Some years ago, to merely serve my slave tributes to one of my university
Professors of English Literature I agreed at translating for him (he was
merely interested in writing a preface to this edition) a renewed version
of Eliot’s Idea of a Christian Society.
He and the publishers game me an old translation of Eliot’s essay back
from the Fifties, and asked me to renew the language and make it
acceptable to the readership of the Nineties.
At a preliminary reading it was obvious that the text contained idioms and
expressions by that time surpassed which made the text sound already
updated. So I tried to modernize its register to refresh it.
Yet, now I think that it was a mistake to hope that the audience would
have been attracted by those extreme conservative views of Eliot by simply
merely modernizing the language in which he expressed those vies.
I now understand that Eliot’s conservative outlook on the role of
literature in society should be kept intact in translation and enjoyed in
the odd style of language he himself employed which fully conveys not only
his personal preconceptions but the preconceptions (misogynist, racists)
of the entire Western World.
If it is true that a translation manages to be in touch with a given
text's original mode by the translatability of the original mode's
linguistic medium (English? easy enough, since Italian and English make
almost literary superimpositions, and at all level almost!) and conceptual
translability of its content (the Christian faith), then this new Eliot's
translation of mine would have had an aim, a success.
But, no, fortunately, over here, Eliot's ideological content with its
emphasis on such a bunch of conservative ethical and religious values, has
totally lost its strength and meaningful ground, in spite of the presence
of the Vatican, and maybe specifically by virtue of this presence.
Anyhow, I am leaving to better qualified voices on Eliot the task of
commenting further these problems.
Erminia
|