By Annie Wyner
Upon its release in 1996, Alessandro Baricco’s novel Seta (Silk) was an instant commercial hit. A bestseller in his native Italy, it has since been translated into sixteen languages, in addition to a stage adaptation in 2006 and a feature film adaptation in 2007. Baricco cuts an imposing figure in the landscape of Italian literature. A well-respected author known for his sparse, taut prose, he is among a relatively slim number of Italian authors who have found success among Anglophone audiences. Italian scholar Luigi Monga describes his style succinctly as “deliberately simple” with “brief, often elliptical sentences…like a series of Japanese haiku.”
Set in the mid-19th century, Silk follows the life of French silkworm merchant Hervé Joncour as he develops an obsession with a young concubine whose eyes “did not have an oriental slant (19, italics in the original)” during his travels to Japan. On a surface level, Silk evokes a traditional travel narrative, depicting the roguish Western hero being seduced by the exotic “Other” but always returning home to find comfort and reassurance in his stable Western identity. However, rather than reinforcing Orientalist stereotypes, the novel problematizes them, blurring the lines between self and other.
Above all, Silk is a novel that dwells in silences and negative spaces, an examination of unfulfilled desire and all that remains unspoken. Joncour’s fixation on the young concubine that captured his imagination remains unrealized, buried beneath clandestine love notes and quick glances. Joncour himself remains evasive throughout the novel, his identity as slippery and difficult to grasp as a swath of silk (back home in France he becomes “the Japanese,” not only a reference to his travels, but also a hint at the other hidden inside the self). It is in these empty spaces that this story of desire and identity begins to unfurl, as lush and heady as a children’s fable.
Silk was originally translated into English by Guido Waldman in 1997, a year after its publication in Italy. A decade later it was retranslated by Ann Goldstein in conjunction with its eponymous 2007 film adaptation (an international co-production directed by François Girard). Waldman and Goldstein offer two immensely different interpretations of the source text, as demonstrated by the opening lines of each translation. Waldman, the prose translator of 16th-century Italian epic poetry, offers an ornate, decadent interpretation:
Although his father had pictured for him a brilliant future in the army, Hervé Joncour had ended up earning his crust in an unusual career which, by a singular piece of irony, was not unconnected with a charming side that bestowed upon it a vaguely feminine intonation. (1)
Waldman’s lush, lyrical prose is deeply immersive, laced with archaisms reminiscent of a 19th-century novel. In a novella such as Silk in which characterization and plot remain quite elusive, Waldman’s lyrical approach gives readers something to grasp onto, grounding them in the time and place of the story. Conversely, Ann Goldstein opts for a more stripped back style. Goldstein, who has established her career as a translator of modern and contemporary Italian authors, offers a far more clipped, prosaic style:
Although his father had imagined for him a brilliant future in the army, Hervé Joncour ended up earning his living in an unusual profession that, with singular irony, had a feature so sweet as to betray a vaguely feminine intonation. (1)
Goldstein’s translation offers a subdued interpretation of the source text, paring back the language in order to avoid imposing her own style. While the poetic and lyrical elements of Waldman’s translation are lost in this approach, Goldstein’s more bare- bones approach allows Baricco’s voice to shine through, removing, as it were, the silk veil of Waldman’s translation.
In both its iterations, Silk straddles the line between domestic and foreign, not unlike Joncour himself. Translation serves as a lens through which Baricco interrogates traditional Western notions of foreignness and domesticity. Joncour, in both Japan and France, is distinctly the other, subverting the trope of the Western “conqueror” and the Eastern “Other.” Unable to communicate in Japanese despite the increasingly long stretches of time he spends there, his romance with the young concubine is filtered entirely through translation, with the Japanese brothel owner Madame Blanche an unwilling go-between for Joncour and his would-be lover.
That the act of translation falls on the shoulders of Madame Blanche, a Japanese woman living in France, further complicates the ideas of foreignness and domesticity, as her name suggests. Translation serves as a sort of silk screen through which Joncour conducts his affairs—even in his most intimate relationships, he is a mere passenger, unable, or unwilling perhaps, to effectively communicate his desires on his own. He exists in the liminal space between the self and the other, his identity elusive, his desires vague. He is a man defined by lack, his life full of gaps and silences. And the novel’s unexpected ending offers a twist on the underlying theme of finding the self in the heart of otherness and conversely, the other–between the lines of the writing, and translating, self. Baricco gifts Hélène, Joncour’s otherwise silent wife, with an erotic imagination and a creative voice that at once capture and question the Western trope of Oriental eroticism.
Translation is an act of rebirth—with each retranslation, the source text is permanently altered. These two translations of Silk demonstrate the immense richness and complexity packed into the novel’s 92 pages. While radically different in their approach, interpretation, and impact, these translations both serve as a proliferation of the source text, injecting the negative spaces with meaning.
Alessandro Baricco, Silk. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Canongate, 2019 [2007].
Alessandro Baricco, Silk. Translated by Guido Waldman, Vintage Books, 1998.
Annie Wyner studies classics, comparative literature, and literary translation at Oberlin College. A translator of ancient Greek, their interests include Greek lyric poetry, Euripidean tragedy, and the intersections of classical literature and modern pop culture.
Works Cited
Monga, Luigi. “Seta.” World Literature Today, vol. 71, 1997, pp. 368. Gale Literature Resource Center; Gale, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19918457/LitRC?u=ohlnk20&sid=summon&xid=0115feff.