Verdigris by Michele Mari, trans. Brian Robert Moore
I suppose one of the main questions of translation is this: do you literally translate the work from the original language, resulting in a complete facsimile, or do you translate the idea of the work? The former, I feel, usually leads to pretty rubbish books. All of the original work’s references and eccentricities, which would be picked up by its language’s audience, are left intact, which usually leads the reader in translation feeling like they’re hearing the joke but not really getting it. A couple years ago I read, or, well, I look at the words of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, a book that I am sure is brilliant in Italian, but its translation into English, with its local jokes and references and all that, is practically incompressible.
I’m thinking about the nature of translation because I have just finished reading Verdigris by Michele Mari, presenting in a translation from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore. The novel, which was originally published in the mid-00s, takes the form of a man looking back to his early teens when he used to stay on his grandparents’ estate in the village of Nasca in Lombardy. On the estate is a hulking groundskeeper, a man constantly described in abject terms, he is the “Monster”, he is “considerably ugly”, has a “bloated face” that is “deformed by growths, cavities, marks, scars”. At one point he is described as an ogre and the narrator comments on his likeness to Lennie from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
The groundkeeper, named Felice, is a simple-minded man who is quickly losing his memory. Our narrator, young Michelín, grows fascinated with the Monster and is determined to help him set up a system by which he can retrieve those few flashes of memory he has left. Holding up a car with NASCAR on the side helps Felice remember that he lives in Nasca, etc.
The novel is an intriguing mystery. Michelín attempts to learn more about Felice, about his grandparents’ estate, about the town and its history, all from a man whose memory is depleting by the day. To read the novel for the plot is incredibly enjoyable. But it isn’t the most interesting aspect of Verdigris, at least, not for me.
The problem with the novel in Italian is that Mari wrote Felice to communicate in an incredibly hyper-local dialect that even born Italians would have a hard time with. Much of the novel is made up of conversations between Michelín and Felice, so when it comes to the question of translation, the translator is left with a challenge. How do you translate a novel that is so much about language, and how do you effectively translate an idiosyncratic dialect so that its eccentricities can be conveyed to a foreign audience?
Well, what the translator Brian Robert Moore did was make Felice Irish. Throughout his very Italian novel, where the characters are called names like Marisa and Carmen, where vineyards grow and all that, there is a central character who speaks in stylised Hiberno English. Things are banjaxed and “the” simply becomes the “d’” prefix. In his afterword, Moore talks about how the character of Felice just felt Irish to him and therefore it made sense to change the character to reflect this. I cannot help agreeing. The way Felice is described, all ruddy and bloated with filthy hands and a barely legible speaking voice, is unmistakably Irish.
Brian Robert Moore’s translation is astonishing work. And it more than makes a claim for translators to be given free rein when it comes to translating not just the language, but the culture, the references and the air of the work. Though I couldn’t possibly make such a judgement, I feel it would be hard for the novel to be any better in Italian than it is in English. Moore’s handling of Mari’s words are exactly how translation should be.
Anyway, hello. Given the ever-shrinking room afforded to books in the media, I thought I’d give Substack a try. I have no rules. I’ll review things that I have thoughts on. I hope you like it.