When My Novel Started Travelling
I recently published my first short novel, The Land on the Horizon (Il paese all’orizzonte in the original Italian). After the Italian edition, I felt the need to translate it into French — because the story is set primarily in France and I wanted French-speaking readers to experience it in their own language, in the language of the places it describes. And into English, to reach as many readers as possible and raise awareness about the war in Sudan.
The translation process, with all its linguistic and cultural implications, surprised me. Working with French beta readers and native English speakers fascinated me. Their comments, questions and suggestions opened up a whole world of reflection.
At first I thought I simply had to carry words from one language to another. Instead, I realised I was accompanying a story on a journey.
Translating: Leading Across
A little etymology.
The verb to translate derives from the Latin traducere, formed from trans (“across”) and ducere (“to lead, to carry”), with the original meaning of “to transport” or “to lead across”.
Over the centuries, the term took on a meaning increasingly tied to the transfer of content and ideas, not just objects or people. This is where the interpretive dimension of translation was born.
This evolution reminds us that translating has never been a simple exercise in word substitution. It means transmitting, reformulating, reinterpreting.
The greatest challenge is to render not only the meaning, but also the voice, the rhythm and the literary effect of the original. Translating a text means seeking a delicate balance between faithfulness and readability.
This is why many professional translators speak of a genuine “responsible rewriting”: the goal is to recreate, for the reader in the target language, an experience as close as possible to the one lived by the reader of the original work.
Every Language Has Its Own Music
A language is much more than a set of words and grammatical rules. It is rhythm, emotion, style, culture.
During this work I was reminded once again of just how different the languages we use really are.
Italian is a language rich in nuance, with an articulate syntax and a strongly syllabic rhythm. English has a more essential structure, a rhythm based on stress and an extraordinary ability to absorb vocabulary from different cultures. French possesses a particular musicality, tied to its liaisons, its sounds and a sentence construction that often differs from Italian.
When the rhythm changes, the music of the text changes too.
This is why literary translation is so complex: it is not enough to transfer meaning — you must recreate rhythm, tone and intonation within a completely different linguistic system.
One of the first dilemmas I faced was the title itself. In French, Le pays à l’horizon preserves almost the entire meaning of the original. In English, however, words like country or land evoke different shades of meaning from the idea I had in mind when I wrote Il paese all’orizzonte. It was the first sign that every linguistic choice carries with it a vision of the world.
Saying Almost the Same Thing
On the Bompiani website (an Italian publishing house) there is a wonderful collection of interviews with translators entitled Dire quasi la stessa cosa— the same title Umberto Eco chose for his celebrated book on the experience of translation.
Alessandro Bassini, answering the question of what is the most valuable tool for a translator, states:
“The ability to find the right balance between skill and creativity. Translation requires a precision bordering on the obsessive, yet at the same time one must be creative. Translating does not simply mean transposing a text from one language to another, but rethinking it and therefore recreating it in a new cultural guise, as well as a linguistic one.”
Sara Marzullo writes:
“In translating we say almost the same thing — and in that potential lies linguistic infinity, the possibility of poetry.”
And Marzia Bosoni adds:
“Translation is never a mere transposition of words or concepts, but the ability to become the voice of another person, another mind.”
Reading these accounts, I had the feeling that everyone was describing the same experience I was living through while translating my novel.
Fernanda Pivano and the Courage to Open New Roads
One extraordinary example of this role was Fernanda Pivano.
Thanks to her work, generations of Italian readers were able to discover authors such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and, above all, the key figures of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs.
Pivano was not merely a translator. She was a cultural mediator. Through her translations she introduced new languages, new imaginaries and new sensibilities into Italy.
Her work demonstrates how translation can influence not only individual readers, but the very evolution of a culture.
The Road Builders and the Gardeners of Cultures
Fernanda Pivano’s story shows how profound the impact of a translation can be. The research I carried out to write this article led me to a broader reflection.
For centuries, translators have built roads between distant places. Some are stone paths that have withstood the test of time and are still travelled today; others are asphalt roads that require periodic maintenance to remain passable; others still run along digital networks and fibre optic cables. Along these roads, stories, ideas, emotions and visions of the world continue to travel.
Thanks to their work, books born in one country have been able to influence readers, writers and thinkers on other continents. Translators have helped to break down barriers, bring different cultures closer together and enrich the cultural heritage of humanity.
But translators have also been gardeners.
They have taken seeds born in one soil and planted them elsewhere, adapting them to new contexts without betraying their nature. Some of those seeds took root, grew and gave rise to new forms of expression, new sensibilities, new ways of telling the world.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Translation
In my novel I imagined that Nicole, one of the protagonists, would use artificial intelligence to update a nineteenth-century diary. This narrative idea led me to reflect on the future of translation — a future that is already, in part, the present.
Today, artificial intelligence has become a permanent fixture in editorial processes. It is used to support documentation, revision, adaptation and translation.
The translator’s profession is not disappearing: it is changing.
Increasingly, the added value lies not in the mechanical translation of words, but in the ability to select, verify, correct, interpret and adapt a text to a specific cultural context.
Literary texts, in particular, continue to demand a sensitivity that goes beyond mere linguistic correctness. Tone, rhythm, ambiguity, irony, narrative intention and emotion remain profoundly human elements.
This is why I believe the translator of the future will be less and less a simple executor and more and more a professional of linguistic quality and cultural mediation — someone capable of using artificial intelligence as a tool, not a substitute.
Conclusion
The way we translate has changed, and will continue to change.
The translators of yesterday worked with well-worn dictionaries and letters sent by post. Those of today can rely on digital tools, collaborative platforms and artificial intelligence.
The means change, but not the destination.
For centuries, translation has been building roads between distant places. Some are stone paths that resist time and are still travelled; others are asphalt roads that require periodic maintenance to remain passable; others still run along digital networks and fibre optic cables. Along these roads, stories, ideas, emotions and visions of the world continue to travel.
Perhaps this is the deepest meaning of translating: allowing a story born in one language to find a home in the heart of a reader who speaks another.
Every translation is a departure and an arrival. The story changes landscape, crosses borders, meets new readers — but it continues to carry with it something of the place it came from.
If The Land on the Horizon manages to reach even just a few Francophone or Anglophone readers, it will not be because words were simply transferred from one language to another.
It will be because someone found a new road toward the same horizon.
