As a Man Grows Older

This review complements a review I posted on the other available translation of this work, published by Yale University Press: Italo Svevo's novel Senilita is one of the great achievements in the bourgeoning era of early Modernism. It has rightly been credited as a forerunner and influence on James Joyce, and any fan of Flaubert, Chekhov, Proust, or Fontane (as well as less celebrated figures such as the Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson or the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis) will find much that is familiar, edifying, and entertaining in this intimate and masterfully observed novel. It is a book full of irony and empathy, artful paradox and plain-spoken truth; it stands half-way between romantic decadence and modernist realism, poised on the cusp of the 19th and the 20th centuries. It is also representative of the most interesting trends in High Modernism precisely because of the self-consciousness of its atttiude toward narrative and language. Svevo, as is well-known from any synopsis of his career, was an Italian Jew brought up primarily in a German-speaking milieu. He is therefore demonstrably and purposefully uncomfortable in his use of Italian (just as Kafka in Czech-speaking Prague is deliberately not quite at home with German, or many post-colonial authors from Africa or India are fluent writers of English but nonetheless not native speakers of the language--this disparity is by definition and design a feature of their writing). And although there is no explicit reference to Jews or Judaism anywhere in this novel, it is not difficult to extrapolate his anamolous presence as a Jew in Catholic Italy as a motivation for his estranged, alienated, detatched mode of storytelling and social observation. All of these factors account both for what's interesting about this novel, and what's difficult about trying to translate it--starting with the title, which nobody seems to understand or care for. There are two available translations in English: this one, and the one published by Yale University Press as Emilio's Carnival. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE buy and read this version!!!!! This is a reprint of the original English translation first published in 1932. It is well produced and idiomatic; it captures the strange and indelible spirit of the original, without compromising its fidelity to the letter of the text. It also benefits from an unusually helpful and insightful introduction (in conspicuous contrast again to the Yale UP version) that is so well-observed and persuasive that I would recommend readers to do as I did and save it until after completing the novel itself. Best of all, this is the less expensive of the two versions! Case closed--who could ask for anything more?! Only that more people read, think, and talk about Italo Svevo, and that more people purchase and read this version of his first great novel.

I don't think Svevo is an artist that can be ruined or even significantly damaged by a translation, any more than Tolstoy can be messed up by Constance Garnett - it may not be as true to the quality of their prose, but for the most part I think their rare value is communicated as long as the translation is accurate: and this one is. The comparison to Tolstoy is apt, because I think Svevo is sort of a bridge between that tradition and Proust, where the writing starts drawing a great deal more attention to itself - and the internal workings of consciousness come to the forefront.Svevo strikes the perfect balance between the 19th century's skill at construction complete characters (well, at least the Russians and George Eliot) and the 20th century's desire to focus intensely on processes of thinking, to lay bare the way they function. What Joyce did by actually splitting up and writing Bloom's individual thoughts, Svevo accomplishes with sentences that have the precision and wit of a French aphorist, while retaining a level of compassion that can coexist with his irony.I remember a passage in The Confessions of Zeno (I read the Zoete translation on that one too) where, after a hilarious sequence when Zeno ends up marrying a woman that he has no interest in marrying, he comes to realize - many years later - just how much he's come to love her. Svevo is, I think, the most warm-hearted of great 20th century writers, even though all of his books are supposed to be merciless unmaskings of ineffectual men.As much as I loved The Confessions (or Conscience) of Zeno, this is the more complete work of art. The five linked stories in Zeno didn't really cohere (especially the last chapter), but this book is beautifully paced and constructed, the work of a young man who is already a master - funny and sad and wonderful. A book to treasure.(Incidentally: I like Joyce's title, As a Man Grows Older, but it would have been nice to have Svevo's original title back - which was only abandoned because they didn't think anyone would buy a book called Senility - certainly very few people bought Senilita when it was in Italian. And people were, understandably, confused, since there's no one in this book who is old, or any discussion in it of aging or senility. But the whole book is filled with an atmosphere of last things: it is also about virility, and the lack of it, and the desire to both have and get away from the mental clarity that comes with intelligence. Senility: a great writer knows how to come up with a great title. But this is still a lovely book in a beautiful edition: another wonderful reissue from NYRB.)

Emilio's Carnival, or Senilità, was written in 1898, a hundred years before an American president fell from grace on the account of his entanglement with a young intern and his propensity to debate the meaning of words, such as the word "is."Emilio of the tile of this book -- middle-aged, middle-of-the-road writer working at a mediocre profession -- lives with his sister in Trieste, which, at the turn of the twentieth century surely must have been of one the great showcases of what solid bourgeois life was all about (or lacking in, depending on your perspective) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book recounts Emilio's fall not from grace so much as from a delusional orderly heaven straight into the cold hell of a realization that much of his take on life and morality are but an illusion. And since Emilio's passions, such as they are, seem to have been spent on his -- and in his -- imagination, rather than in life or in giving voice to them through the arts, he is left in a state of inertia, or that of "senilità." In this sense, this novel is thoroughly modern, and Emilio's inner life is likely to be more than familiar to the folks equivocating on the frozen shores of "analysis paralysis."Svevo narrates Emilio's entanglement with the cherubic-looking, but unselfconsciously promiscuous and vulgar, Angiolina with an almost unsettling edge of unreliability, provoking a sense of vertigo -- at least in this reader. What anchors the reader as he or she navigates through the precipitous landscape of Emilio's psyche are the passages in the novel that bring the city of Trieste to unequivocal life in all kinds of weather. That and the realistic descriptions of the last days of the lonely Amalia, Emilio's sister, who dies in an addiction-induced delirium and in "the agony reserved for the dissolute."Irony, unreliability, delusions, and delirium are the prime forces that move the plot and shape character in this novel, bridging Svevo's world and ours and making this book a fresh read even now, even in the post post-modern literary world. I believe that the following quote from the novel sums up not just Emilio's problem but also Svevo's approach to literature in general: "He realized that the truth he was attempting to relate was less credible than the dreams he had fabricated as reality."

I understand the concern with finding a correct translation of Senilità, but I do not share the opinion that it is a huge problem that the Beryl de Zoete version is translated a bit more "freely." I am writing this after having studied Svevo in the United States and in Italy and having read it in Italian at least three times and in the de Zoete translation twice. This may not make me more of an authority but hopefully will temper the following comments:Essentially, the problem with translating Italo Svevo's work (if it is a problem) is that it was already been translated once from Austrian German thoughts (Svevo was born Hector Schmitz in Trieste, an Austro-Hungarian port city) into Italian. When you read Senilità (or its forerunner, Una vita - which is painful to read) you get an idea of how hypercorrect Svevo's writing was. This was not by accident, but rather through his desire to write perfectly in Italian. While this makes it an exceptionally easy read in Italian, if you translated it too closely, it would read more like Hemingway than anything else. In translations, I like the de Zoete translation (Bantam Modern Classics) because it is a little more fluid.On to the merits of the book, whatever the translation or title, it is a masterpiece of Italian decadentism. The protagonist, Emilio Brentani is the last member of a dying family who must find a way to keep it going. He is getting on in years (which I guess early in the 20th century was mid-30s) and this is his last opportunity to do it. The book traces his battle with Angiolina, who is more element of nature than human, and the story takes him through a vortice vitale (the vortex of his life) into old age. He carries out this battle against the background of caring for his sick sister Amalia and taking lessons from his libertine friend and sculptor Stefano Balli as they walk along behind the dog catcher. The time frame is Carnevale, the period before la Quaresima (Lent). The basic story is of his farewell to meat (so to speak) before the long fast that concludes his life.I think this book makes a great introduction to Svevo and the svevian concept of "inept" man, and it is more focused than La coscienza di Zeno. I give it the thumbs-up.

Readers should be aware that this translation, by Beryl de Zoete, is much older, freer, and less accurate than the newer one, published by Yale Nota Bene, translated by Beth Archer Brombert as "Emilio's Carnival." Don't be fooled by the classy NYRB edition; the usually impeccable editors of that series have passed this "vintage" translation into print with nary a warning. Of course, older translations may be your thing (they're certainly mine much of the time) but you should know that this edition isn't all it seems. For more information on de Zoete as a translator, see William Weaver's excellent introduction to his wonderful translation of "Zeno's Conscience," which nicely dispatches de Zoete's "The Confessions of Zeno" to the dustheap of translation history.