“For a long time, I went to bed early.”
With these words (in Lydia Davis’s translation), Marcel Proust began his exploration of memory and perception now known as In Search of Lost Time, formerly titled Remembrance of Things Past.
The two titles bookend a similar concept: was he actively seeking time that had somehow escaped, or was he more calmly remembering things that were simply no longer? Or was he splitting the difference: thinking his way out of the mirror dividing the two positions?
The past, it is said, is another country. Is translation, then, a form of time travel?
***
Proust describes the luxuriant way in which he slid from wakingness to sleep, trying to detect, while awake, the moment in which he fell asleep, or—in a dream state—convinced that it was now time to go to sleep, and thus wakening. A perfectly ordinary thing becomes a touchstone of memory. A madeleine dunked in tea or a child falling asleep can open some kind of door.
Ordinary details, the punctuation of narrative, are, in a sense, the bread and butter of translation, the bridges between one language and another, one culture and another. They separate worlds and keep them together.
***
I learned Italian in the cornfields of Iowa and in the Romanesque Revival architecture of Royce Hall at UCLA, before moving to Italy and steeping myself in the language for ten years. Oddly enough, Royce Hall is a 1920s imitation of the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, and there couldn’t be a better metaphor for studying language in a classroom: it’s a loose inspiration and a false façade. For a translator, knowing how the system described by the words actually works is a major step forward in producing a credible model of the world described.
For someone who’s used languages and the liminal space separating them as the coal-face in a very rich mine of translation, my first encounter with Italian words and ways still sparkles as a magic time. One moment stands out: the first time I caught myself thinking in Italian.
I was probably missing home: sitting on my very Italian bed—not a box springs and mattress, but the rete, a cot with a spring-and-wire support mesh holding a thin cotton-batting mattress that seemed to be the only kind of bed in the university town of Perugia where I was studying. Then it dawned on me just what was making me feel so completely at sea and far from the comfortably familiar. Every thought in my head was in a foreign language: thoughts I couldn’t have understood just a few months earlier. Suddenly the word foreign was very foreign indeed: straniero. In fact, I was attending Perugia’s Università per Stranieri, or University for Foreigners.
In his book The Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher tells this story about the word foreign, and the difficulties involved in translating it: “An Englishman [is] sitting in a restaurant in northern France, struggling with some of the finer points of the menu. The attentive waiter spots his difficulty, and asks politely, ‘Monsieur est étranger?’ The Englishman looks shocked, and replies, with some dignity, ‘Étranger? Mais non, je suis anglais!’” I understand the man’s impulse: he’s not foreign, everyone around him is foreign. But I never shared his indignation, of course. It was exactly that foreignness that I sought out, even as I felt homesick and rootless.
I sat in a café in the center of town as workers repaired the street surface outside. What a pleasure: instead of the roar of jackhammers and the noxious smell of hot asphalt, I was treated to random variations on the Anvil Chorus: stonemasons in square folded-newspaper hats sat on low wooden stools chiseling replacement slabs of pietra serena, a central Italian bluestone, to fit into the elaborate mosaic of paving stones. It was an ancient, cheerful sound.
At first I lived in a pensione, and the landlady, a strange and subtly manipulative woman whose two adult children still lived at home—the daughter newly divorced, the son not yet finished with university—showed me how Italians cool a scalding caffè latte.
The only methods I knew, as an American, were: stir, blow, or put in ice cubes. Italians in the 1970s seemed unaware of the existence of either ice cubes or air-conditioning, but they had the travaso, a simple process that required nothing but running water. Two heavy mugs, one of which contained the piping hot caffè latte. Run cold water, pour the hot liquid into the empty mug, fill the now-hot mug with cold water, let sit for ten seconds, empty, switch mugs, repeat until you have fine-tuned the temperature. When I saw this, I felt like a weird hybrid of Margaret Mead and Hints from Heloise. It was so simple, and so perfect.
Once I started looking, these details were everywhere. My roommates (after having moved out of the pensione and into an apartment share) rescued a cat from the street, a tiny bedraggled kitten. I was going to the store and asked if I should get some cat food. They both looked at me as if I was a martian. Angela already had a pot of water boiling on the stove, and she drained it: a bowl of angel hair pasta is what you feed a stray kitten. As the Dothraki would say in Game of Thrones: this is known.
Slang expressions can say it all: in English, we say that things go together like a horse and carriage, or—pace Forrest Gump—like peas and carrots. In Italian, something that accompanies something else perfectly is said to be like cacio sui maccheroni: like cheese on pasta.
How do you say you’re speechless in Italian? Mi cascano le braccia: my arms fall off. That’s right, not only am I unable to speak, I can’t even gesticulate. When a Spaniard wants to say you shouldn’t cry over spilt milk, he shrugs philosophically and utters this phrase: más se perdió en Cuba. Teased out, the phrase means that what Spain lost when it lost the earthly paradise of Cuba to the Americans in 1898 was so incalculably vast that nothing can really matter now.
Each of these expressions strike me as a portrait of a national soul. But I’m probably wrong. We make assumptions about things, and they’re often wrong.
Here’s an example. I lived in Milan for ten years, the city where I spent the longest time in Italy, longer than Perugia, Cuneo, Rome, or Florence. Milan is a very particular place, a city of fog, formality, sober exteriors and luxurious interiors. It is a Calvinist city compared to the rest of Italy, a city that long called itself Italy’s moral capital—a title that has hopefully been retired, since Silvio Berlusconi and a host of his associates and confederates have been seen for the buffoons and bandits that they always were.
In a city so fixated on facades and discretion, I noticed that all restaurants had filmy white curtains in the windows. I asked about it and learned that they were required by law. I thought it over and decided that the reason must be the city’s veiled nature. Milanese didn’t want to do their dining under the eyes of the unwashed on the streets outside. I felt pretty confident I’d glimpsed a revealing detail.
But one day I was eating alone in a restaurant near my house on the outskirts of Milan. A car took the curve outside the restaurant far too fast, and slammed into another car parked outside the restaurant. That car rammed the side of the restaurant and shattered the plate-glass window into a thousand razor-sharp shards, which were all caught before they could slash the diners—by a gauzy, required-by-law curtain. I thought I knew what I was looking at, but I had been sadly mistaken. The curtains were there because plate glass windows can shatter and explode inward.
In Italy, I also noticed that doors open inward. I know that doors in public establishments are required to open outward, the obvious reason being that in case of fire, an inward-opening door can become a bottleneck. That happened in a nightclub fire decades ago and it became the law of the land in the US. I’m not a hundred-percent certain, but my belief is that the reason doors open inward in Italy is that while people inside might crowd against them, cars outside might park them in. Because in Italy, cars park on the sidewalk. And I mean every inch of the sidewalk. Now, cars aren’t likely to park so close to the door that they’d obstruct it, but it may well happen.
In fact, in a book I once translated, a car salesman working in a showroom in downtown room notices that the sidewalks outside are relatively clear of cars, leading him to the sickening realization that he’s once again neglected to plan his summer vacation and Rome is emptying out for August. It’s any Italian’s worst nightmare: to be relegated to a city without people, to walk down sidewalks free of cars.
I remember a sign that only Italy could have produced: STREET CLEANING THIS COMING WEDNESDAY, ABSOLUTELY NO PARKING FROM 8PM TO 6 AM, NOT EVEN ON THE SIDEWALKS.
Not even on the sidewalks.
****
Antony Shugaar, Asymptote Italy editor-at-large, is the author of Coast to Coast and the coauthor of Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator. He is a translator: among his most recent titles are The Crocodile by Maurizio de Giovanni, Resistance is Futile, by Walter Siti, Other People’s Trades, and If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi. He is working on a book about translation for the University of Virginia Press.