Calvino, Italo. The Road to San Giovanni. Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

I tend to stay away from translated books, even though I know my life would be enriched by reading fiction, poetry, and other works not originally written in English. But I dread translations. Translators, even good ones, are caught in a bind: If they do a literal transcription, once-beautiful prose comes forth as awkward, stilted, often incomprehensible. If they attempt to render the foreign phrases in an idiom more English, they end up creating a different work—one of their own.

Pick up any two editions of Pablo Neruda. Almost all Neruda’s poetry in English is published with the original Spanish on the left page and the translation on the right page. Even if you know little Spanish, it is revealing to compare two translations attempted by American poets. Consider these final lines from Enigmas:

Probing a starry infinitude,

I came, like yourselves,

Through the mesh of my being, in the night, and awoke to my nakedness—

All that was left of the catch—a fish in the noose of the wind. (Ben Belitt)

and

I walked around like you

Investigating the endless star

And in my net during the night

I woke up naked

The only thing caught.

A fish

Trapped inside the wind. (Robert Bly)

To me, the second one more closely fits the elegant yet earthy Neruda of the left side of the page. On the other side of the world, we have Basho’s frog that jumped into the pond, splash. This Japanese haiku has been translated into English hundreds of times and you wouldn’t believe the many ways of rendering this simple phrase, how stiff or how relaxed it can be, how true or how false to a frog, a pond, and a splash.

A few fortunate writers have genius translators. Italo Calvino, I hope, is thankful for Tim Parks. I don’t know much about Mr. Parks, except that he must be British rather than American. I say this because he uses the word dustbin instead of garbage can. This shows up in one of the funniest pieces of prose I have ever read, “La  Poubelle Agréée” (The Registered Dustbin), one of five “memory exercises” in The Road to San Giovanni. Calvino turns taking out the garbage into a philosophical, comical tour de force, and Parks doesn’t get in his way.

The mechanics of transferring our leavings from under the sink to the container for collection are described in excruciating detail and elevated to a purificatory rite. Calvino confesses, “Carrying out the poubelle agréée is not something I do without thinking, but something that needs to be thought about and that awakens the special satisfaction I get from thinking.” This thinking about waste disposal ranges tongue-in-cheek from the Crisis of the Bourgeois Family to the corruption of Christian Democrat administrations and the history of revolution in Western civilization. Even the sheet of newspaper used for lining the trash can comes under scrutiny. In the end, Paris’s Le Monde gets the nod.

(This review appeared in the Redwood Coast Review.)