguistic and cultural frontiers", Lahiri steps into their wake. She defines herself as "a daring cultural geographical grafter", who makes translation her main heuristic key, who seeks to unhinge the idea that translation and the original stand in a hierarchical relationship, where the former is derivative and the latter authentic, or - worse - where the former is contaminated and the latter is pure. Hence the parallelism - in a beautiful and daring chapter in which he analyses the myth of Echo and Narcissus, making the one the symbol of translation, and the other that of writing - with those who hope that America will 'become great again' or claim that Italians come before others. Sick of narcissism, they end up succumbing to the illusion that deceives them, like Narcissus who "desires, without knowing it, himself; he praises, but he is the one praised, and while he covets, he covets himself, and at the same time he kindles and burns" (verses from Ovid translated by Lahiri, which in Gardini's translation in Chiedimi qualunque dono, Ponte alle Grazie, 2023 instead sound like this: 'He desires himself and does not understand,/ praise goes to the one who makes it, and coveting,/ he is coveted, and a fire gives and receives/ together').

The fact that the author decided, at one point in her life, to write books in Italian (a 'groping in semi-darkness', with a vision that on the one hand is 'compromised', on the other becomes 'fulminating'), and to have then, after long reflection, also decided to self-translate for the English version of some of these, becomes the occasion for other, original observations on authorial identity, on the false myth of the definitive text (from the English version of the Italian text a third Italian version was generated), on the possible annihilation of the text that this operation produces, etc. To be a writer-translator, Lahiri observes, is to give value to both being and becoming, because 'literature is not normative, but speculative'.

To translate is to multiply, even the speculations (There is no word for any thing/ Because the thing, when it exists, is a crowd/ A petal is not enough to make the rose/ To translate is to recompose the corolla'; Gardini, Gardening, in Translating is a kiss). Lucretius - here in the splendid translation by Milo De Angelis (De rerum natura, Mondadori, 2022) - had already pointed this out: 'A single voice suddenly divides into many voices/ and distinctly reaches the ear of each one imprinting/ its form and its clear sound on the words'.