Through the eyes of the translator February 7, 2020 – Posted in: Books – Tags: ,

For Man looking by Alberto Moravia

of the translator Maria Oikonomidou

The novelist makes you look through the keyhole at everything you can't see otherwise, said o Alberto Moravia. This is precisely the situation in which the reader is involved, without any responsibility or intention of his own, when he suddenly realizes that he is looking at "the man who looks", the central hero of one of the most important novels of the Italian writer. The translator cannot be an exception, since their rules of engagement are usually decided by the author. And when it comes to Moravia, things get really serious…

The man looking it would see the light of day in 1985, just five years before Moravia died. In this respect, he summarizes almost the entire subject he tackled in his previous work. It is a record of middle-class everyday life, which, removed from any epic element or moral precept, dramatizes the lives of its protagonists themselves. The "man watching" literally watches through the keyhole the not-so-great events of his time, with particular emphasis on the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, watches his enigmatic wife, watches the heavy presence of his father, finally watches himself to look through the shadows of a psychographic and at the same time hedonistic game, like what only Moravia knows how to set up so masterfully.

This fact in itself also has a collateral – and in this case beneficial – consequence for the translator himself, who naturally experiences a multitude of emotions when faced with such a weighty name: the precision with which Moravia uses the tools in order to move between the more indiscernible levels of psychosexuality, the detached and playful style with which he approaches issues that are usually presented as clichéd dramas of modern urban ethnography, in a sense free the translator from other concerns than the accurate transcription of the meaning of the words .

Thus, the process of translation itself becomes in a way a part of the division of roles that Moravia sets up on either side of the keyhole. And as far as I'm concerned, it was a role I thoroughly enjoyed.