Against Fluent Translation

In the English-language context, it is typically assumed that a good translation is one that reads as though it had originally been written in English. The scholar and translator Lawrence Venuti calls this fluent translation, as opposed to foreignizing translation, which emphasizes the original's difference from English. As Venuti points out, there is a political dimension to which method a translator chooses, or a publisher accepts. If the translation is fluent, the text is domesticated, folded into English-language cultures and values; if it is foreignizing, it makes use of English-language cultures and values to make the text intelligible without assimilating it, at the very least signalling that the text is the product of a different cultural paradigm.

Despite the supremacy of the rhetoric of diversity in American liberal politics, the conservative impulse to render all translations fluent continues to dominate. Few translations (about three percent of American book-length publications in a given year) ever reach English-language readers and those that do are, almost without exception, fluent. Diverse literary voices are only acceptable if they are easily assimilated by American readers, easily interpreted along American political lines and social values. When translators are mentioned at all, they are either praised for clarity and accuracy (even when the reviewer can't read the original) or damned for awkwardness and obscurity. At the heart of this understanding of translation is a decidedly American assumption of human universality, a belief that emotion translates smoothly from one context to another without need for mediation, that an essential, cohesive self can be metaphysically expressed in a text, regardless of its original language, and that difference is identity-based and superimposed upon a foundational, generalized humanity. 

This means, in practice, that literary works that are thorny, difficult, recalcitrant, strange, that is, in some way, unassimilable, almost never get translated into English. Monolingual English speakers exist in a culturally coherent bubble, challenged only by alternatives that are nevertheless contextually intelligible. The current practice of translation permits American readers to presume their own normalcy and insists on a utopian, near-magic conception of communication across languages and cultures. Fluent translation is cultural isolationism clothed in anodyne diversity politics. Its a way to take credit for multiculturalism without confronting its challenges, self-satisfaction in the guise of humility.

This doesn't mean that every translation needs to be enormously challenging for English-language readers: it means that not every literary work can be rendered in smooth, lucid, concise English. It means that a genuine interest in openness to the other requires living with some frustration and discomfort, moments in which the reader realizes a given work wasn't written just for him. Foreignizing translation threatens the reader's narcissistic sense of normalcy and cultural superiority. It's impossible for any one person to learn all living languages, but foreignizing translation, translation that embraces alterity, with all its difficulty, with all its irreducible untranslatability, has the potential power to foment cultural exchange without the prerequisite of universalism, in itself culturally contingent. If diversity is to be genuinely valued in American literary culture, then fluent translation needs to be recognized as the assimilationist practice that it is, and foreignizing translation must be encouraged. If we can't tolerate a text that doesn't pander to our own values, how can we hope to be tolerant of human beings different from ourselves?

The 10 Best Italian Films Since 2006

When I made a list in 2013 of the best Italian films of the twenty-first century, I was so hamstrung by lack of access that none of my choices had been produced later than 2005. Since then, between a proliferation of streaming services and some exciting DVD releases, I've been able to access a wealth of Italian films, from comedies and documentaries to fantasy films and dramas. Sadly, Il giovane favoloso, or Leopardi, the film that I anticipated so breathlessly in my previous post, was a disappointment, but in compensation, here are ten wonderful movies. All of the films on this list are available with English-language subtitles and have seen international release.

Behind the White Glasses (2015)
This documentary about Lina Wertmüller, the brilliant director of Seven Beauties, Swept Away, and Love and Anarchy, is a charmer: a film that recognizes her extraordinary capacity to have fun, no matter what, no matter how dark or hopeless circumstances might be. Wertmüller discusses not only her films, but her musical collaborations with Nino Rota, her work as a very young assistant director with Fellini as he made 8 1/2, and her opera productions. Especially precious are the interviews with a lively, twinkly-eyed Giancarlo Giannini, the muse of her greatest films of the '70s. Though formally Behind the White Glasses doesn't break new ground, it has a bright and bushy-eyed quality that fittingly reflects the irreverent, but never fluffy character of Wertmüller's films.

Golden Door (2006)
Emanuele Crialese's hallucinatory drama about a family of Sicilian immigrants' journey to the United States is bracingly well-lit and slips in and out of magical realism like a dolphin, leaving behind the grainy, gritty style of neorealism for the hyper-intensity of hope amid agony. The film's original title, Nuovomondo, literally means NewWorld, and immigration is, indeed, portrayed as a voyage from one world to another. The widowed Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato) hears the tales of man-sized vegetables and dragon-sized sheep, of roads paved with gold, that he's assured he will find in America, so he buys passage for himself and his sons. The scenes set on Ellis Island are heart-breaking, especially for those of us with personal ties to that haunted place.

Habemus Papam (2011)
Though not on a par with Caro diario or The Son's Room, Nanni Moretti's romp through the election of a new pope, released when the unpopular Pope Benedict was still the Supreme Pontiff, is one of his best recent efforts. Moretti assumes a lighter, less overtly politicized approach than in previous films; the institution of the papacy is less raked over the coals than lightly singed. Michel Piccoli plays Cardinal Melville, reluctant to accept the burden of the papacy, while Moretti himself plays the psychoanalyst secretly called in to cure the errant new pope of his desire to escape responsibility for global Catholicism. An especial treat is a scene of the cardinals playing an impromptu game of volleyball.

Loose Cannons (2010)
This sweet-tempered, sunny comedy directed by Ferzan Özpetek doesn't land every joke; it's warm and messy and occasionally veers into unintended farce. The performances, though, by Riccardo Scamarcio, Ennio Fantastichini, and Alessandro Preziosi elevate material that could easily slide into the typical hysterical, stereotype-dependent mainstream Italian comedy, while Özpetek's off-kilter weirdness (suicide by cake?) adds dimension to the quirkiness. Tommaso (Scamarcio) confides in his brother (Preziosi) that he's planning on coming out to their conservative, blustery father (Fantastichini), only for his brother to steal his opportunity, causing the father to have a heart attack. Meanwhile, Tommaso's boyfriend is driving up, expecting to meet the family. Fantastichini's mad-eyed paranoia that the entire city is mocking him recalls Saro Urzì as the dishonored father in Germi's Seduced and Abandoned, while the warm glow that pervades Tommaso's life when he ceases hiding his sexuality makes a better argument for inclusiveness than speechifying. 

My Brother Is an Only Child (2007)
Riccardo Scamarcio again stars in Daniele Lucchetti's tale of two brothers growing up in the turbulent '60s and '70s, but it's Elio Germano who steals the show as hot-headed troublemaker, Accio, who veers violently from a masochistic vocation for the priesthood to neo-fascist thuggery, only for his political extremism to be annihilated by its consequences on his radical brother (Scamarcio) and his alluring girlfriend (Diane Fleri). My Brother Is an Only Child is an ambitious film; it attempts to distill the complexity of extreme party and sexual politics through the relationship of two brothers. Remarkably, it succeeds.

Passione (2010)
John Turturro's homage to Neapolitan music strings together performances, both archival and new, from nearly every major performer to emerge from Naples in the past century, from Enrico Caruso to Sergio Bruni and Renato Carosone, all the way up to Pietra Montecorvino, Raiz, Peppe Barra, and Almamegretta. The rich miscuglio of traditions, from lyric opera to Arabic, Spanish, and African song, results in an exhilarating aural experience, matched by the pulsating rhythmic editing of Simona Paggi and the color-saturated, sinuous cinematography by Marco Pontecorvo.

The Sicilian Girl (2008)
Whatever moralism it might participate in, most mafia films assume the perspective of the mafiosi. It's rare for a woman to take center stage in such films, even rarer for her to be an ally of law and order, rarer still for her to be an agent and not just a victim. Based on the life of Rita Atria, a seventeen-year-old girl who became a star witness in the investigation of Cosa Nostra, the film fictionalizes her story, but director Marco Amenta, who previously directed a documentary about Atria, resists the worst sensationalist excesses. The Rita of the narrative film (Veronica D'Agostino, at times too shallowly expressionistic) begins keeping a diary after she witnesses the assassination of her father (Marcello Mazzarella). Obsessed with vengeance, especially after her brother (Carmelo Galati) is killed by the same assassin, Rita turns upon the whole mafia system.

Tale of Tales (2015)
Matteo Garrone's stunningly gorgeous and often gruesome fantasy film, adapted from three stories collected in Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti, stars an international cast that includes Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, John C. Reilly, Shirley Henderson, and Alba Rohrwacher. In the first tale, a childless queen impregnates herself by eating the heart of a slain sea dragon, while in the second, a king offers his daughter's hand to any suitor who can identify an exotic skin, in fact the skin of a grotesquely huge pet flea, and in the third, two old crones are courted by a prince enchanted by their ethereal singing. Garrone and his fellow screenwriters make no attempt to domesticate these slyly cruel stories, reveling in their strangeness and their witchy anarchy.

Vincere (2009)
Director Marco Bellocchio elicited from Giovanna Mezzogiorno her best ever performance, as Ida Dalser, Mussolini's (Filippo Timi) first wife and the mother of his son. Working with newly discovered archival materials, including letters and diaries, Bellocchio and fellow screenwriter Daniela Ceselli reconstruct a devastating history; Dalser and her son were considered threats to Mussolini's regime and thus they were separated and eventually incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals where both would die under suspicious circumstances, forgotten by posterity and excised from official records. The textured cinematography, with its velvety reds, inky blacks, murky browns, and silver-sheened greys, is by Daniele Ciprì. A masterpiece.

The Wedding Director (2006)
Another marvel directed by Marco Bellocchio, The Wedding Director stars Sergio Castellitto as a filmmaker in crisis, confounded by his latest project, an adaptation of Manzoni's I promessi sposi, who finds a flimsy excuse to flee to Sicily. There, he becomes entangled by an invitation from a prince to direct the wedding video of his daughter. Obviously responding to films like 8 1/2, Contempt, and All That Jazz, in which directors (re)enact personal and creative imbroglios by making a metafilm, The Wedding Director isn't brassy, nihilistic, or trying to exude a cool aesthetic. It's introspective, exploring the ineffable spaces that open up when relationships, whether with people or artworks, real or imagined, fall apart.

Film Review: Luchino Visconti's "The Leopard"

It's generally a mistake to watch an adaptation immediately after reading the book. The small details and nuances are still freshly vibrant and those neglected or omitted are irksome, while insignificant changes - the color of a character's eyes, a table instead of a desk, a conflation of a month into a few days - seem enormous. Such was my experience of watching Luchino Visconti's adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's epochal novel, The Leopard (Il gattopardo, or literally, The Serval). With Visconti as director, Nino Rota's score, Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography, a screenplay with contributions by Suso Cecchi d'Amico, and a cast including Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale, the film seemed like something I might have dreamed up, but the subtle pleasures of the book, contemplative, decadent, saturnine, were not the same pleasures of the film. On a first viewing, almost immediately after closing the covers of the book, I didn't care much for the film, despite its pedigree, and its achingly lovely evocation of a world long since dead.

Revisiting the film now, I realize that I was too caught up in looking for an exact replica of the novel, and that was not Visconti's project. The film is a masterpiece, in dialogue with its source material, but not a mere imitation. And this is fitting, for the most celebrated and famous quotation of the novel is in fact: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." A more succinct translation of the concept of trasformismo, I am not capable of writing. Both novel and film follow the leonine, aging Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster) as he ironically observes the events of the Italian Unification from his ancestral estates in Sicily, giving his blessing to his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), who falls in love with the bourgeois Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), a match that would have been impossible before Garibaldi's Red Shirts embarked on their famous climb up the Italian Boot.

Lampedusa was in fact the last Prince Lampedusa and the novel's politics speak to that fact, to his mourning for the end of his lineage  and the desecration of the family palazzo and to his ambivalence towards the Italian Unification, a long, bloody process usually celebrated as a decade of heroism, the extinction of a paternalistic, feudalistic aristocratic reign and the birth of representative government. Visconti, too, was an aristocrat, but he was also a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party, and for this he was known as the Red Count. The film adaptation diverges most from the novel by including a lengthy sequence, during which the protagonists are absent, of the battle between the Garibaldini and the Royalist forces for the city of Palermo. Reminiscent of the siege of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind, it's a bloody, frenetic interlude, a gaping hole in the aristocratic decorum and sedate luxury of the Prince of Salina's life. However, the film subtly critiques the political despair of the novel: the transfer of power from occupiers, colonists, small monarchies, and the papacy to a national government, with the Piedmontese king at its head, was less a victory than a slight shift in power with monumental consequences. The radical democratic and egalitarian impulses of Garibaldi and the impassioned patriotic utopianism of Mazzini became mere rhetorical implements to toss away once Cavour's crafty diplomacy and power machinations succeeded as not merely a strategy but the very means of Italian governance, but in 1963, hope burgeoned that the evils of corrupt government, repressive social structures, and class inequality could be defeated. The prince's statement in 1860 that Sicilian poverty would last at least another century or two was not so pessimistic in a film made a century afterwards. The red of the uniform of the Garibaldini could just as easily be the red of the communists; the change in the noble Tancredi's uniform, from Garibaldino red to monarchical blue, is not commented upon at random. Red was defeated once, but red fights again in Palermo through the magic of film.

The political commentary, though, is fodder for academics; the film's beauty and sensuality, its immersive techniques, can be marveled at and reveled in by any viewer. Visconti achieves something perfectly in The Leopard, something he strove to achieve in all his films: the viewer has a distinct sense of being thrown into a real, living, vital world. There are doors to unexplored rooms, roads to populated towns, the books can be read, the dust can work its way into seams and wrinkles, a celebratory cake with green icing can be tasted. At the end of the ball, crushed flowers and torn bits of tulle and lace drift under the last dancers' tripping feet. There isn't a single character, even the savagely gorgeous Angelica, who doesn't sweat in the stultifying Sicilian heat. This miraculous recreation of a world in its death throes is more than inviting: the viewer actually becomes a fellow ghost wandering through the cobweb-draped, unused rooms of the Salina palazzo. This immersiveness, more than the complicated political and romantic events of the plot, justify the film's lengthy running time of more than three hours. One needs time to look at the chandeliers glittering with candles, the hunting dog taking a spare moment to dig under a rock, the dabbing of cologne on a handkerchief; one needs time to hear the crepuscular chanting of the rosary, the bird-like chatter of girls at a ball. More than once, the camera takes up the position of a character and Tancredi, or Angelica, or Don Calogero, her absurd father in an ill-fitting tuxedo, look directly into the viewer's eyes. 

Visually, each frame is like a painting; aurally, The Leopard resembles an opera: this is so in nearly all of Visconti's post-neorealist work. But only Senso rivals this film in its engagement with Italy as an invented nation. In the Divine Comedy, Dante dreamed up a unified Italian peninsula, and since then Italians and the Italian diaspora have either accepted some conception or other of what Italy actually means without thinking past rhetoric, or done what Visconti has done in The Leopard: try to create Italy anew from a fragmented history of the stitching together of distinct regions, an Italy that might perhaps never exist except in the future.

The Didacticism of Fantasy

The conflict between good and evil is good business: superhero narratives, the Harry Potter and Star Wars leviathans, role-playing games, the majority of horror films, that is, the most valuable intellectual property right now promulgates moral paradigms that are dualistic and assumed as objective. Our fantasies take place on a military plane; as protagonists, we imagine ourselves incarnating good and creating utopias built upon the carcasses of the evil we have annihilated. It's tempting to believe that good pitted against evil has no genuine alternative but moral relativism, thought of as a doctrine that ranges from dunderheaded, sugary pap for the privileged to the sort of emptied out logic that skids right into justification for genocide. Of course, if we're honest with ourselves, most of the moralities by which we attempt to abide are relative, simply because otherwise we are positing ourselves in a vacuum, a hardly imaginable human state.

Magic, whether it's called the Force or a superpower, is the instrument of our fantasies, a weapon. Sometimes magic becomes a synonym for love or a sign of God's favor, but only if wielded by the hero. Is a vicarious belief in magic some kind of vestigial clinging, a childish regression in response to the traumas of modernity? Such is the framing we usually give to tarot card and psychic readings, even as we gorge on these stories of good and evil, and, more significantly, draw lessons from them. Why are these stories so valuable to us? Defenders (though heaven only knows why they need defending, given that their detractors are decidedly in the minority) argue that these stories teach us how to behave and how to define ourselves. They're supposed to galvanize us into taking action. In other words, they are didactic and inspirational.

For, despite a current allergy to the word 'didactic' (if I could only claim a dollar for each book or film review I've read of late that praises its object as not didactic, only to delineate its message, or what it teaches us), fantasy narratives, whether optimistic or pessimistic, are responded to as parables, stories that teach us how to be. This is why audiences get upset, for instance, if a protagonist says something flippant about a marginalized group. It's a problem not because the thing was said, but because we assume we're being taught to say it.

What would happen if we stopped searching for lessons or messages, stopped trying to decode a morality or ideology from our fantasy? I'm not arguing against analysis, but against analysis that presupposes that stories function first and foremost as instructional fables. The difference between art and propaganda can be difficult to parse and the line between them can be crossed and crossed again (for instance, in the case of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi films or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin), but propaganda is generally supposed to yield only one interpretation. If art does that, it's bad art. The strongest case to be made that pop culture has an artistic dimension, and isn't merely consumerist entertainment, lies in a refusal of didacticism. Thus, instead of evaluating the message of a film - usually a bromidic generality, such as 'be true to yourself' (every Pixar film's motto) - as either correct or incorrect, morally speaking, the critic would try to understand what good actually means in the context of the book or film, what evil means, what it means for a protagonist to be assumed as the character that aligns with good, why we assume that the reader or viewer only relates to the good characters, what it means that violence is so often evoked as a means to peace. A deeper analysis could yield lessons, but lessons aren't much use if the complexity of reality demolishes their meaning as soon as one attempts to enact them in our daily lives.

For instance, Pixar films, when interpreted didactically, usually yield up the lesson I cited above: 'be yourself and you'll be happy and fulfilled.' This is a lesson we like as a culture; it doesn't threaten capitalism - Buy this product and you'll be happy! Not happy yet? Buy it again! - and it falls into line with identity politics. But what the heck does it mean to 'be yourself,' even assuming there's such as a stable, discrete self? What if 'yourself' is a bully? What if 'yourself' is selfish, or prone to violent tantrums? And further than that, what does a happy ending look like for living, breathing people? The credits don't roll as soon as we've hit peak happiness. Politically engaged criticism, especially of pop culture, has fallen into a shallow evaluation process that evades questions of real import and displaces responsibility for moral progress onto works of art, letting people on the ground off the hook. Evaluative critical practice lets us believe that seeing a film about a woman superhero in the theatre somehow strikes a blow for feminism. It doesn't. An empowered female character in a film, or novel, or game, might make us feel better for a while, but her existence doesn't alter the gendered power dynamics that are active in our own lives. The real magic is the magic we perform on our own minds, a magic that deceives us into believing that finding the right lessons in our entertainment is the same thing as enacting those lessons in the world we live in. The Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino, in his extensive work on magic and ritual in the Italian South defined the practice of magic as a means of coping with a negative that cannot be overcome by the individual. If the deception we're practicing on ourselves is our liberal, 21st century, American magic, the unfortunate corollary is that we're doing it because the negative in our lives cannot be overcome by each one of us as individuals.

If the work of criticism is to have positive political repercussions, it has to start examining how art confronts the negative, not merely re-enacting the battle of good versus evil by dropping each book, movie, game, song, and so on, into a box marked either good or evil. If art merely teaches, and doesn't complicate, indoctrinates, and doesn't question, intones, but never sings, then it's no art at all. As critics, we can choose not to read didactically. We can choose to think rather than consume and reason rather than agree (or disagree).