The Beats in Translation

...Translating Kerouac's language, Pivano wrote, meant not simply translating the meaning of his words, but his entire "method of description, his angle of vision, his use of timbre and sound...

...Ginsberg was acompanied by Fernanda Pivano, his Italian translator, a short, square, middle-aged woman with strong features and close-cropped hair...

...it is, instead, a work of art...

...I met you years ago...

...His book is a series of poetic sketches and diary notes recounting his travels to New York City, Mexico, Patagonia, and other places around the world...

...Interestingly, in Italian, the words "traitor" and "translator" are very similar...

...At the far end of the pool a raised platform held a scattering of candy-colored sofas, easy chairs and ornamental columns...

...LETTER FROM BASCHI The Beats in Translation By Ruth Ellen Gruber Baschi A few years ago, I stood at midnight on the corner of Broadway and 110th Street in Manhattan with a musician friend of mine who had spent some time in Italy 20 y ears or so earlier...

...He shrugged...

...In a 1960 essay she bemoaned the lack of a good dictionary of their terminology...

...I was reminded of this several years ago, after the Italian version of one of my own books was canceled because I discovered that the translator had rewritten entire sections and added extraneous material to suit her own understanding of my subject...

...As an aspiring young writer, I asked her how on earth she handled the problem of translating the intricate, slangfilled English of Ginsberg and others into an Italian that would have the same impact many miles, continents and cultures away...

...You spoke to me about your method of translating...

...Ginsberg and other Beat writers have been translated into Italian since the 1950s, and they have become staples here...

...Once, I remember, at 2 a.m., I somehow found myself shopping for food with him and others at a fluorescentlit, all-night Indian grocery store in the not yet gentrified Notting Hill district...

...The award ceremony was held on a chilly early fall evening at a hotel on the shore of Lake Corbara, formed by damming up the Tiber River, about 10 miles from Baschi itself...

...Si...

...she seemed to move with difficulty, and her eyes were heavy, almost opaque...

...A number of prominent Italian writers and television personalities maintain weekend homes in the area, however, and some of them were instrumental in establishing the Penna d'Oro awards, which annually honor "culture in journalism...

...We were discussing language and translation and lyrics...

...The court, however, recognized "the lyric beauty of some of its images [and] the force and the rhythm of the storytelling" as elements that proved "the novel is not pornographic or obscene...

...Now in her 80s, Pivano was receiving a Penna d'Oro for her lifetime achievement in literature...

...I'm always afraid that I will change or lose something, not to mention simply make a mistake...

...She smiled at me again for a moment, then slowly, slowly walked on...

...The words rolled out of his mouth like a mellifluous river...

...Another young woman presented each winner with a carving of an owl, the symbol of wisdom...

...I didn't know quite what I wanted to say, or even, really, why...

...Not long after this ceremony, one of Italy's top youth cult figures, a rock star who goes by the name Jovanotti, came out with a book that raced up the bestseller charts...

...Signora Pivano," I mumbled...

...All of a sudden, as the taxis flashed past and the Korean grocers plied their 24-hour trade up the block, my friend struck a pose, lifted a finger, and started reciting the first lines of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl"—in Italian...

...I asked the TV news director how he had come to be picked forthe Penna d'Oro, and what he knew about the award...

...Pivano has in fact written eloquently about the "often almost insurmountable" difficulties of rendering the idiosyncratic language of the Beats into Italian...

...She spent more than half a dozen pages analyzing how Kerouac developed his personal prose language and how his use of words, timing, rhythm, and punctuation were influenced by jazz, bop and Chinese literature...

...Through her personal involvement with the writers she championed, as well as through her work, she has become a legend on the Italian literary scene...

...I approached her after the ceremony as the award-winners, presenters and audience members moved en masse across the hotel grounds to a free threecourse dinner in the hotel restaurant...

...I met Ginsberg a couple of times in the early 1970s, when I was working on and off for a now-defunct London poetry publisher who had put out several of his books...

...For each word the poet uses," she told me, "I choose one Italian word, just one, and I use that word and that word only whenever the English word appears...

...He received invitations to pick up awards all the time, he said...

...Neither journalism nor literature ranks high among the interests of most local residents...

...And not by chance was Pivano the main speaker at an event in Milan launching the work that drew a crowd of 2,000 or more...

...A young blond woman dressed in an extraordinarily revealing red velvet gown read excerpts from their works...

...Another time I met him in Rome, again late at night, on a rain-slick cobbled street...

...In her essay, Pivano described the immediacy of Ginsberg's poetry as based in "the vulgarity, crudeness and sordidness that often derive from flesh and blood...

...As the translator and critical interpreter not only of Ginsberg, Kerouac and other Beats, but also of authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she is regarded as the person who opened the door to 20th-century American literature for Italian readers...

...His rounded Italian syllables lacked the brutal impact of Ginsberg's jagged English, but they created a definite dissonance of their own against the background of upper Broadway by night...

...I have remembered what you said for all this time...

...They included the director of a TV news operation, a somewhat doddering philosophy professor who writes columns for a Rome newspaper, and one of the literati who maintain weekend homes in the Baschi area, whose latest novel had won this year's top Italian literary prize, the Premio Stresa...

...It is my conversation with her that I recall most vividly...

...Indeed, she noted, Jovanotti himself wrote that "in his rucksack he took with him only two books: the Bible and Kerouac...

...Pivano looked much as I remembered her from the early '70s...

...Seeing Pivano's name on a poster for the Penna d'Oro spurred me to attend the event—a mixture, it turned out, of kitsch, culture and unintentional high comedy...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a correspondent for The New Leader, based in Italy...

...There's a lot of Kerouac's On the Road in Jovanotti's book," Pivano told an interviewer...

...He decided to accept this one because he had never been to Baschi, and also because of Pivano's presence on the list of recipients...

...with Allen Ginsberg...

...I thought of Pivano at the time, as I have on other occasions through the years, but I had no contact with her after the one meeting I've mentioned...

...When no one was reading or talking or presenting, an offstage musician played tinkly piano-bar music that wafted over the scene like something from an old movie sound track...

...In addition to Pivano, more than half a dozen other writers or journalists received awards...

...Then, this September, I learned that she was to be among the recipients of an award called the "Penna d'Oro"—it can be translated as "golden pen" or "golden feather"—presented by the little town of Baschi in central Italy, near where I spend much of the year...

...He called the award-winners up, one by one, sat them down on the sofas and engaged them in breezy talk-show chitchat that was part flattery, part innuendo...

...Last May, for example, the 22nd edition of the Italian version of Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans was published...

...The audience—150 or so people, including invited guests, local VIPs and interested local citizens—sat outside in the dark, wrapped in coats, at tables arranged around three sides of the hotel's spotl it Swimming pool...

...When Marisa Bulgheroni's translation of a critical anthology by Seymour Krim, The Beats, came out two years later, she partially filled this gap by including a glossary of such Beat terms as "bennies," "bugged," "cat," "chick," "cool," "dig," "far out," "goof," "high," "hip," "hipster," "joint," "make it," "scene," "square," "turn on," and "with it...

...Age had slowed her, though...

...Not by chance did the volume feature an Introduction by Fernanda Pivano that hailed Jovanotti as a revelation on the literary scene...

...When the novel first came out in Italian in 1960, its publisher was put on trial for obscenity...

...Even though I have now, of course, read the books she translated in the original English," he said, "I vividly remember the impact on me when I first discovered them through her translations...

...The bearded, curly-haired idol, who started out as a disk jockey, is famous for his enthusiastic Italian rap riffs that exude optimism and upbeat positive thinking...

...Baschi is a postcard-perfect medieval hilltown, set amid vineyards and olive groves...

...One must approach such a delicate procedure with talent as well as understanding, and a dedication to preserving the spirit and the letter of the original...

...There is not even any real bookstore in the town...

...Roaming this stage was a jovial master of ceremonies with a hand-held microphone...

...The newspaper La Repubblica recently called her "the historic godmother of American literature in Italy.' "She not only translated these writers—she fed them, loaned them money and took them in," I was told by Guido Fink, a well known critic of American literature and film who will soon become the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles...

...She looked at me and smiled, then kissed me on each cheek as if I were someone she actually knew...

...I am far too literal to be a good translator...