Two thirds into Fabio Lastrucci’s summer alienation story, and boy is this a workoout.
And one of a completely different genre.
Fact is, Lastrucci’s prose is a clear example of what’s been described as “syntax as style”.
It’s not just what he writes – it’s the way he writes it, the order in which he lays the words on the page that is significant, more, decisive to the development of the story.
It would be extremely easy to translate Fabio’s story in the standard, direct way – focusing on getting the meaning across and good riddance.
But that would be just part of the story, and the end result would be lame, incomplete, faulty.
Hence, the problem – replicating as faithfully as possible the author’s phrase construction, without sliding into the sort of English Tarzan used to speak in Johnny Weissmuller movies.
Preserving both grammar and syntax.
This sort of considerations and concerns forced me to scrap my first attempt at translating the opening of the story – and that’s how I’m proceeding now: first I do gramatically sound, concise translations, then I scrap them and do a rewrite mimicking Lastrucci’s phrase construction.
Does it work?
It seems so.
And the story’s so fun, reading and writing it twice is no great effort.
