Il primo capitolo — The First Chapter

Translating tense: what English loses and gains

Italian narrative prose distinguishes several pasts — passato remoto for events, imperfetto for background and habit, trapassato for what came earlier — where English fiction uses mainly the simple past, with the progressive and the past perfect as occasional tools. Translators therefore spend much of their time deciding where an Italian distinction must be rebuilt in English and where it can safely disappear. Sometimes the gain runs the other way. English requires a past perfect to mark that one past event preceded another, where Italian can let an imperfetto and a già carry the same meaning; English also uses one auxiliary, 'would', for both the conditional and the future in the past, which can create an ambiguity the original only hinted at. Good translation does not mean reproducing every grammatical feature, but reproducing the effect on the reader. Ada's principle — that a reader who wonders is better than one who has everything explained — is shared by many translators. An open sentence in the original is a decision the author made, and the translator's job is to keep it open, not to resolve it on the reader's behalf.