https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6484-550X
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essays reflects on the philosophy and ideology underlying the practice of translaTING Il pensiero meridiano by Italian sociologist Franco Cassano. II pensiero meridiano is a foundational text to understand the culture of deliberate thinking that the author suggests is characteristic of a ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘Southern’ perspective on the world, which he sets counter to the Neoliberal globalizing modes of thinking of Western capitalism. I take as my starting point the terms misura (moderation, measure) and dismisura (lack of moderation, excess), that have been translated in multiple ways in the English text; and I explore how, precisely because Cassano’s book uses the terms to highlight ‘tensions of opposite signs, those of earth and sea’ (which he also uses to compare those of Western capitalism and Southern resistance), they are polyvalent and express more than a single interpretive key in which to read them. As such they embolden the translator to ‘play around’ and transform them in the target text, so that the translator can transfer the ideological fluidity of the original in a textual fluidity that defamiliarizes the target language readers, forcing them to appreciate the original’s message in English even from the textual standpoint.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Franco Cassano. Il pensiero meridiano (Bari: Laterza, Citation1996). We translated four additional essays: ‘L’europa e il pensiero meridiano’ and ‘Sapere cardinale,’ which were originally published in Paeninsula. L’Italia da ritrovare (Bari: Laterza, Citation1998); ‘Contro tutti i fondamentalismi. Il nuovo Mediterraneo’ from Rappresentare il Mediterraneo. Lo sguardo italiano (written with Vincenzo Consolo, Messina: Mesogea, Citation2000); and ‘Pensare il Mediterraneo,’ which was written in Italian by Cassano, specifically for this translation.
2. A search on Google Scholar shows it to have been cited more than forty times and, according to World Cat, the volume has been purchased by more than 600 libraries worldwide (as of May 2017). Though its reach might seem mostly confined to academic venues, the hope of both publisher and translator is that it might be readily available to a broader public so as to not confine its reach to traditional intellectual circles. Indeed, the desire to engage a diverse audience affected some of our overall translation strategies, because it led us to mix different translation practices such as domestication and foreignizations, as evidenced in the remainder of the article.
3. Verdicchio (Citation2014, 207).
4. Piciché (Citation2014, e1-3).
5. Simon (Citation1996, 16). This presence can occur visually, by adding lines of text where none exist in the original; and contextually, by filling out the main text with the kind of ‘midrashic’ exegesis that clarifies and interprets for the readers what the text loses culturally in its movement to the target language. This matter will be reprised later in this essay.
6. Ferme (Citation2013, 18–20).
7. Cassano (Citation2012, 2–3).
8. Toury (Citation1995). Toury has been at the forefront in explaining that translations matter, and are transformative, much more in the target culture, since they can introduce variance by their mere thematic and linguistic schemes, and because these linguistic schemes, especially when extraneous to the target language, can cause disruptions and rearrangements that force a rethinking of the latter’s schemata. Also, in a more subversive mode, again, Gideon Toury, ‘Cultural Planning and Translation,’ in Anovar/Anosar: Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación, eds. Alberto Álverez Lugrís and Anxo Fernández Ocampo (Vigo: Servicio de Publicións da Universidade de Vigo, Citation1999).
9. Pierre Bourdieu. The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia UP, Citation1993).
10. Ferme (Citation2007, 88–112).
11. Karamanjan (Citation2002). In the article, Karamanjan differentiates between three types of culture (‘the “personal,” whereby we as individuals think and function as such; the “collective,” whereby we function in a social context; and the “expressive,” whereby society expresses itself’), and claims that those who are bicultural and multicultural process the linguistic transactions of translation at a higher level than those who are not, because they are more likely to process the transcoding of text not merely at the level of ‘language transfer,’ but by focusing on its integration with cultural transpositions that address all three levels.
12. Elsewhere and with regard to a different model, I have engaged in the problematic relationship between translation models based on theoretical assumptions based in the aesthetics of defamiliarization prevalent in the Anglo-American academy (see following note for two titles by Lawrence Venuti), and market pressures and audiences based in the reality of readership in cultural contexts that differ vastly from those in which the theoretical models originate (Tradurre è tradire, especially Chapter 2, where I discuss the translation market of translation under Fascism).
13. Venuti (Citation1995). The concept of defamiliarization and the practice of using marginal linguistic registers in translation pervade Venuti’s work. In addition to The Translator’s Invisibility, these ideas can be found in, Rethinking Translation (London: Routledge, Citation1992), The Scandals of Translation (London: Routledge, Citation1998), and the more recent Translation Changes Everything (London: Routledge, Citation2013). Throughout, Venuti confronts the editorial practices of Anglo-American publishers, which are guilty of homogenizing language in foreign texts translated into English. Indeed, he believes that most publishing houses elide linguistic and cultural otherness in favor of a standardization and homologation of language caused by capitalistic motives that dominate the production and sales interests of these companies.
14. Camus (Citation1951). The reference was to the last section of the book titled in French ‘La pensée de Midi’ (and translated in English as ‘Thought at the Meridian’). For Camus, even though ‘meridian thought’ foreshadows Cassano’s own understanding of Mediterranean ‘measure,’ it was not related to geo-political transformations brought forth by Western capitalism, but was a thought of resistance to the nihilistic undercurrents coursing through early 20th-century philosophical thought.
15. Cassano, Southern Thought, 41–42.
16. This was Cassano’s first response when I visited him in Bari in the summer of 2009. Though he eventually agreed to some of my arguments, it did not quite convince him, as proven by a conversation I had with Professor Claudio Fogu in Berkeley, CA in March 2013 (after the publication of the translation), during the conference of the California Interdisciplinary Consortium of Italian Studies (CICIS) titled “All Things Trans-“ (March, 8–9, 2013). Fogu asked me how come Norma Bouchard and I had translated misura with a plethora of terms, because he had asked the same question of Cassano, and the latter had suggested he himself did not remember the original explanation, and attributed it to a not-so-clear translators’ choice. My response to Fogu and Cassano himself presented in nuce many of the thoughts that I have elaborated in this essay.
17. Franco Cassano, ‘Il mondo visto dal Sud,’ keynote address, American Association of Italian Studies Conference, Eugene, OR, April 13th, 2013, Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme translators. The text remains unpublished in English. Professor Massimo Lollini published a summary of the presentation, and of the roundtable that followed, in the essay ‘Il mondo visto dal Sud,’ California Italian Studies Journal 4 (Citation2013), 2 (Spring).
18. Derrida (Citation1981) 20.
19. Besides in Positions, Derrida wrote extensively on translation and its impossibilities, since he considered the practice of translation fundamental for his deconstruction theories. Other important texts by the French philosopher in this sense are ‘Des Tours de Babel’ (which was translated with the same title into English and published in Joseph Graham’s Difference in Translation); and The Ear of the Other: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida.
20. Cassano, Southern Thought, 52–56, 144–149.
21. Dryden (Citation1992), 26. Here I am paraphrasing Dryden’s oft-repeated statement, which he used to explain his approach to translating Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.’. It reflects one of the main tenets in translation theory, domestication, which suggests that texts should allow their target language readership the ease of familiarity with the ideas and thoughts exposed in the text.
22. This is a play of words on the title of a text that is important for Cassano’s analysis, Zygmunt Bauman’s Globalization. Liquid Modernity. In it, Bauman suggests that ‘liquid modernity’ in its fluid movement through cultural, political, and historical barriers, is one of the fundamental principles of globalization and of its tranformation of our contemporary world.
23. Our ability to impose the philosophical fluidity of multiple English words onto the original’s univocal term raises the question about the translator’s ‘authority’ in negotiating her presence in the text. This issue was raised by one of the reviewers of this article, and it is an extremely valid one. Had Norma or I not had a previous, extended relationship with Cassano, and the ‘authority’ derived us from our presence as scholars in Mediterranean Studies in the United States and from Cassano’s trust in our ability to understand his text, our subversive move might not have been endorsed by Cassano himself or the publisher. While exploring this issue extends beyond the scope of this essay, it is one that refers us back to the balancing of theoretical models and practical experiences within the cultural field of translation production to which I have referred at times in this text.
24. Conversely, there are texts where what I discussed here does not apply, which require different methodological approaches (especially when dictated by practical needs).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Valerio Ferme
Valerio Ferme is Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Northern Arizona University. He grew up in Italy and moved to the United States for his postsecondary education. He has degrees from Brown University in Biology and Religious Studies; two masters in Italian and Comparative Literature from Indiana University, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1998 he moved to the University of Colorado as a professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, and affiliate in Film Studies, Jewish Studies, the Mediterranean Studies Group, and the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, before becoming the divisional dean for the Arts and Humanities. In 2017, he was hired by Northern Arizona University to become its Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. He has published two single-authored books of criticism: Tradurre è tradire. La traduzione come sovversione culturale sotto il fascismo (Ravenna: Longo, 2002), and Women, Enjoyment, and the Defense of Virtue in Boccaccio’s Decameron (New York: Palgrave, 2015). He also has published one co-authored book of criticism (Italy and the Mediterranean in the Post-Cold War Era, New York: Palgrave, 2013 with Norma Bouchard); one bilingual book of poetry (Diario Italo-Americano, Pescara: Tracce, 1996); two co-edited volumes (From Otium to Occupatio in Italian Culture, Chapel Hill: Annali d’Italianistica, 2014; and Mediterranean Encounters in the City, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015); one co-translated volume (Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean, New York: Fordham UP, 2012), and over 50 between articles and reviews.