ROME — When I am in charge of a translation, the first question I ask myself is not about the text itself, but how to approach the work.
For example, when I embarked on translating Travels in the Congo, the travel diary by French author André Gide, I decided to experiment with an idea I had had for some time: to try and reproduce the original French version in Italian. The book's language was sometimes contracted and fragmentary, sometimes stretched out into lyrical slashes or even soaring in invective. So my mission was difficult: I needed not only to translate it in the most faithful way possible, but in the most corresponding way too, almost as if I was copying it, creating an imitation rather than a translation.
This experiment — of course it will be the readers who will assess how successful it was — came to me out of a growing dissatisfaction with the fact that good, even excellent translations may completely lose the syntactic, grammatical relationship to the original version.
I love languages both for their lexicon than for their structure, for the way they order words in a precise sequence. The notion that a translated text should not "feel" translated, but on the contrary it should turn out as if it had been written in the target language in the first place, is useful for those who translate a lot and work with books of wide circulation. When dealing with refined and rare texts, in my opinion, it is necessary to aim for a more radical approach.
Marco Polo's story
And here we come to Marco Polo's Il Milione (The Million), better known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo, which I have recently translated into modern Italian, a language that even fifteen-year-olds can read.
Il Milione (according to the most credited hypothesis, the title derives from Emilione, the nickname of the Polo family) was penned by Rustichello da Pisa, a modest 13th-century novelist who wrote in the Franco-Venetian language, at the dictation of Marco Polo the explorer.
They both found themselves prisoners of the Genoese, and they both had a desire to put to good use that time of enforced confinement and inactivity. Marco Polo is for all intents and purposes the source and creator, but the language and the hand are Rustichello's.
Beauty and money, discovery and interest, travel and enrichment, pomp and war.
This happened precisely at the end of the 13th century. The original manuscript was soon lost due to the many copies that were made: a case of disintegration due to too much success, fatal at the time of technical non-reproducibility. There are therefore several copies, threaded (how faithfully?) from the original text, and a translator, in the first place, must select one.
My choice fell on the codex that, according to scholars, is the closest to the original, the manuscript named Fr. 1116 in the National Library in Paris. Fr. 1116 has specificities that are not at all original: breaks, interruptions, abrupt suspensions, even lacunae and omissions that, far from making it shoddy or shapeless, characterize it and make it singularly modern.
An illustration of Kublai Khan by Évrard d'Espinques for "The Travels Of Marco Polo."
Wikimedia
Earthy language to unveil
It is so modern that the Tuscan version of the fourteenth century, by a translator who worked on a codex very similar to the manuscript preserved in Paris, perceived an uneasiness in it, and considered rounding off the ending with a spurious epilogue that guaranteed a circularity and a happy ending. That spurious ending, which in my translation I have obviously taken care not to repeat, was widely considered part of the original story.
Il Milione is a text that is indeed marvelous (in the literal sense of the word) and that justifies the exhilarating and smooth rereadings or transpositions that insist on exoticism, on the titanic figure of Kublai Khan and the astonishing imperial palace of Shangdu, on flora and fauna seemingly out of the dawn of time. But at the same time it is also a book shot through with a pragmatism, a brutality that is absolutely concrete, in which pages and pages are devoted to trade, money, and war. Taut, concise pages, in which every word counts, for example in the detailed description of paper money in use by the Mongols.
As this harsh, ironclad side of Il Milione came to light, my translation took on burnished tones, moving as far apart from the other available modern Italian translations, which willingly yield to the one-sided image of Il Milione as a soft, precious silk cloth embroidered with legends.
And while the beauty and finesse of the artifacts are omnipresent in the text, the truth is that the original Marco Polo never tires of mentioning these objects' economic value, price, and the lavish earnings they guarantee. Beauty and money, discovery and interest, travel and enrichment, pomp and war.
And perhaps it was providential that Marco Polo, in his Genoese captivity, met not a sublime poet, but the earthy Rustichello. There were however legions of translators who provided embellishing, sugarcoating, and smoothing, which I tried to stop at the gates of the citadel.
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