Before we get to the end of July, I want to acknowledge the two most compelling art events I took in during the month of June. One was a concert, the other a book, and both raised some interesting ideas about translation, re-interpretation, and our present connection with the past.
The first was a Beethoven concert at Davies Hall, accurately described by the San Francisco Symphony as a “Beethoven Marathon.” It lasted from 7:00 p.m. to nearly midnight on Saturday, June 20, and purported to be (and, for all I know, was) an exact recreation of Beethoven’s Akademie concert held on December 22, 1808, in Vienna. MTT and his excellent orchestra were joined on this occasion by some illustrious guests, including the soprano Karita Mattila and the pianist Jonathan Biss. The program included both Symphony 5 and Symphony 6, plus three lengthy choral pieces (the final one of which was the crazy, fun Choral Fantasy), plus the Piano Concerto No. 4.
Having set themselves this imitative task, the SFS were stuck with Beethoven’s order and length, and that restriction had minor disadvantages. I could have done, for instance, without at least one of the choral pieces. But set against this were the brio and skill with which the whole program was performed, not to mention the increasing enthusiasm—laced with an unavoidable element of self-congratulation—on the part of the hardy, devoted audience members who lasted the full distance. I did not feel I was getting Beethoven as people of his time would have heard it, but I felt I might be getting something even better: a version of his (apparently very unsuccessful) evening that turned all the old failures into triumphs. There is something amazing about hearing those two great symphonies in one evening, each one filling a very deep musical need which Beethoven himself both created and answered. And then to have, on top of that, Jonathan Biss’s transcendent interpretation of the Fourth Piano Concerto, which seemed to make of it an entirely new and yet faithfully old piece of music—well, it was heaven. Heaven, as I understand it, is supposed to go on forever, and this concert certainly did, but that was one of the good things about it.
My other noteworthy event was Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi, translated into English as The Betrothed. Manzoni wrote and published the novel in the early nineteenth century, but he set it much earlier, in the romantic vagabond-and-troubadour era of seventeenth-century northern Italy. His main characters are two peasant-class lovers who are kept apart by the machinations of an upper-class villain and his henchmen, who include a cowardly priest, a casually sinful cousin, and a gaggle of house-trained criminals. The events of the tale are entertaining enough in a picaresque kind of way, but what really keeps the story moving along is the voice of the narrator. Like Cervantes in Don Quixote, Manzoni purports to be copying much of this material from a scribe who came before him, with equally witty results. He is tied, he keeps insisting, to the tale as it was given him, and can’t therefore explain things fully; he is stuck, that is, with the written record. This results in formulations like “But what else he did we cannot tell, as he was alone; and history can only guess. Luckily, it is quite used to doing so.”
As you can tell from just those sentences, the translation is a dream. Fortunately for English-speakers, this Italian masterpiece was brought into our language by Archibald Colquhoun, the same genius who gave us the one and only translation of Lampedusa’s The Leopard. To witness Colquhoun faithfully following Manzoni as he faithfully offers up his (wholly made up) historian’s tale is to be launched into the vertiginous regions that Borges liked to occupy.
As with the Beethoven Marathon, The Betrothed had its longeurs: I wasn’t sure, for instance, that I really needed to hear every available detail about the plague that struck Italy in the 1600s, decimating its cities and towns. But sticking with the program as it had been laid down by the long-dead creator was part of the pleasure of this adventure, just as it had been with the concert. And whereas you may wait quite a while before Beethoven’s Akademie concert appears on a stage near you, you can rush right out and get the Manzoni/Colquhoun novel right now—and I highly recommend that you do. I don’t know how I managed to get this far in life without reading this major Italian work of literature, but certain books have a habit of lying in wait for us until we are finally ready for them. The Betrothed, for me, was one of them.