Translators have one of the hardest jobs in the world - everyone feels free to criticise their work. For a while I freelanced for an Italian marketing agency in Pescara who paid me to take issue with translations they had commissioned, and presumably they used my reports to beat their supplier down on price. Perhaps I should have refused the work.But who am I trying to kid? I think Raymond Rosenthal did the English-speaking world a great service by making the first translation of Primo Levi’s “Il sistema periodico” - The Periodic Table. If my memory serves me correctly, although works like “If this is a man” were well known, it took many years for a publisher (in this case Picador) to commission an edition for Anglophones.
Each chapter of the book was based on the name of an element and the events in the author’s life which that material brought to mind. I was so impressed that I wrote a book myself in which each chapter was based around an LP record and the mundane events in my own life that they still recall when I listen to them. It predates Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity - with which it shares the same unhealthy obsession for popular music - by several years. There the similarities end because Hornby published his book (and a number of others) sold the film rights and became, one imagines, immensely rich. Mine still resides as a Word file on CD.
But … and here’s the thing that struck me most when I finally read Levi’s book in its original language … I violently objected to the fact that Mr. Rosenthal had translated the perfectly polite term ‘sterco’ - manure or dung - as a four letter word. It even stopped me from recommending the book to English friends for a number of years. All that hard work, skill, knowledge, dedication … and I had to quibble over one word.
So last week I made a small act of reparation and recommended it to two people. I urge you to read it. There. That makes three.
Review of The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. E qualcosa anche per il lettore italiano.
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