Translating with Biography

Originated in a journal entry from 23rd April

The chiltern hills, the setting for this variant. Photo Credit: Humphreys of Henley

Readers of “The Hermit” encounter Nino as his childhood wanes in a tempestuous and vivid summer. He, as I did then, spends his days in the fields and the village, keeping an eye on the sagging sun to make sure he is home before dark. Clapping at the files illuminated by low-angled light over the knee-high grass on his walk home.

Erín Moure asks herself the question in her post “Bright Eyes” “What if I introduce words from my childhood”¹? What if words which feel as foreign to her as those in the original were replaced with words which stem from the root of her? Who will be walking in the poem?². I ask myself this same question, however, I want to know what would happen to the “folds of the text”³ if, instead of speaking to Nino’s, it spoke to my experience. Where would the creases intersect and how would this story, Italian as it is, change if it were to become, not only in written English, but written about an English childhood?

Angus was a pain in the neck as a boy - I always thought so at least - but now I realise his anger wasn't simply a whim, or at least no more than mine was. I was beginning to recognise that that house wasn't the same to him as it was to me. The feathering dust sheets pinned to the doorframes - billowing in the summer breeze - was, for him, a promise of open air, calling him to freedom; for me, simply the background to a breathless lamp-lit night. There were rooms - bare, empty rooms – that we kept closed and if Angus stuck his nose in when we opened them to work, I felt a flare of pride because I understood that for him, the breeze blocks, the toolbox, the timber must have sat in his mind as a beautiful, strange scene to fantasise about.

We couldn’t stay in the last house. Its walls and neighbours had begun to close in so, in the height of August we took Angus and the girls to our new home and in those first days they never stopped longing for the river we had left behind. They had been there since birth and knew nothing else. I could see his mother in him. In the final days before we left, when she was stretched thinly but always moving Angus had shadowed her and tried desperately to hide the stress that the move was causing him. He was twelve and it didn’t seem real to him that his room would change, that he would leave behind the neighbours’ children, his friends. When I told him that we couldn’t stay there, he said to me, “It’ll be worse in our new house, you’ll see.”

Now he had given up the fight and was recovering, thanks, in part, to the permission we had given the children to play in the woods. I had drawn the line at them going alone but Angus was reasonable enough to not try and trick me or sneak out, also because he knew that if he did, he wouldn’t be allowed to go anymore. Besides, this boy who had made so many friends by the water had an air of not understanding the children who lived around the fields. He hung around with them, maybe played, but never had any of them come over. I think that after the first few days, he had turned them against him by romanticising his old friends too much. He spent the mornings roaming the fields behind the house with his sisters or wandering to the community on the hill to be among the Christian missionaries and their families, especially keen to meet the children from far away, from towns not in this country: people who spoke in exciting ways, who bragged of coming from exotic places. I still remember the joy he had in getting to know Joey, the boy from South Korea who even had a house in Seoul and told stories of his trips into the mountains to visit family. He spoke about it excitedly at the table. His sister made fun of him, and Angus glared at her with hatred in his eyes. In the mid-afternoon we cut across the fields, Angus and I – him running ahead – so he could play in the woods. The woods in this area were very large, disproportionate to the fields surrounding them and the allotments which sloped down towards them. We trampled through the thickets, placed our bags down among the beech trees, sat on a stump basking in the sun, collected sticks to build a den against a tree and sometimes, out of curiosity, we ventured through the nettles and holly which ran undisturbed along the top edge of the forest. Angus was very proud of his freckled skin.

This variant is cyclical on two fronts, firstly, in that it is a revisiting of a story I first encountered a decade ago during my undergraduate degree. As I carved out Nino’s story from the piece and filled in the spaces with my own, it built upon the reading I had made at that time of a boy searching for meaning in a world wider than the one he knew. Also in that I now find myself at a different time in my life relating more with the narrator than I once did, watching a nephew run through the same field I knew as a child.

I somewhat sceptically, embarked on this exercise expecting it to produce an inauthentic version of the text which provided no further insight into the lives of the characters and the setup of the initial section of the story. However, I found that by placing myself into the position of Nino, I was brought back to memories from growing up that I had not thought of in years and was reminded of how fleeting childhood is. Nino is on the cusp of his teenage years and will, unknowingly, leave behind many of the simple pleasures he experiences, and it is that simple, childish joy and loss of innocence which forms one of the pillars of the story.

The handling of Nino’s late mother was a difficult line to tread. I wanted to maintain the feeling of upheaval which Nino had experienced however, I thankfully still have both parents and chose not to morbidly imagine the loss of one. Centring on the period surrounding my family’s move to a valley in the countryside and leaning on aspects of our respective childhoods which were similar such as time spent in nature, meeting people from other backgrounds, and a fool-hardy chasing of independence was vital in capturing the same feeling of the story despite the experiences being largely different. I opted not to change the overall flow of the piece and the structures of the sentences if I could help it. I wanted to add my flesh to the bones of Pavese’s writing, so the voice of the narrator remains, as much as possible, unchanged due to my wanting to foreground the change in character. If the purpose of these variants is to contribute to a more well-rounded text, then this exploration has resulted in a deeper grasp of Nino’s character through a literal placing of myself in his shoes. The expansiveness and transience of childhood which, as an adult, is all too easily forgotten, was brought to centre stage with this version. This is an attempt to “experience the source text”⁴ through using translation as a creative endeavour. An attempt to consciously engage with the translator’s journey through the work and the process of decision-making which translators must undertake. This variant lit up a dimmed corner of my journey through the text and, to some extent, my life.