Reflections of an Italianist

Abstract

What are studies in this day and age, and where does my own specialization, Renaissance Italian, fit into them? Has Italian ever really fit in that well--particularly given the fact that in large departments, the Italianists are almost always outnumbered by those who teach Spanish and French (if not Portuguese)? And should Italian fit by virtue of its distinctiveness--or by what Paul Ricoeur, in an essay to which I will return, calls its comparabilities? (1) My brief intervention will suggest that one way to think about Romance and the often vexed relationships among them to invoke translation: particularly the history of translation, and particularly history that focuses on the moment when the vernaculars as we now know them finally established their hegemony over Latin in the sixteenth century. (2) I will confine my remarks to thinking about Italian and French, although the work of Paul Julian Smith among others on Spanish vital to filling out picture important for our understanding as to where our increasingly threatened language and literature departments have come from, and where they are heading. For those departments to remain vital, they must explore ways of interconnecting with one another--both to understand what their historical relationships have been and to make the case for their necessity in the future. (3) This why we might consider translation studies as way to rethink relationships among national languages. Translation has usually been peripheral to the university. Translations don't count because they're not reflective of original work, while translation studies bas been perceived, particularly in the United States, as too technical to be scholarly or humanistic field. Many of out best translators have not been affiliated with universities: William Weaver, Electa Arenal, Edith Grossman, and Michael Moore, to name just few. And yet the study of translation's history, its theory as well as its practice, vital to learning about the particularities of language--and to impressing upon students the importance of thinking about the way that works. John Dryden's claim that he never paid so much attention to Latin as to when he was trying to put it into English epitomizes what the process of translation does: it forces one to consider both the specificities of individual languages and the relationships between them--and to clarify the extent to which one can, and cannot, be translated into another. To this extent, translation forms the basis for truly comparative understanding not only of languages, but of literatures. The early modern period witnessed the triumph of the vernacular as literary across eastern as well as western Europe, inclusive of the Romance to which Romanic Review has been dedicated since its inception. The ensuing contest among different vernaculars as to which would take the place vacated by Latin felt in variety of ways throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century struggle for linguistic primacy. Dryden's sensitivities to Latin may seem to be the reverse of what we find in one of the earliest reflections on translation and its relationship to emergent vernaculars in sixteenth-century Europe: Joachim du Bellay Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse. As Du Bellay's most recent translator, Richard Helgerson, has put it, during the prosperous 1540s, Du Bellay wanted a rebirth of the Roman Empire with France as the new Rome. (4) In this text devoted to exploring the role of the vernacular in newly-constituted Europe, Du Bellay first laments the effects of Babel and claims that it too bad that there isn't just one language: it takes so many years pour apprendre des motz! (349). But he then stumbles onto the key: to translate everything into French, turning it into the vehicle through which one can learn all things. Envisioning return to the day when Latin was the universal language, Du Bellay predicts that King Francois I will be like Augustus and that French will become like Latin--which in any case, Du Bellay observes, is already dead (352). …