Dear all,

Apologies for the late letter this week. Last night was the end to a role-playing game campaign I’d been running since about March, and I spent all my time and energy this week worrying about sticking the landing. It is also why this letter is a little less focused than usual. I beg your indulgence on this matter.

Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities - my favourite book of all time - describes the city Ipazia thus:

Di tutti i cambiamenti di lingua che deve affrontare il viaggiatore in terre lontane, nessuno uguaglia quello che lo attende nella città di Ipazia, perché non riguarda le parole ma le cose.

William Weaver’s translation, which is the one I am familiar with, describes the city Hypatia like this:

Of all the changes of language a traveller in distant lands must face, none equals that which awaits him in the city of Hypatia, because the change regards not words, but things.

I have always wanted to learn Italian, which shares a strange kinship with my mother tongue Telugu. They both use words that end in vowels, rather than consonants. I wanted to learn it before I read Invisible Cities. But Invisible Cities asked me a question I find difficult to answer - what if the translated text has impressed itself too indelibly into my soul?

Kate Briggs, in her novel This Little Art, points out that every single word of every single translation has been handled by a translator. We think of translation as a clear glass pane, and the success of translating as the success of that clarity. If that pane were marked and mottled, if it were green or brown rather than clear, the light that passes through it is changed. But in fact every translation changes the text. It must. Otherwise the text remains in the language in which it was written.

Hypatia, only one of Calvino’s invisible cities, asks a different question. How can language survive changes in the things it describes? When meaning and word disconnect and reconnect in ways that are not clear to us, even though we are the people disconnecting and reconnecting?

Ipazia says:

Non c’è linguaggio senza inganno.

Hypatia says:

There is no language without deceit.

I wonder even about the choice to change the name of the city from Ipazia to Hypatia. I know nothing about this choice. I have no insight into why Calvino picked the former, why Weaver felt it was important to change it to the latter.

But I know that the change matters, because it seems the two versions of the texts themselves lie about the name of the city when compared to each other. Translation is the art of that change. And it is a slippery art indeed.

So much of Invisible Cities is about language, images, symbols. It is about the impossibility of Marco Polo sharing with Kublai Khan the wonders of his empire without ever having to leave his hammock. So why does he persist? For the same reason that I continue to read translations, knowing that now I must attempt two understandings: one of the text, and the other of the way that the text was made into a language I know.

What makes a ‘good’ translation? I sure as hell don’t know. I have tried my hand at a few, usually Telugu poetry. I do not claim to be a good enough poet or translator to really do justice to it, but sometimes one wants to try anyway. What I find more than anything is that replicating the feeling that the poem elicits seems quite a different endeavour to replicating the visual imagery.

Yet when the translation works, it strikes true. What is the process by which this striking occurs? It seems impenetrable to me except to say that when it does, I recognise it.

Next week, why I was late this week and what role-playing games did for me during Covid.

Cheers,

mvs

PS The Swedish translator of Lord of the Rings, Åke Ohlmarks, translated a key scene in the Return of the King incorrectly by attributing the death of the Witch-King of Angmar to Merry rather than Eowyn. He later blamed the burning down of his house on Tolkien fans who were secretly practicing black magic and Nazi occultism. Fun fact!