Translating Lawrence: A Personal Experience with an Elusive Fox

Abstract: In the study Dire quasi la stessa cosa (To say almost the same thing, 2003), Umberto Eco criticises books about translation because, in spite of their interesting and even subtle theoretical analyses, they lack concrete examples, so that all their discussions about how to translate a text seems to be hanging in a vacuum. A translation is always a transmission, a rite of passage from one language and cultural tradition to another, from a spatial and temporal background to a different one. This passage is in a certain sense incomplete without the vehicle of interpretation. The importance of the category of “time” in relation both to the original text and to its translation into a different language is discussed here emphasising that literary works belong to their time, and readers accept that they are written in a language which differs, to a greater or lesser extent, from the contemporary one. Translations, on the contrary, must be written in the language of the present, and this is proved by their being subject to an inevitable obsolescence. After underlining the limits of the existing Italian translations of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox (Linati, 1929, and Sortino, 1991), this essay discusses some of the main problems raised by the translation of The Fox into Italian, namely the gender of the Fox, formal and informal speech, the male protagonist, self-censorship, untranslatable expressions.