‘In Every Story There Is a Silence’: Translating Coetzee’s Female Narrators into Italian

Abstract

Translating is not only an exercise in the restoration of meaning. The translator’s true challenge lies in restoring meaning while preserving the way in which that meaning is expressed, because style is what is unique to a text. While working on a book, translators find many obstacles along their path in the form of innate tendencies, that are very difficult to resist and that deform and manipulate the stylistic features of the text. Working on Coetzee’s novels, this is particularly true when the narrator telling the story is a woman, due to specific aspects of translating gender. In my article I will explore some of the issues I faced when I translated into Italian two of Coetzee’s novels, In the Heart of the Country (1978) and Foe (1986). On one side, in telling Magda’s and Susan’s stories in Italian, the translator has to resist the temptation to rationalise the narrator’s language or to fill in the silence pervading the two novels just to make the text more coherent. And on the other side, she has to find a suitable language with regard to both diction and syntax, and to look for a way to address the question of what Magda calls ‘the pronouns of intimacy’, when the female and the colonised subject are marginalised by patriarchal authority.