Prince charming, or the blue prince

The labour of interpretation and rewriting involved in translation is (if the translation is any good) completely invisible. This is not, by any means, a revelation. But I remember having a conversation on this topic with a writer friend of mine, who had genuinely never thought about it in these terms. He had some of his books translated in Italian, and wereunhappy with the translation of his titles. I could see his point: somebody had taken his creation and morphed it into a foreign creature, a distant relative at best, one he could not recognize. The fact that he spoke a little Italian made things worse, because it gave him a glimpse of the meaning of words selected by the translator. He didn’t, however, have a level of understanding of the language that gave him access to the multi-faceted levels of meaning shaped by cultural references, tradition, current political and social discourse, and so forth, which a translator must have to make informed choices.

To explain that the meaning of words is vastly broader than the mere correspondence of meaning found in dictionaries, and give him an idea of the process translators go through, I to told him about a sentence I had recently translated, which read

“(…) ero un piccolo principe, azzurro come la costa ligure”.

Let’s look at the parts of this sentence in detail: Ero un piccolo principe, azzurro.. : literally, “I was a little prince, blue…”? No, not at all: “principe azzurro” may very well literally translate into “blue prince”, but really it means “prince charming”. So does prince charming have a melancholic undertone in Italian? God, no. That’s because “azzurro” doesn’t quite translate as “blue”, in two ways:

1. it specifically means “ligth blue” (and not any shade of blue in general, as it does in English); in Italian, azzurro is the colour of the sky or the sea on a sunny day;

2. azzurro has a dreamy connotation, a summer vibe, a carelessness and a hopefullness that have nothing in common with any of feelings triggered by the word “blue” in English (and as an aside, even the Italian word “blu” (literally, “dark blue”, the shade), has nothing of the gloom or sadness of the English “blue”).

   So let’s continue:

“(…) I was a little prince, charming like the Ligurian coast”

Now, this doesn’t really reflect the original either, for a couple of reasons:

1. In the original sentence, the Ligurian coast is light blue - the colour of a summer sky, dreams, hope; it paints summery pictures of the Ligurian coast, its flowers, clear-blue skies, sun-drenched pebbly beaches.

2. By describing the Ligurian coast as charming, we produce a text that’s closer to a real estate pamphlet.

   So what can we do?

   Maybe, try making an addition:

   “(…) I was a little prince, as charming as the blue Ligurian coast”

   Is it exactly like the original? No. What are the options?

   “I was a little prince, as blue as the Ligurian coast”: now the little prince is sad. And so is the Ligurian coast. That’s a no.

   “I was a little prince, as charming as the light-blue Ligurian coast” - oh gawd no, the sheer clunk, who even writes that. Why do we need to say it’s light-blue, when the term “azzurro”, with all its connotations, does not exist in English?

   Did we solve it then? Does “as charming as the blue Ligurian coast” work just like the Italian? Not really, but that’s the limit of translation. We did what we could.

   So we all agree; it’s not the same, but - and I can’t stress this enough - it can never be. Translators can spend hours thinking about some minuscule detail in a phrase the writer likely came up with in less than a minute. So, if you read the translation, and what you get from it is very similar to what you would get when reading it in the original, then the translator did a great job. And ironically, the more that effort is invisible, the better the translation.