The Refracted Hermit

Reading any text, whether it is the original or in translation “can be an be an attempt to respond to the otherness, inventiveness, and singularity of the work”¹. It is this otherness which the translator must grapple with to both convey any nuance of the original in the translated text, and to present it to the target culture in a way it will be understood. The handling of this otherness throughout this process will introduce an “ethical dimension of translation [and] should be seen as a question of respect – respect for the otherness and difference of the past, […] of the author of the source text and of his/her readers (including the translator)”². The task of managing this respect lies in the hands of the translator who must undertake a negotiation between the otherness of the work and the target culture on behalf of any future reader.

Furthermore, there exist, according to Clive Scott, spaces of translation. The blank page “is the place of the translator’s imagination, the stage on which the [source text] will be performed, the site of the convergence of a whole bundle of virtualities: the virtual spaces generated by the text in the mind of the reader/translator”³. It is this space that a reader fills as though it were a pool. It teems with readings, theories, potentialities, assumptions and extrapolations which each diverge from the text, and it is from this pool that the variants in this piece come. This space allows the translator to play with the text, growing and shrinking it and, in my case, into the shapes of the following translations.

My choice of variant forms arose naturally through the process of keeping a log of reflections as I began to translate this story. Challenges which I faced in the course of the work collided with my personal experience and the unique aspects of my day-to-day life while translating this piece. The result is a collection of short journal entries accompanied by an early version of the variant which the collision inspired. The journal mentioned provided a foundation upon which the following work is built.

“The Hermit” by Cesare Pavese, is a short story about a young boy named Nino who becomes infatuated with a quasi-mythologised cave-dwelling local character named Pietro, or, ‘the hermit’. Pietro is initially despised by certain villagers but becomes accepted by Nino’s family after saving him during a storm. I intend to take Pavese’s story and translate it with my “sited body”⁴; to focus on translation as an act which takes place within a spatial and temporal context by indulging the varied readings of the piece documented in my journal. These readings, each a result of my “idioculture [which lies] in a permanent condition of change”⁵, are refractions of this story through my body, like white light through a prism. The refracted variants will stretch the tension between the otherness of the work of literature and the culture which will receive the text. The final translation will then loosen the tension but will hold within it the shape of each divergent variant.