Month: March 2023

On Chins, Bribes, Liberals, and Translation

The first of an occasional series of anecdotes on the pleasures and puzzles of literary translation

Lately I’ve been reading a collection of short stories in Italian, Novelle italiane: L’Ottocento (Italian Short Stories: The 1800’s; Garzanti, Gilberto Finzi, editor), for pleasure and also in search of something interesting to translate. One of the stories in this excellent two-volume collection is “Fortezza” (“Fortress,” 1878) by Edmondo De Amicis. It’s a tale-within-a-tale, with a thin outer crust that sets the stage for the main story in the form of an extended flashback.

Here is the grim opening sentence of the main story. It describes the bloody chaos that beset Italy during the Risorgimento, when various local powers, rebellious factions, and foreign occupiers were fighting each other for control:

Era l’estate dell’anno 1861, allorché la fama delle imprese brigantesche correva l’Europa; quei giorni memorabili, quando il PietroPaolo portava in tasca il mento d’un ‘liberal’ col pizzo alla napoleonica; quando a Montemiletto si sepelivan vivi, sotto un mucchio di cadaveri, coloro che avevano gridato: — Viva l’Italia; — quando a Viesti si mangiavano la carne dei contadini renitenti agli ordini dei loro spogliatori; quando il colonello Negri preso Pontelandolfo vedeva appese alle finestre, a modo di trofei, membra sanguinose di soldati; quando il povero luogotenente Bacci, ferito e preso in combattimento, veniva ucciso dopo otto ore di orrende tortura; quando turbe di plebaglia forsennata uscivan di notte, colle torce alla mano, a ricevere in trionfo le bande; quando si incendiavan messi; si atterravano case; si catturavan famiglie; s’impiccava, si scorticava e si squartava; e a tener vivo e accrescere il miserando eccidere venivano dalla riva destra del Tevere, armi, scudi e benedizione.

My first-pass, clunky, overly-literal translation of this passage might be something like this:

It was the summer of 1861, when the fame of brigands’ deeds ran through Europe; those memorable days when Pietropaolo carried in his pocket the chin of a ‘liberal’ with the Napoleonic bribe; when at Montemiletto they buried alive, under piles of corpses, those who had cried, ‘Viva l’Italia;’ when at Viesti they ate the flesh of the peasants who resisted the demands of those pillaging them; when Colonel Negri near Pontelandolfo saw hanging from windows, in the manner of trophies, the bloody limbs of soldiers; when poor Lieutenant Bacci, wounded and taken in combat, was killed after eight hours of horrendous torture; when mobs of mindless rabble came out at night, torch in hand, to welcome the bands in triumph; when couriers were set on fire; houses flattened; when families were seized; when men were hanged, drawn, and quartered; and to keep alive and increase the sordid massacres, arms, money and benedictions arrived from the right bank of the Tiber.

I’m sure there is plenty to argue with in this first pass, stylistically and semantically, but I think I’m at least hitting close to the mark on what the author wants to convey.

Except for this ‘PietroPaolo’ who carries a bribe-holding chin in his pocket.

First of all, who is this “Pietropaolo?” My Internet searches didn’t turn up any renowned Pietropaolo in 1860’s Italy. So I guessed that the name (“PeterPaul” in English) was a generalization—an Italian version of “the average Joe.” (Though I found no confirmation for this guess.)

So what about “carried in his pocket the chin of a ‘liberal’”? “Carried” can also be rendered as “bore” or “wore”. But “carried” makes sense with “nella tasca” (“in his pocket”), which seemed to provide little room for ambiguity. (Unless “in the pocket” means something like “as a last resort” or “just in case?”)

So what about “the chin of a ‘liberal’”? This was the most mystifying part. I couldn’t help but wonder whether “mento” (“chin”) was a typo for “mente” (“mind”). The “mind of a liberal” almost made sense in this context. In those politically sensitive times your average Italian might hide his liberal views, metaphorically placing them out of sight in his pocket.  But I was reading the story in a reliable edition, and in any case it’s very dangerous to “fix” a text you don’t understand by assuming someone else has made an error.

Perhaps the rest of the phrase might hold the answer…. I knew the term “pizzo” from Italian literature and TV shows to mean protection money paid by shopkeepers to the Mafia to keep their businesses from getting burned down. But I guessed that it could easily refer to extortion money in general. So why “Napoleonic”? Well, parts of Italy were then under the control of Napoleon III’s French troops. It wasn’t hard to imagine “Napoleonic” French sentries or customs officers shaking down the locals to cross a bridge or import some goods.

But that still doesn’t explain “the chin of a ‘liberal’.” I latched on to the fact that the word “liberal” is in quotes in the text. Perhaps it was a brand name, maybe of cigarettes or tobacco. There was once, after all, a common Italian brand of cigarettes sold under the brand “Nazionali” (“Nationals”).

So what? Well maybe the average Peter-Paul was in the habit of stashing protection money in a “Liberal” tobacco tin in his pocket in case he got stopped by French troops…what do you think? Of course, that didn’t really solve the “chin” problem.

I researched the Italian words for “chin” and “pocket” for metaphorical meanings and usage in figures of speech. No help. I looked for a “liberale” product or trademark, same result. Still, I was almost ready to believe the phrase could be rendered as something like:

“[…]those memorable days when Italian men walked around with cash-filled tobacco tins in their pockets, for ‘bribes alla Napoleon.’”

But this rendering relied much too heavily on pure supposition. It was a literary house of cards.

I was only reading the story for fun—so I could have just let the mystery be. The odd phrase didn’t prevent me from enjoying or understanding the rest of the story. But it really bugged me. I don’t like to impose on my Italian friends for help in understanding texts except in emergencies (or unless they’re getting full credit as a co-translator). It feels like asking your plumber neighbor across the street to help you fix a leaky toilet for free. So I stewed over it for several days. I finally gave up (and in) and asked an expert—Dr. Tullio Pagano, a professor of Italian literature at Fairleigh-Dickinson University, for help.

He pointed out that “pizzo,” besides protection money, also could refer to a small beard. He surmised that this Pietropaolo wore this kind of beard.  So what was a “pizzo alla Napoleonica?” Well, I googled images of the then-reigning Emperor of France, Napoleon III, and sure enough, he’s shown sporting a cute little VanDyke.

But even Tullio couldn’t explain what was meant by “in his pocket.” One of my theories was that this Pietropaolo carried a fake little beard—a “chin” —in his pocket, in case he needed a quick disguise. Another case of the mind trying to fill in what it doesn’t know with invention.

Meanwhile my friend Dr. Pagano asked a colleague of his, Luigi Cepparrone—an expert on literature of the period and on De Amicis in particular, who teaches at the University of Bergamo—what was meant by this phrase. Dr. Cepparrone’s answer came back, brutal, astonishing, and shockingly straightforward:

La frase fa riferimento alla ferocia dei briganti, schierati con i Borbone e con il Vaticano e particolarmente avversi ai liberali fautori dell’Unità. La frase vuol dire che il brigante Pietropaolo aveva trucidato un liberale, appunto, e portava come scalpo nelle tasche il mento con il pizzo alla napoleonica staccato dal viso di questo liberale. De Amicis fa riferimento a un fatto storico, di cui aveva letto nelle cronache del tempo. Il personaggio cui si fa riferimento era un vero brigante di nome Ferdinando Pietropaolo della nota banda del brigante Crocco. Una sentenza pronunciata contro Ferdinando Pietropaolo afferma: “Considerando che la ferocità di Pietropaolo è posta in evidenza anche dalla scoperta di un mento umano con pizzo alla Napoleone (imperiale) tolto a qualche disgraziato di opinioni liberali, e che Pietropaolo portava barbaramente seco».

My translation:

“The phrase refers to the ferocity of the brigands, aligned with the Bourbons and the Vatican and opposed to the liberal proponents of a unified Italy. The phrase means that the brigand Pietropaolo had in fact murdered a liberal and carried in his pocket, like a scalp, the chin with the Napoleonic beard cut from the face of this liberal. De Amicis is referring to an historical fact, which he had read about in the newspapers of the day. The person to whom he refers was a real brigand named Ferdinando Pietropaolo, of the famous Crocco gang. A sentence pronounced against Pietropaolo specifies: ‘considering that the ferocity of Pietropaolo is affirmed even by the discovery of a human chin with a beard alla Napoleone cut from some unfortunate of liberal opinions, which Pietropaolo barbarically carried around.’”

So I was mistaken on every single aspect of this brief phrase. Pietropaolo was an actual person. He quite literally carried a chin in his pocket. The chin had a beard, not a bribe. The ‘liberal’ was a liberal, not a box of snuff or a pack of cigarettes.

So what are the lessons of this tale?

First: it’s dangerous to satisfy your confusion about the meaning of a text by just guessing what would make the most sense, and hoping for the best.

Second: context, context, context! If I had kept the rest of that sentence in mind, I would have seen that the phrase in question had to be something pretty grisly.

Third: sometimes the literal meaning is…the meaning. Sometimes a chin carried in a pocket is just…a chin carried in a pocket!

Fourth: sometimes there is no substitute for an expert opinion! My thanks to Tullio Pagano and Luigi Cepparone for untying this knot for me.

On Florida, Democrats, and “The Ultimate Cancel Act”

Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia filed SB 1248, an act that would cancel the state’s Democratic Party.

The so-called “Ultimate Cancel Act” would direct the Florida Division of Elections to “immediately cancel the filings of a political party, to include its registration and approved status as a political party, if the party’s platform has previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude.”

The Democrat Party, the predominant political entity in Florida before 1990, advocated for slavery prior to 1865 and seceded from the Union in 1861. It is the only party recognized by the Florida Division of Elections that would be impacted by this law.—”‘Ultimate Cancel Act’: Florida Republican proposes bill to ‘cancel’ Democratic Party,” Matteo Cina, Fox 35 Orlando, 1/3/23

Ok. All right. We’ll set aside the fact that it was the Democratic Party that stood up for working people, the elderly, and the sick from at least as far back as the Great Depression; that it was the Democrats who fought for civil rights and enfranchisement for and alongside black Americans in the 1960’s, even at the cost of losing its political grip on the American South; that it was the Democratic party that fought and still fights for the rights of women to make their own health decisions; that the Democrats had to fight tooth and nail against Republican obstructionism to make universal affordable healthcare a reality; etcetera, etcetera. And we’ll ignore the fact that it was precisely when the party turned definitively to the fight for equal rights that conservative white Floridians fled en masse to…the GOP.

The Democratic Party was in fact the pro-slavery party before the Civil War; it’s a party that obstructed and eventually reversed gains to black rights and enfranchisement during Reconstruction; and the party whose Southern wing stood behind Jim Crow laws–at least until the Lyndon Johnson era.  And we don’t hear Joe Biden or Alexandra Ocasio Cortez going around apologizing for their party’s racist, slave-mongering past. So let’s abolish the Democratic Party once and for all, as the good (or at least Republican) folks in Florida propose to do.

But there’s a fly in the cocoa butter. It occurs to me that, unlike Communist China, political parties here do not wield actual authority. It is the local, state and federal governments, as personified by their elected officials, that do. And so I propose that, out of respect for basic human decency and a clear-eyed understanding of history, we abolish the State of Florida.

Florida voluntarily seceded from the United States of America on January 10, 1861. It decided that it would rather go to war against its own government than give up the right to own and use human beings as agricultural implements. At the time white Floridians owned altogether about 70,000 slaves, which they had a perfect right to do under Florida state law. After Federal troops left Florida following Reconstruction, the state legislature did everything it could to prevent the state’s African American citizens from voting. It also passed Jim Crow laws that prevented black people from using public facilities and transportation or forced them to use separate ones. Etcetera, etcetera. And that’s just the legally sanctioned side of racism. Florida led the nation in per-capita lynching from 1900 to 1930.

I had the cute of idea leading off this sorry little post with an image of the Florida state flag with a big red X through it–“cancelled,” get it? But that wouldn’t work, because the flag already has a big red X. Take a look…you have one guess as to why that is.

Given its sordid history of slavery and violent racism, we have no choice but to cancel Florida. Let’s “cancel” (to use Blaise Ingoglia’s language) the governor and the state legislature. Let’s convert the State Capitol to a museum about citrus fruit and giant pythons. We don’t want to frighten our kids with scary truths about the state’s actual history, so let’s rip it out of textbooks and pretend it never existed. Let the syllables “flor” and “ida” never conjoin except in Spanish class. We’ll call that thing that sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico Dys(ney)topia from now on.

There, I feel so much better already.

On Donald Trump, Prostitutes, Money, Justice and Politics

We live in very strange times.

Our nation’s previously elected leader has declared that he is about to be arrested, which may or may not be true. He has framed his prosecution as political persecution, in fact as an attempt to subvert the will of the people, whom he has called upon to rescue him and by doing so to save their country.

Those people might do well to consider the crimes for which Donald Trump is being investigated by prosecutors in New York. He is not being charged (if he is in fact being charged at all) for speaking out against oppression, or for criticizing the policies of the current administration, or for championing an independent press.

His alleged misdeeds involve paying a prostitute $100,000 to keep her mouth shut about his adulterous affair with her, on the eve of his re-election bid, and using the tax-deductible campaign contributions of his donors to do so, and then publicly denying it.

It’s not exactly the most monstrous sort of crime a man can commit, and it’s not being treated as such; it’s a misdemeanor. It seems an odd cause for which to man the barricades.

Of course his supporters say and some actually believe that the allegations are (pardon the phrase) trumped up. Not that they aren’t true…even his Republican allies aren’t seriously disputing that these events actually happened. What they object to is that our justice system is actually seeking…justice. They call the prosecutor’s action “political.”

Perhaps it is. But it appears that a crime was committed, one that is serious enough to be examined by our courts. (And if I were a Trump true believer who had donated my hard-earned cash to his cause, I would be kind of mad if I found it had been used to cover up compromising hoochy-coochy.)

Yet even Mike Pence, whom the howling lynch mobs searched for at the President’s all-but-explicit instigation on January 6, 2021, called the impending indictment “politically motivated.” Gov. Ron DeSantis has expressed a similar opinion.

But if prosecutorial attention can be political, so can its opposite. The Republican establishment has shown a very odd lack of interest in investigating the President’s premeditated call to violent action in the days before “January 6th,” or even the deeds of those who actually did occupy the Capitol and cause death and destruction. That lack of interest is “political” indeed, in a way which promotes political well-being above serious, even existential threats to our nation.

Meanwhile I may have to go to traffic court next week to contest the deep-state’s preposterous allegation that I was going 50 in a 35 m.p.h. zone. It’s a POLITICALLY MOTIVATED WITCH HUNT!! Take to the streets to stand up for me and TAKE YOUR COUNTRY BACK!

Beware the Idiocies of March

The U.S. State Department just sent me my previous, expired passport. I suppose it’s in case I want to travel back in time.

Pet peeve of the moment: when did the “t” between syllables get cancelled? Why has “Manhattan” become “Manhah-in?” Or Staten Island “Stah-in Island?” It’s not fair to the letter T or to the other boroughs. No one says they’re from “Brooh-yn.”

I think it was sometime in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s that composers and performers of pop music quit trying to create actual melodies. It’s OK, I get it. It’s hard to think up a tune. Plus if necessary you can always just sample something from the 70’s, when people wrote, like, music.

Of all the foul half-truths and lies coming out of Russia’s propaganda machine, the line, “the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian” gets under my skin, because it contains a grain of truth. It’s exciting to watch the Ukrainians beat back the great Russian bear. It’s exciting to watch the contest between our appliances of war and theirs. We need to remind ourselves that this is not a Superbowl writ large, but a massive violent conflict in which thousands of human lives have gone up in flames.

But those videos of Russian tanks getting blown up? I have to admit, they never get old.

How ironic that the U.S. House of Representatives is preventing the citizens of the District of Columbia from showing leniency towards criminals. Unless, of course, they’re the criminals actually attacking the U.S. House of Representatives.

Should I abstain from enjoying the ethereal music of Wagner because of the composer’s racism? There’s an interesting dilemma. But Scott Adams’ “Dilbert,” the sour, cynical and repetitive comic strip about office politics by someone who never actually learned how to draw? Not an issue.

Tennessee: Guns, Yes! Men dressing up like Marilyn Monroe…too dangerous!

A photo from Tennessee governor Bill Lee’s high school yearbook shows him dressed up as…a woman. Says hizzoner, any comparison between him and what happens in a cabaret is “ridiculous.” I couldn’t agree more. His Marilyn Monroe is terrible!

Reaction after seeing Chris Rock’s Netflix show Selective Outrage: If you’re going to slap someone in public, in fact before a live global T.V. audience, don’t pick on a talented comedian. It may take a while, but you’ll get what’s coming to you, many times over.

“March Madness”? Whoop-de-doo.

On “Woke” and Viva Max!

I saw the film Viva Max! probably in late 1969 or early 1970, in one of Denton, Texas’ two movie theaters. It’s a comedy about a Mexican army officer who leads his troops across the U.S. Border to San Antonio, in order to reclaim the Alamo for Mexico. My 10-year-old-self thought it was pretty funny. It also had a catchy march/mariachi theme song which became a staple of middle-school marching bands.

In later years I occasionally caught a glimpse of Viva Max! in cycling through late-night TV channels, and it started to seem a little lame. More recently, I’ve wanted to see it again, but it’s kind of hard to find. It doesn’t show up on Netflix’s DVD service, or on Amazon Prime, for example. It doesn’t make the Turner Classic Movie rotation. I have a suspicion as to why: the movie is transparently, blatantly racist.

The lead character is played by Peter Ustinov in brownface as the bumbling title officer, doing a cheesy “Mexican” accent. Ustinov was a British actor of (according to Wikipedia) Russian, Polish, Jewish, Ethiopian, Italian, French, and German descent. What he was not in any way was Mexican. His character’s second in command, Sergeant Valdez, is played by John Astin, of TV’s Addams Family fame. If there were any actual Hispanic members of the cast, I can’t find them.

Today such a project would not get past the concept pitch. But there’s no evidence of hackles or even eyebrows being raised back then. (The closest thing I can find to indignation is a comment in Vincent Canby’s dismissive review in the New York Times. Canby stated that Ustinov’s “busy performance” included “a Mexican accent that would probably strike even Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez as too much.”) I imagine that any actual Mexican viewers would have found the film deeply offensive, but of course it wasn’t made with a Hispanic audience in mind. What was different then, than now?

Viva Max! wasn’t a product of right-wing xenophobic hate-mongers. It came out of the pseudo-progressive Hollywood establishment. The movie sets up and parodies the dumb Texas redneck stereotype (played to perfection by Jonathan Winters as a frustrated shopkeeper-National Guard officer) and makes fun of anti-Communist paranoia. Ustinov’s character isn’t portrayed with the hateful, scary, Donald Trump sort of anti-immigrant racism, but rather with the much more comfortable patronizing, condescending sort of racism. He’s a sympathetic character, and it’s easy to imagine that his creators thought they were humanizing the Mexican “other.” The screenplay was written by none other than a young Jim Lehrer (and adapted from his own book), later of PBS MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour fame. Hardly an avatar of knee-jerk xenophobia. Ustinov himself advocated a planet governed (not just mediated) by the United Nations.

I think about Viva Max! when I think about anti-“woke” hysteria today. I am certain that any objections to the film for its demeaning portrayal of Mexicans would have caused the same rolled eyebrows and shaking heads that, say, gender-neutral pronouns do today. I don’t particularly like gender-neutral pronouns, and I am not convinced that they are important. But I don’t think the concept is stupid, and I wonder how thinking people will look back on this era in fifty years. Maybe they’ll say, “Can you believe that back then, people were referred to by different terms, depending on whether they had a penis or a uterus?” I certainly hope that suppression of the role of slavery and Jim Crow in public education will be accepted as monstrous. And I hope that banning of drag shows will look as ridiculous as the censoring of Elvis Presley’s hip gyrations were in his time.

But who knows? We’ve been taking big backward steps these days with respect to women’s rights and education among other things. “Woke,” which to me means a healthy, honest examination of one’s own feelings towards other human beings, is being set up as Average Joe’s bogeyman. The idea that black people may be treated worse than white people in this country is being demonized as “critical race theory.” So maybe Viva Max! and its ilk will enjoy a comeback—and not in any ironic, cult-film kind of way.