Salinger in Italian

For most readers, what defined Salinger as an author was his voice, the way he used language—so it might be surprising that he had huge fame in other languages, too. In Italy, there's an entire school of creative writing called "Scuola Holden" (literally a school, with classes and everything) which takes its inspiration from Salinger; the school is supported by some of the biggest names in contemporary Italian writing, including Alessandro Baricco (its president), Niccolò Ammaniti, Carlo Lucarelli, and Sandro Veronesi. It gets its name from the Italian translation of The Catcher in the Rye, Il giovane Holden ("The young Holden"): the title and the character are famous enough in Italy that further explanation is really unnecessary.

But the voice of Holden in Italian was the work of translator Adriana Motti—who said "I didn't take him seriously at all." She had been working as a translator for Einaudi in the '50s, but when Einaudi ran into money troubles she took a job in the press office of the highway department. When Einaudi got back on its feet and offered her The Catcher in the Rye she quit her day job—but she called that "the stupidest decision of my life."

She was happy not to have contact with Salinger—if translators spent all that time getting to know authors, read all their works, get inside their heads, when would there be time to translate? She didn't even read a book before sitting down to translate it: "Come on, if I read it first I can't translate it: I get nauseated and it becomes a terrible bore." (Of course, that's only possible when translators get their work via requests or assignments from publishers; when translators have to function as literary scouts as well, as is generally the case in the U.S., they have to read not only the books they work on but many more as well, in order to select possible projects, prepare samples, and pitch them to publishers.)

As for the translation itself, Motti had to reinvent Holden's slang in Italian with the help of young friends and family members. It was a pain, she said, starting from the title; Calvino (her editor at Einaudi) wrote a note included in the Italian edition to explain the untranslatability of the original title. Holden's trademark phrase "and all," which turns up (it seems) three times a page in the English, would not do in Italian, where there is a very strong stylistic objection to such repetition, so she came up with a list of equivalents and rotated them all through—and now all are Holden's stylistic trademarks in Italian.

She was proudest of her translations of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), but out of the forty books she translated—also including E.M. Forster, P.G. Wodehouse, Laurence Durrell—only Il giovane Holden brought her any recognition. "It's an atrociously underpaid job (and I made top money), I understand how translators can be sloppy: you need to translate thrillers, they're less demanding."

The voice of Holden Caulfield in Italian, Adriana Motti died in January 2009.