On Translating Albanian Author Romeo Çollaku's Mjaltë në teh into Italian: An Interview with Professor Eda Derhemi and Francesco Ferrari

by Sydney Lazarus

Eda Derhemi, Teaching Associate Professor of Italian and EU Center affiliate faculty, and Francesco Ferrari, PhD candidate in Italian, recently received a literary translation award from the Albanian Ministry of Culture and the National Center for Books and Reading for their translation of the Albanian novel “Mjaltë në teh” by Romeo Çollaku into Italian, under the title “Miele sul coltello” (Besa Editrice, 2020). 

A polyphonic novel whose title translates to "honey on the knife's edge" in English, it narrates the everyday lives of people from an isolated mountainous village in southern Albania over the course of three decades, from Italian and German occupation during World War II through the late 1960s, when Albania was ruled by Enver Hoxha's totalitarian government. 

The EU Center conducted a written interview with Derhemi and Ferrari to learn about how this collaborative project came into being, difficulties that the novel presented, the unique challenges of translating from Albanian into Italian, and more. 

EUC: Can you tell us about your language backgrounds?

 

DERHEMI: Albanian is my first language, and Albania is where I lived and studied. During the extremely isolated communist decades, Tirana, the capital of Albania, considered Italian as a path to reach the world, its knowledge, music, art, fashion and especially freedom. A considerable number of young people from Tirana had some level of Italian, often learned in non-traditional ways, like through contact with Italian radio or television. Then I emigrated to Italy and used Italian as my main language of work and life. Since 1995, when I emigrated to the U.S., English and Italian have been my primary languages.

 

FERRARI: My language background reflects the linguistic heterogeneity of Italy with its local varieties, dialects and minority languages. I hail from an Arbëresh (Italian-Albanian) community located in the northeast of Calabria, the toe of the “boot,” and my first languages are Italian, of course, and this variety of ancient Albanian called Arbëresh. Only much later did I learn English. 

 

EUC: What motivated you to translate Mjaltë në teh, and how did the two of you come to work together on the Italian translation?  

 

DERHEMI: I read Mjaltë në teh soon after it was published in Albania and enjoyed the novel’s linguistic complexity, masterful character depiction, and its rich and powerful description of two very significant historical periods — World War II and Eastern European communism. I wrote an article 

that provided a psychoanalytical account of the obsessive and fascinating pursuit of language in the novel.

Eda Derhemi

Each character is somehow “marked” by language in strong ways. All of them have peculiar connections with words, and the characters' language evolves alongside changes in their personal lives, as well as alongside ideological — and therefore linguistic — transformations. Even a very educated Albanian reader would have a hard time understanding every lexical item and idiomatic expression in the original because of the very isolated nature of the vocabulary used in the tiny village in the novel and because of the author's extensive use of archaic words and expressions. Furthermore, two radical linguistic changes occur as the plot progresses: one character who travels to the northern regions comes back to the southern village speaking a different dialect, and in the second part, the arrival of communism brings to Albania and to our novel a “new” slogan-based, frozen language, with a new lexicon and syntax. 

I also could not stop thinking that the fate of Italians who ended up in Albania before and during the war was very little (if at all) known in Italy, and only by older Italians. There are three Italian characters in the novel. All of them are very different from one another. They come from different regions of Italy and have their own specific relations to the other Italians and Albanians in the village.

This project was possible only with the collaboration of Francesco Ferrari. Francesco is Italian of Arbëresh origin and had the right linguistic and literary skills to make the Italian mixtilinguism sound as natural as the Albanian one, including the sporadic use of Arbëresh. Francesco immediately embraced the project, and this is how we started working together about two years ago.  

 

EUC: What was the translation process like?

 

DERHEMI: It was like a repetitive girotondo (Ital. for “dance in a circle”) around the text. We would read and translate a page, discuss the main words and expressions that needed to be revised, point out the dialectological and stylistic issues that needed further work, and isolate specific words that we needed to check in specialized dictionaries or discuss with the author. 

 

We would read and reread the dialectal versions until they would sound equally transparent or opaque to the average Italian reader as they would to the average Albanian reader. We also decided to select a small amount of words from Arbëresh and from Albanian proper, in order to match very isolated words that were used in the village where the novel was set, as well as words borrowed from the Greek, that would be incomprehensible to the average Albanian reader. Arbëresh and the southern Italian dialects have been coexisting for many centuries. Phonetically they speak to each other, creating a harmonious mixed language that while not always literally transparent to the reader, keeps her completely engaged in this peculiar story with peculiar people and ways of speaking, and gives the same exact effect as the original.

 

EUC: For readers unfamiliar with Italian and Albanian, what unique challenges were presented by translating between the two languages? 

 

Francesco Ferrari

FERRARI: One of the challenges was certainly that of adapting the Albanian syntax to the Italian one. As much as Italian phrasing can be notoriously overflowing itself, it was necessary on many occasions to break down the sentences into shorter clauses without affecting the flow of Collaku’s writing. To this end we worked both on the punctuation and on the order of the words within the sentences, which in both Albanian and Italian is more flexible than English. Our purpose was to emphasize the expressionist force of Collaku’s prose and its patina of popular language even without recurring explicitly to the dialect. 

 

DERHEMI: Italian and Albanian do not belong to the same branch of the Indo-European languages, so they have considerable grammatical differences between them. I will mention only one example here. Albanian has two verbal moods, the admirative and the optative, which do not have equivalents in the Italian grammatical system. The optativemood expresses wishes and curses and can be more easily translated using the Italian subjunctive and lexical items, but the admirativeis very complex. It’s used to express surprise, marvel, or strong emphasis, often accompanied by irony and even secondary or opposing connotations. We had to play with the word order and rely on lexical and stylistic means that changed in every case, since the meaning of this mood is context sensitive and there is no one solution to fit all cases.

 

EUC: Which aspects of the text did you find most challenging to translate? 

 

DERHEMI: The main challenge was to translate one of the richest linguistic repertoires — the different varieties that populate the book — that I have ever encountered in a novel. Every dimension of the linguistic varieties of a language is represented in the novel: diatopic (different geographical dialects are used), diaphasic (different styles and registers are active in different characters and situations), diastratic (different sociolects, and even different speech corresponding to different acquisition levels), and diachronic (among the rich and diverse idiolects in the novel, there are special words and expressions of an archaic and obsolete nature).

 

FERRARI: Expressions and terms related to folkloric beliefs posed a challenge. One that was particularly troublesome was the word xhinde, a sort of shadow that, as the legend goes, causes epilepsy if stepped over. After considering several options we decided to leave it untranslated and to intervene only on the level of morphology by italianizing it as ginde. Rendering it literally as calpestare le ombre (stepping over the shadows) would have entailed a loss of its dialectal flavor. It would also have sounded too gothic, as malombra (evil shadow) is used in many Italian popular traditions to mean a ghost. Although in the novel xhinde certainly relates to magical beliefs “calpestare le ombre” would have been potentially misleading as it does not have much to do with the specter. Digging a little into Italian folkloric repertoire we came across expressions such as male di San Donato (Saint Donato’s disease) and other similar that did not have the same expressive force, mostly because we would lose the idea of stepping over, which gives a concreter and physical sense of the accidental nature of the disease. Finally, we decided to simply transliterate the Albanian xhinde into ginde. The reader will not know what that exactly is, but its strangeness and opacity easily blend into the mixture of dialectal and colloquial expressions in the novel. It is consistent with a multi-layered language where not everything is immediately apprehensible.

 

EUC: What were some other challenges you ran into and the variations you considered? 

 

FERRARI: In the novel, there are three Italian characters, two of whom are defectors of the Italian army who found shelter in the village. One of them is named Giuseppe (Xhuzepe). Upon arriving at the village Giuseppe is renamed Josifi, a more pronounceable form for the locals. We found it still too close to the original and at the same time quite unnatural sounding, so we opted for a more radical transformation, adopting the Arbëresh form Zef, which is — or maybe I should say used to be — a common abbreviation of the name Giuseppe in the Arbëresh communities. 

Another example in this vein is Maqo, the name of a secondary character. This form, Maqo – which is the shortened Albanian name that corresponds to the Italian Tommaso – would be too distant from an Italian. Tommaso, on the contrary, would have been too familiar to maintain the same strange allure of the original. Hence, we altered Tommaso the way an Arbëreshspeaker might do and came up with Tumàsi.

EUC: In closing, which translators, living or dead, translating from any language into any language, do you admire most? 

 

DERHEMI: I do not believe in translation. I only tolerate it, because it is indispensable. This is a profession of extreme importance that needs high quality interdisciplinary knowledge, but that, in most cases, is miserably paid — especially in the case of good literature that does not directly interest money-making or power-making institutions. 

 

FERRARI: I must have been 15 when my father got me a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in Italian. Throughout the years I came across many other translations of Baudelaire’s poems, but none of them could convey the same rhythm, the same fluidity, the same music. Since I do not speak any French, the pleasure of reading was my main parameter for judging the effectiveness of the translation. Not a reliable one, I admit. Anyway, some years later I came across Diceria dell’Untore (The Plague Sower) by Sicilian author Gesualdo Bufalino. The protagonist of the novel, a WWII veteran, describes the life of a group of men in a sanatorium where most of them would spend their last days. The style, the combination of prose and lyricism, and the lexical refinement sounded familiar, as did the name of its author until I found out that the translator of my beloved version of Le Fleurs du Mal and the author of this intense novel was the same person. Today I still have these two books, and I bring them with me wherever I go.