La prova — The Sample

The passato remoto in translation, and the first sentence

Italian fiction is overwhelmingly narrated in the passato remoto — nacque, decise, sostenne — while everyday speech in most of the north uses the passato prossimo. Translators into English have it easy and hard at once: English has a single simple past for both, so the tense itself disappears, but the distance the remoto creates — the sense that this is a story, told from far away — has to be rebuilt with word choice, rhythm and tone. Translating the remoto with an English perfect ('has been born', 'has maintained') would turn literature into a report. The first sentence of a novel is where translators spend the most time per word, because it sets the voice that the reader will trust for the next four hundred pages. Translators often draft the opening last, or redraft it many times, once they know the whole book. Alex's difficulty — a single verb that has to be ironic, a little solemn and affectionate at once — is a typical one: no word in the target language covers exactly the same ground, so the translator chooses the nearest and lets the surrounding sentence do the rest. Francesca's advice is a translators' commonplace too. Many professionals never send work the night it is written: what reads as brilliant at midnight often reads as merely clever, or simply wrong, the next morning. Il giorno dopo, a mente fresca, is when a draft becomes a translation.