Halfway down again

Came across Carlo Porta's translations of Dante's Inferno into Milanese dialect, made around 1801-1805. Wow, they're fun!

A mitaa strada de quell gran viacc che femm a vun la voeulta al mond da la me sont trovaa in d'on bosch scur scur affacc, senza on sentee da pode seguita: doma a pensagh me senti a vegni scacc, ne l'e on bosch insci fazzel de retra, negher, vecc, pien de spin, sass, ingarbij pesc che ne quell del barillott di strij. At the halfway point of that great journey that we each take in turn to the world beyond I found myself in a dark, dark woods without a path to follow, the mere thought of it makes me shiver, nor is this wood so easy to describe, old, filled with thorns, rocks, and tangles, more eerie than a witch dance.

No witches dancing in the original (and am I the only person who pictures a rave here? probably).

Fashionable Milan goes back at least two centuries:

Sul fa di donn che innanz d'anda in tiatter consulten specc, sart, serva e perucchee ne se moeuven de ca fin che sti quatter no han dezis de conzert ch'hin bej assee, insci anca mi par no ris'cia on scarpiatter preghi el Poetta a squadramm da capp a pee par dezid se da sgiunsg sont assee franch fina alla prima ventalina almanch. Like women who before going to the theater consult mirror, tailor, servant and hairdresser and don't set foot outside the house until these four have agreed that they are beautiful enough, so I, to avoid any mistake, beg the Poet to look me over from head to foot and decide if I am steady enough to arrive at least to the nearest tavern.

"Specc, sart, serva e perucchee." Love it love it love it. Then Porta compares the tortures of the damned to local drivers:

Gh'e manch picch in Milan per Santa Cros de quell che no gh'e chi di anem dannaa: e se incontren fors manca furios i nost carrocc de sira par i straa, de quell che sbragaland a tutta vos se incontren lor mitaa contra mitaa, borland coj oss del stomegh zerti prej, robba de spuva sangu doma a vedej. There are fewer peasants in Milan for the feast of Santa Croce than there are damned souls here: and maybe carriages collide less furiously in the evening in our streets than do these souls who, bawling loudly, collide one half against the other while rolling stones with ribcages, stuff whose very sight makes you spit up blood.

Of course, Milan had an Austrian problem:

Gent de millia strazion, millia pajes, d'on parla che stremiss pesc ch'el todesch, sclamazion de dolor e sfogh de guaj: infin el pareva el ver marcaa dell'aj. People of a thousand extractions, a thousand countries speaking a language that frightens more than German, exclamations of grief and the venting of troubles: in the end it really sounded like the garlic market.

I have to conclude with Porta's version of the famous scene of Francesca reading that romance novel with Paolo:

Ma quand semm vegnuu al punt che el Paladin el segilla a Zenevra el rid in bocca cont el pu cald e s'ciasser di basin, tutt tremant el me Pavol me ne imbocca vun compagn che 'l ne fa de zoffreghin. Ah liber porch, fioeul d'ona baltrocca! Tira gio galiott che te see bravo: per tutt quell di gh'emm miss el segn, e s'ciavo! But when we got to the point in which the Paladin seals Guinevere's laugh in her mouth with the hottest and most airtight of kisses, Paolo, trembling, feeds me a similar one, which acts as a match. Oh you dirty book, son of a whore! Go ahead Galeotto, you sure are good: for that whole day we put our seal on it, and good-bye!

E s'ciavo! (English translations taken from Bernadette Luciano, "A Milanese Hell: Porta's parodistic "translations" from the Inferno", Italica, vol. 69, no. 1. (1992), pp. 45-60.)

Comments

[Mike R.]

That is a fun translation. Nothing really to add, but thanks for sharing.

Say, do you have any interesting Shakespeare translations? I once saw Hamlet, Prinz von Dnemark, a German TV movie of Hamlet that was translated from English to German and then translated back from _the German translation_ to English, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I had hoped.

Cheers,

Mike

[Randy McDonald]

It's a minor pity about what has since happened to Milanese and its kindred tongues. Thanks for sharing.

[Carlos]

Um. Randy, the Milanese would be amused by your pity. They might be offended if they realized it was based on a perceived lack of agency.

Just FYI, the linguistic statements in that Wikipedia article, though hedged, are badly flawed. It's systemic to Wikipedia articles on languages in general, since Wikipedia uses Ethnologue's highly dubious extreme splitter and tree classification.

(Incidentally, Ethnologue is a creation of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a Christian missionary group with a very interesting history. It's useful to keep that in mind when evaluating their methodology.)

[Randy McDonald]

Carlos:

Um. Randy, the Milanese would be amused by your pity. They might be offended if they realized it was based on a perceived lack of agency.

Let me unpack, and clarify.

It's a minor pity, only. It's clear enough that the decline of Lombard dialects was product of state policies accepted by the large majority of Lombards (Italian-language mass media, education, government services, et cetera), extending back to that "First we made Italy, next we must make Italians" phase of nation-building. It's hardly a consequence of, say, state terror; Lombardy is not the Donetsk Basin. It isn't even Wales. That Italian dialects seem to be used as a cudgel against outsiders, instead of a source of cultural capital that has to be extended to everyone (as is the theory with French in Qubec or Catalan in Catalonia) doesn't lend me immediately to the causes of their languages. Provenal's xenophobic head-in-the-sand approach didn't exactly work out well for that speech. Just as they aren't intrinsically positive, language shift and language loss aren't intrinsically negative.

The splitter-versus-uniter debate in languages is interesting--Mark Abley's readable Spoken Here takes a look at the case of Provenal (is it or is it not an Occitan dialect? ah, blessed isolating Flibrige). Based on the production of literature in many of the difference vernaculars of Italy (Venetian, Piedmontese, and Neapolitan seem to have the largest corpuses, from my admittedly superficial readings) and the definition of these vernaculars as languages by many of their speakers--the negative reactions to the
very recent designation of Italian as Italy's official language would otherwise be inexplicable--I'm inclined to treat them as languages.

[Randy McDonald]

As for the pity, I find it sad when small-minded people retreat into narrow dead-end solutions aimed at preserving what they like. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with small nations, after all, or small languages. But, if the people concerned see the future lying in rejecting these particular traditions, who am I to say anything but that it's sad that's the only way they can move forward.

[Carlos]

Randy, the privileging of Tuscan in northern Italy dates back to Petrarch in Venice. It's not a construction of late nineteenth-century nation-building. A cursory knowledge of the history of Italian literature would have told you this. Instead, you've trepanned a long, rich, and complicated story to fit your political prejudices.

I am shocked and dismayed at your confident ignorance. I find it sad when small-minded people use history tendentiously to make themselves feel politically in the right. For a time I hoped that you'd dodge that bullet, and then I hoped that it was just a phase. All I can say at this point is that it's been a very long phase, and that it's sad. Please move forward.

[Randy McDonald]

Carlos:

Yes, there's Petrarch; there's also Goldoni. There were multiple traditions, many of which could have been activated to different degrees if things had plausibly taken different routes.

[Y]ou've trepanned a long, rich, and complicated story to fit your political prejudices.

Um? The inability of Provenal to survive contact with French can be traced in large part to the xenophobic conservatism of many proponents of Provenal and the Felibrige's isolationism. Provenal signally failed to cope with urban mass civilization, or immigration, as effectively as Catalan in nearby Spain. The centralism of the French Third Republic had a lot to do with things, too, but it wasn't the only factor.

Small cultures and peoples have to be able to embrace innovation if they're to survive. I honestly don't see how this recognition necessarily represents a "trepanning" of anything. Common knowledge, that I'll agree.

I find it sad when small-minded people use history tendentiously to make themselves feel politically in the right.

! No, I'm not beating my wife, thanks for asking.

[Carlos]

Randy, you've got a problem. Several of them, in fact. Would you like me to dissect them out in the open, or would you like to take this to e-mail? Either way.

Next time, don't make smarmy political drive-by comments on a fun birthday post.