MUSINGS ON SOME AUTHORS' STYLES

Ovidius Naso may be considered the Grimm to dell'Anguillara's Andersen, the former's tales being more laconic and the latter's belle infidèle translations more vivid, more lifelike, with more details and a closer peek at human nature, characters less like cookie-cutter-cut... Let's take a passage from Hermaphroditus as an example.
Ovid, ut supra, is this concise:

Caras adit; videt hic stagnum lucentis ad imum

usque solum lymphae; non illic canna palustris

nec steriles ulvae nec acuta cuspide iunci;

perspicuus liquor est; stagni tamen ultima vivo

caespite cinguntur semperque virentibus herbis.

Nympha colit, [···]

saepe legit flores. Et tunc quoque forte legebat,

cum puerum vidit visumque optavit habere.

He entered Carian country; here he saw a glittering pond whose waters, all the way to the bottom, 

let the light through; not a single marsh cane,

nor barren algae, nor sharp-pointed reeds

surround the liquid; this pond, however, is to the furthest reach

surrounded by a lawn of evergreen herbs.

A nymph dwells here [···]

or she picks flowers. And thus was she, with her strength picking them,

when she saw the lad and, having seen him, wished to have him.

While, to compare, dell'Anguillara goes the extra nine miles:

Ogni loco di Licia ha già trascorso,
e poi di Licia in Caria ha posto il piede,
là dove pargli raffrenare il corso
vicino à un fonte cristallin, che vede,
che subito l’invita à darvi un sorso
l’umor, che in limpidezza ogni altro eccede,
che lascia (in modo egli è purgato, e mondo)
penetrare ogni vista insino al fondo.

Every place in Lycia he has already visited,
and then, across the border from Lycia to Caria has his foot landed,
there where it appears that his course has stopped
close to a crystal clear fountain, he sees
that suddenly he is enticed to have a drink
by the liquid, whose cleanness surpasses any other's,
that lets (so purified and clear it is)
every eyesight look through, all the way to the bottom.

Spinoso giunco, over canna palustre
non fa nell’orlo altrui noia, ò riparo,
ma terra herbosa, e soda il fa si illustre,
ch’avanza ogni artificio human più raro.
Or come giunge il giovane trilustre
a così nobil fonte, e cosi chiaro,
vuol ristorar di quello umore il volto,
che gli ha ’l Sole, e ’l camin co’l sudor tolto.

Neither thorny reeds nor marsh canes

present around any bother or obstacle,

but the grassy ground and the lawn make it so illustrious

that it surpasses the rarest human-made landscaping.

Thus, when the trilustral youth arrives

by such a noble and such a clear fountain,

he wants to restore to his face the liquid

that the sun and the journey, through perspiration, have wrested from him.

Gusta con gran piacer quel chiuso fonte
preso il garzon dal caldo, e dalla sete,
le man si lava, e la sudata fronte,
e poi và sotto l’ombra d’un abete,
che fin, che ’l Sol non cala alquanto il monte,
vuol dar le lasse membra à la quiete:
Ma siede à pena in su l’herbosa sponda,
ch’una Ninfa lo scorge di quell’onda.

He quaffs with great pleasure of that secluded fountain,
the stripling seized with heat and with thirst;
he washes his hands, and his perspiring forehead,
and then he seeks the shade of a fir;
for, till the sun has gone down over the hills,
he wants to give the weary limbs some rest:
but scarcely has he sat down on the grassy bank
that a nymph of that spring beholds him.

The lad in the Italian translation is more lifelike; he suffers from exhaustion, thirst, heat; finding a crystal clear spring with a thick canopy and a luscious lawn around, he quickly refreshes himself with drink and shade, and then decides to rest until later in the afternoon; and thus, he has a reason to see the irruption of Salmacis into his resting place as an unexpected disturbance; establishing his character as even more introverted -and hers as even more extroverted-, this scene of the aloof young lad enjoying the quiet and the refreshment definitely adds more realism to the conflict that is the catalyst for the story.


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The Russian Puss in Boots, translated by Ekaterina Ursinovitch, may be cited as a superb cultural translation. The mujik's three sons, Grisha, Sasha, and Ivan Durak, are there all three, and Ivan -being the youngest- inherits the farm cat. The royals are now a czar and czarevna, and the ogre is changed to the Great Eater (a member of Ivan's crew in the Flying Ship tales), who turns into several farm animals (instead of more exotic tropical beasts). The generic "youngest of three peasant brothers" in Perrault is given his Slavic name, Ivan Durak (literally, Jack the Fool), in the Ursinovitch translation. Ivan Durak, like the czars and their families, the bogatyrs, the Baba Yaga, the Zmey Gorynych, Koshei the Immortal... is a fixture of Slavic lore, which gives names to the stock characters to identify them (in a manner similar to commedia dell'arte: Likewise, Andersen's Klodshans becomes Ivanushka Durachok, the diminutive of Ivan Durak). The ostensibly weak and foolish "youngest of three peasant brothers" bears always the same name in Slavic lore, the dragon is always green and three-headed, and the wicked witch is always an iron-toothed, big-nosed Baba Yaga living in an izba on chicken legs (just like the tricky valet is always Arlecchino and the tricky maid is always Colombina).
Ursinovitch's Red Riding Hood (Krasnia Shapotchka) is likewise a Russian peasant girl, a six-year-old with flaxen hair and eyes blue as forget-me-nots, who, on the way to meet her babushka (not bedridden, and given presents on a special occasion by her granddaughter in that basket) in the woods, encounters the Grey Wolf -whom we Western Europeans call the Big Bad Wolf-. The translator gives her age (in a similar way that, in Dumas's Snow Queen, the princess is 18 -Elle monta sur le trône a l'âge de dix-huit ans- and her prince is in his early twenties -jeune homme de bonne mine âgé de vingt à vingt-et-cinq ans-), and her features (likewise, unlike his wife/fiancée -of whom Dumas gives no physical description-, the prince in the Dumas Snow Queen has curly raven hair: une tête couverte de cheveux noirs bouclés), aside from transposing the forest a few degrees east of the ones where the Western tale takes place. Like the prince and the princess in Dumas's La reine des neiges - Prince et princesse to their Andersen counterparts, or dell'Anguillara's Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, Krasnia Shapotchka is not a different individual from Red Riding Hood, but a different -and more realistic- interpretation of the same character.

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