The gravitational law of levity

I never know where to start. From myself at seventeen, perhaps, and from Silver Bay, Minnesota. From that extremely small America I had not expected, the imperial snow of that winter, the nine different churches of a community of one thousand eight hundred and thirty two inhabitants plus me, the heavy and ridiculous fame of each member of the community. The capital boredom, the beauty, the power of nature; an unaware provincialism. I have known Munro’s landscape, textscape, inscape long before I found myself translating it, but I recognized it right away. My body had been there, I knew the light of the sky, the many colors of the snow, the church choirs, the rich cakes, the town open secrets, the scandals.

Alice Munro writes about the unperishable quality of things, she is a master of it. After more than three thousand five hundred pages of her writing, filtered through the fine sieve of translation, I know something about her way of building stories and I know I have been most privileged. With every story Alice Munro builds a house and leads the reader through its rooms, she says. But every time she subtracts the scaffolding employed to build the very house, the structure leaves a trace only in the difficulty for me to chase her through the rooms. I have met her words, her narrating grammar, the quiet revolution of her stories: “I entrust everything to the next story; the next story is always the perfect one”, says Munro.

She writes of things which become the “subjective” correlative of an indelible world. So, when all her Maries, Connies, Frances, Maggies, Sallies, Vernas, Charlenes, Lauras, Vikis, when all the secular nymphs of her imaginary Ontario will have faded in our memory and gone back to the state of more or less significant names, we shall still remember the smell of a soap (which has a frightening quality); the list of novels on a bookshelf; the white and pink cheap cotton dress that keeps coming up between the thighs, a scarf, a linoleum floor.

We shall go back time after time to Munro’s stories and unexpectedly discover ourselves in the description of an embarrassment, of a shame, a selfish gesture, a violence, a joy, an arrogance.

Translation starts in someone else’s beginning and therefore speaks a language of deceptive reassurance. Here I am, says the beginning, I am the beginning. But it is in the genitive that the apprehension is born. Translation is never an innocent practice, it is a combination of compromise and surrender. There is in Italian one word RESA to mean simultaneously rendition, rendering and surrender, therefore the rendering and the surrendering of the text in Italian coincide.

While speaking of Alice Munro’s collection Open Secrets the American writer Michael Cunningham has recently said: “If you are in a room full of American writers and you mention Alice Munro’s name a hush always descends. Alice Munro is the writer most American writers most love. She writes with a simplicity and directness about impossibly complicated lives, our lives,. I was reading Alice Munro when my mother died. It didn’t seem at all ludicrous to be reading Open Secrets when my mother passed away”.

She writes with a simplicity and directness about impossibly complicated lives.  I could rephrase Michael Cunningham’s statement from my translator’s perspective and say: “She writes in an impossibly complicated way about the simplicity and directness of lives, our lives. A simplicity inhabited by layers of meaning that I cannot reveal nor select without betraying her.”

It has been hard and exhilarating, tiring and inspiring to spend so much time, so many days, so many hours in the company of an author like Alice Munro. She is now 87 (90) years old and does not write any more. I have finished writing her writings a couple of years ago. Our bodies have met once, a memorable experience for mine, quite likely a forgettable one for hers I remember every single detail of that day: the heat, the food, her words, her fragile insolence in refusing aa guided solitary visit to the Sistine  Chapel, her request to be accompanied instead to the Protestant Cemetery in Rome on the grave of John Keats. But my real, long conversations with her had taken place in her stories that I had translated.

“I write from where I am in life,” says Alice Munro. This is what has allowed her to rewrite the same stories over a period of thirty years, because if the stories do not change, cannot change, if they are just declensions of the same predicaments, coincidences, secrets, loves, sorrows and disappointments, what definitely changes is the author’s body, her brain and her mind, therefore the way of seeing and looking at the raw material of her narratives. So Alice Munro declares that she writes from where she is in life and I wonder; can a translator say the same thing? Can I confess or reveal (and is it a revelation, after all?) that  I, too, translate from where I am in life?

I cannot deny, at least not to myself that the degree of awareness and the amount of energy that I relied upon during these past thirty years have changed with my body and my brain. If I ask myself what translators need to complete their task my answer is: non only competence, and the deepest possible knowledge of one’s own language, but also resilience, patience, memory, love, devotion. Besides, mis-quoting Grace Paley and her decalogue for the poet: “ It is the responsibility of the translator to breathe, to exist, to be there”. My translations have changed through time: they used to be a lot less aware but certainly more energetic (just like my life); the expectations I had on my language used to be more self-confident and more self-centered.

After twelve years spent in the company of Alice Munro’s stories, I found myself committed to the project of translating the entire corpus of Jane Austen’s works. Two great writers, two extraordinary writers in a row. Alice Munro, an artist who made the best of her existential and artistic longevity producing, collection after collection, The Lives of Girls and Women - to employ the title of one of her works – of the small towns of the Ontario she invented. Jane Austen, the young writer who never made it to old age and who left us six unattainable novels.

When I received the proposal of translating  Jane Austen’s novels my reaction was fear, a need to escape. I felt trapped by the paralyzing force of the privilege; I felt in trouble; I procrastinated my answer to the proposal knowing full well that an inescapable YES had already pronounced itself inside my mind. And finally I surrendered to the difficult joy of accepting the task.

My project would start with the translation of Northanger Abbey the wonderfully imperfect novel that Jane Austen wrote at the age of twenty and that was published only after her death and her success. Here came my first question. Who is the Jane Austen who wrote Northanger Abbey? A very young girl, endowed with a brilliant mind and a very good sense of humor. But a girl who lived two and a half centuries ago. So, how old is Jane Austen? What is her age, the age of her life, of her novels? What does her inner landscape look like? Who am I that start translating her juvenile work at the age of sixty, almost twenty years more than Austen’s age when she died and forty more than her age when she wrote Northanger Abbey? Did she, like Alice Munro, write from where she was in life? And if this is the case, will our verbal exchange be possible? Would I feel up to the linguistic task of translating a contemporary twenty-year-old author? I do not think so. What entitles me to translate a twenty-year-old author of the eighteenth century? What does the young Jane Austen find so funny about  the uneventfulness of life in general? What does she write about? Well, all in all what she writes about is money and women. And here I have finally found something that might help me through the difficulty of my task; because money and women is what Alice Munro wrote about, too. Social classes and women, cultural irrelevance and women, marriage and women, love and women, financial independence and women, writing and women, lack of sentimentality and women. I think Jane Austen and Alice Munro have achieved the goal of revealing the two remotest ways of expressing a deliberate lack of sentimentality.

They write of course from two extremely distant perspectives in time, space, beliefs, ideas and  style. But maybe this is what I have to offer Miss Austen, and her consecutives and the scarsity of her transitive verbs, and her language that, according to Tony Tanner, “tends to record movements governed by considerations of decorum and etiquette”, and her deferral of gratification, her absence of vulgarity.

I have more than three thousand five hundred pages of Alice Munro, the old woman who lives and works two centuries after Northanger Abbey was conceived. I have my twelve years spent on her Canadian English to offer to the lightness, and brightness and sparkling English of Jane Austen. Perhaps.

About the author(s)

Susanna Basso is a translator and author. She has translated works by Alice Munro, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Angela Carter; and is currently working on the complete works of Jane Austen. She is the author of Sul tradurre. Esperienze e divagazioni militanti (Milano, Bruno Mondadori 2010).

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