READING THE WORLD: Howard Curtis Interview

(For Reading the World, I conducted a number of interviews with translators of RTW books. These interviews are meant to get a variety of translators' opinions on matters common to all translations, and to let each translator discuss their particular book. These will be posted throughout the month. This is the third. The second was with Karen S. Kingsbury. The first was with Katherine Silver.)

How did you discover the work of Ottavio Cappellani?

I was sent the book by a British publisher, Atlantic Books, who wanted a reader's report.  I hadn't even finished reading it when I was informed that Farrar Straus & Giroux had bought the English language rights, and there was no longer any need for the report.  I then wrote to FSG, saying I liked the book and would they consider me as the translator?  They asked me to translate a sample chapter, and to my surprise they liked it enough to commission a complete translation.  I say "to my surprise" because I'm British and it was obvious from the start that the book would need to be translated into a very American idiom, but they must have seen something in the sample that made them think I'd be right for the translation.

What in particular about this book do you think is worth bringing to English-language readers?

You ought to ask FSG this question, as they were the ones who chose the book.  But speaking personally, I think it's interesting for English-speaking readers to get a different perspective on a subject (the Mafia) which has been done to death - if you'll pardon the expression - in American books and movies.

Is there anything about Cappellani's writing that you think is difficult to translate into English?

Yes.  "Who is Lou Sciortino?" is written in a mixture of standard Italian and Sicilian dialect, with a smattering of English words and phrases too. It was obvious from the start that there was no way to exactly reproduce this linguistic richness, which I'm sure accounts for a lot of the book's humor for Italian readers.  The only solution was to translate it into a kind of stylized American Mafia-speak, with the odd Italian word thrown in, which would be funny enough to provide some sort of equivalent to the original.

In translating, do you tend more toward trying to make the reader forget that this isn't the original, or toward trying to actively remind the reader that the book is from a different language?

My tendency is always to make the readers forget that they're reading a translation.  In the case of this book, for the reasons outlined in my answer to Question 3, I had to proceed slightly differently and deliberately include some foreign words and phrases.

Can a translation be as good as the original?

Theoretically no, since there is always something that gets lost.  On the other hand, a good translator may be able to produce something that is close in quality to the original.  And it can always happen that a translator is given a book that is not very well written - it's certainly happened to me in the past (no names, no pack drill) - and the temptation then is to try to improve it, out of a sense of professional pride.  So it may happen that a translation actually end up better than the original.  But that's probably the exception rather than  the rule.

And lastly, do you think it's important to read works in translation? What part of your own reading do works in translation make up?

Obviously, I wouldn't be a translator if I didn't think that there were lots of books "out there" that were worth bringing to the attention of English-speaking readers. As far as my own reading goes, in the languages I understand I always read try to read books in the original.  As far as the rest of my reading goes, perhaps 10% - 20% is translated from other languages.