Marco Ottaiano and the (lost) treasures of Spanish literature

It is curious to consider, in the days of Turin Book Fair, the fate of a literature more neglected than enjoyed by the Italian public. If a good average reader (a figure both realistic and imaginary) can rattle off dozens of names of English and American, French and German, and Russian, South American and Japanese authors, when asked about Spain he will often go no further than five or six writers. As if, due to historical inattention, Spanish literature occupied a peripheral department of the shelves, where with a casual long jump you can go from Cervantes to Javier Marías or Javier Cercas ignoring the works that other great authors have consigned to history. This is a topic of conversation to be broached and enjoyed with Marco Ottaiano, professor of Spanish language and translation at the University of Naples L’Orientale.

What could he have conspired, if there was a conspiracy, against Spanish literature?

Translators, editors, intellectuals. Each for his part. Let’s take just one example: Beníto Pérez Galdós, a giant of nineteenth-century realism who in Italy is not perceived as a classic even if he is at the level of Dickens, of Balzac. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was regularly translated, then with the civil war and Francoism, which determined the isolation of Spanish culture, our intelligentsia viewed with suspicion what came from that country, also penalizing the previous production. If the average reader of Galdós knows anything, it is thanks to the films that Buñuel made from his works.

Other reasons for forgetting?

The publishing industry published Spanish authors without systematization. Let’s take the case of another great from the past, who also lived and produced in Naples: Ramón Gómez de la Serna, with a specific weight equal to that of a Virginia Woolf in England. He has remained almost unknown in Italy because programming was needed to help him circulate, not some occasional translation.

Meanwhile, what were the Hispanists doing?

Among the previous generations of scholars, the provenance from Romance philology prevailed. They often stopped in Góngora, ignoring what had happened from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards. Many things are unknown about Cervantes himself and a genius like Lope de Vega remained and remains, after all, an author for intellectuals. Finally, there is a reason concerning the language: believing that Spanish is “understood”, publishers often entrusted the translations, even of notable twentieth-century writers, to non-experts, even to Germanists, “a dictionary is enough”. Thus the disconnect between Hispanists and the publishing world was accentuated. Now it is catching up, for example with the translations of new authors such as Sara Mesa and Isaac Rosa. But continuity is needed for them to win over a stable audience.

While the amazing, well-deserved fortune of South American literature in general continues.

Certainly, ever since the boom of García Márquez and the interest in magical realism authors, fiction translated from Spanish into Italian has been predominantly Hispano-American.

An essay by Carocci on literary translation will be published next autumn, with the significant title: ‘A way of feeling reality’.

It comes from my experience as a translator from which I have drawn some “good conduct” rules for dealing with a text, with the necessary balance between philological operation and editorial purpose, because let’s not forget that books are translated to be read by the general public. I have made my own the teachings of Antonio Tabucchi, of whom I was a student in Siena and although as a Lusitanist he strengthened us in the theory of translation.

What are the specific transposition problems from the Spanish language?

It’s a paradox, but sometimes it’s easier to translate from distant languages ​​because they allow for a wider margin of recreation. Working on Spanish you risk leaning towards the calque and falling into the traps of what George Steiner called the “contradictory tension” between neighboring languages. There is also another aspect: the Spanish language, and more generally Spain, for the general Italian public has responded to an exoticizing imagination that has almost become a prejudice. It has also happened in the cinema, where the author who has most imposed himself is Pedro Almodóvar because he has combined certain stylistic elements in his way: excess, colour, folklore.

In addition to your academic activity, you have cultivated your editorial experience in your odd side and you were a friend of Ermanno Rea and Tullio Pironti. What do you remember?

Beyond work, Tullio taught me how to live: she was one of those people who continue the work of a father. Rea explained to me better than anyone else how to observe the social mechanisms and processes that move a city. I also owe a lot to David Trueba, a writer and filmmaker like his brother Fernando: he introduced me to the ‘Azcona Group’, named after the screenwriter who worked with Marco Ferreri and which still meets once a week in the Italian restaurant Mercato Ballarò in Madrid. I adopted a phrase of David that seems very simple (it seems): “Things always have to be done”. Following this maxim, I have just started another thing that I felt a creative need for: a memoir on autobiographical events starting from the neighborhood where I was born, Ponticelli, on the eastern outskirts of Naples.