Translation: The most immediately striking aspect of this book is that no translator is acknowledged. Eco wrote it in English and a comparison with its Italian next-of-kin, Dire quasi la stessa cosa, published earlier this year, would illuminate the revealing "experiences of translation" examined in it, writes Marco Sonzogni.
Indeed, Experiences in Translation (2001) is the title of another study by Eco on the "elusive art", as William Weaver - Eco's prominent English translator - described translation. That study was based on Eco's 1998 Goggio Lectures at Toronto University. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation has also originated from a series of lectures - the 2002 Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford University.
When a "new" work on translating is published, theoretical expectations are generally high. Quite often, however, the feeling that there has been nothing new, not even the examples, dashes hopes. Eco admits to feeling "irritated" when reading "essays on translation that, even though brilliant and perceptive, do not provide enough examples".
His engagement with languages and translation has always been central to his academic preoccupations and creative work. This, perhaps, is the reason why his writings on these topics are fascinating. This is so even when the lesson to be learned - in this case, that practical "wordsmithing" of translation informs its theoretical formulations more than the other way round - is an old one.
Still, the main strength of this book is precisely that theory is kept at arm's length. Eco's erudition can be overwhelming and the dynamics of translation offer a tempting opportunity to display it.
His witty sense of humour, however, combined with his knowledge, has rooted the book in the "practical problems" of translation and their solutions.
When technical terminology is used, the nuances and implications of terms such as hypotyposis ("the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene") and ekphrasis ("when a verbal text describes a work of visual art") are explained. Thus they become understandable.
In the introduction, Eco suggests that translation scholars "should have had at least one of the following experiences during their lives: translating, checking and editing translations or being translated and working in close co-operation with their translators".
The book testifies to and authenticates that Eco has experienced all three. It does so by discussing telling "cases" he encountered as a meticulous editor, translator - from French of Quenau's Exercices de style and Nerval's Sylvie - and translated author (Eco also comments on translations of the Bible, poetry and film-scripts).
This is an asset. Yet it can also be perceived as an occasional limitation. Readers not familiar with Eco's fiction may feel excluded from some of his "explanations", however enticing. Several examples involve Eco's native Italian. This, too, may not interest those who do not speak it. (Given his insipid Guardian review of this book,Michael Hofmann may be among them).
Yet translation is inevitably a multilingual experience. In this book, Eco is at his best as a Virgil-like guide into, and out of, the selva oscura of its intricacies and idiosyncrasies. His account of dialectical criteria - source and target; losses and gains; interpretation and intertextuality; adaptation and rewording; "machine" and "human" translation; languages and the perfect language - is comprehensive and clear.
The closing sentence is a meaningful summary: "Among the synonyms of faithfulness the word exactitude does not exist. Instead there is loyalty, devotion, allegiance, pity." What then is the answer to the question in the title?
For one word in Latin - mus - English, like other European languages, has two options (mouse and rat). It also has a wealth of idiomatic expressions in its everyday and literary usage. Eco seems to enjoy this conundrum and cleverly exploits it to test the strengths and limitations - cultural as well as linguistic - of translation.
For example, in Hamlet "rat" is an animal but it is an insult in Richard III. Eco points out that in Italian "the word ratto has no connotation of contemptible person and rather suggests (though improperly) speed" (ratto as an adjective means "speedy"). Dante, for example, used ratto in this sense.
In one of the most lyrical passages of Inferno, Francesca explains how she and her lover, Paolo, were killed by her husband when caught indulging in adulterous love. She "introduces" her "unfaithfulness" with these words: "Amor, ch'al cor gentil ratto s'apprende". A "faithful" translation would be: "Love, which quickly takes hold of a noble heart". (In Carson's less literal but effective version, "Love, which is so catching, seized this one").
The online "automatic translation" provided by Babel Fish, reads: "Love, that to the kind heart rape is learned". An incorrect and insensitive rendition at first, it could be a defensible option: "rape" meaning "abduction", "kidnapping", as in The Rape of the Sabine Women or The Rape of the Lock. Love, after all, "kidnaps" Francesca's and Paolo's hearts, leading them to sinful passion and, as the poet put it, to "una morte", to die together.
Dante however, conveys this "seizure" with a verb, s'apprende, and an adverb, ratto, not with a noun meaning "rape". (By the by, several online German to English dictionaries list "rape" - after "abduction" and "kidnapping" - to translate Entführung, as in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail).
Other websites, such as FreeTranslation, provide a very different version of Dante's line: "Love, that to the kind heart rat is learned".
In both cases, the computer made, as Sherlock Holmes might say, two "cardinal mistakes" of interpretation: a morpho-syntactic one - ratto as noun, not as adverb - and a semantic one. Neither meaning is appropriate to the context.
Re-translating those blatantly "un-negotiated" translations into Italian, "rape" becomes violenza and "rat" becomes topo, not ratto. Back to base: mouse or rat? For Sex and the City columnist Carrie Bradshaw, a squirrel "is just a rat with a cuter outfit".
In fashion at least, if not in the negotium of translation, as Eco effectively documents in this charming study, mouse and rat are exactly the same - badly dressed.
Marco Sonzogni is faculty fellow in Italian at UCD and editor of Translation Ireland
Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. By Umberto Eco, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 200pp. £12.99