‘Il canto di Ulisse’ describes a translation process like no other. Absent are the quiet room, the pen, paper, keyboard, screen, dictionary that nowadays usually accompany the translator’s work. Instead, there are two friends walking in the fresh air, momentarily released from labour. Absent, moreover, are the words on the page to be translated, that comforting object that is at once static and mutable, authoritative and open-ended. Instead, there is flawed memory, conversation, communion. The translation that happens in the canto (named for an act of song, a bodily, expressive, fleeting thing) has other priorities, other aims, other strengths at hand. It is first and foremost a translation between and of persons; a carrying across (trans-latio) of one self to another. Like the Dantean text it translates, it enacts a going-beyond the limits, a desperate striving for liberty and fully lived humanity, but it is a liberty of mind, of language, and not of body.
The impetus for the translation that takes place in the canto has desire at its core. A desire to learn, a desire to seize a moment of liberty, to communicate, to be understood, to go beyond the awful limits of the present time and place. The shared desiring of Primo and Jean (Jean who, unlike Ulysses, ‘non trascurava di mantenere rapporti umani’, as Levi comments earlier in the chapter) pushes the translation forwards despite its shortcomings in terms of accuracy or creativity (it is ‘scialba’, ‘pedestre’). Though words might be forgotten, something fundamental of the absent Dantean text is expressed in this urgent desiring – Ulysses’ narrative of unquenchable desire, striving, desperate: ‘il messaggio’ comes through.
Perhaps the translation is so full of feeling because the text to be translated is not on the page, an object, but is an integrated part of Primo’s memory. He is not translating Dante, he is translating his memory of Dante, Dante learned and remembered in who-knows-what circumstances - at home, at school - with who-knows-what feelings and associations. A text learned a world away from where he is. And yet his current situation makes the (memory) text take on meaning it did not have before. The gradually increasing pace of the narrative and the shift from past to present tense amplifies the sense of urgency; he is changing, the text is changing, everything is happening now, all made possible by the openhearted interlocutor Jean, who experiences with him. The intimacy of this translation act is breathtaking. Unlike other acts of translation that have an object which is (to varying degrees) fixed, external, safe, a book we can close at the end of the day, here the object is within, maddeningly intangible, bearing with itself not a third party’s words to be ‘interpreted’, but those words passed through the translator’s own living memory. The person of Primo through Dante is the source text.
As Alexander has pointed out in relation to this chapter, ‘all translations […] bear the imprint of the moment’ (Alexander 2007, 160). The physical circumstances of this act of translation are tangible (‘gradevole marcia’, ‘aria fresca’), manifesting the momentary liberty of the participants (‘mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’). I would add to this: not only is the moment imprinted on the translation but the persons involved in it. The canto manifests in an extreme way the fact that ‘translators are never […] neutral, impersonal transferring devices. Translators’ personal experiences – emotions, motivations, attitudes, association […] are indispensable’ (Robinson 1991, 260). In the canto, the personal experiences of the translator are not only indispensable, they are inescapable, they are the text itself.
The meaning of the text is generated in the willing coming together of the two friends, Primo and Jean. The text’s ‘message’ is not something external but emerges from their lives; meaning is found in the interpersonal act of translation itself, ‘at the heart of [which] is recovery’ (Woods 2014, 3). Primo and Jean are seeking to recover something of themselves in this stolen, fleeting translational exchange. Where words fail, Primo relies on Jean’s experience to fill in the gaps (‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire’). But it is the present moment and the people they are now that makes possible a new reading, a new translation of the Dantean lines filled with revelation, empathy, resonance: ‘Dovevo venire in Lager per accorgermi’. It is their present state as ‘uomini in travaglio’ that enables Jean to ‘receive the message’ of the text, which is as much Primo’s life as it is Dante’s words.
We do not hear the ‘dull’ (‘scialba’) translation that is produced in this encounter between the friends. It does not exist, only their living of the process of translating is recorded. The production of an object was never the aim of the encounter or the subsequent narrative Levi weaves around it. We are left with a message which, though composed of words, expresses the ineffable.
RC