The opening passage of Fontamara introduces the reader immediately to the tone of the work, a tone that will remain through the device of the series of fictitious narrators whose accounts Silone is supposedly recording. And it is the tone, always downbeat and gently ironic even when the most moving and painful experiences are being described, that gives this novel its special quality. In the opening paragraph the narrator describes the transitoriness of progress, the way in which the long, slow development of technology that led to the arrival of electric light in a small mountain village can be overturned in a single night, and the faintly mocking, almost resigned tone is immediately established.
The Italian text consists of five sentences. The first two open with time phrases—il primo di giugno locates the start of the narrative on a definite date; il primo di giugno opens the sentence that expands on that initial blunt statement and moves the reader on in time. The third sentence again opens with a time phrase, now qualified by the conversational first word così, and moves still further into time future, through weeks and months. The final two sentences both open with a verbal phrase of movement: per arrivare and per tornare, that sum up the point being made in the opening paragraph about the slow movement of technological advancement compared to the speed with which that technology can be abandoned. The language of this paragraph is therefore misleadingly simple, and the almost conversational tone camouflages a heavily rhetorical passage, carefully structured to build to a point of climax and utilizing a series of patterns of repetition (e.g. the various time phrases; phrases such as illuminazione elettrica, luce elettrica, chiaro di luna, etc.).
The English translation has not made any attempt to retain the pattern of five sentences, beginning with either a time phrase or a verb of movement. Instead the second sentence inverts the time phrases, and puts them at the end—which could be defended in terms of English stylistic modes—and the remaining three sentences are formed by splitting one SL sentence into two and then by joining two other SL sentences together. This device works well in the first instance, creating the two short, conversational statements beginning 'So it continued' and 'In the end'. But by joining the two SL sentences into a single, long TL sentence, the sense of movement of the original is lost in the clumsy structure. The infinitives arrivare and tornare have become elapsed and to plunge back, the phrase attraverso I'olio di oliva e il petrolio has been expanded (but not made clearer) into a century which included the age of oil and that of petrol. The use of era strikes a jarring note, the inversion of the final part of the sentence means that all the impact of the last words of the SL text is lost, and the introduction of the personal pronoun us makes the shift in register between the first four sentences and the final one all the more incongruous. Yet there has clearly been an attempt to set up patterns of repetition in the English text (e.g. the repetition of era, century) even though phrases such as chiaro di luna and luce elettrica are not translated consistently. In short, it is difficult to see what the criteria behind the English translation were, for there are so many inconsistencies. What does seem apparent, however, is that the English translators have not given adequate consideration to the function of the stylistic devices used by Silone.
Wolfgang Iser, developing Roman Ingarden's discussion of the 'intentional sentence correlatives' that make up the world presented in the literary text, points out that the intentional correlatives disclose subtle connections which individually are less concrete than the statements, claims and observations, even though these only take on their real meaningfulness through the interaction of their correlatives.
Iser goes on to state that the sentence does not consist solely of a statement 'but aims at something beyond what it actually says', since sentences within a literary text 'are always an indication of something that is to come, the structure of which is foreshadowed by their specific content'. If the translator, then, handles sentences for their specific content alone, the outcome will involve a loss of dimension. In the case of the English translation of the texts above, the sentences appear to have been translated at face value, rather than as component units in a complex overall structure. Using
Popovič' s terminology, the English versions show several types of negative shift involving:
(1) mistranslation of information;
(2) 'subinterpretation' of the original text;
(3) superficial interpretation of connections between intentional correlatives.
Having begun by stating that I intended to avoid value judgements of individual translations, it might now seem that I have deviated from my original plan. Moreover, it might seem unfair to lay so much emphasis on cases of negative shift that emerge from the first few sentences of a vast work. But the point that needs to be made is that although analysis of narrative has had enormous influence since Shlovsky's early theory of prose, there are obviously many readers who still adhere to the principle that a novel consists primarily of paraphrasable material content that can be translated straightforwardly. And whereas there seems to be a common consensus that a prose paraphrase of a poem is judged to be inadequate, there is no such consensus regarding the prose text. Again and again translators of novels take pains to create readable TL texts, avoiding the stilted effect that can follow from adhering too closely to SL syntactical structures, but fail to consider the way in which individual sentences form part of the total structure. And in pointing out this failure, which is first and foremost a deficiency in reading, I believe that I am not so much passing judgement on the work of individuals as pointing towards a whole area of translation that needs to be looked at more closely.
Hilaire Belloc laid down six general rules for the translator of prose texts:
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