Ritorno a Bologna — Back in Bologna

The translator's arithmetic

Literary translation is slow work. A professional translating fiction may manage anywhere from a few pages to ten or more a day, depending on the difficulty of the text, and then needs time for revision — often as long again as the first draft. Translators commonly break a book into a daily quota, as Alex does, and many describe the first draft as the stage where you get everything down and the revision as the stage where you make it sound like a book. Francesca's remark about her grandmother is accurate for much of northern Italy, including Bologna: in everyday speech the passato remoto has largely given way to the passato prossimo, and older speakers may use it only for distant events like the war — and even then switch halfway through. In Tuscany and especially in the south, the remoto remains far more alive in conversation. For a translator, every such choice in the original says something about who is speaking and from how far away. Block A of this year — the commission, the contract, the resignation, Trieste — ends here. From the next lesson, the work is the text itself.