To clarify, I am not familiar enough with this work to offer any meaningful comment, but did find it interesting none the less.
Michael F. Moore: I promessi sposi (the original Italian title of The Betrothed) is a beautiful, sweeping novel that every Italian has read. While I’ve translated many contemporary authors (including Pope Benedict XVI), I have always wanted English readers to have a deeper sense of Italian literature and culture. Tradition weighs heavily on Italian artists, and when they create, they have to contend with that glorious tradition. Manzoni forged the modern Italian language, and his novel—yes, he wrote only one—is still the greatest novel in the Italian language.
But while I started translating with the ambition to restore this novel to its rightful place in world literature, as I got closer to publication, circumstances in the world lent the novel a renewed importance. First and foremost, the Covid-19 pandemic. In two chapters of the novel, 31 and 32, Manzoni describes the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Milan in 1630, in a report that mirrors, eerily, the moment we have just been through.
The portrait he gives of the Capuchin brothers, to whom the municipal government assigned the responsibility for tending to the sick, the dying, and the dead from the bubonic plague, highlights both their Christian vocation and their practical know-how. Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan during those years, reminds the priesthood of their duty to serve the poor and needy. And the hero of the story is Padre Cristoforo, who is unafraid to confront the powerful and sacrifices his life in the service of the plague victims.
The novel has a powerful ethical dimension, sensitive to the moral complexities the characters face but nevertheless clear and firm in its exhortation to justice, faith and forgiveness.
He called it a historical novel, in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, who was hugely popular throughout Europe at the time. I would call it an epic of the Italian people. It is historically faithful, but with elements derived from sources as varied as opera comica and the gothic novel (like Frankenstein or The Mysteries of Udolpho).
Throughout the translation, I was doing a balancing act between loyalty to Manzoni’s style and a wish to write in good modern American English. I wanted the language to sound neither too antiquated nor too contemporary. His sentences can be very long, and his paragraphs interminable. I sometimes broke them into smaller pieces, without sacrificing any content or word play.
While I did sometimes indulge in Latinate words, I was more interested in restoring the popular appeal of the novel. Too often the classics are rendered in a decorous, elevated style; an approach that would have violated Manzoni’s purpose. He wanted to bring written and spoken Italian closer together. You can see his critique of elaborate language in different parts of the book, particularly at the very beginning, in his introduction, and in his quotations from 17th-century texts.
Translating ‘the greatest novel in the Italian language’: Michael Moore on restoring ‘The Betrothed’ to its rightful place in world literature | America Magazine
Michael F. Moore: I promessi sposi (the original Italian title of The Betrothed) is a beautiful, sweeping novel that every Italian has read. While I’ve translated many contemporary authors (including Pope Benedict XVI), I have always wanted English readers to have a deeper sense of Italian literature and culture. Tradition weighs heavily on Italian artists, and when they create, they have to contend with that glorious tradition. Manzoni forged the modern Italian language, and his novel—yes, he wrote only one—is still the greatest novel in the Italian language.
But while I started translating with the ambition to restore this novel to its rightful place in world literature, as I got closer to publication, circumstances in the world lent the novel a renewed importance. First and foremost, the Covid-19 pandemic. In two chapters of the novel, 31 and 32, Manzoni describes the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Milan in 1630, in a report that mirrors, eerily, the moment we have just been through.
The portrait he gives of the Capuchin brothers, to whom the municipal government assigned the responsibility for tending to the sick, the dying, and the dead from the bubonic plague, highlights both their Christian vocation and their practical know-how. Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan during those years, reminds the priesthood of their duty to serve the poor and needy. And the hero of the story is Padre Cristoforo, who is unafraid to confront the powerful and sacrifices his life in the service of the plague victims.
The novel has a powerful ethical dimension, sensitive to the moral complexities the characters face but nevertheless clear and firm in its exhortation to justice, faith and forgiveness.
He called it a historical novel, in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, who was hugely popular throughout Europe at the time. I would call it an epic of the Italian people. It is historically faithful, but with elements derived from sources as varied as opera comica and the gothic novel (like Frankenstein or The Mysteries of Udolpho).
Throughout the translation, I was doing a balancing act between loyalty to Manzoni’s style and a wish to write in good modern American English. I wanted the language to sound neither too antiquated nor too contemporary. His sentences can be very long, and his paragraphs interminable. I sometimes broke them into smaller pieces, without sacrificing any content or word play.
While I did sometimes indulge in Latinate words, I was more interested in restoring the popular appeal of the novel. Too often the classics are rendered in a decorous, elevated style; an approach that would have violated Manzoni’s purpose. He wanted to bring written and spoken Italian closer together. You can see his critique of elaborate language in different parts of the book, particularly at the very beginning, in his introduction, and in his quotations from 17th-century texts.
Translating ‘the greatest novel in the Italian language’: Michael Moore on restoring ‘The Betrothed’ to its rightful place in world literature | America Magazine