A Note from the Translator
Approaching a text as rich and accomplished as Maddalena Vaglio Tanet’s first novel is a daunting prospect. It is a work of fiction rather than a poem, yet Tanet is also acutely alive to poetry. The two poems of the epigraph, by Amelia Rosselli and Azzurra D’Agostino, brilliantly capture the mood of the novel, and poetry is woven throughout the book in the form of Silvia’s hallucinatory reveries, exchanges between Gianni and Martino on John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘Glory be to god for dappled things/For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow’), marching songs remembered from the war, verse quotations from fairy tales, and in the work of the Piedmontese poet Angelo Brofferio, whose dialect poems Silvia shares with her grateful student Giovanna. Nearly every chapter in Dear Teacher ends with a poetic observation, and the opening line of the novel is itself infused with a lilting rhythm.
Poetry is notoriously difficult to parse in one’s own language, let alone someone else’s. Slippery pronoun referents (often though not always intentional), subtle internal rhymes, idiosyncratic rhythms, and a personal lexicon are all part of a writer’s batterie de cuisine. Added to that, Italian is a musical language whose beauty is enhanced through the insistent repetition of sounds and ideas in a way that English is not. On the contrary: from an early age, English speakers are taught to avoid repetition, to pare down their formal writing, clean it all up. So one of the greatest challenges of translating from the Italian—yet surprisingly one of the most enjoyable—is to find a way of anglicising these emphases and repetitions without sacrificing their intrinsic rhythm and beauty: to preserve the poetry inherent in the prose.
If poetry is a more or less obvious stumbling block, everyday diction in Italian is no less challenging to translate, since idioms in any foreign language must be learned and cannot simply be translated literally, even if doing so results in a string of constituent words that make a certain linguistic sense. In the gorgeous closing lines of Chapter 42:
A family of roe deer are sitting on their haunches among the cyclamen in the small glade, but when one of them scents [Silvia’s] presence
and pricks up its ears, the others rise in unison and flee pancia a terra [as fast as they can].
A literal translation would render this phrase as ‘flee, stomachs to the ground’, which is confusing to say the least. The idiom, however, conveys the idea that the deer are running so fast that their bellies almost seem to touch the earth. None of the many optional idioms in English reflects the poetry of Tanet’s writing about nature in the right way.
It is as important for a translator to capture voice and tone in a novel as it is for the author to establish them in the first place. In Dear Teacher, there are almost as many different voices as there are characters, and because Tanet makes ample use of free indirect style, there were numerous registers to reproduce, ranging from that of the curious, adventurous, and displaced ten-year-old boy, Martino, to those of the middle-aged curmudgeon Anselmo and the feverish visions of the starving teacher, Silvia. Given the setting in the 1970s, it was also important to consider the appropriateness of the vocabulary used in the translation alongside the inevitable issues of class and gender, all of which have an impact on speech.
Translation is a multilayered task which starts with basic semantics. But in the end, it is really about listening. A translator needs a good ear, not just for the music of the original text but for that of her own, as well: for the respective rhythms of each, since they often differ wildly, and both must make their own kind of poetry. I hope that this English version of Dear Teacher succeeds in channelling something of the power and beauty of the Italian original.
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