Translating Style: The English Modernists and Their Italian Translations [Hardcover]

Tim Parks (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0304700983 | ISBN-13: 978-0304700981 | Publication Date: July 1997

A work of literary criticism, this text provides both an analysis of the literary style of some of the 20th century's leading writers as well as an insight into the art of translation. Tim Parks is a novelist and professional translator and seeks to show through detailed analysis what it really means to translate literary style. Combining literary and linguistic approaches, the book proceeds, through a series of interconnected chapters, to analyze Italian translations of the works of Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. The concluding chapter which examines six passages in English and Italian without stating at the outset which is the original language. The aim is to show how a study of the differences between the two texts leads very quickly to an awareness of which was the original and of what was the essential problem it posed for the translator. Authors presented in the text include: Hemingway, Rosetta Loy, Antonio Tabucchi, Jack Kerouac, Alberto Moravia and Roberto Calasso. The aim of the book is to savour the extent to which any text is driven by the language in which it is written, even when it departs from standard usage, when it seeks to achieve the status of literature.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Cassell (July 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0304700983
• ISBN-13: 978-0304700981
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,478,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Act of Translating, October 24, 2001

By 

Darth Vader (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Translating Style: The English Modernists and Their Italian Translations (Paperback)

This book is an interesting presentation of the problems of literary prose translation, specifically those that occur in translations into Italian of selected texts of English literature (Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Pym, Green). Sometimes I wanted to throw up my hands at the lack of "political correctness" in the book, since the argument harps upon the various inadequacies of the Italian language in capturing the style of literary English. But scholarly balance is not the author's aim. Rather, he undertakes to write about translation problems and does so in a domain that he unmistakeably has a special affection for, namely English literature of the modern period. The side-by-side comparisons of English originals with their Italian translations are a wonderful example of attentive close reading. Following an introduction to the rhetorical differences between written English and written Italian, the first two single-author chapters are excellent. Building on a wealth of examples, Parks shows Lawrence's Italian translator alternately coping with and fleeing from the verbal disjointings of "Women in Love." In the case of Joyce's "The Dead," the translator is masterly, but the fundamental dissimilarities between English and Italian prevent an effectual translation of Joyce's tone.
In the next couple of chapters Parks sometimes resorts to slogans: "Mrs. Dalloway" is an "infinitely complex book"; Beckett is an "exceptional linguist." The last two writers discussed, Pym and Green, are presented as peripheral and difficult cases. There is a final chapter containing passages of various origin, some of them Italian, some English. The chapter's title, "Seen from Both Sides...," does suggest a concluding redress of scholarly imbalance, but the aim turns out to be a solicitation of the reader's guesses as to which of a pair of passages is the original and which the translation. This sort of discussion might attract readers interested in the coding aspect of language, but I found it unsatisfying because the passages are not illuminated by the rhetorical or literary-historical observations that enliven the introduction or the discussions of individual authors. But certainly at least the first half or so of the book recommends itself strongly to students of literature and translation and to others who take literary art seriously.