One of the most fascinating aspects of languages, for those who study or translate them, is their mysterious nature of almost living beings. Languages are slowly born from each other; they feed on objects, thoughts, experiences of the peoples who use them; they grow and change, take root or dry up, merge and fertilize; they die, nor keeping them under glass bells will prolong their life. Words and constructs arise unwanted, spread, migrate or slip away from use, beyond the illusion of control of grammars, projects, powers of all sorts.
Thus, live as it is, each language has a body and a kind of spirit. Describing the former and understanding its mechanisms is an arduous task; however, it makes use of measurable data and excellent analysis tools, such as linguistic science today provides and continues to refine. Much more elusive – yet self-evident in its own way – is the latter. Who denies, even at first glance, that German and French have two different “charisms”? Who, translating simple texts from Arabic to Italian, did not have to measure themselves with distant ways of feeling, expressing and organizing the world? And as for human beings it is tempting to frame a character in a few stereotypes, so for languages there are infinite common places lurking: “poetic language”, “from merchants”, “from military”, “cold”, “hard “,” Musical “,” romantic “. But yet,
In this process it is discovered, among other things, how each language seems better equipped for certain purposes or, conversely, has fewer resources to reach others. Over the years, the writer has observed that German, thanks to the productivity of its system of prefixes and suffixes and the ductility of compound nouns, allows expressing analytic-abstract contents with precision and brevity unattainable for Italian; while this has a frequency of figurative expressions, and above all an impetus to freely create unpublished, extraordinary ones: an Italian speaker who is also uncultivated intends metaphors, hyperbolas, irony, metonymies, antonomasies at an incessant rhythm without knowing it, and runs into serious communication problems if maintains the same style in another language.
Therefore translation is a very delicate process, comparable to the transcription of a melody for various instruments, or to the recitation of the same monologue by various actors. For Elisa it will not sound identical on the piano, on the organ or on the contrabassoon, nor To be or not to be will have the same effect if played by a child, a young man or an old man: each language will give its lively character to the texts that in it take shape. The translator will make friends with his secret spirit and will try – with humility and audacity – to make the most of it, as does the composer with his instruments and the director with his actors. There will be insurmountable limits, but also tasty surprises. Of all the infinite German translations of Odi et amo of Catullus, only one has ever made a shocked, shocked pupil of a provincial high school leap to her feet: “Prof, now I understand!”. It was the one, in prose, in her maternal dialect.
