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From Italian to English: Désirée Jung interviews Jennifer Panek

As I read “Mercedes,” I had a mix of joy, rage, awe, sympathy, and frustration, but despite all these emotions, I could not stop reading it, which makes the text effective, in my opinion. All this to say that the story “did not read” as a translation. Are you able to comment on that? What is more important to you when you decide to undergo a new project? The story or the narrative of how the story is told?

I’m so glad you found it effective! Olga Campofreda has this low-key, matter-of-fact style of storytelling that gradually draws you in until you’re completely engrossed in her characters’ inner lives. It’s really encouraging to know that my translation provides the same experience, and slightly surprising to hear that doing so makes it “not read as a translation.” I confess to not having read that many translations, as the time I have to read for pleasure goes mainly to reading Italian novels—it’s something I started doing twenty years ago to improve my language skills and I’ve never stopped. I’m also largely self-taught as a translator, but the first translation workshop I ever took, back in January 2020, was with the brilliant writer and translator Tim Parks, and one of the things he impressed on us was that if something is unmarked in Italian—if a native Italian speaker would read it as everyday speech or a natural turn of phrase—it should be similarly unmarked in English. Translating, for me, is about trying to give an English reader an experience that, on the level of the language, is as close as possible—in literal meaning, in literary style, in what sounds natural or striking or strange—to what an Italian reader would have with the original.

The stories that tempt me to translate them, now that I’m thinking about it, tend to fall into two categories. One has to do with stories where you can intuit something below the surface that’s never quite spelt out: the plots tend to be quite straightforward, the events not far removed from ordinary life, but you keep ruminating about them after you've read them, thinking “what was that actually about?” And when answers start to bubble up, what’s below the surface usually turns out to be a really perceptive dissection of some facet of human experience, some dilemma, perhaps, that maybe you’ve experienced but you’ve never really put your finger on. And now you can look at it and say “oh yes, it’s that.” “Mercedes” falls into this category. The second category is anything I find hilarious. If I read something in Italian that makes me laugh out loud, I can’t resist trying to translate it for the same effect in English. The first translation I managed to get published was an excerpt from a Sandro Veronesi novel that had made me laugh uncontrollably in an airport departure lounge. It was just too good not to share with as many readers as possible!

Being a translator myself, I often second guess what is readable or translatable into English from the so-called original language; aspects such as cultural background, slangs, settings and alike make the entire journey challenging and time consuming and yet very satisfying. How did you come to choose this story? Was the author Olga Campofreda involved in the translation process? How much liberty did you have in making creative choices? And what is the key factor when deciding to use one word or another?

“Mercedes” came to me through a different route than usual. Normally I read something, love it, translate it (or a bit of it, if it's long), and then start the wild ride of trying to get permission from the rights-holder. I could write some nonfiction humour myself on that last part. But this time it started with me reading Olga Campofreda's wonderful 2023 novel, Ragazze Perbene, translating a sample of it, and sending it off to Olga herself: she has a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from University College London and was teaching Italian there, so her contact info was available online. Much to my delight, she loved the sample and wanted to use it, so we’ve been in touch ever since. At some point, I asked her if she had any short stories she’d like to share with English-speaking readers, and she sent me “Mercedes.” I had complete liberty in my creative choices, though: even though Olga is fluently bilingual, her only interventions in this translation were on things I asked her about. For instance—it’s a tiny little choice, but translation is a series of tiny little choices—the socks the narrator tells us she wears to bed in winter are calzini doppi, which means “double socks.” Nothing I could find online could tell me if these were double-layer socks, like the kind you wear for hiking, or two pairs of socks, so I asked Olga and learned that calzini doppi were just thick socks. I was a bit disappointed that they weren’t something more specific—there’s a little extra touch of fuddy-duddy to someone who wears two pairs of socks to bed—but the Tim Parks who lives in my head told me not to embellish, and so “thick socks” they were.

The key factor in choosing one word over another? It’s an interesting thing to think about. I suppose it’s a kind of balancing, for each sentence, sometimes even each word, a whole set of things to do with sound against another set of things to do with meaning. Can you get the rhythm and tone of the original and accurately capture the literal meaning, in all its detail, of what’s being said? Which way do you lean if a line doesn’t lend itself to both? How much of an image should you sacrifice for its information, or how much information for an image? And then there are the peculiar puzzles that make translation so much fun: a piece I worked on recently contained a throwaway reference to a thirty-year-old scandal about crimes committed by police officers in Rome, where the narrator recalls a very specific protest chant, complete with metre and rhyme. The spare style of narration in “Mercedes” was pretty straightforward to translate. The trickiest bit might have been the girls who tell the narrator about “manifesting.” In Italian, le mie alunne di terza—literally, “my [female] pupils of the third”—gives us the necessary information about gender and age in one very short, very natural phrase. But even if English had a gendered word for pupils—“schoolgirls” doesn’t work here—readers can’t be expected to know the Italian school system, nor could I falsify that system by putting them into Canadian grade eleven. My solution of replacing grade with age—“some of the sixteen-year-old girls in one of my classes”—isn’t as elegantly concise as the Italian, but I was at least satisfied it sounded natural enough not to draw attention to itself.

You say you translate for the pure joy of it, and I completely identify with your statement. I consider translation one of—if not the most—undervalued and underpaid professions and skills in the literary world. Are you affected by this comment? Simply put, are you bothered by the condition translators find themselves in today or do you disagree with this statement? Can you elaborate on the joyful aspects of translating?

Archived somewhere in my e-mail from twenty-five years ago is a conversation—I can’t remember with whom—with the subject line “career in translation.” In the alternate universe where I didn’t luck into a tenure-track job a few years after my Ph.D., I’m sure I have a great deal to say about translators being undervalued and underpaid. Pretty much every translator I’ve met says the same. But on the principle of not talking about things I have no experience with, all I can say is that literary translation isn’t an easy field to break into: this is going to sound ridiculous, but when I first started thinking about publishing, after years of translating just for fun, it was a bit of a surprise to learn that you can no more apply for a job as a literary translator than you can apply for a job as a novelist!

The joy, of course, isn’t in the business of translation but in the work itself. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I find it the most absorbing work ever: it’s as if there’s nothing my mind would rather do than puzzle over how best to translate this or that Italian phrase into English. I’ve never had much of an impulse to do any kind of creative writing, and academic writing is a painful slog—grind out a sentence, take a break, grind out another sentence—but when I sit down to translate, time vanishes. And then there’s also something joyful about being able to give someone else this wonderful thing that you read and loved and have now transformed into something they can read and love, something they wouldn’t get to have if you hadn’t done that. A translated novel by Elena Ferrante or Alba de Céspedes—or Olga Campofreda—makes people’s lives better in a way that another academic article on early modern drama doesn’t.

One of the most brilliant aspects of this story for me is the condensation and intersection of multiple time occurrences, moving us from the past into the present, and back to current time smoothly. I also really enjoyed how the story aims to convey a “truth”—I killed my husband—that is presented in many versions, offering the reader the possibility to disagree. How relevant is this story to the world we live in today and the narratives we create, as well as the narratives that create us?

My first reaction to “Mercedes” was puzzlement. It didn’t seem to add up. There’s no way the narrator believes she actually killed her husband, no way she believes in “manifesting”—even the teenagers who explain it to her know enough to giggle about it. But what resonated with me was the way she’d gradually shut herself down, without even really being aware of it, into the person Sergio had defined her as—and how her urge to buy and wear that string of pearls meant there was still something inside her that had resisted this process. I trust my ex-husband isn’t reading this, but I know what it feels like to shut down parts of yourself because they don’t fit someone else’s idea of you. Same goes for the line about a hyper-critical man shrinking down a couple’s social circle until it was “us versus everyone.” “We were supposed to be enough for us.” Ugh. I’ve been there. The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered if we were also being invited to imagine the husband’s story, the one he doesn’t get to tell because he’s dead. The title is “Mercedes,” after all: is his new car just a bigger, bolder, more expensive version of the narrator’s string of pearls? And what might her own role have been, over the years, in turning the man she loved into the man on the couch? Is it inevitable that people in close relationships end up reducing each other in this way—not just spouses, perhaps, but parents and children, siblings, long-term friends? Who’s been allowed to turn us into the versions of ourselves that we’ve become? Could we have avoided it? Should we have tried?

Are you fluent in Italian? How do you think translation influences your work and vice versa?

I never really know how to define “fluent.” Can I hold a long and involved conversation in Italian? Absolutely. Will everything that comes out of my mouth be perfectly grammatical and idiomatic? Absolutely not. My spoken Italian is a strange and probably rather entertaining amalgam of formal language courses, multiple visits over the last thirty years to my mother’s Italian cousins on the Adriatic coast, and everything I’ve absorbed—dated slang, eccentric literary vocabulary, out-of-place regionalisms—from a steady diet of Italian novels. I dream of spending a serious amount of time living in Italy someday, and seeing how much I can improve with full immersion.

As for your last question: since I trust my Dean isn’t reading this either, I’ll admit that translation has had an unexpectedly deleterious effect on my work, as I’ve been allowing it to take up more and more of my time! I’ve actually spent the last few years plotting early retirement from academia, so I can devote myself full time to a second career doing what I love.

 

 

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