By Anna Wenzel
Published in 1996 in Italy, Alessandro Baricco’s novel Silk has been translated into English twice. It was first translated in 1997 by Guido Waldman, and retranslated by Ann Goldstein in 2006. Although it is set in the middle of the 19th century when the realist novel is at its peak, Silk has a dreamy, immaterial quality to it. Its plot is loose and cyclical as the protagonist, Hervé Joncour, makes repeated journeys between France and Japan to purchase silkworm eggs – a dangerous and illegal enterprise contingent on Hervé’s ability to bring the eggs back to France before they hatch.
While there is a love triangle at the center of the narrative, the characters are faint in personality and in dialogue. Hervé Joncour, the ultimate “observer” of his own life, barely seems to have a sense of self, as he is pushed by the whims of those around him – such as the mysterious Baldabiou who dispatches Hervé on his quest for silkworm eggs and the silent Japanese girl who hands him a note that unravels his understanding of his being. In this vein, the novel itself seems to create a feeling of “silk,” as its very existence slips through the fingers of the reader.
The narrative has a likewise elusive quality. The novel is comprised of sixty-five short chapters, most of which are barely a page long. The story is stretched between swaths of half-empty pages and it compresses long, world-round journeys into single sentences. Many of the chapters have repeated paragraphs that feel like poetic refrains and create a woven pattern. Robert Rushing defines Baricco’s prose in Italian as “tightly, beautifully sparse and controlled as [Italo] Calvino’s, but more lyrical…[he] uses the fantastic to great effect; and…the novel is erotically charged” (209). Following Rushing’s analysis, one gets the impression that Baricco’s authentic prose is silk-like: beautiful, sparse, fantastic, erotic. The novel as a whole should function under the principle of feeling, looking, and sounding silken through its plot, formatting, and writing.
And yet, Silk reads differently in each of its two English translations. The style of writing and the quality of the prose is where the two translations diverge. Goldstein has prioritized the “sparseness” of Baricco’s prose in a very literal sense. Her translation is minimal in its embellishments and its interpretation, rendering the novel into English in its most accurate, albeit plain, form. Waldman, on the other hand, has evidently prioritized the text’s beauty and lyricism. Using outdated turns of phrase, he allows the novel to mimic a 19th-century English work, creating the feeling of an older text that evokes the time placement and setting of the story. Waldman’s translation emphasizes the way that the story itself, beyond its exotic beauty, continuously slips through Hervé Joncour’s fingers as he travels around the world, longing for a voice he will never hear and failing to recognize the words of the woman he loves the most. Goldstein’s, on the other hand, stays in control over the terse, more compact aspects of the text.
In the latter half of the book, Hervé Joncour has returned to Japan for his final trip with an excuse that he will buy silkworms, really hoping that he will see the mysterious Japanese girl one last time. Japan has descended into civil war and Hervé Joncour arrives to find the village of Hara Kei, the man that Hervé Joncour has been purchasing the silkworms from, destroyed. He blindly follows a little boy through the woods towards the makeshift camp of a fleeing Hara Kei, and sees the girl’s litter in the distance as Hara Kei’s party continues to move. In the passage below, Barrico describes the sight of the litter, wherein we can glean a better impression of the different approaches Waldman and Goldstein took:
| BARICCO Hervé Joncour alzò il capo.Stoffe meravigliose, seta, tutt’intorno alla portantina, mille colori, arancio, bianco, ocra, argento, non una feritoia in quel nido meraviglioso, solo il fruscio di quei colori a ondeggiare nell’aria, impenetrabili, più leggeri del nulla. | WALDMAN Hervé Joncour raised his head.Superb materials, silk, the litter was enveloped in it, in a thousand hues, orange, white, ochre, silver, not a slit of any kind in that wonderful nest, only the rustle of those colours waving in the air, impenetrable, lighter than nothingness. | GOLDSTEIN Hervé Joncour raised his head.Marvelous fabrics, silk, draping the litter, a thousand colors, orange, white, ochre, silver, not a peephole in that marvelous nest, only the rustling of the colors rippling in the air, impenetrable, lighter than nothing. |
Even within the difference in lexical choice for the quality of the fabrics – a superlative for Waldman (”superb”) and an English cognate for Goldstein (“marvelous”), the two translators’ approaches become evident. Waldman’s subtle decisions are significant in defining his version of the text as silk-like, as exemplified by the line “lighter than nothingness.” The novel’s elusive qualities are apparent through analysis of this word as “nothingness,” making the novel itself appear more opaque and obscured. Goldstein translates this line as “lighter than nothing.” Rushing, too, in his article translates this line with the word “nothingness” (222), emphasizing the immaterial, quasi unearthly yet concrete presence of silk throughout the novel as its key image and plot device. Goldstein, on the other hand, creates a more matter-of-fact, modern-sounding account of Hervé’s dream-like life, reminding us that we are, after all, reading a contemporary author writing about 19th-century characters and events.
And yet, there is something special about the word “nothingness” that floods the entire novel. It is less than nothing, it is an absence, something that is just out of reach, fleeing, ephemeral. Hervé Joncour chases a voice he cannot hear, a woman that he does not know, and a sensation that he has not felt. It is this nothingness that evades him and that cradles his obsession, a sensation not unlike silk on skin. Waldman’s interpretation of the novel captures its sensations in a way that is undeniably poignant and thought-provoking, sensuous and diaphanous, like silk itself.
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk. Translated by Ann Goldstein, Vintage Books, 2006.
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk. Translated by Guido Waldman, Harvill, 1997.
Anna Wenzel is a student at Oberlin College studying Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. She translates from German and has an interest in contemporary literary fiction and non-fiction.
Works Cited
Rushing, Robert. “Alessandro Baricco’s ‘Seta’: Travel, Ventriloquism and the Other.” MLN, vol. 118, no. 1, 2003, pp. 209–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251577.