Trauma and Survival: Translating a Post-Freudian Literary Biography

Translators of works of non-fiction frequently find themselves facing the same kind of problems faced by literary translators. In the Italian publishing world both kinds of translation often have to be target-oriented, with figures like the “revisore” or the editor intervening to simplify and normalise translations according to their view of the potential reader. On the other hand, literary biographies often combine narrative and intertextual references, requiring a translator to show special attention to the theoretical and ideological considerations that may underpin the story of the author’s life: among the description of biographical events, various kinds of technical terms may emerge whose semantic density cannot easily be carried into the target language without resorting to terms that editors would consider inappropriate for a general readership. My brief paper puts forward a specific problem encountered when translating In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), Fiona Sampson’s biography of Mary Shelley. Sampson is a poet in her own right and writes with a marked style laden with terminology derived from psychoanalysis. It becomes clear, although this is never made explicit, that her understanding of Shelley is driven by a Freudian approach and her language alive with Freudian terms. I will present examples of Sampson’s use of the phrasal verb “to act out” to describe a complex psychic state which, in specialist circles in Italy is expressed with a straight borrowing from the English noun form “acting-out.” Translating literally into Italian for the layman, we would have “passaggio all’atto”, a vague formulation that doesn't make much sense for the general reader. In a non-specialist text like a biography the translator must decide on each occurrence of such terminology whether it is wiser to stay with the specialist term or to explain and paraphrase. This presentation examines the criteria for making these decisions.