Encoding realia across cultures

Encoding realia across cultures On the translation of Stephen King’s The Shining into Italian Matteo Francioni University of Macerata

INTRODUCTION

By its nature, literary translation has always been concerned with a different cluster of issues than technical translation. Among the diverse features and empirical approaches discussed by Scarpa (2008) and Rega (2001), it is vital to recognize that a piece of literature is an “open text,” subject to the hermeneutic skills of the receivers (readers and translators). For, indeed, every single reading act is a translatorial act in its broader sense, inevitably affected by losses of the author’s intended meaning. Since functionalist theorists as Reiss and Vermeer (1984) introduced the concept of skopos applied to all text types, the current literary demands have overshadowed issues on literal renderings to start a wide-ranging debate not just limited to mere word translation, but including cross-cultural transmission of the inherent linguistic elements of a given community of speakers, i.e. the realia. This paper on Stephen King’s The Shining will concentrate on realia, a crucial issue for the translators striving for equivalence in an age where literature has reached the global marketplace through the Internet. The case study I propose will present and discuss excerpts from the 1981 Italian translation of The Shining by Adriana Dell’Orto in order to shed light on the adopted strategies in the translation of realia, so to meet a prototypical readership who is notably receptive to the American horror fiction literature, though lacking prominent domestic exponents in this genre.1

THE OVERLOOK HOTEL: GEOGRAPHIC REALIA

1

For a comprehensive outlook on the Italian contemporary horror-writers see Mochi (2003).

Despite King sets the plot along real-existing U.S. locations (Boulder, Colorado; the Rocky Mountain National Park; Stovington, Vermont; Miami, Florida; Denver Stapleton Airport; Rangely, Maine), he opportunely points out in the explanatory notes that the Overlook Hotel is completely fictional. The hotel name underlies thorny issues for the translator, as polysemy occurs if one does not exclusively look at the verb to overlook in its geographical regards, but also in its socio-political and ethnographic ones. As regards the first category, due the fact that the hotel is nestled on the top of the Colorado mountains, the Overlook has a dominant prospect on its surroundings. King depicts the car journey of the Torrence family up the Rocky Mountains as a painstaking enterprise, as though its members were struggling to meet an overpowering personality:

Danny was impressed with the mountains. One day Daddy had taken them up in the ones near Boulder, the ones they called the Flatirons. […] And they were actually in the Mountains, no goofing around. Sheer rocks faces rose all around them, so high that you could barely see their tops even by craning your neck out of the window. (The Shining, p. 85)

Danny era impressionato dalle montagne. Un giorno papa li aveva portati in gita sui monti vicino a Boulder, quelli che chiamavano Ferri da Stiro. [...] E che fossero proprio in montagna non c’era dubbio. Tutt’attorno si levavano nude pareti di roccia, così alte che quasi non si riusciva a scorgerne la testa dal finestrino. (Shining, p. 89)

In these few lines the heights of the landscape are associated with two landmarks of American culture symbolizing power and wealth, i.e. the Flatiron Building in NYC and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. In the Italian translation these references are blurred. The reference to the Flatiron Building is completely domesticized into a literal translation, “Ferri da Stiro.” Despite the New Yorker skyscraper appears clear in the source language and the Italian audience would

require, if ever, only a minimal adaptation (Grattacielo Flatiron), the translator’s choice is aimed at an immediate understanding on the lexical level, without hinting at the cultural meaning of the original. In Newmark’s words the translator opts for a semantic translation, without reproducing the same effect on the foreign audience (Newmark 1981, p. 51).2 Similarly, the translator underestimates the peculiar shade of meaning of the “sheer rock faces,” alluding to the granite-sculptured presidential faces (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln) on Mount Rushmore. The adjective “sheer” is turned into “nude,” i.e. bare, vegetation-lacking, in the Italian translation, so modulating the qualitative level of the sentence.3 However, the translator might have dropped a hint later on, when she translates “tops” as “teste,” in an attempt to regain the cultural focus behind the author’s lexical choice, which has previously been concealed.4

THE OVERLOOK HOTEL: SOCIO-POLITICAL REALIA Kings reveals to the reader that men-driven politics and economy have showcased and doomed the hotel over the years. In the novel, while the previous managers’ only greed was recklessly aimed to speculate on the hotel’s value (e.g. the Mafia wars) and to show off its opulent prestige (e.g. the masked ball of Horace Derwent), Al Shockley and his appointed manager Stuart Ullman’s only mission is to rebuild the hotel’s finances and reputation. The Overlook and the Watergate hotels are representative of a sense of guilt to be expiated by enforcing strict managerial rules, so to avoid any further “leaks” of inconvenient news. Journalists have shed light both on the Watergate and the Overlook events; they are paladins of the “real” struggling against an “imagination” which seeks to hide any evidence of the events. As Bernstein and Woodward committed themselves to uncover the “dirty jokes” started by the “Plumbers” having set bugs between the stairwell and the underground parking of the Watergate hotel, Jack is motivated to investigate the “leaks” of information in the basement, the “crypt” of the Overlook. On page 242, while Jack is engrossed with his scrapbook, Wendy calls 2

See also Newmark 1994, p. 51. See Vinay and Darbelnet 1995, pp. 246-255. 4 See Newmark 1981, p. 42, for discussion of the translator’s task to know the source language properly so as to formulate ad-hoc hypotheses on the author’s lexical choices. 3

out to him thinking he would be placing rat traps, and he answers: “Yeah, baby looking for rats.” The Italian translator renders Jack’s reply as “sono qui per cercar topi” (p. 228), minimizing the ethnographic meaning of the word “rat” which reflects a variety of idiomatic expressions as “to smell a rat” and “to rat on someone or something.” It is important to retain the ethnographic meaning of “rat” because it transcends the idea of what Jack should be doing at that moment, i.e. placing rat traps, to mirror Jack’s emotional response before the scrapbook as well as his action taken in the aftermaths, i.e. sensing the conspiratorial pressure behind the glamorous hotel over the years and making Ullman aware of his duty to fight for truth to emerge in his novel (see chapter 20).

THE OVERLOOK HOTEL: ETHNOGRAPHIC REALIA In The Shining, the Overlook hotel is not only the symbol of money and social prestige, but it also stands for a space of “anonymity,” an “in between” space where one could find a “homey” atmosphere in a place which is anything but his/her home. Next, due to a traditional domestic confinement, the house is the realm of the women, the so-called “dominae,” who used to be in charge of the fire kept inside the “domus” (the Roman house), as representatives of the goddess Vesta. The hotel can be perceived as an ethnographic realia inscribed in American culture, owing to the increasing importance of social migration within the United States boundaries. According to a Census Bureau report, between 2012 and 2013, 35,9 millions of U.S. citizens moved their residence to another state. The same statistics displays that men with higher education were more likely to move intercounty for job-related reasons than women. In The Shining, Jack is namely well-educated (he used to be a teacher) and moves from Stovington, Vermont, to Boulder, Colorado. and then to the Overlook hotel to cultivate both his novelist’s vein and to raise some money while taking care of the prestigious hotel during the closing season. As a symbol of men’s power, the hotel broadcasts Marc Anthony Torrance’s voice in Jack’s consciousness by means of a CB radio (p. 335), but as Jack has missed his father

throughout his childhood he cannot discard his presence by just smashing the radio. Jack’s ambitions are not simply aimed at claiming his authority over his family and the staff members (i.e. Ullman and Halloran) in the hotel. Jack intends to assert eagerly his responsibilities, to overlook every aspect of his caretaker’s and paternal duties, in an attempt to restore balance in the hotel’s troublesome past as well as in his own family experience. As regards family bounds, King draws attention to the crisis of the American family afflicted by alcoholism and violence. According to a Florida Institute of Technology statistics, it is estimated that drugs and alcohol are a factor in at least 80 percent of domestic violence incidents in the USA. Alcoholism caused Jack’s father to batter his wife, to make her “take her medicine (p. 330), which is translated into Italian as “prenderai la purga” (p. 306), i.e. “take your purgative.” The translator opts for a translation shift affecting the rank level of the word “medicine,” so maintaining the cultural meaning of a bitter expiation of a guilt, even corroborated by the political nuances of meaning evoked by the word “purgative” in Italian, i.e. “purghe staliniane” and “purga del sovversivo.” Moreover, “medicine” may be opportunely translated into “purga” because “purge” harks back also to Anthony’s job as a male nurse: its obsessive repetition makes Jack commemorate his father, immolating his family to his name.

CONCLUDING REMARKS The Shining is a masterpiece of horror fiction with over a million copies sold since 1977. Its narrative backbone has inspired prominent movie directors as Stanley Kubrick, who shot a world-famous intersemiotic translation, as Roman Jakobson would have defined it (see Jakobson 2004), of King’s novel in 1980. The Italian interlinguistic and intercultural transfer affecting realia in the novel can arguably be gauged, as Even Zohar pointed out, “in the process whereby imported goods are integrated into a home repertoire” (Zohar 2005, p.68). Conceiving the repertoire as “encompassing the rules and materials that govern not merely the production, but also the consumption of a literary product” 5, The Shining has successfully met the requirements of the Italian home repertoire, not exclusively owing to the translator’s ability to

5

Ibid.

convey the thrilling atmosphere of the plot, but also through an opportune intercultural mediation of the realia within the novel. One crucial realia that has been left out of the discussion is the title of the novel which has shifted across the editions from a rather imaginative, communicative translation, i.e. Una splendida festa di morte (1978), to a semantic (non-)translation by means of a loanword, i.e. Shining, which proves completely acceptable in the Italian repertoire owing to Kubrick’s contribution as well. Next, comparing the cover layout of the original with the equivalent adopted on the nowadays Italian version of The Shining, it becomes clear once again that the Italian translation has benefited from the fortune of Kubrick’s movie and other King’s novels published in Italy, since Jack Nicholson’s ominous grin stands out on the front cover and the writer’s close-up fills in the back. Blurbs in the Italian version play a minor role, as only the original New York Times review appears on the second bookmark cover of the Dell’Olio’s translation. For, as I have tried to demonstrate in this paper, the Italian horror-fiction polysystem is still young to see in King’s The Shining a secondary model, considering the pivotal influence of the American Gothic fiction across the centuries.6 Realia cannot easily be replaced, as a general rule, throughout languages and horrorfiction culture, since realia and literary polysystems, perceived as paradigms of the repertoire, are in a constant state of flux, and thus translation strategies are subject to vary accordingly.

6

See Bacigalupo 1999 for a comprehensive discussion on Poe’s reception in Italy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY SOURCES 

King, Stephen: The Shining (1977), New York, Anchor Books, 2012

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King, Stephen: Shining, trad. Adriana Dell’Orto, Milano, Bompiani, 2014

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King Stephen: Una splendida festa di morte, trad. Adriana Dell’Orto, Milano, Sonzogno, 1978

SECONDARY SOURCES 

Bacigalupo, Massimo: Poe in Italy, in Lois Davis Vines (ed.), Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1999, pp. 62-74

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Even-Zohar, Itamar (ed.): Translation and Transfer, Polysystem Studies, special issue of Poetics Today 11, (1), 1990, pp. 73-78

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Even-Zohar, Itamar: “The Making of Culture Repertoire and the Role of Transfer,” in Itamar Even-Zohar (ed.), Papers in Culture Research, Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University, 2005, pp. 68-75

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Jakobson, Roman: “On linguistic aspects of translation,” in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, pp. 138-143

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Mochi, Roberta: Libri di sangue: L’horror italiano di fine millennio, Brescia, Larcher, 2003

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Newmark, Peter: La traduzione: Problemi e metodi, Milano, Garzanti, 1994

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Rega, Lorenza: La traduzione letteraria: Aspetti e problemi, UTET, Torino, 2001



Reiss,

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Vermeer,

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Translationstheorie, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1984 

Scarpa, Federica: La traduzione specializzata: Un approccio didattico-professionale, Milano, Hoepli, 2008



Vinay, Jean Paul, and Darbelnet, Jean: Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais: Méthode de traduction (1977) in Juan Sager and M.-J. Hamel (eds.), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for translation, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamin, 1995