Where I'm Reading From

“ARE YOU THE TIM PARKS WHO . . . ?”

WHAT THE POETS of the ancient world feared most was exile, alienation from their community. This was the punishment of Seneca, Ovid, Catullus, and many others. It wasn’t that they were incapable of learning another language and addressing a different audience; just that it made little sense to do so. Their work had meaning in relation to the community to which they belonged.

To what community does a writer belong today? The whole world, might seem to be the obvious answer in an era of globalization. Alas, it’s not that simple. Take my own case. I am known in England mainly for light, though hopefully thoughtful nonfiction; in Italy for polemical newspaper articles and a controversial book about soccer; in Germany, Holland, and France for what I consider my “serious” novels Europa, Destiny, Cleaver; in the United States for literary criticism; and in a smattering of other countries, but also in various academic communities, for my translations and writing on translation. Occasionally I receive emails that ask, “But are you also the Tim Parks who . . . ?” Frequently readers get my nationality wrong. They don’t seem to know where I’m coming from or headed to.

How can something like this happen in a world where information is supposed to flow so freely? The key, I suppose, is never to enjoy huge success in any of the fields you work in. Chance, modern communications, and an urgent need to earn money can do the rest. In 1979 I married an Italian; in 1981, aged twenty-six and already writing novels that were regularly rejected, I moved to Italy. Unable to publish, I translated, first commercially, then, with a lucky break, novels. At last in 1985 a novel of my own was published in London and I began to build up a small reputation as a novelist. However, my living in Italy prompted publishers to ask me to write about the place, luring me with offers of “a great deal more money than you will ever earn with the kind of novels you write.” After ten years I gave in, writing first about the street I lived in and some years later about Italian children, schools, and families. It was great fun and all at once I was Mr. Italy.

But if this reputation made sense to the English—one of their ilk decoding another country—it didn’t attract the Germans, Dutch, and French who seemed to feel that serious novel writing was not compatible with this kind of ironic anthropology. In Germany, where my novels were outselling English editions by many times, the critics invited me to intensely earnest debates on Europe and fiction, and in general everybody felt it would be unwise to insist too much on this other material. I was now quite different people in England, Germany, and Italy, where I had begun to write newspaper articles in Italian on Italian issues for Italians, without the framing and contextualizing needed when talking about such matters to those who don’t know the country. Then, while all this was going on and for reasons I have never fathomed, The New York Review of Books invited me to write about Italian authors and books on Italy; a long collaboration began, I convinced the Review that I could also write about matters non-Italian, and my image in the USA, if one can speak so grandly, became radically different than it was elsewhere. I was an essayist.

Why do I feel this state of affairs is interesting? We think of globalization as drawing more and more people into a single community where readers all over the world read the same authors. The process is hardly new, more like an acceleration with greatly empowered means of an old propensity toward connection, communication, acquisition, appropriation, aggregation. Since earliest times communities expanded, swallowed each other up, or were swallowed, became more aware of and curious about those neighboring communities too big to beat. The writer whose community was destroyed was finished. Who would listen, even if he could speak their tongue? He was irrelevant. Others more fortunate found themselves with a larger and larger community to address: the court, the burghers, a growing group of cultured men, eventually the middle classes, and finally the people. Now there was also the possibility that somebody in another country, seeing your local fame, might grow interested, might translate your work.

Huge numbers of languages, great riches and diversity were lost in this process, which allowed larger societies to form so that eventually a single writer was in a position to speak to thousands, millions, even tens of millions. At this point writers were competing to be one of the chosen few who would enjoy the privilege of selling their work to much larger, though necessarily looser and more fragmented communities. Some began to see this as a form of freedom; not to be fatally attached to one homogeneous group, not to risk extinction as a writer if your community, your peers, rejected you. The day came when writers actually sought out exile, left voluntarily, and were proud of it. Byron, Shelley, Lawrence, Joyce—they stood outside the societies that had made them and became in their own lifetimes international figures. Yet they continued to write toward and mostly against the nations that bred them, and their international success depended on their notoriety in their home countries.

We still feel this is the normal model for literature. At the Nobel level it is very unusual to give the prize to a writer who has not already won laurels in his own country. For popular fiction, Stephen King, Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, and Stieg Larsson all follow a similar pattern: a book is phenomenally successful at home, other countries buy into it (which can happen very rapidly now), as the sales mount up, a promotions machine gears up to support them, projecting the same image of the author worldwide as was projected at home. The effect is to sever the umbilical chord, if not the relationship, with the home community. Writers like Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling cannot be exiled. They have readers everywhere.

But globalization is not uniform and not always so kind. It can happen that a writer remains absolutely trapped in his local community, perhaps well known for a restricted group, but unable to project him or herself outside it. I think of the fine South Tyrolese novelist Joseph Zoderer, who yearns to be an international novelist and has had his work translated in some countries, but never in English, and who finds himself constantly labeled as a Tyrolese writer. To publish successfully he has to write toward this community; when he seeks to write about matters outside it, neither his own community nor the outer world are interested. Likewise there are many writers from ex-colonies or simply the developing world who find they have to address the Western world about their now distant home; publishers are immediately less interested if they seek to address other issues (I have heard this from a successful young Chinese novelist in London, and from a Surinamese in Holland). I say “have to” with the implied condition, if they want to be well and traditionally published. It is our desire for money and celebrity that binds us.

But my own case is, I think, more curious, and I would be eager to hear of other writers in the same position, or rather many positions. Inevitably, as one addresses different communities of readers in different countries one tends to write differently for them, not necessarily to please, but just to be in meaningful relation to them. In fact if I want to displease them, I have to be very aware of their likes and dislikes. I don’t do this with cynical calculation. It simply happens, like an adjustment to the weather, or the language you are speaking, or your new girlfriend’s parents; and you discover you are a different writer, a different person almost, when engaging in different projects. This can be quite liberating and certainly more fun than the writer who feels trapped in a small world. You realize you are many writers, potentially very many, and the way your talents develop will depend on the way different communities in different countries respond to you.

This reality is in sharp contrast with the rhetoric that surrounds creative writing today. If asked, most writers will say they write only for themselves and are not aware of, let alone swayed by an audience. An ideal notion of globalization, then, posits this sovereign individual, who enjoys a consistent and absolute identity, above any contamination from those who buy his work, selling the product of his or her genius to a world that is able to receive it and enjoy it in the same way everywhere. So individualism and globalization go hand in glove. The idea that we are absolutely free of any community permits us to engage with all people everywhere. This is why so much international literature is about freedom and favors rebellions against institutions.

But the experience of the writer addressing multiple separate audiences—or perhaps using pseudonyms for certain kinds of writing in contrast with the work published under his or her own name—belies this myth. Indeed, as the years go by, I begin to suspect that it is precisely in positing themselves as independent from and uninfluenced by the collective, that writers are in fact agreeing to fill a part that the modern community of would-be individuals has dreamt up for them: the one who allows us all to believe that freedom and absolute identity outside the community are possible.

UGLY AMERICANS ABROAD

I’M ENGLISH AND live in Italy. During March 2011, within two or three days of each other, I received: from The New York Review of Books, four novels by the Swiss author Peter Stamm; from the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, in English and Italian; and from a New York publisher, a first novel, Funeral for a Dog, by the young German writer Thomas Pletzinger. The last was accompanied by some promotional puff that began: “Pletzinger is German, but you wouldn’t know it from his debut, which is both wise and worldly.”

What a wonderful insight this careless moment of blurb-talk gives us into the contemporary American mindset! We want something worldly, but if it seems too German, or perhaps just too foreign, we become wary. As my mailbag indicates, the literary community is very much an international phenomenon, but not, it would seem, a level playing field. To make it in America, Pletzinger must shed his German-ness as if he were an immigrant with an embarrassing accent.

Peter Stamm, whose novels I eventually reviewed, rises to this challenge with great ingenuity. He writes in the leanest prose imaginable, telling stories about phobic characters in love with routine, in need of protection, but simultaneously anxious that life might be passing them by; they yearn for life and are afraid of it, and the more they yearn, the more they are afraid. Stamm’s genius is to align his spare prose with the psychology of people who fear richness and density; that way he creates a style that’s both “literary” and absolutely translatable:

Andreas loved the empty mornings when he would stand by the window with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and stare down at the small, tidy courtyard, and think about nothing except what was there in front of him: a small rectangular bed in the middle of the courtyard, planted with ivy with a tree in it, that put out a few thin branches, pruned to fit the small space that was available.

If you didn’t know Stamm was Swiss, nothing in the English translation would betray this blemish. Certainly he never tells you anything about Switzerland, or the other countries where his books are set. Whenever one of his main characters is asked, while abroad, about his or her home country, the wry Stamm has them shrug and answer that they don’t really have anything to say.

Franzen is the opposite; he could hardly be more loudly American, and to come to him right after Stamm is to see how different are the roads to celebrity for the Swiss author and the American. While Stamm’s characters come free, or bereft, of any social or political context, Franzen’s often seem barely distinguishable from a dense background cluttered with product names, detailed history and geography, linguistic tics, dress habits, and so on, all described with a mixture of irony and disdain, an assumption of superiority and distance, that I immediately find myself uncomfortable with.

Lists abound in Freedom: to describe the meanness of the grandparents of Patty, the protagonist, we are given a list of the “insulting gifts” they bring at Christmas:

Joyce famously one year received two much used dish towels. Ray typically got one of those big art books from the Barnes & Noble bargain table, sometimes with a $3.99 sticker still on it. The kids got little pieces of plastic Asian-made crap: tiny travel alarm clocks that didn’t work, coin purses stamped with the name of a New Jersey insurance agency, frightening crude Chinese finger puppets, assorted swizzle sticks.

Every character trait, every room, every neighborhood, is good for a list, as if Franzen himself were eager to overwhelm us with gifts of dubious taste:

By summer’s end, Blake had nearly finished work on the great-room and was outfitting it with such Blakean gear as PlayStation, Foosball, a refrigerated beer keg, a large-screen TV, an air-hockey table, a stained-glass Vikings chandelier, and mechanized recliners.

Often it feels like the characters only exist as an alibi for what is really a journalistic and encyclopedic endeavor to list everything American. Where it’s not objects, it’s behavior patterns:

In the days after 9/11, everything suddenly seemed extremely stupid to Joey. It was stupid that a “Vigil of Concern” was held for no conceivable practical reason, it was stupid that people kept watching the same disaster footage over and over, it was stupid that the Chi Phi boys hung a banner of “support” from their house, it was stupid that the football game against Penn State was canceled, it was stupid that so many kids left Grounds to be with their families (and it was stupid that everybody at Virginia said “Grounds” instead of “campus”).

It’s interesting that in this passage the Italian translator has to leave words like football (as opposed to soccer), then Grounds, and campus, in English. This alerts us to a larger problem with translating Franzen; these are not just lists of American things and things American people do, but also—and crucially—of the very words Americans use. Foosball, or table football in British English, is called calcio balilla in Italian, Balilla being the nickname of a child hero who in 1746 started a revolution by throwing stones at Austrian soldiers. The translator rightly shies away from using a term that would shift the mind abruptly toward Italian culture, leaving the incomprehensible Foosball. Further on, Italian has neither the object nor the denomination “mechanized recliners,” so the translator is obliged to explain what it is (and the reader still won’t be able to picture this aberration in all its ugliness).

For the American reader, there is the pleasure of recognizing the interiors Franzen so meticulously describes, while the English reader can just about hang on with all he has learned from films and TV. Not so for the Italian, or German, or Frenchman, who simply struggles through lists of alien bric-a-brac. We might say that if the Swiss Stamm, to attract an international public, has been obliged to write about everyman for everyone everywhere, Franzen, thanks to the size of America’s internal market, but also to the huge pull the country exercises on the world’s imagination, can write about Americans for Americans (which is no doubt as it should be) and nevertheless expect to be read worldwide.

Aside from the recognition factor—this is America—are there other pleasures to be had from Franzen, pleasures available to the foreigner reading in translation? I knew before opening it, of course, that Freedom was “an important novel” if only because The Guardian had dedicated to it an article on its homepage (on which my browser opens). Even before he had read the book, the Guardian writer remarked that Franzen was probably the only novelist alive able to revive our belief in the literary novel. Traveling in Holland the week the English edition was published, I saw that Amsterdam’s main international bookshop had dedicated their entire window to it.

At a loss to understand this enthusiasm (I found the novel hard going), I checked out The New York Times Book Review where Sam Tanenhaus canonizes the novel in his first sentence; it is “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Interesting here is the word American. To be a masterpiece of American fiction is to have hit the top. “A masterpiece of Swiss fiction” does not have the same ring, and if, say, a work by Pamuk is declared a masterpiece it will not be “a masterpiece of Turkish fiction.” Tanenhaus then quickly explains Franzen’s achievement, which is to gather up “every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.” He goes on:

Franzen knows that college freshmen are today called “first years,” like tender shoots in an overplanted garden; that a high-minded mom, however ruthless in her judgments of her neighbors’ ethical lapses, will condemn them with no epithet harsher than “weird”; that reckless drivers who barrel across lanes are “almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity.”

Is it really such an achievement to know that “freshmen” are called “first years” (as in most places in the world for that matter)? The plot is described as “intricately ordered” and Franzen’s one prominent formal device (having the main character Patty relate much of the book as a third-person autobiography on the prompting of her therapist) as “ingenious.” Neither is true. The plot is a complete pig’s ear—to use a very English if not American expression—and is best grasped by checking out John Crace’s hilarious “Digested read,” again in The Guardian. As for the voice, the supposedly unsophisticated jock, Patty, turns out to have a style that is undistinguishable from that of the extremely sophisticated Franzen; it is never clear what the story gains from pretending that she is telling it. On the contrary, the move undermines the novel’s credibility.

But Freedom’s failings are interesting in so far as they deepen the mystery of the book’s international success. It’s one thing for the Americans to hype and canonize one of their favorite authors, but why do the Europeans buy into it? Ever anxious that they need to understand America, fascinated by its glamour and power, Europeans are perhaps attracted to those American novels that explain everything: Roth’s American Pastoral, DeLillo’s Underworld. More than a novel by an American, they want The Great American Novel. But of course Europeans also resent American world hegemony and feel (still and no doubt wrongly) superior culturally.

Freedom has this characteristic: Franzen appears to get all his energy, all his identity, from simultaneously evoking and disdaining America, explaining it (its gaucheness mostly) and rejecting it; his stories invariably offer characters engaging in the American world, finding themselves tainted and debased by it, then at last coming to their Franzenesque “corrected” senses and withdrawing from it. Blinded by this or that ambition, they come to grief because they lack knowledge, they lack awareness. Thus the importance of so much information. Unlike his characters, Franzen knows everything, is aware of everything, and aware above all that redemption lies in withdrawal from the American public scene. What message could be more welcome to Europeans? A friend writes to me from Berlin and remarks, “Here in Germany, Franzen’s the only American novelist people talk about.” That is, Franzen is establishing a picture of a dysfunctional America that Europeans feel happy with. With Franzen they can “do” America and have done with it.

YOUR ENGLISH IS SHOWING

IS ENGLISH, AND specifically American English, destined to take over the world?

The recent acceleration in communications and the process we’ve grown used to calling globalization have renewed an old debate about the relationship between lingua franca and vernacular. The nations of the European mainland are constantly anxious that the adoption of English words and even syntactical structures may be seriously reshaping their languages. Meanwhile, in many technical fields, scientific papers are now written almost exclusively in English, with the result that certain concepts become difficult to express in the local vernacular since no one is at work developing a vocabulary for them.

Back in 2000, in an intriguing article titled “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Sheldon Pollock discussed the possible ways a lingua franca can relate to different vernaculars by comparing the fortunes of Latin and other languages in the Roman Empire with those of Sanskrit and local languages in India and the East during the same period (roughly from the beginning of the first millennium to its end). His general claim is that while in the West Latin was ruthlessly imposed on the back of Roman military conquest and tended to obliterate the languages of peoples subdued, in the East there was a more relaxed coexistence between the cosmopolitan lingua franca and the surrounding vernaculars, Sanskrit gaining a general currency more through trade and a desire to be widely understood than through military conquest or political coercion.

The burden of Pollock’s article is clear enough: that we needn’t think about the spread of English as necessarily in conflict with the world’s vernaculars; he wants us to avoid thinking in terms of “either/or” and work toward a relationship that is “both/and.” The advice is good, and more than a dozen years later the article is as intriguing as ever, though perhaps what struck me most on a recent rereading was the contemporaneous nature of these linguistic experiences in East and West: both saw the rise and decline of a lingua franca at more or less the same time, suggesting the working out of an underlying process and the manifestation of a collective will.

But reading about translation and international literature, reading novels in translation from many nations, and also reading the work of graduate students of translation and creative writing, I have gathered the impression that we are heading for a new and rather different resolution of the tension between lingua franca and vernacular. While easily conceding that certain areas of highly specialized knowledge become the exclusive domain of English, most people are not so willing, nor able, to read novels, or indeed any prose that involves strong elements of style, in a foreign language. There they want to keep to their mother tongue. Nor are many creative writers able and willing to follow in the footsteps of a Conrad or Nabokov, or more recently the many Asian and Indian writers who have switched from their native tongues to more marketable English. Most writers want to go on writing in their own languages.

Yet at the same time, neither readers nor writers are happy any longer with the idea that a literary text’s nation or language of origin should in any way define or limit the area in which it moves, or indeed that a national audience be the first and perhaps only arbiter of a book’s destiny. We feel far too linked up these days not to want to know which books are being read in which other countries right now. And if we are writers, of course, we want our own books to travel as widely as possible.

The obvious solution is translation. And indeed, there has never been so much translation as there is today, nor has it ever happened so soon after publication of the original, with groups of translators sweating over typescripts of blockbuster thrillers or even literary novels so that they can be published at the same time in many countries with a simultaneous and unified promotional campaign. Few people realize how many books are now translated by more than one translator (often this is not made clear in the credits), nor how fast translators are expected to work. It might be argued that the literary world is merely following the cinema with its international distribution circuits. But books are not films. While most films can survive subtitling or dubbing, the success of translation very largely depends on the levels of complexity in the original text. Above all there is a problem with a kind of writing that is, as it were, inward-turning, about the language itself, about what it means to live under the spell of this or that vernacular.

Of course one can translate Joyce’s Ulysses, but one loses the book’s reveling in its own linguistic medium, its tireless exploration of the possibilities of English. The same is true of a lot of the experimental writing of the 1960s and 1970s. It is desperately hard to translate the Flemish writer Hugo Claus into English, or indeed Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow into anything. There was a mining of linguistic richness in that period, and a focus on the extent to which our culture is made up of words, that tended to exclude, or simply wasn’t concerned about, the question of having a text that can travel the world. Even practitioners of “traditional” realism such as John Updike or, in England and in a quite different way, Barbara Pym, were obsessively attentive to the exact form of words that was their culture. In many ways Pym is untranslatable into Italian, or rather translation so alters the tone of the work that it’s hard to think of it as by Pym at all.

It was when I was invited to review in the same article a new translation of Hugo Claus’s Wonder (1962) alongside Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (2003) and Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (2006) that it occurred to me that over the forty years between Claus and the others an important change had occurred. These more recent novels had, yes, been translated, from Norwegian and Dutch into English, but it was nothing like the far more arduous task of translating Claus and many of his peers. Rather, it seemed that the contemporary writers had already performed a translation within their own languages; they had discovered a lingua franca within their own vernacular, a particular straightforwardness, an agreed order for saying things and perceiving and reporting experience, that made translation easier and more effective. One might call it a simplification, or one might call it an alignment in different languages to an agreed way of going about things.

Inevitably, there is an impoverishment. Neither of these authors have the mad fertility of Claus; but there is also a huge gain in communicability, particularly in translation where the rhythm of delivery and the immediacy of expression are free from any sense of obstacle. Is it possible, I asked myself, that there is now a skeleton lingua franca beneath the flesh of these vernaculars, and that it is basically an English skeleton?

Of course as soon as one has excited oneself with an idea, one finds confirmation of it everywhere. As I have observed, Peter Stamm very much fits this description, likewise the German Siegfried Lenz, and many other French and Italian authors. So strong is the flavor of English in the Italian of the bestselling thriller writer Giorgio Faletti that a number of readers suggested it was actually translated from an English original written by someone else. At my own university in Milan, we have a project called GLINT (Global Literature and Translation) of which one area involves studying the extent to which Italian syntax has shifted toward English models over the last fifty years. There is no shortage of evidence. Contemporary Italian more frequently puts the adjective before the noun, more frequently uses possessives for parts of the body, more frequently introduces a pronoun subject, and more frequently uses the present progressive, all changes that suggest an influence from English.

So that is the intuition. The idea is not so much the old polemic that English is simply dominant and dangerous; but rather that there is a spirit abroad, especially in the world of fiction, that is seeking maximum communicability and that has fastened onto the world’s present lingua franca as something that can be absorbed and built into other vernaculars so that they can continue to exist while becoming more easily translated into each other—or into English itself.

One may see this as a wise compromise between lingua franca and vernacular, or as a slow caving-in to rampant English. Certainly it’s hard not to regret the dazzling and very Italian density of an author like Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose work is still only inadequately translated. On the other hand it’s intriguing to see that in resistance to the general drift toward the international—a game of polarities if you like, where one trend is confirmed by the extent to which it provokes its opposite—there is also a flourishing of dialect poetry, texts comprehensible only by a very small community. (I cannot understand the poetry of my close colleague Edoardo Zuccato, who writes in the Milanese dialect.) But such poetry is almost always published with an Italian translation alongside it, suggesting the poet’s desire for intimacy and authenticity on the one hand and an eagerness, perhaps anxiety, to be widely understood on the other. Any eventual translations, of course, will be made from the Italian, not the dialect.

LEARNING TO SPEAK AMERICAN

IN 1993 I translated all 450 pages of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony without ever using the past participle of the verb get. The book was to be published simultaneously by Knopf in New York and Jonathan Cape in London; to save money, both editions were to be printed from the same galleys, so it would be important, I was told, to avoid any usages that might strike American readers as distractingly English or English readers as distractingly American. To my English ear gotten yells America and alters the whole feel of a sentence. I presumed it would be the same the other way round for Americans. Fortunately, given the high register of Calasso’s prose, get was not difficult to avoid.

Now, two decades later, I am obliged to sign up to gotten. Commissioned by an American publisher to write a book that explores the Italian national character through an account of thirty years’ commuting and traveling on the country’s rail network, I am looking at an edit that transforms my English prose into American. I had already sorted out the spelling, in fact had written the book with an American spell check, and didn’t expect that there would be much else to do. Wrong. Almost at once there was a note saying that throughout the three hundred pages my use of carriage for a passenger train car must be changed to coach. Since this is a book about trains and train travel there were ninety-eight such usages. There was also the problem that I had used the word coach to refer to a long-distance bus. Apparently the twenty-four-hour clock was not acceptable, so the 17:25 Regionale from Milan to Verona had to become the 5:25 PM Regionale. Where I, in a discussion of prices, had written “a further 50 cents” the American edit required “a further 50 euro cents,” as if otherwise an American reader might imagine Italians were dealing in nickels and dimes.

I had started the editing process in a spirit of easygoing cooperation, determined to set aside any pride in Englishness and work to produce the best package possible for an American public. After all, the work was being paid for by an American publisher, and my commissioning editor had proved extremely helpful when it came to discussing the shape of the book. But doubts soon arose. Prose is not something that remains the same when words are substituted—jeans for dungarees, for example—or when one synonym is preferred to another. Rhythm is important, and assonance likewise. Ninety-eight uses of a two-syllable carriage are not the same as ninety-eight occurrences of a single-syllable closed-o coach. This is why, statistically, assonance, alliteration, and rhythm tend to be weaker in translations than in original texts; consciously or otherwise a writer, even of the least ambitious prose, is guided by sound, while the language itself is constantly forming standard collocations of words around pleasantly assonant combinations—fast asleep, wide awake. Any intervention in these patterns, whether simply substituting words to suit a local use of the same language, or, more radically, translating into another language, disturbs the relationship between sound and semantics.

But my train book isn’t just a text written by an Englishman to be published in America. It’s about Italy, the Italians, how they see things, their mental world. One of the ways one can get across the difference is to focus on words or usages that don’t quite translate—the appearance of coincidenza, for example, in station announcements, which can mean a planned and timetabled train connection, or a quite unplanned, unexpected development to which an urgent response is required, such as a last-minute platform change. Over these matters the American editor dutifully followed. But where I had written mamma and papà, the edit had transformed to mamma and pappa. This rather threw me, in part because I had assumed that Americans said mama and papa, but mostly because papà is accented on the second syllable, whereas in Italian pappa, with the accent on the first syllable and that double p that Italians, unlike Anglo-Saxons, actually pronounce, is a word for mush, or baby food.

Despite my hailing from England—a country that still uses miles—I had expressed distances in meters and kilometers and it seemed odd now to find my Italian characters speaking to each other about yards and miles and, of course, Fahrenheit, which they never would. Or saying AM and PM, rather than using the twenty-four-hour clock as they mostly do, even in ordinary conversation. Slowly, as well as being concerned that some sentences were now feeling clunky and odd, I began to wonder if American readers really needed or demanded this level of protection. Wouldn’t they soon figure out, if I said “the temperature was up in the sizzling thirties,” that I was talking Celsius? Or at least that in another part of the world people had another system for measuring temperature according to which thirty was considered warm? Mightn’t it be fascinating for them to be reminded that the twenty-four-hour clock, which Americans usually associate with military operations, has long been in standard civilian usage in Europe? Italy introduced it as early as 1893.

Or again, does a newsagent really need to become a news dealer, a flyover an overpass, a parcel a package, or in certain circumstances between among and like such as? Does the position of also really need to be moved in front of the verb to be in sentences like “Trains also were useful during the 1908 earthquake in Catania,” when to me it looked much better after it? And does making these relatively small changes really make the text 100 percent American anyway? One thinks of how thoroughly the Harry Potter novels were Americanized for their US editions: would they really have sold fewer copies had the Anglicisms been kept? Wasn’t half the charm of the series its rather fey Englishness (occasionally Scottishness)? Would we Americanize the Irish Joyce? Or again, if we want to have language conform to local usage, what about considering chronology as well as geography? Shouldn’t we bring Dickens, Austen, Fielding, and Shakespeare up to date? Make it easier? Forget that language is constantly changing and different everywhere?

Turning page after page of the copy editor’s notes, I began to make connections between this editing process and many of the things I have written about here. America is very much a net exporter of literature. Its novels are read and translated worldwide, where readers generally accept miles and Fahrenheit, pounds and ounces, AM and PM, and indeed have grown accustomed to these old-fashioned, American oddities (when it comes to doing science, of course, Americans use the more practical European systems). In Germany, for example, where around 50 percent of novels are foreign works in translation, Roth’s and Franzen’s characters are not obliged to discuss distances in kilometers.

Conversely, America imports very little—only 3 to 4 percent of novels published in the States are translations—and what it does import it tends to transform as far as possible into its own formulas and notations, in much the same way that Disney has turned every fable and myth worldwide into a version of Mickey Mouse. This situation is a measure of American power, but brings with it the danger of mental closure and inflexibility. Speaking recently at a conference in Milan, the Italian literary agent Marco Vigevani lamented that fewer and fewer American editors are able to read novels in Italian, French, and especially German, and this inevitably has reduced their enthusiasm for publishing foreign literature, since they are obliged to rely on external readers for advice.

Travel books are popular, likewise novels set in distant exotic countries, suggesting an appetite for awareness of other societies and their different lifestyles. But how far can literature really expose us to another world if everything is always returned to the reassuring medium of our own language exactly as we use it, with all our own formulas, dimensions, accents, and habits? More than anything else, what makes a foreign country foreign and difficult is its language, and though we can’t be expected to learn a new language for every country we want to know about, it seems important to be reminded of the language, reminded that one’s own language is not the supreme system for understanding the world, but just one of thousands of possibilities. Does anybody in the end really know with absolute certainty, all the differences between American and English usages? Aren’t there a wide range of usages in both these countries? How can I know, when I see a particular edit, if it is an Americanism I have to accept, or a matter of individual taste I can take issue with?

And all this without mentioning house style, that frighteningly powerful dye which, in some magazines, turns every contributor’s prose the same color. In my train book, for example, after a few pages discussing the fate of Italian railways under Nazi occupation, I begin a new paragraph “2,104 railwaymen died in the war”: to my ear the bare number has exactly the brutal eloquence that such statements demand. But I find this changed to “A total of 2,104 railwaymen died in the Second World War.” What is the sense of a total of? Surely it’s not a requirement of Americanization. What does it add? I have to presume that some house style forbids me from opening a paragraph with a number. Why? This whole question may seem a quite different matter from the contrast between Americans Americanizing and Europeans accepting Americanisms, but the truth is that house style is a much more common occurrence in the US and more aggressively enforced, to the point that when one rereads work one has written for The New Yorker it no longer seems like one’s own voice at all. I can think of no similar experience with English or European magazines, as I can remember no experience quite like my tussle over tense changes for the American edition of my book Medici Money.

Not that good editing is not precious. I have been saved a thousand stupid mistakes and much ugly phrasing by good editors; it is the desire to fix style in an unchanging standard that is noxious. As if people didn’t have different ways of speaking. And a cultural trait like this must mean something, must come out of some deep assumption. Is it simply the publisher’s anxiety that his readers are weak, ready to put their books down at the slightest obstacle, and hence must be reassured by a homogeneity of usage that more or less makes language invisible? Or could it be that the long American hegemony has bred an assumption that American formulations are inevitably global currency and should be universally imposed?

IN PRAISE OF THE LANGUAGE POLICE

HOW FAR SHOULD writers be asked to conform to standards of language and syntax? Behind this apparently innocent editorial dilemma lies the whole issue of what we expect from literature.

Most readers seem to favor (and indeed favour) complete freedom for writers, seeing nothing but pedantry in the application of rules and in some cases questioning whether such things can really be said to exist anywhere but in the heads of copy editors and the establishment police. As readers, it seems, we love to feel we are in direct contact with an especially creative, possibly subversive mind and that we are getting all of its quirks and qualities unmediated and unmitigated by the obtusity of lesser folks perversely eager to return everything to the expected and mundane. This is no doubt why so little is said about editing even in the more learned papers, while nothing at all appears in the popular press, let alone at a promotional level. One cannot imagine, for example, a publisher launching an advertising campaign to boast that it has the most attentive copy editors in the business and can guarantee that everything you may read from its list has been properly purged of anything grammatically iffy, or foreign, or idiosyncratic.

By the same token, very little is said of the mediating work of translators, even though we know that when a great piece of literature has been translated more than once, the various versions can sound quite different and obviously owe a great deal not just to the technical expertise but also to the personality and mindset of people we usually know nothing about. In general, we don’t like to think of creative writing as a joint venture, and when it emerges, for example, that Raymond Carver allowed his work to be drastically edited, our appreciation of him, and indeed the work, is at least temporarily diminished. We want to think of our writers as geniuses occupying positions of absolute independence in relation to a tediously conventional society. Conversely, we abhor, or believe we abhor, the standard and the commonplace.

Yet nobody requires the existence of a standard and a general pressure to conform to that standard more than the person who wishes to assume a position outside it. It is essential for the creative writer that there be, or be perceived to be, a usual way of saying things, if a new or unusual way is to stand out and to provoke some excitement. So when D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love writes of Gudrun’s insomnia after first making love to Gerald that she was “destroyed into perfect consciousness,” he needs the reader to sense at once that this is syntactically anomalous; a person can be “transformed into,” “turned into,” “changed into” but not “destroyed into.” The syntactical shock underlines Lawrence’s unconventional view of consciousness as a negative rather than positive state, something that again is emphasized by the unexpected use of the word perfect,—“perfect consciousness”—rather than a more immediately understandable and neutral intense.

Naturally, anyone writing with this level of creativity needs a copy editor willing to accept that rules can be bent and broken. But that doesn’t mean such editors have no role. It is important that the “special effect” stand out from a background of more conventional prose, and that a deliberate departure not be mistaken as something merely regional, British perhaps, or simply that there not be so much clutter around it of one kind or other that it is hardly noticed. George Orwell, a champion of strict grammar as a vehicle of clear thinking, memorably begins 1984 with a very simple, almost embarrassingly conventional novel-opener of a sentence in order that the anomaly constituted by the last word pack a big punch: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” In a different field, David Hume, when presenting his radical and unconventional philosophy, did everything to remove from his writing any indication of his “Scottishness,” sending drafts to friends to have them check his writing for “Scottishisms.” It was not that he thought standard English superior, just that he did not want a reader’s attention to be distracted from his main purpose.

The editor’s job then becomes one of helping the writer to see where an unessential, perhaps unconscious departure from the norm is actually draining energy away from places where the text is excitingly unconventional. That is, the editor reminds an author that to construct a coherent identity he has to remember his relationship with society and with the language we share and cannot express ourselves without. To go out on a limb linguistically, accepting no compromise and creating an idiolect that really is entirely your own, may win awed admiration, as did Finnegans Wake, but will likely not attract many readers, and arguably does not allow for the communication of nuance, since all the ordinary reader will understand is that you are indeed off on a trip on your own; even Joyce’s hitherto staunch supporter Pound, hardly a slouch himself when it came to literary experiments, would have no truck with it.

However, linguistic conventions, in so far as they exist and editors seek to apply them, tend to be national. Albeit with a degree of flexibility, the ear is accustomed to local patterns, and the eye has grown used to a certain system of punctuation, a certain approach to paragraphing (the London Review of Books, for example, is markedly different from The New York Review of Books in this regard). Hence the problem of what to do with a text from a different culture, a different country, a different language, or simply from the distant past, where any deliberate departures were intended to stand out against conventions that are not our own and that we very likely don’t know or don’t care about.

But if language habits tend to be national, we live in a world that is more and more international, a world where, certainly in Europe, readers are just as likely to be reading books in translation as in their national language. For translators, and indeed for editors of translations, there is a risk that they might not recognize the exciting subversiveness of a certain usage if they are not entirely familiar with the cultural standard and social context in which it is uttered: the first Italian translation of 1984 has the clocks striking one, not thirteen, its translator apparently unaware of how interesting a clock striking thirteen would be.

Even where translators and editors are sensitive to such effects, it may be impossible to achieve them within the different conventions of their own language. I have looked at translations of “destroyed into perfect consciousness” in many languages, and most of them split the structure into such formulas as “destroyed, absolutely aware.” This is not because the translators are poor but because in their languages it is hard to find a standard usage (“transformed into”) that can be bent to accept a word like destroyed, for the trick of Lawrence’s expression is that its strangeness does not lead to a loss of fluency. Milan Kundera objected vigorously in Testaments Betrayed that his subversive formulations in Czech were returned, in translation, to standard German or French, but although it’s true that translators and their editors are not always the most adventurous people, it is also the case that one language’s rules are not another’s.

All this alerts us to the fact that each text and each usage in the text has no absolute existence, content, or meaning, but is always understood in relation to where we are now, what we regularly read and expect to see on the page. The translator frequently finds himself obliged to translate not the words themselves, but the distance between those words and other words that might normally have been used, but weren’t. It is a tough proposition.

Unless . . . unless we come to the conclusion that it no longer makes sense, or very soon may not make sense, to talk about different territories and rules and being “one of us.” Very soon it may be that we are all, at least as far as literature is concerned, part of one global territory where we are obliged to be constantly aware of different customs not as if they were happening far away within fairly well-marked and self-contained boundaries, but as if they had become part of what happens on our street. In that case, we may, for a while, as international stylistic conventions slowly form, be obliged to accept that we live in an era of great confusion, where the exact position any writer is taking in relation to a presumed cultural standard has grown extremely problematic.

There is a fascinating moment in the history of translation that occurs sometime in the early twentieth century when, with some notable exceptions, translators stop translating the names of characters. It is as if Italian readers had become so aware of England that one could no longer go on talking of Niccolò Nickleby, Samuele Pickwick, and their famous author Carlo Dickens. Or you could say that the Christian name no longer suggests a parental choice and social reference that we can easily transfer into our own system of names, but rather an absolute unchangeable denotation of an individual. Charles Dickens is Charles Dickens throughout the universe.

In any event, this global mingling of cultures works against nuance and in favor of the loud, clamorous, highly stylized, and idiosyncratic voice that can stand out in the cosmopolitan crowd. It will be a world in which the need for an editor to mediate and clarify the position of the individual writer in relation to some hypothetical standard will be seriously challenged, but, in the general disorientation, all the more necessary. Indeed, it may well be that as the Internet era matures and more authors self-publish online without any editorial assistance, we will begin to grow nostalgic for those finicky copy editors who at least gave us something well-defined to kick against.

TRANSLATING IN THE DARK

“WE MUST BELIEVE in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature.” Thus Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish poet and winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, quoted in a recent essay by Robin Robertson, one of his translators. Robertson goes on to describe the difficulties of capturing Tranströmer’s spare voice and masterful evocation of Swedish landscape in English, particularly if you don’t know Swedish well. Robert Lowell, Robertson tells us, translated Tranströmer with only a “passing knowledge” of the language. Robertson himself describes a process wherein his Swedish girlfriend gives him a literal line-by-line translation into English, then reads the Swedish to him to give him “the cadences,” after which he creates “relatively free” versions in English.

This approach to translation is not uncommon among poets (W.H. Auden gave us his versions of Icelandic sagas in much the same way). Nevertheless, Robertson feels the need to call on various authorities to sanction a translation process that assumes that poetry is made up of a literal semantic sense, which can easily be transmitted separately from the verse, and a tone, or music, which only a poet is sufficiently sensitive to reconstruct. Thus Robertson observes:

In his introduction to Imitations (1962), Robert Lowell writes that “Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything.”

Here the “of course” skates over the fact that tone is always in relation to content: if the content were altered while diction and register remained the same, the tone would inevitably shift. One notes in passing the disparagement of the “usual reliable translator”—the fellow knows his foreign language, but doesn’t understand poetry.

T.S. Eliot is then cited as having warned Lowell not to present his “imitations” of Tranströmer and others as “translations”:

If you use the word translation in the subtitle it will attract all those meticulous little critics who delight in finding what seem to them mis-translations. You will remember all the fuss about Ezra Pound’s Propertius.

Here collocating meticulous with little does the job that Lowell/Pasternak achieved with “usual reliable”: there are always people who interfere but don’t understand.

Robertson also calls on the British poet Jamie McKendrick, who, he feels, is “surely right” when he says “The translator’s knowledge of language is more important than their knowledge of languages.” How vague this remark is! Does it mean that the translator has one kind of knowledge of how language in general achieves its effects, and another of the nuts and bolts of the different languages he knows, the first kind being “more important” than the second? If that is the case, then to what degree more important? Wouldn’t the two, rather, be interdependent and mutually sustaining? These perplexities apart, the thrust of McKendrick’s argument is clear enough: we are sweeping aside the objection that a profound knowledge of a foreign language might be required to translate its poetry, or prose for that matter, thus clearing the path for a translation by someone who is an expert in the area that counts: our own language.

I really do not wish to nitpick. I enjoy Lowell’s and Robertson’s translations of Tranströmer, and Pound’s Propertius. I am glad these people did the work they did, giving us many fine poems along the way. As a writer myself who has also done a number of translations I might be expected to have a vested interest in the idea that what skill I have in English sets me apart from the “usual reliable” translator. However, and quite regardless of whether we want to call such work translation or imitation, it does seem that a serious issue is being dispatched with indecent haste here.

Let us remember our most intense experiences of poetry in our mother tongue, reading Eliot and Pound as adolescents perhaps, Frost and Wallace Stevens, Auden and Geoffrey Hill, then coming back to them after many years, discovering how much more was there than we had imagined, picking up echoes of other literature we have read since, seeing how the poet shifted the sense of this or that word slightly, and how this alters the tone and feeling of the whole. And then let’s also recall some of the finest poetry criticism we have read—by William Empson, Christopher Ricks, or Eliot himself—the ability of these men to fill in linguistic and literary contexts in such a way that the text takes on a deeper meaning, or to tease out relations inside a poem that had been obscure, but once mentioned are suddenly obvious and enrich our experience of the work.

Now imagine that, having a poet friend who wishes to translate these authors, you offer a literal translation of their poems in your second language, perhaps French, perhaps German, perhaps Spanish. Maybe you read The Four Quartets out loud, line by line, to give him the cadence. But does our translator friend, who doesn’t know our language well, hear what we hear when we read aloud? The onomatopoeia, perhaps. But a dying fall in one tongue may not be the same in another, not to mention the echoes of other texts, or simply of voices in the air in our language. During my thirty years in Italy I have often been told by uninitiated English friends what a beautiful and harmonious language Italian is; but that is Italian as heard by an ear accustomed to English sound patterns. To the Italian ear, and to mine these days, much of what is said in Italian grates. One hears the language differently when one knows it.

Why do those “usual reliable translators” often give us work that we feel is wooden or lackluster, thus inviting the poets to get involved? Teaching translation, I frequently deal with students who write well in their mother tongue, but whose translations into that tongue lack fluency. This brings us to a paradox at the heart of translation: the text we take as inspiration is also the greatest obstacle to expression. Our own language prompts us in one direction, but the text we are trying to respect says something else, or says the same thing in a way that feels very different. All the same, what often frees the student to offer better translations is a deeper knowledge of the language he is working from: a better grasp of the original allows the translator to detach from formal structures and find a new expression for the tone he is learning to feel: in this case, however, every departure from strict transposition is inspired by an intimate and direct experience of the original.

All this to arrive at the obvious conclusion that while expression and creativity in one’s own language is crucial, a long experience in the language we are working from can only improve the translations we make. But the really interesting question is: Why are such intelligent writers as Eliot, Lowell, Pasternak, Robertson, and McKendrick unwilling to consider the matter more carefully? Is it because, to return to Tranströmer, “We must believe in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature”? There is no point, that is, in examining what we do too closely if we’ve already decided what we want our conclusion to be.

But why is it imperative that we believe in World Literature? It seems we must imagine that no literary expression or experience is ultimately unavailable to us; the single individual is not so conditioned by his own language, culture, and literature as not to be able to experience all other literatures; and the individual author likewise can be appreciated all over the globe. It is on this premise that all international literary prizes, of which there are now so many, depend. The zeitgeist demands that we gloss over everything that makes a local or national culture rich and deep, in order to believe in global transmission. There must be no limitation.

I have no quarrel with the aspiration, or all the intriguing translation/imitation processes it encourages. My sole objection would be that it is unwise to lose sight of the reality that cultures are immensely complex and different and that this belief in World Literature could actually create a situation where we become more parochial and bound in our own culture, bringing other work into it in a process of mere assimilation and deluding ourselves that, because it sounds attractive in our own language, we are close to the foreign experience. Tranströmer remarks:

I perceived, during the first enthusiastic poetry years, all poetry as Swedish. Eliot, Trakl, Éluard—they were all Swedish writers, as they appeared in priceless, imperfect, translations.

Try this experiment: pick up a copy of a book mis-titled Dante’s Inferno. It offers twenty celebrated poets, few of whom had more than a passing knowledge of Italian, each translating a canto of the Inferno. Inevitably, the result is extremely uneven as in each case we feel the Italian poet’s voice being dragged this way and that according to each translator’s assumptions of what he might or might not have sounded like. Sometimes it is Seamus Heaney’s Inferno, sometimes it is Carolyn Forché’s, sometimes it is W. S. Merwin’s, but it is never Dante’s. Then dip into the 1939 prose translation by the scholar John Sinclair. There is immediately a homogeneity and fluency here, a lack of showiness and a semantic cohesion over scores of pages that give quite a different experience. To wind up, look at Robert and Jean Hollander’s 2002 reworking of Sinclair. Robert Hollander is a Dante scholar and has cleared up Sinclair’s few errors. His wife, Jean, is a poet who, while respecting to a very large degree Sinclair’s phrasing, has made some adjustments, under her husband’s meticulous eye, allowing the translation to fit into unrhymed verse. It is still a long way from reading Dante in the original, but now we do feel that we have a very serious approximation and a fine read.

LISTENING FOR THE JABBERWOCK

WHAT IS THE status of translated works of literature? Are they essentially different from texts in their original form? One of the arguments I have put forward is that there is a natural tendency toward rhythm, alliteration, and assonance when one writes even the most ordinary prose, and that editing to conform to the linguistic conventions of a different culture can interfere with this. The translator gives priority to the semantic sense, but that sense was also partly guided in the original by what one might call the acoustic inertia of the language.

Naturally, an alert and resourceful translator can sometimes come up with the goods. Here for example is a sentence from Joyce’s “The Dead”:

It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life.

A monosyllabic onslaught of p’s and h’s—the husband is the bisyllabic odd man out—falls into a melancholic, mostly iambic rhythm. A masterful Italian translation by Marco Papi and Emilio Tadini gives:

Ora non gli dava quasi più pena pensare a quanta poca parte lui, suo marito, aveva avuto nella sua vita.

The Italian inevitably settles for bisyllables but finds a host of p’s and a quiet, even rhythm to match the resigned tone of the English.

Such combinations of luck and achievement are rare, however, and mainly come in literary texts, poetry in particular, where the translator is prepared for the writer’s evident and strategic use of poetic devices. All too often, the generous attempt to match such devices—one thinks of Pinsky’s translation of the Inferno—only alert us to the strain and effort the translator has to make to force the language of translation into the desired sound patterns, patterns which in the original sounded easy and even natural. Meantime in novels, even the most evident poetic effects are often simply ignored. Here is D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love describing the combative Gudrun’s encounter with an equally combative rabbit, Bismark:

They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back.

None of the translations I have looked at match Lawrence’s repetition of thrust to suggest a parallel between the woman and the rabbit, the way the violence of the one provokes the response of the other and puts both on the same level. Nor do they capture the nice way the word lusty ties the two thrusts together soundwise: none of them begins to recover the stubbornness and economy of “set its four feet flat.” It is not a question of poor translation; the text was created in English and that is that. This is what Paul Celan, despairing of translating Baudelaire, called “the fatal uniqueness of language,” when the creative mind, deeply integrated within a set of native sound patterns, produces something that can exist exclusively in that language.

Another way of approaching the question of what is different about translation might be to look at a text where the usual relation between semantics and acoustic effects is radically altered. Everybody knows the opening of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

The comedy of the poem is its reproduction of a range of acoustic and rhythmic strategies that the reader immediately recognizes as typical of a certain kind of poetry, but with nonsense words. The suggestion is that all such poetry is driven to a degree by the inertia of style and convention, that the sound is as decisive as the sense in determining what gets said; indeed, when we “run out of sense,” the sound trundles on of its own accord. But how could one begin to translate “mome raths outgrabe”? We have no idea what it means. The only strategy would be to find an equally hackneyed poetic form in the translator’s language and play with it in a similar way.

Liberated by the fact that many of the words don’t have any precise meaning, the translator should not find this impossible, though whether strictly speaking it is now a translation is another issue. Here is a heroic Italian version by Milli Graffi:

Era cerfuoso e i viviscidi tuoppi,

Ghiarivan foracchiando nel pedano

Stavano tutti mifri i vilosnuoppi,

Mentre squoltian i momi radi invano.

In general, however, what we find is a reproduction of the sense, but with a much diluted intensity of the Jabberwock effect. Developing Frost’s notion that “poetry is what gets lost in translation,” we might say that what we won’t find in translation is this lively, often undiscriminating pattern of sounds, an ancient enchantment, which the best writers can integrate with their creativity and the worst simply allow to take over the show, as in the marvelously poor poetry of William McGonagall:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

Translated texts, then, and there are ever more of them in the world today, tend to be cooler, a little less fluid—they will operate more on the rational intellect than on the rhythm-wired senses. They will deceive you less and charm you less. Of course there are notable exceptions, texts that were translated with the seduction of the reader and the beauty of the language very much in mind. Where these are old and central to our culture—the Bible, most obviously—they can become canonical on a par with our homegrown writing. But there are remarkably few of them.

I have often wondered if that is why, in certain countries, translations now even seem to be preferred to works written in the native language. A large study carried out at my university on four corpuses of texts—Italian novels before 1960, English novels translated into Italian before 1960, Italian novels after 1990, and English novels translated into Italian after 1990—suggests that while the national language in Italy is changing fast, with Italian novelists ever more open to stylistic influence from the cinema or from abroad, translations into Italian keep alive a hypercorrect literary Italian that has otherwise lapsed into disuse. Even the most disturbing texts can, at least linguistically, deprived of the Jabberwock effect, prove calm and reassuring.

IN THE WILDS OF LEOPARDI

I’M STARTING A translation, my first for many years, and at once I’m faced with the fatal, all-determining decision: What voice do I translate this in?

Usually one would say: the same voice as the original’s, as you hear it in the Italian and imagine it in English. This would be along the line of Dryden’s famous injunction to translators to write as the author would write if he were English—a rather comical idea since we are interested in the author largely because he comes from elsewhere and does not write like an Englishman. In any event, this text is a special case.

I’m translating a selection of entries from Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone. This is a book all Italians know from school though almost nobody has read it in its entirety. The word zibaldone comes from the same root as zabaione and originally had the disparaging sense of a hotchpotch of food, or any mixture of heterogeneous elements, then a random collection of notes, a sort of diary, but of disconnected thoughts and reflections rather than accounts of events. Leopardi, born in 1798 and chiefly remembered for his lyric poetry, kept his Zibaldone from 1817 to 1832, putting together a total of 4,526 handwritten pages. Printed editions come in at something over two thousand pages, before the editor’s notes, which are usually many. There is general agreement that the Zibaldone is one of the richest mines of reflection on the modern human condition ever written. Schopenhauer in particular referred to Leopardi as “my spiritual brother” and saw much of his own thinking foreshadowed in Leopardi’s writings, though he had never seen the Zibaldone, which at the time was still unpublished. The selection I’m translating, put together by an Italian publisher, is made up of all the entries that Leopardi himself had flagged as having to do with feelings and emotions.

Immediately two problems arise as far as establishing a voice for translation. First, the book is almost two hundred years old; second, even if Leopardi might have imagined its being published, it was certainly not written or prepared for publication and is full of elisions, abbreviations, notes to himself, rewrites, and cross-references. In fact, on his death in 1837 the huge wad of pages was dumped in a trunk by his friend Antonio Ranieri and was not published in its entirety until 1900. So, do I write in modern prose, or in an early-nineteenth-century pastiche? Do I tidy up the very personal and unedited aspect of the text, or do I preserve those qualities, if I can?

The first question would be more tormented if I felt I had any ability to write an approximation of early-nineteenth-century English. I don’t. So that’s that. But I’m also suspicious of the very idea of such time parallels. English and Italian were in very different phases of development in the 1830s. Official English usage had largely been standardized in the previous century, and novelists like Dickens were preparing to launch a full-scale assault on that standardization. Not to mention the fact that American English already had a very different feel than British English. Meantime, Italian hardly existed as a national language. Only around 5 percent of Italians were actually speaking and reading Italian when the country achieved political unification in 1861. The literary language, dating back to Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio, was Tuscan, and this is the language Leopardi writes in, but without ever having been to Tuscany, at least when he began the Zibaldone. For him, it’s a very mental, cerebral language, learned above all from books. Does it make any sense to move from this to the language of Shelley and Byron, or Emerson and Hawthorne?

Even given these circumstances, Leopardi was special to the point of idiosyncrasy. Brought up in a provincial town in the Papal State of central Italy, then one of the most backward territories in Europe, son of an eccentric aristocrat fallen upon hard times, Leopardi was a prodigy who seems to have spent his whole childhood in his father’s remarkable library. By age ten he had mastered Latin, Greek, German, and French. Hebrew and English would soon follow. The Zibaldone is peppered with quotations from these languages, and they can be heard, particularly the Latin, here and there in his prose. Thinking aloud, as he seeks to turn intuition and reflection into both a history of the human psyche and a coherent but very private philosophy of nihilism (with his own shorthand terms, which sometimes don’t quite mean what standard usage would suppose them to mean), he latches on to any syntax that comes his way to keep the argument moving forward. Some sentences are monstrously long and bizarrely assembled, shifting from formal structures to the most flexible use of apposition, juxtaposition, inference, and implication. The one other translation of an “old” text I have done, Machiavelli’s The Prince, was a picnic by comparison.

Do I keep the long sentences, then, or break them up? Do I make the book more comprehensible for English readers than it is for present-day Italian readers (for whom footnotes giving a modern Italian paraphrase are often provided)? Above all, do I allow all those Latinisms to come through in the English, which would inevitably give the text a more formal, austere feel, or do I go for Anglo-Saxon monosyllables and modern phrasal verbs to get across the curiously excited intimacy of the text, like someone building up very complex, often provocative ideas as he goes along, with no one at hand to demand explanations or homogeneity or any sort of order?

Here, for example, is a brief and by Leopardi’s standards very simple entry on hope and suicide:

La speranza non abbandona mai l’uomo in quanto alla natura. Bensì in quanto alla ragione. Perciò parlano stoltamente quelli che dicono (gli autori della Morale universelle t.3.) che il suicidio non possa seguire senza una specie di pazzia, essendo impossibile senza questa il rinunziare alla speranza ec. Anzi tolti i sentimenti religiosi, è una felice e naturale, ma vera e continua pazzia, il seguitar sempre a sperare, e a vivere, ed è contrarissimo alla ragione, la quale ci mostra troppo chiaro che non v’è speranza nessuna per noi. [23. Luglio 1820.]

Do I write:

Hope never abandons man in relation to his nature, but in relation to his reason. So people (the authors of La morale universelle, vol. 3) are stupid when they say suicide can’t be committed without a kind of madness, it being impossible to renounce all hope without it. Actually, having set aside religious sentiments, always to go on hoping is a felicitous and natural, though true and continuous, madness and totally contrary to reason which shows too clearly that there is no hope for any of us. [July 23, 1820]

Or alternatively:

Men never lose hope in response to nature, but in response to reason. So people (the authors of the Morale universelle, vol. 3) who say no one can kill themselves without first sinking into madness, since in your right mind you never lose hope, have got it all wrong. Actually, leaving religious beliefs out of the equation, our going on hoping and living is a happy, natural, but also real and constant madness, anyway quite contrary to reason which all too clearly shows that there is no hope for any of us. [July 23, 1820]

Or some mixture of the two? The fact is that while I find it hard to imagine translating Dante’s famous Lasciate ogni speranza any other way than “Abandon all hope” (curiously introducing this rather heavy verb, abandon, where in the Italian we have a simple lasciare, to leave), here I just can’t imagine any reason for not reorganizing La speranza non abbandona mai l’uomo into “Man never loses hope.”

And if I leave dangling modifiers like “having set aside religious sentiments,” am I going to find an editor intervening as if I’d simply made a mistake? If I warn the editor that there will be dangling modifiers because Leopardi doesn’t worry about them, does that mean that I can then introduce them myself where Leopardi doesn’t?

All these decisions are further complicated by the fact that as I began my translation of two hundred pages of extracts, a team of seven translators, and two specialist editors, based in Birmingham, England, and largely sponsored by, of all people, Silvio Berlusconi, completed the first unabridged and fully annotated English edition of the Zibaldone, a simply enormous task. Their version had not yet been published at this point (by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States) but I had a proof copy. Do I look at it? Before I start? Or only after I finish, to check that at least semantically we have understood the same thing?

Well, certainly the latter and with due acknowledgement of course; there is absolutely no point in my publishing a version with mistakes that could have been avoided by checking my attempt against theirs, as quite possibly they will have been checking theirs against the recent French version. On the other hand, there is equally no point in my producing a translation that is merely an echo of theirs. I’d be wasting my time. This kind of translation just doesn’t pay enough for you not to need some other incentive: the crumb of glory that might accrue from producing a memorable Leopardi.

I decide to look at the Translator’s Note in the new edition, and perhaps a few parts of the translation that don’t correspond to the extracts I’m supposed to be translating, just to get a sense of how they’ve dealt with the various issues of style. Immediately I realize that these translators faced an even greater dilemma than I do. Seven translators and two editors will each have heard Leopardi’s highly idiosyncratic voice and responded to his singular project, his particular brand of despair, in his or her own way; but one can’t publish a text with seven (or nine) different voices. Strategies must have been agreed on, and a single editor must ultimately have gone through all two-thousand-plus pages to even things out. This means establishing a standard voice that all the translators can aim for and making certain decisions across the board, particularly with respect to key words, the overall register, lexical fields, and so on. In any event, after reading a few paragraphs of the translation itself I’m reassured that my work will not merely be a duplication of theirs, because I hear the text quite differently.

Here the reader will want me to characterize this difference, perhaps with a couple of quotations. And the temptation would be for me to show something I could criticize and to draw the reader onto my side to support some supposedly more attractive approach. But I don’t want to do that. I’m frankly in awe of the hugeness of this team’s accomplishment and aware that they have done things the only way they could to offer a complete translation of the whole text.

What I’d rather like to stress is my intense awareness, as I read their translation, of each reader’s response, which is the inevitable result, I suppose, of the individual background we bring to a book, all the reading and writing and listening and talking we’ve done in the past, our particular interests, beliefs, obsessions. I hear the writer in an English that has a completely different tone and feel than the one that emerges from my colleague’s collective efforts. It’s just a different man speaking to me—a different voice—though the Leopardi I hear is no more valid than the Leopardi—or Leopardis—they hear.

ECHOES FROM THE GLOOM

FIFTEEN YEARS OF diary entries. From 1817 to 1832. Some just a couple of lines. Some maybe a thousand words. At a rhythm ranging from two or three a day to one a month, or even less frequent. Suddenly, it occurs to me that if Leopardi were writing his Zibaldone today, it would most likely be a blog. Immediately, the thought threatens to affect the way I am translating the work. I am imagining the great diary as the Ziblogone—the big blog—launched from some eccentric little website in the hills of central Italy. I’m wondering if I should suggest to the publishers (Yale University Press) that they might put the entries up one a day on their site; they could use Leopardi’s own system of cross-referencing his ideas to create a series of links. Fantastic! Perhaps I could start embedding the links as I work. Why not?

It is impossible to translate a work from the past and not be influenced by what has happened since. Or at least to feel that influence, if only to resist it. I translated Machiavelli’s The Prince during the Iraq War. States invading distant foreign countries with authoritarian governments, Machiavelli warned, should think twice about disbanding the army and bureaucracy that opposed them, since these institutions may offer the best opportunity of maintaining law and order after the war is over. I remember wanting to translate this observation in such a way that even the obtuse Mr. Bush simply could not miss the point. If I could have sneaked in the word Iraq—or perhaps more feasibly shock and awe—I would have.

With Leopardi, there are no problems of this kind. Nor does he have the sort of reputation that might prompt a translator to work toward a text that people are expecting. Although Italians consider him one of their greatest writers, Leopardi is hardly known in the Anglo-Saxon world, apart from his poetry (Jonathan Galassi published a translation of Leopardi’s complete poetic works as recently as 2011). However, even in Italy there is a staunch resistance to his prose work and philosophical thinking. It is not merely because he is ferociously anticlerical that so many “polite” thinkers shy away, or seek to disqualify him—Mazzini and Garibaldi were if possible even more so, but remain popular for their political positivism. There is also his absolutely lucid and quite remorseless pessimism. Here he is, in a fairly light moment, talking about universal envy:

The sight of a happy man, full of some good luck he’s had, or even just moderately cheered by it, some promotion won or favor granted, etc., is almost always extremely irksome not just to people who are upset or depressed, or simply not prone to joyfulness, whether out of choice or habit, but even to people neither happy nor sad and not at all harmed or deflated by this success. Even when it comes to friends and close relatives it’s the same. So that the man who has reason to be happy will either have to hide his pleasure, or be casual and amusing about it, as if it hardly mattered, otherwise his presence and conversation will prove hateful and tiresome, even to people who ought to be happy about his good luck or who have no reason at all to be upset by it. This is what thoughtful, well-educated people do, people who know how to control themselves. What can all this mean but that our self-regard inevitably and without our noticing leads us to hate our fellow man? There’s no doubt that in situations like this, even the nicest people with nothing at all to gain or lose from another’s success, will need to get a grip on themselves and show a certain heroism to join in the partying, or merely not to feel depressed by it.

How does this cosmic pessimism, as it’s sometimes called, affect my translation? As one reads the Zibaldone, one can’t help feeling that one has heard its voice elsewhere. Either Leopardi has had more influence than I knew about, or others since have arrived at similar combinations of gloomy content and emphatic style. An Italian can’t help thinking of Giorgio Manganelli and Carlo Emilio Gadda. But the voices that for me are most constantly present, or nascent, in long sections of the Zibaldone, are Samuel Beckett’s (the novels), Emil Cioran’s, and, above all—indeed overwhelmingly, especially in the wilder riffs on the scandals of human behavior—Thomas Bernhard’s. This is Bernhard’s character Reger in Old Masters reflecting on the value of painting:

Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt — an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect — to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. These pictures are full of lies and falsehoods and full of hypocrisy and self-deception, there is nothing else in them if we disregard their often inspired artistry. All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man’s absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. That is what all these pictures express, this helplessness which, on the one hand, embarrasses the intellect and, on the other hand, bewilders the same intellect and moves it to tears, Reger said.

So, how far should I allow this perception of affinity to influence the way I translate? Can I prevent it? Am I just reading Bernhard back into Leopardi, or is the style, the attitude, really there in the Zibaldone? I’m sure it is. Beckett certainly had read Leopardi, as had Cioran, but Bernhard? Bernhard was influenced by Beckett, occasionally to the point of plagiarism, and by Cioran of course. And he would have read Schopenhauer, who felt a great affinity for Leopardi, though Schopenhauer couldn’t have read the Zibaldone itself, since it wasn’t published until long after his death. Still, the more I think about it the less it matters whether Bernhard had actually read Leopardi or not. What is at stake here is the way a certain optimistic Christian socialism that has dominated in the West, an attitude that relies heavily on denial—benign denial, one might call it—has naturally spawned its opposite in writers whose fierce rhetoric determinedly exposes every illusion.

If, as a translator, I focus entirely on the semantics and the order in which Leopardi’s sentences are set up—something that the translators of the complete Zibaldone, shortly to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, have tended to do, in understandable respect of the rigor of the writer’s thought—then that rhythm of scandal that I am hearing in his prose, the need to insist, against the grain of all conformity, that things really are as bad as they can be, the world a “solid nothing” and man, particularly modern man, “utterly beyond all hope”—will largely be lost. Because an insistent rhythm in English is not created the same way as it is in Italian, and because Leopardi’s sentences have such a determined flow, pushing forward impatiently, but remorselessly, with frequent repetitions and redundancies and constant lists that suddenly break off in edgy etceteras (my Word software counts 8,738 of them in the Zibaldone). Here he is talking about the near impossibility of sincere friendship between those of the same profession:

For example, accepted that perfect friendship, abstractly considered, is impossible and contradictory to human nature, between peers even ordinary friendship becomes extremely difficult, rare and inconstant, etc. Schiller, a man of great feeling, was hostile to Goethe (since not only are people of the same profession not friends with each other, or less friendly, but there is actually more hatred between them than between others who are not in the same circumstances) etc. etc. etc.

As I see it, there would be little point in getting the semantics absolutely right, and even readable, if one failed to convey this emotive, Bernhardesque urgency; for, crucially, the emphatic rhythm—the hyperbole and insistence with which the pessimism is delivered—both increases its impact, and becomes its consolation, almost its comedy. Leopardi is not unaware of the perverse pleasure one can take in having demonstrated how bad things are. One of the passages that most gets me thinking of Bernhard, and resisting him, begins with a quote from the Aeneid where Virgil has Queen Dido declaring she will die unavenged, but is happy to die all the same. Leopardi reflects:

Here Virgil wanted to get across (and it’s a deep, subtle sentiment, worthy of a man who knew the human heart and had experience of passion and tragedy) the pleasure the mind takes in dwelling on its downfall, its adversities, then picturing them for itself, not just intensely, but minutely, intimately, completely; in exaggerating them even, if it can (and if it can, it certainly will), in recognizing, or imagining, but definitely in persuading itself and making absolutely sure it persuades itself, beyond any doubt, that these adversities are extreme, endless, boundless, irremediable, unstoppable, beyond any redress, or any possible consolation, bereft of any circumstance that might lighten them; in short in seeing and intensely feeling that its own personal tragedy is truly immense and perfect and as complete as it could be in all its parts, and that every door towards hope and consolation of any kind has been shut off and locked tight, so that now he is quite alone with his tragedy, all of it. These are feelings that come in moments of intense desperation as one savors the fleeting comfort of tears (when you take pleasure supposing yourself as unhappy as you can ever be), sometimes even at the first moment, the first emotion, on hearing the news, etc., that spells disaster, etc.

What Leopardi has that Bernhard hasn’t is the glorious understatement of that final etcetera, which diminishes the particular drama, and dramatically worsens the human plight.

MY NOVEL, THEIR CULTURE

HOW SHOULD A novelist feel on seeing his work translated, completely, into not just another medium, but also another culture?

Recently, I opened a DVD package with the title Stille (Silence), put it into my computer, and sat down to watch. Actually, I had received this DVD a month earlier. It is an Austrian film production of my novel Cleaver. I did not look at it at once because I was in denial. I have been generously paid for the rights to film, I am delighted it has been made and grateful to the producer for pushing it through, but Cleaver was written in English and has an English hero from a specific milieu—a journalist and documentary filmmaker who, as the book opens, has carried out, for the BBC, a destructive interview of an American president easily recognizable as George Bush.

It would be nice (for me) to have an English or American film adaptation of the book—or at least a version in the English language. But the DVD was sent to me in German with no subtitles, and my German isn’t great. That is my fault, of course, not the producer’s. It would make no sense for the Austrian production company to dub or subtitle the film, if it doesn’t have a potential English-language buyer. Its target market is German national TV.

The idea of the novel is simple: Harold Cleaver, sensual, in his fifties, an overweight womanizer, witty and worldly-wise, at the top of his journalistic game, is profoundly shocked by a novelized family biography written by his son, Alex, which reveals him, Cleaver, as a bully, a megalomaniac, utterly insensitive to his partner, the boy’s mother, and largely responsible for the death of Angela, Alex’s talented rock-singer sister. Cleaver’s ire and dismay on reading this are partly responsible for the ferocity of his interview with the US president, but also his decision, immediately afterward, on the opening page of the novel, to abandon London, his family, journalism, everything he knows, and escape to a place where he, a great communicator, can’t speak to anyone and where no one will recognize him: the Italian South Tyrol.

Living in Verona, I am close to South Tyrol, which has always been a holiday destination for me; after thirty years here I know it well. In the high Alpine valleys, its sparse population speaks a German dialect that even many Germans and Austrians find hard to understand. On arrival Cleaver proceeds to look for a place, as he puts it, above the noise line, high up in the mountains, where there is no reception for his cell phone, no electricity, no means of communication at all. He wants to cut himself off, perhaps to die. Eventually, he rents a tiny hut, Rosenkrantzhof, his only contact a peasant family with whom he has to communicate in sign language. Alone in the vast alpine emptiness, he discovers that the mind grows louder and more frightening when the world around is silent. As winter deepens and physical survival becomes an issue, Cleaver cannot free himself from an interminable, mentally exhausting quarrel with his son’s book, and a growing awareness of how completely his main life choices, indeed his entire consciousness, have been driven by the feverish media environment he lived in, a certain way of thinking, talking, and exhibiting oneself, with which we are all familiar.

In the film everything is rearranged. Rightly so. Film must use different tools to unpack the same can of worms. The opening image, as the titles go up, is a mountain swept by a blizzard. A figure emerges from a hut on an exposed ridge and trudges, staggers into snowdrifts, falls, and lies still. This scene anticipates the story’s climax when Cleaver almost perishes in the snow. A voiceover cuts in; it is the son narrating from his book. However, my eye was captured by the long list of German names appearing on the screen: Jan Fedder, Iris Berben, Florian Bartholomäi, Anna Fischer. And then, very much the odd man out, Tim Parks. Gratifying, but displaced. I’m aware of course that it is the novel’s setting in a German-speaking world, in a territory that was once an Austrian possession, that has made it possible for the Austrian producer to raise the necessary funds to make the film. By lucky accident my setting fits in perfectly with certain Austrian, German, and European regulations for obtaining public finance for filmmaking.

Cut to Cleaver as TV talk-show host. He is a German Cleaver. German face—the jowls, the hairstyle—German suit, German body language, and behind him one of those urban backdrops they like to put behind TV announcers to suggest that they are in the center of urban bustle and not buried deep in the stale corridors of a TV studio. The backdrop is a broad canal, or waterway, at night, with handsome, brightly lit white buildings on either side, monuments, distant traffic, cafés. The German or Austrian viewer will doubtless know where this is. Vienna perhaps? Or Berlin? Or Hamburg? I just don’t know. But immediately I feel they have done the right thing, Germanizing everything. The German-speaking audience must recognize the media world that the German Cleaver operates in, the world they see on their news programs every night. But I realize that even if they dub or subtitle the film, my own English friends will not have the same sense of immersion they would get if the backdrop were London, the people Londoners.

I wonder if this Cleaver has an Austrian accent. Surely not, if the Austrians are aiming at German TV. I put the actor’s name in Google and find he is from Hamburg. I wonder why they have kept the name Cleaver, pronounced exactly as in the English, but now spelt Cliewer, in line with German phonetics, and transformed into Harry Cliewer rather than the more sober, at least in English, Harold Cleaver. Though I chose it spontaneously, instinctively, the word/name Cleaver came to be important for me as I progressed with the novel for its antithetical semantic energies, the idea of cleaving to someone (in marriage, in oneness), and splitting something away from something else: Is Cleaver irreversibly attached to his family and milieu or can he really split away from them and become someone new and different? Is the mind free to leave the culture that formed it? Those were the thoughts going through my mind as I described his flight, then his disappointment that moving away has only intensified his mental belonging. The cover to the DVD shows Cliewer face-on raising an axe above his head, but the connection with his name—axe, cleaver—is lost, and anyway the German title for the printed novel is Stille, silence.

Five minutes in and here comes the big scene with George Bush, shortly before the 2004 election. (As I wrote the book I wasn’t sure whether Bush would be re-elected or not; nor was Cleaver as he escaped the Tyrol—it’s one of the things he thinks about in his isolation.) But no, the film doesn’t give us the American president. It would hardly be conceivable that the American president would submit to an interview on the German Harry Cliewer Show, as he might perhaps submit to the most senior BBC journalist on a program with the more serious name of Crossfire. Through the clanking of my rusty German, I appreciate that this villain is a banker. The film has been updated and localized to bring us to the recent European banking crisis and the Euro emergency. This is very smart. German viewers will appreciate Cliewer’s kamikaze courage in taking on the head of the Bundesbank—is that who he is?—in what is to be his last interview. Cleaver—sorry, Cliewer (I have checked the name in German dictionary to see if it exists as a word, but there is no trace of it) throws down a handful of five-hundred-euro notes on his desk and makes some insulting remark, at which the banker, who clearly expected an easier ride, stands up and stalks out in fury.

I am struck by this thought: had the movie been made by a British or American company and the original scenario—Cleaver versus Bush—been retained, or perhaps moved to an American rather than British setting, European viewers would have had no problem picking up a London or, say, Washington backdrop. They would immediately have recognized the American president and appreciated what was at stake. All over the world, people have seen so many American and British movies that even the milieu would have been superficially familiar. Many of them would have had no problem watching the movie in English, and watching a movie in a foreign language always leaves one feeling pleased with oneself for having acquired that language. In other words, the simple fact that I’m British, from London, with a familiarity with that milieu—Cleaver himself is based on a London journalist I know well—gave my novel a more global potential. It could have worked in Germany without these changes.

However, in order to get public funding, the Austrian filmmakers had to set the work in German-speaking Europe, indeed largely in the Tyrol (the Austrian, not the Italian Tyrol). And anyway they no doubt and very rightly feel far more at home making the work local and specific to their community, since as I have said it is to be broadcast on TV and not, so far as I know, released in cinemas around the world. As a result they have made a product that even if dubbed would not so easily appeal to an international market. My feeling is that the producers have done absolutely the right thing both aesthetically and given the production situation in which they must operate. But the megalomaniac Parks would have preferred his name in cinemas across the globe.

The strangest transformation, though, comes with the Tyrol. The protagonist of the novel is a man from a familiar, highly nuanced London setting, the center, as the British see it, of Anglo-Saxon news media—London interiors, London furniture, recognizably London banter. He is shifted to a place that is essentially, nowhere, a mountain waste, in late fall, people who are quite incomprehensible (the novel—a medium made up of words—has unexplained lines in South Tyrolese dialect); interiors that are generically antique, peasant, and Teutonic. It’s so disconnected from everything Cleaver knows that he struggles to see it as anything but caricature, struggles to understand that the few people he meets are indeed real people with real lives who, despite not being at the center of the media world, deserve attention and respect.

Instead and inevitably, for German and Austrian viewers, the Alps, the Tyrol are very much part of their familiar world and mental landscape. Cliewer has no trouble understanding people there, and indeed barely a day or two after his arrival, a local newspaper has his photo on the front page, so everyone recognizes him. This introduces whole areas of reflection and perhaps significant German material that could not be in my book. This may make the film a richer experience for the German public, at least in this sense, though it entirely sacrifices the drama of Cleaver’s not only going somewhere very remote, but above all divesting himself of his main strength, his language.

I watch the film unfold with a mixture of admiration, bewilderment, and, for purely selfish and private reasons, disappointment. My potentially global work has been made local. It is now locked into Germanic culture. It portrays the German media world, a distinctly German sensuality, a concrete Tyrolese. Well, haven’t I written frequently in admiration of the artist happy to engage with his local community and ignore the global? Indeed I have. But this local is not my local. And of course, thanks to the complex laws of film rights and copyright, something else I have recently expressed a few opinions about, it will now not be easy for English or American producers to make their own version of the film. Like it or not, Cleaver, Cleaver, really has expatriated. He’s Cliewer now.