By Hanna Alwine
Alessandro Baricco’s Silk is a story about the tension between the Self and the Other. Hervé Joncour, its principal protagonist, is instantly unlikeable. The novel is set in the 1860s and follows Joncour’s recurrent trips from his small French town of LaVilleDieu to Japan, where he buys masses of silkworm eggs to replenish those at home struck by a silkworm-killing blight. Leaving his wife Hélène at home, he becomes secretly enamored with a young Japanese girl, whom he distinguishes for her eyes that “did not have an oriental slant” (19, italics in the original), a feature that exemplifies Joncour’s tendency to find the domestic within the foreign. Rather than expand his cultural or linguistic understanding of what he refers to as “the end of the world,” Joncour’s travels seem to merely reinforce his own exoticized fantasy of the East.
The interlocking relationships of the domestic and the foreign present in the novel’s plot are bolstered by the structure of the text itself. At the surface, this novel reads like a traditional 19th-century European male travel fantasy. A Frenchman, Hervé Joncour’s contact with Japan is mediated by his obsession with the fabricated figure of a nameless Japanese girl. Their linguistic incompatibility puts her always just out of reach. Unidentified and elusive, the girl is defined by Joncour’s manufactured vision of Japan. Though embedded in a space culturally and geographically divergent from his home, Hervé Joncour’s interactions with Japan are ultimately narcissistic. In the Other, Joncour looks only for a reflection of himself.
This is a point argued by Robert Rushing’s analysis of Baricco’s Italian source text. His essay proposes that this novel is not a “simplistic, ‘feel-good,’ Orientalist story that conjures up the threat of the Other only to then dissipate it, leaving its presumably Western readers reassured” but is instead “acutely aware of the Orientalist tradition of travel literature that it belongs to” (211). Reviewers of the text in translation have largely ignored the frame this text provides for a critique of Orientalist narratives, reading it instead as a failed love story or variation on the traditional love triangle.
Baricco’s visibly experimental text rejects this reduction. In constant conversation with itself, the text crosses and puts into question linguistic borders through its composition of layered languages—Baricco’s Italian original incorporates words and phrases from French and Spanish along with Japanese ideograms. These ideograms appear in notes Joncour receives—one while he is in Japan, another upon his return home—as coded communication from the unnamed girl, interactions interpreted through a Japanese brothel owner who lives in France and who translates for the Frenchman. In these key moments of heteroglossia—several linguistic forms existing within a single space—Baricco’s form and plot work to reinforce the text as one that is self-aware and critical of the hierarchy that structures these instances of cultural and linguistic exchange.
The intercultural and intralinguistic relationships woven throughout this text combined with this novel’s popularity in Italy make it an ideal candidate for translation. This text was translated twice in the span of ten years by Guido Waldman (1997) and Ann Goldstein (2006) – typically an honor reserved for established classics of world literature. The two translations retain the plot, form, and structure of the original, but Goldstein’s and Waldman’s stylistic choices give the novel a decidedly different feel. Waldman’s translation reads in the voice of a 19th-century novel, his quasi-archaic prose emphasizing the lyrical qualities of Baricco’s alternating multi-clausal sentences and short, fragmented phrases. Waldman’s English translation borders on the foreign in its preservation of this novel’s poetic form—some chapters merely a few sentences on half a page—and in its strangely rendered syntax.
Although Goldstein preserves the poetic form utilized in Baricco’s original, her translation works to transmit the novel into a more accessible, colloquial English, stripping down its layer of foreignness. French words preserved and emphasized in italics in Waldman’s text are anglicized in Goldstein’s. Simple shifts such as the removal of the accents on “pebrine” and “Voila” do not carry over the heteroglossia that serves Baricco’s problematization of the Other.
Waldman’s translation does not merely retain these foreign words in the text, but uses italics to index the foreign in other creative contexts. Waldman translates Joncour’s love-making by proxy towards the end of the novel as “In the dark it took nothing to make love to this girl and not to her” (48), Goldstein as “In the dark it was nothing to love her and not to love her” (74). Here, Goldstein’s translation makes no distinction between the two female figures present in this phrase, obscuring the way one girl stands in for the other. In his original, Baricco uses the conventions of Italian grammar to distinguish between the two hers. Although Waldman’s translation does not follow Baricco’s text as literally as Goldstein’s, he is able to preserve an essential aspect of the Italian novel. Without these explicit signposts, Goldstein’s translation seems to lose some of the nuance of Baricco’s novel.
However, the diverging interpretations of Baricco’s novel offered up by Waldman and Goldstein’s translations are not to the text’s detriment. Instead, they work in tandem to illuminate the work of the translator, a process often forgotten or ignored when translated literature is presented to an Anglophone audience. Laid side by side, the difference in the two translations’ language is evident.
Baricco’s short novel almost reads like a collection of linked prose poems, a form that lends itself to be read and reread. Rather than understand Waldman’s and Goldstein’s translations as in competition, one “more faithful” than the other, it may be more useful to see them as partners. Read together, they introduce a layered complexity, a single text mediated by several speakers, a reading experience made possible not in spite of a translation, but because of it.
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk. Translated by Ann Goldstein, Vintage Books, 2006.
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk. Translated by Guido Waldman, Harvill, 1997.
Hanna Alwine studies Comparative Literature, Literary Translation, and Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She translates from French and is interested in the complex relationships between languages that share a nation.
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.