Horcynus Orca

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Horcynus Orca is a novel by the Italian writer Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–1992). The eloquent epic was hailed as a masterpiece of Italian literature when it was published in 1975. In almost 1,500 pages, D'Arrigo tells the last eight days in the life of a war returnee from the Second World War , the sailor 'Ndrja Cambrìa, on the way to his home village in Sicily.

The work, long considered untranslatable because of its richness of content and language, was only made available in another language 40 years after its publication: Moshe Kahn's translation into German was awarded the German-Italian Translator Prize and the Jane Scatcherd Prize in 2015.

content

The first sentence defines the time and place of the following approximately 1450 pages of the novel:

“The sun set four times on his voyage, and at the end of the fourth day, which was October fourth nineteen forty-three, the sailor 'Ndrja Cambrìa, a simple captain of the former Royal Navy, reached the feminine land on the seas between Scylla and Charybdis. "

- Stefano D'Arrigo / Moshe Kahn (transl.) : Horcynus Orca

The following monumental wealth of content can only be summarized in a few words: The protagonist of the novel, 'Ndrja Cambrìa, is looking for ways to cross the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily (mythological: the strait between the two sea monsters of the Odyssey , Scylla and Charybdis ) to return home. He succeeds in this in the end, but in the end, on the eighth day of his journey, he loses his life by a stray shot while training for a rowing competition.

The sailor's voyage is woven into numerous flashbacks and reflections, divided into 50 individual episodes, on the protagonist's memories, on events from his past, on the mythology of the area, on the real situation of the people, especially the fishermen in the immediate post-war period in southern Italy Destruction of their livelihoods, the poverty of the people, the heat of the Mediterranean sun. And his journey is woven into an abundance of encounters with people who have been profoundly changed by the war, partly real or seemingly real persons, partly beings and figures belonging to the mythology of the region. 'Ndrja Cambrìa collects and observes sensory impressions, own and foreign memories and dream figures and is “busy dealing with all the splinters into which the old world has dissolved”.

The eponymous dolphin species Orcinus Orca itself is mythologically exaggerated (already in D'Arrigos' own spelling in the title, "Horcynus" ); the orca is the leitmotif of death in the novel.

History and reception

D'Arrigo found his subject as early as 1956: after a year of work, he had written a novel entitled La testa del delfino (The Dolphin's Head), the original version of Horcynus Orca . In 1958, the author apparently saw two episodes from it, around 100 pages, as having been completed to the point where they were detached for publication. The two stories appeared in 1960 in the literary magazine Menabò , edited by Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino , under the title I giorni della fera (Days of Fere).

This publication met with a great response from Italian literary critics, and there was general expectation that an epoch-making novel would appear in 1961. On Vittorini's recommendation, the publisher Arnoldo Mondadori accepted the manuscript for printing under the title I fatti della fera (Stories about the Fere) and had proofs made . The expectation was, however, premature; the novel was only published by Mondadori in Milan in 1975 , 14 years after the flags had been sent for the final correction, now with the title Horcynus Orca . D'Arrigo had fundamentally revised his work in the meantime, with major linguistic and stylistic changes, and doubling the size to a good 1200 tightly printed pages.

While the novel was not recognized internationally for a long time, the literary criticism in Italy initially reacted cautiously, but after a brief silence very attentively, albeit differently: The majority of important writers and critics enthusiastically celebrated the novel as an epochal work of world literature, as “1257 pages of pure poetry” ( Pasolini ), a smaller group expressed itself disparagingly. In 1977 D'Arrigo was awarded the “Special Jury Prize” of the Premio Mondello for his work .

In 1982 the work was reissued by Mondadori in two volumes, a reprint took place in 1994. The original version of the novel with the title I fatti della fera (Stories about the Fere) - the proofs from 1961, which the author then spent 14 years revising - was published in 2000 in a text-critical edition.

The decisive critical edition of the work - and the basis for Moshe Kahn's translation into German - is the new edition in 2003 by the Rizzoli publishing house ( RCS MediaGroup ) in Milan with an introduction by the literary scholar Walter Pedullà , editor of the complete edition of D'Arrigo's writings, and an extensive bibliography. In this edition, the continuous revisions and changes made by the author after the first edition have been taken into account.

translation

For a long time Horcynus Orca was considered an untranslatable work: the publishers shied away from the financial risk, the translators from the exuberant linguistic power of the original.

As early as the early 1960s - after the success of the first publication of the two individual chapters - Mondadori had offered the rights to foreign language translation on the book market. In the German-speaking area, Piper-Verlag accepted the offer on the recommendation of the translator Heinz Riedt . But when the work was presented in its final form 14 years later, the foreign publishing houses gave up their options because the reviewers, including Riedt for Piper-Verlag, declared the text illegible and the language forms newly developed by D'Arrigo Found content incomprehensible.

In March 2015, 40 years after the first publication of the epic, the German version was published by S. Fischer Verlag, the first translation ever; The translator Moshe Kahn worked on it for eight years, from 2006 to 2014 , the first six years on the translation, the last two years on the revision, together with his editor and editor, the publisher Egon Ammann . In an extensive afterword, Kahn provides information about the problems he was faced with as a translator: D'Arrigo had created a completely new language for his magnum opus , based on Sicilian Italian . In consultation with the author, with whom he had been in regular personal contact since the early 1980s, Kahn saw it as his task to undertake a congenial translation rather than a translation in the conventional sense, a “redesign, adaptation, as a ferryman activity between two distant ones Banks. The sound, the sentence rhythms, the old, middle and new language levels of German demanded that I occasionally had to move away from the original in order to produce effects similar to the original ”.

Kahn's translation - and with it the discovery of the work for the German-speaking area - was almost universally celebrated in the feature pages: The Wiener Zeitung describes the transmission as “brilliant transliteration and retouching”, Peter von Becker describes the rediscovery of the novel and the translation in the Tagesspiegel simply as a “literary sensation”, the reviewer of the NZZ , the romance writer Franziska Meier , reads D'Arrigo's novel as “a crazy linguistic work of art that rises as a necromancy against the background of warlike devastation” and overlooks the author “in dialogue with world literature by Homer Dante to Melville and Joyce ”. The FAZ reviewer , Hubert Spiegel , reads Kahn's translation as a verbatim version of a Mahler symphony, and Maike Albath also classifies Kahn's achievement in the ZEIT literary supplement as a “translational feat”. Tim Caspar Boehme expressed himself more skeptically in the taz , for whom reading became a “physical” effort; the reviewer sees the danger of exhaustion and surrender of the reader to the flood of text and the linguistic “vehemence” of the work.

Awards

literature

plant

  • Horcynus Orca . Rizzoli Publishing House, Scala italiani series , Milan 2003, ISBN 978-88-17-87228-7 .
  • Horcynus Orca . From the Italian and with an afterword by Moshe Kahn. Published by Egon Ammann, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-10-015337-1 .

Secondary literature

  • Andrea Cedola: La parola sdillabbrata. Modulazioni su Horcynus Orca. Giorgio Pozzi Editore, Ravenna 2012, ISBN 978-88-96117-28-6 .
  • Andrea Cedola (Ed.): Horcynus Orca di Stefano D'Arrigo. (Conference proceedings) ETS, Pisa 2012, ISBN 978-88-467-3232-3 .
  • Fernando Gioviale: Crepuscolo degli uomini. Attraverso D'Arrigo in un prologo in tre giornate. Bonanno, Rome 2010 ISBN 978-88-7796-612-4 .
  • Marco Trainito: Il codice D'Arrigo. Anordest, Villorba 2010, ISBN 978-88-96742-06-8 ( online ( Scribd ); accessed October 23, 2018).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ In the German translation.
  2. ↑ Stefano D'Arrigo: Horcynus Orca . Translated from the Italian by Moshe Kahn. Frankfurt / Main 2015, p. 11.
  3. ↑ cit. Franziska Meier : The odyssey of a war returnee , NZZ April 4, 2015; accessed October 23, 2018.
  4. ^ Moshe Kahn, translator's comments on Horcynus Orca , p. 1458, similar to Franziska Meier: Die Irrfahrten eines Kriegsheimkehrers , NZZ April 4, 2015; accessed October 23, 2018; see. further on Marco Trainito: L'Orca. Genesi, vicenda editoriale, genealogia culturale e simbolismo nel romanzo di Stefano D'Arrigo. ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, January 28, 2004; accessed October 23, 2018.
  5. ^ I giorni della fera . Il Menabò No. 3, Einaudi Publishing House, Turin 1960. Cf. Marco Trainito: Stefano D'Arrigo (1919-1992) , ItaliaLibri.net; accessed October 23, 2018. "Fere" is a made-up word by D'Arrigos for "dolphin", s. Moshe Kahn: Translator's Notes , Horcynus Orca , Frankfurt / Main 2015, p. 1458.
  6. ^ Moshe Kahn: Afterword , Horcynus Orca , Frankfurt / Main 2015, p. 1465.
  7. ↑ Moshe Kahn: Afterword , Horcynus Orca , Frankfurt / Main 2015, p. 1466, names a. v. a. Pasolini , Malerba , Levi , Calvino .
  8. ^ Moshe Kahn: Afterword , Horcynus Orca , Frankfurt / Main 2015, p. 1466, names Cases and Siciliano . Kahn notes in ibid. That Siciliano later apologized to D'Arrigo for this and did not include his criticism in his collected writings .
  9. ↑ further reviews are collected from Marco Trainito: Stefano D'Arrigo (1919-1992) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, February 10, 2004; accessed October 23, 2018.
  10. ^ Il Premio Letterario Internazionale Mondello: Albo d'Oro dei vincitori del Premio Internazionale Letterario Mondello ; accessed October 23, 2018.
  11. ↑ I fatti della fera . Edited by Andrea Cedola and Siriana Sgavicchia, Rizzoli Publishing House, Milan 2000, ISBN 978-88-17-66981-8 . For the edition history of this Ur-Horcynus cf. the short review by Pasquale Vitagliano: I fatti della fera (1975) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, September 24, 2003; accessed October 23, 2018.
  12. ^ Marco Trainito: Horcynus Orca (1975-2003) , ItaliaLibri.net; accessed October 23, 2018. On the significance of the 2003 edition in the context of a text-critical complete edition of D'Arrigo's works, cf. also the remarks by Moshe Kahn in his translation of Horcynus Orca , Frankfurt / Main 2015, p. 1457.
  13. ^ Moshe Kahn, epilogue to Horcynus Orca , p. 1465ff.
  14. ^ Moshe Kahn, epilogue to Horcynus Orca , p. 1470.
  15. ↑ Hubert Spiegel: No, it was not insane , FAZ March 12, 2015; accessed October 23, 2018.
  16. ^ Moshe Kahn, epilogue to Horcynus Orca , p. 1469.
  17. ^ Lennart Laberenz: D'Arrigo, Stefano: Horcynus Orca , Wiener Zeitung, March 14, 2015; accessed October 23, 2018.
  18. ↑ Peter von Becker: In the Sea of ​​Languages , Tagesspiegel, February 18, 2015; accessed October 23, 2018.
  19. ^ Franziska Meier: The odyssey of a war returnee , NZZ April 4, 2015; accessed October 23, 2018.
  20. ↑ Hubert Spiegel: No, it was not insane , FAZ March 12, 2015; retrieved October 23, 2018. See also Hubert Spiegel: Moderner Odysseus looking for a home , Deutschlandfunk , Büchermarkt, February 8, 2015.
  21. ↑ Maike Albath: Sizilianisches Wettrudern , Zeit-Literatur 11, March 2015, p. 12.
  22. ↑ Tim Caspar Boehme: Lost on the Strait of Messina , taz, May 9, 2015, p. 14.