A few days ago I finished translating to Hungarian Umberto Eco’s collected conference lectures – or, as he calls them, his “occasional writings”: Costruire il nemico, “Constructing the Enemy,” or, more precisely, “Making the Enemy”. The title comes from Eco’s personal experience in New York, when a Pakistani taxi driver tried to place the unfamiliar Italy on his mental map by asking who their traditional enemies were.
Believe it or not, two weeks ago in Azerbaijan a taxi driver asked me exactly the same question. It seems that alongside the classic anthropological example – when two New Guinea natives from different tribes happen to meet, they must find at least one common ancestor, even a mythical one, so they won’t be forced to kill each other – a shared enemy can also create harmony and friendly back-patting between strangers. We don’t have to go far to find proof of this truth, but in the Caucasus the traditions of making the enemy have such a long history that, had Eco known them, he wouldn’t have needed to reach once again for the already much-quoted examples from Ginzburg, Wagner, and Céline to illustrate the construction of the enemy image.
But that is the nature of the conference lecture as a genre. The audience does not expect something radically new; they enjoy having the evening made homely by recalling texts they have already read, and Eco is quite happy with that, as he stresses in the introduction: “one of the virtues of occasional writing is that it does not force originality at all costs, but simply wishes to entertain both the speaker and the listener.” Throughout the volume, themes and passages familiar from his recent works reappear one after another – which probably also signals which book the master was working on at the time – the inventories of medieval church treasuries from The History of Beauty and the topoi of the enemy’s ugliness from On Ugliness, Victor Hugo’s endless enumerations and Gargantua’s games from The Infinity of Lists, imaginary worlds and lost islands from Baudolino and The Island of the Day Before.
Yet when Eco is in his element, he can perform new tricks even with familiar texts. In the longest piece of the volume, tellingly titled Hugo, alas!, he demonstrates, through pages of rolling quotations, how many rhetorical devices Victor Hugo employs to exaggerate exaggeration beyond all limits, until it becomes epic and sublime for the astonished and overwhelmed reader. In “I Am Edmond Dantès!” he attempts something similar himself. After offering a detailed and delightful analysis of one of the most important rhetorical tools of the serialized novel – the unexpected recognition of characters and its subcategories – he composes a ten-page uninterrupted collage of grand recognition scenes from Dumas, Hugo, Ponson du Terrail, and others. And this endlessly extended firework display works perfectly even without knowing the characters or the plots: one would read on and on in breathless suspense.
Velines and Silence, by contrast, is only six pages long, yet it keeps the translator busy, who must supply a host of footnotes explaining memes from Italian domestic politics in 2009, starting with the veline of the title. The word, which originally meant the thin typing paper used for carbon copies – I typed on it myself! does it even still exist? – underwent its first semantic shift during Fascism, when the “Ministry of Popular Culture” (MinCulPop) sent out such sheets to editorial offices informing them what could and could not be written. From then on, velina meant an instruction from above, and by extension censorship itself. Then the television show Striscia la notizia, launched in 1988 and since grown into Italy’s most watched program, featured pretty girls who delivered typed news to the two comic hosts on roller skates – and they themselves came to be called veline. The word expanded further in 2009 – even spawning the term velinismo – when Berlusconi’s party cynically nominated a series of overtly erotic actresses, singers, TV presenters, and even reality-show participants for the European parliamentary elections. Eco sees a very deep connection among the various meanings:
Once, in journalistic jargon, the velina became the symbol of censorship, silence, disappearance. The veline we know today, however, are its opposite: as everyone knows, they are icons of appearance and visibility, indeed of fame achieved through sheer visibility, made outstanding solely by their appearance. We are thus dealing with two forms of veline-ness, corresponding to two forms of censorship. The first is censorship by silence; the second is censorship by noise, whose tools are the TV program, the show, the news broadcast, and so on. If the veline of the past said: “To prevent objectionable behavior, one must not speak of it,” today’s velinismo says: “So that people will not speak of objectionable behavior, one must speak a great deal about other things.” Noise that conceals.
But Eco would not be Eco if he did not surprise his translator. On the night before finishing, two new essays only a few months old – one of them about the WikiLeaks affair – arrived as additions, increasing the topicality of the forthcoming volume. I would have been more surprised if it had not happened. As I mentioned before, the Italian publisher edits Eco’s works while translators are working on the other language versions, so that they may appear simultaneously in every language, and the master himself remains involved in the editing throughout. As a result, during the work one can always expect emails containing additions and changes, giving yet another, specially Eco-like shade of meaning to the word velina.
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