by Primo Levi
One essential difference remains in place between human and animal parasites. The old-school human parasite had to be intelligent, because he lacked the appropriate instincts: for him, parasitism was a choice, and he was obliged to invent his own artifices. The animal parasite, as far as we know, is all instinct, totally programmed, and its brain is minimal or entirely lacking. There is an economic consideration in this; the hunt for an enormous, rapid host has such an unpredictable outcome that the species has preferred to invest its creativity not in brains, not in the digestive apparatus, not in the sensory organs but, instead, in a prodigious reproductive apparatus: the tapeworm, devoid of brain, digestive tract, and locomotor apparatus, produces in the course of its adult life many millions of eggs. This enormous compensatory fecundity serves to inform us that a tapeworm’s “infant mortality” is extremely high, and that a larva’s likelihood of enjoying a career is on the order of magnitude of one in a million.
Human fleas, which is where we began, have fallen out of fashion, and no one misses them, but in fact in the past few years we have witnessed a mysterious revival of lice, and so we should be on the alert. It is important to remember that the flea, aside from being a vehicle of epidemics, was, just a few decades ago, part of European civilization and folklore, mixed with all social classes (as is shown by the crinoline described above), and was often mentioned by men of letters. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who had a boundless faith in providence, wrote that fleas are dark, and are attracted by light cloth, in order to ensure that humans can catch them: “If these little black, light, nocturnal animals didn’t have an instinct for white, it would be impossible for us to descry them and catch them.” Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, in an 1835 sonnet, paints an oddly sensual miniature of the purciaròla (flea-infested girl), who finds no delight greater than that of getting rid of her fleas:
Everyone has his preferred tastes.
Mine is for fleas, you see—I like
to crush them and hear the crackling sound.
In Balzac’s Droll Stories, the nuns of the merry Abbey of Poissy explain to an innocent novice what she must do to tell whether a flea she has caught is male, female, or virgin, but they add that it is an exceedingly rare thing to find a virgin flea, “since these beasts have no morals, are all wild hussies, and yield to the first seducer who comes.”
In the popular mind, the flea, much like the fly, for that matter, has family ties to the devil. In Faust, in Auerbach’s Cellar, Mephistopheles is roundly applauded when he sings a song about a king who had a large-sized flea, cherished it like a son (not like a daughter: pulce, feminine in Italian, is Floh, and masculine, in German), and had a fine suit made for it out of silk and velvet.
Truth be told, the appearance that a flea presents under a microscope is so peculiar as to verge on the diabolical, and equally diabolical is its ability to avoid capture with a leap so rapid that it swiftly eludes sight and seems to vanish. It was precisely this leap that formed the subject of many decades of study by an amateur scientist rich in patience and talent, Dame Miriam Rothschild. It should come as no surprise that a naturalist would ignore our repugnance and our taboos; in fact, these studies have produced such surprising findings that even laymen deserve to know about them.
The leap of a flea is commensurate with need: the leap of a mole flea, or of any flea that lives on a permanently den-dwelling animal, is feeble or even nonexistent, because getting onto its slow or sedentary host presents no problems. On the other hand, when the host is fast-moving and lively, like a cat, a deer, or a human being, it is crucial that the insect, as soon as it has completed its metamorphosis, be successful in the fundamental undertaking of its life, that is, the leap that will take it from the ground to its destination. The human flea has made measured leaps of thirty centimeters in height, which is to say, at least a hundred times the length of the flea itself.
Now, the power required for such a leap cannot be supplied by any muscle, much less an insect’s muscle: insects are practically inert at low temperatures, and the flea must in fact make a “cold” leap, because it often completes its metamorphosis in unheated quarters, such as the floors of certain human dwellings, and as soon as it emerges from its larval stage it has a need for blood.
Given the problem, evolution has through millions of years of trial and error come up with an elegant solution. The powerful musculature that enabled the flight of the flea’s winged ancestors has been converted, and linked to a system of elastic storage of mechanical energy: basically, a tension, trigger, and release mechanism similar to that of the crossbows of olden days, or the spring-loaded spearguns used now by scuba divers.
The flea’s elastically deformable organ, analogous to the speargun’s spring and the crossbow’s bow, is made of a protein that is virtually unique in the animal kingdom, similar to rubber but with greatly superior performance. Thus, the energy needed for the prodigious and instantaneous leap is accumulated during a slower preparatory phase: between one leap and the next, the flea must “gather its strength,” store up energy in its springs, but even for this pause it requires only a few tenths of a second. This is the secret that allows the insect to leap even in chilly surroundings, and to leap so high and so far.
Dame Rothschild and her colleagues plumbed and reconstructed these subtle phenomena by fabricating ingenious tools, for example high-speed cameras operated by the flea’s own leap. There may be readers who wonder what the purpose of such research might be: a religious soul might reply that the harmony of creation is mirrored even in a flea; a secular spirit would prefer to point out that the question is beside the point, and that a world in which we studied only useful things would be grimmer, poorer, and perhaps even more violent than the world in which it is our lot to live. In essence, the second answer is not very different from the first.
To Translate and Be Translated
According to Genesis, the first humans had only one language: this made them so ambitious and so dexterous that they set about building a tower that reached as high as the sky. God was offended at their audacity, and He punished them in a subtle manner: not with a thunderbolt but by confounding their speech, which made it impossible for them to continue their blasphemous work. This episode has parallels, surely no accident, with the story of original sin, a story that comes shortly before this one in the Bible and which was punished with expulsion from Paradise; we can conclude that linguistic differences were perceived from the earliest times as a curse.
And a curse they have remained, as anyone knows who has been forced to live, or, even worse, forced to work, in a country where he doesn’t speak the language, or anyone who has been obliged to hammer a foreign language into his head as an adult, when the mysterious material in which memories are engraved becomes more refractory. Further, for many people, at a more or less conscious level, anyone who speaks another language is a foreigner by definition, an outsider, a “stranger,” and different from me; and someone different is a potential enemy or, at least, a barbarian—that is to say, etymologically speaking, a stutterer, someone who cannot speak, a quasi-non-human. Thus, linguistic friction tends to become racial and political friction, yet another curse that afflicts us.
It ought to follow that those who practice the trade of translator or interpreter should be honored, inasmuch as they strive to limit the damage done by the curse of Babel; such, however, is generally not the case, because it’s hard to translate, and so the product of the translator’s efforts is often poor in quality. This gives rise to a vicious cycle: the translator is paid poorly, and someone who could be or become a good translator looks for some more remunerative line of work.
To translate is a difficult undertaking, because the barriers between languages are higher than is commonly thought. Dictionaries, especially pocket dictionaries intended for use by tourists, can be useful for one’s basic needs, but they constitute a treacherous source of illusions; the same can be said of those multilingual electronic translators that have come on the mark
et in recent years. The correspondence that both the former and the latter certify between a word in the source language and the corresponding word in the target language is almost never truthful. The respective areas of meaning may partly overlap, but it is a rare thing for them to coincide entirely, even between languages that are structurally close and historically related.
Italian’s invidia has a more specialized meaning than the French envie, which can also mean desire, and than the Latin invidia, which also incorporates hatred and aversion, as is attested by the Italian adjective inviso (abhorrent). It is likely that this family of words originally referred solely to the idea of “looking poorly upon,” both in the sense of causing harm by looking, that is, casting an evil eye, and in the sense of feeling uneasy when looking at a person who is hateful to us, and of whom we say (but only in Italian) that non possiamo vederla (literally, “we can’t see him,” meaning “we can’t stand him”); but thereafter, in every language, the word drifted in different directions.
It does not appear that there are some languages with broad areas of meaning and other languages with narrow ones: the phenomenon is capricious. The area of the Italian verb fregare includes at least seven meanings, while that of the English verb “to get” is practically endless. Stuhl means “chair” in German, but, through a chain of metaphors that can be pretty easily reconstructed, it has also come to mean “excrement.” It seems that Italian alone has bothered to distinguish between birds’ piume (small downy feathers) and penne (feathers proper); French, English, and German overlook the distinction entirely, and the German word Feder actually describes four distinct objects, the piuma, a bird’s feather, a pen for writing, and a spring of any kind.
Another trap for the translator is the so-called false friend. For remote historical reasons (which, case by case, would certainly be intriguing to track down), or sometimes owing to a single misunderstanding, terms in one language may appear in another language where they acquire a meaning that is no longer similar or contiguous—as in the instance mentioned above—but completely different. In German, Stipendium is a scholarship (stipendio is “salary” in Italian), Statist is an extra in a play (statista is “statesman” in Italian), Kantine is a store or shop (cantina is “cellar” in Italian), Kapelle is an orchestra (cappella is “chapel” in Italian), Konkurs is bankruptcy (concorso is a contest or competition in Italian), Konzept is a rough draft (concetto in Italian is “concept”), and Konfetti is confetti (but confetti in Italian are sugarcoated almonds).
French macarons are not, as they sound to the Italian ear, “maccheroni” (macaroni) but correspond, rather, to the Italian amaretti (in English, “macaroons”). In English, “sensible,” “delusion,” “ejaculation,” “apology,” “compass” by no means signify what an Italian might assume at first sight; that is, sensitive (sensibile), disappointment (delusione), discharge of sperm (the only meaning of eiaculazione), apologia (apologia), drawing compass (compasso). “Second mate” is terzo ufficiale (literally, “third officer”) in Italian. An “engineer” is not an engineer in the Italian sense but anyone who works with motors or engines: it is said that this “false friend” proved costly, not only to a number of translators but also to a young noblewoman of southern Italy, who in the years just after the last war found herself married to an American railroad engineer, on the strength of an avowal made in perfectly good faith but sorely misunderstood.
It is not my good fortune to speak Romanian, a language passionately beloved of scholars of linguistics, but it must be crawling with false friends, constituting a veritable minefield for translators, if it’s true that friptură is a roast (in Italian “frittura” is fried fish), that suflet is the soul or spirit (in Italian, it looks very much like soufflé), that dezmierdà means to caress (to an Italian, the word looks scatological), and that indispensabili means underwear (“indispensable” in Italian). Each of the terms listed is a trap laid for an unwary or inexpert Italian translator, and it is amusing to consider that the trap is set in both directions: a German is in danger of taking an Italian statesman for an extra.
Another trap set for the translator consists of idiomatic phrases, which are present in all languages but specific to each. Some of these are easy to decipher, or are so bizarre that they would put even a novice translator on the alert: I don’t believe that anyone would blithely write in Italian that in Great Britain “cats and dogs are raining down,” but there are other cases in which the figure of speech sounds far more innocent as it mingles with the general narrative, at the risk of being translated word for word; one such case occurred in the translation of a novel into Italian, where we read that a well-known benefactor has a literal skeleton in his closet, which may seem possible but certainly not usual.
A writer who does not wish to put his translators into an awkward situation should abstain from the use of idiomatic phrases, but that’s easier said than done, because all of us, both in speech and in writing, employ such phrases without even realizing it. Nothing could seem more natural to an Italian than to say “siamo a posto,” “fare fiasco,” “farsi vivo,” “prendere un granchio,” the aforementioned “non posso vederlo,” and hundreds of other similar expressions (respectively, “we are in place,” meaning “all is well”; “do a wine bottle,” meaning “fail”; “make oneself alive,” meaning “not to be a stranger” or “get in touch”; “catch a crab,” meaning “to make a blunder”; “I can’t see him,” meaning, as noted above, “I can’t stand him”). Nonetheless, these are all meaningless for a foreign reader,1 and not all of them are explained in a bilingual dictionary. Even the Italian question “Quanti anni hai?” is an idiomatic phrase, literally, “How many years do you have?” An English speaker or a German speaker would say something equivalent to the Italian “Quanto vecchio sei?”—literally, “How elderly are you?”—which sounds ridiculous to us, especially if the question is directed to a child.
Other difficulties arise from the use of local terms, common in all languages. Any Italian knows what Juventus is (a championship soccer team), and any Italian who reads newspapers understands what is being alluded to when someone writes “Quirinale,” “Farnesina,” “Piazza del Gesù,” and “Via delle Botteghe Oscure” (respectively, the Quirinal Palace, residence of the president of the Italian Republic; the Farnesina Palace, the official seat of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Piazza del Gesù, the headquarters of the Christian Democratic Party; and Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party), but if a translator working from an Italian text has not immersed himself at great length in Italian affairs he will surely be baffled, and no dictionary will come to his assistance. What will help him, if he possesses it, is a linguistic sensibility, which is a translator’s most powerful weapon, though it isn’t taught in school, just as it is impossible to teach prowess in writing in verse or composing music; it will allow him to sink into the personality of the author of the text he’s translating, to identify with him, and it will let him know when something in the text sounds wrong, doesn’t work, is off-key, lacks meaning, or seems unnecessary or jarring. When that happens, it may be the author’s fault, but more often it’s a signal: one of the traps described here is waiting, unseen, with its jaws yawning.
But to be a good translator it’s not enough to avoid traps. The task is more challenging: it requires that you transfer from one language to another the expressive power of a text, which is a superhuman undertaking, to such a degree that certain celebrated translations (for instance, the translation of the Odyssey into Latin or of the Bible into German) have marked turning points in the history of our civilization.
Nonetheless, because a text is the product of a profound interaction between an author’s creative talent and the language in which he expresses himself, every translation entails some inevitable degree of loss, comparable to that of someone who goes to a money changer. This loss varies in scale, from large to small depending on the translator’s skill and the nature of the origin
al text; as a rule it is minimal for technical or scientific texts (but in that case the translator must not only possess mastery of two languages but also understand what he is translating, which means a third area of expertise), and quite vast for poetry (what remains of “e vegno in parte ove non è che luca,” “I have reached a part where no thing gleams,” if it is reduced and translated as “giungo in un luogo buio,” “I come to a dark place”?2).
All of these cons might frighten and discourage any aspiring translator, but we can add some weight to the balance pan of the pros. Besides being an enterprise of civilization and peacemaking, translating can also offer unique gratifications: a translator is the only one who truly reads a text, reads it in depth, in all its wrinkles, hefting and evaluating every word and every image, or perhaps even uncovering gaps and false sections. When he manages to find, or even invent, the solution to a problem, he feels “like a god,” without, however, having to bear the burden of responsibility that weighs on the author’s back: in that sense, the joys and labors of translating are to those of creative writing as those of grandparents are to those of parents.