“Gentile signorina,” the purse-snatcher wrote to his victim at the beginning of a short story that University of North Dakota professor Elizabeth Harris has translated.

He had been examining the contents of the purse, imagining what his victim is like and coming to realize he had fallen in love, she said.

“Gentile signorina” literally means “Dear Miss” in Italian and it has the impersonal feel of “Dear Sir or Madam” in English. But “Dear Miss” just isn’t used in English. So, after some agonizing, including a small debate with author Giulio Mozzi, Harris decided on “Dear signorina.”

Something, it seemed, would be lost in the translation.

Harris, who teaches creative writing full time, said translators must make thousands of decisions like that as they translate a literary work, in effect becoming “second authors.”

Steven Finney, a UND Norwegian language instructor who occasionally translates Norwegian literature, agreed: “You’re trying to recompose it, you try to make it read as though the author was a native speaker.”

He and Harris are among a handful of people in the area who translate foreign literature, and both have been honored for their work.

Harris’ translation of Mario Rigoni Stern’s book “Giacomo’s Seasons” won recognition from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her latest work is a translation of Mozzi’s collection of short stories called “This is the Garden”; she’s holding a book launch party Thursday at the North Dakota Museum of Art on campus.

Finney is still seeking a publisher for his translation of popular Norwegian author Ingvar Ambjørnsen’s short story “Into the Mountain,” about a man with what sounds like a fatalistic worldview and his realization of the impact that has on his nephew. The American-Scandinavian Foundation gave Finney the Translation Prize in 2010 for that work. More.

See: The Jamestown Sun

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