Taccuino di traduzione

"Più la storia s'avvicina ai nostri tempi, e più alle fusioni di due civiltà attraverso la carne si sostituisce quella attraverso la carta. Alle invasioni le traduzioni." Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: 1940, 11 gennaio

25/11/2006

Qualcosa di diverso

Metto da parte per un momento la traduzione, le lingue e i principi grammaticali.

Pankaj Mishra, che mi aveva conquistato con la vita del Budda (An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World) e che ora mi tiene in pugno con il suo ultimo libro Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Tibet and Beyond, racconta la sua visita a Shanghai.

Today beggars approach you discreetly on the Bund, Shanghai’s embanked riverfront, whose grand buildings once housed the banks, trading houses and diplomatic missions of China’s foreign overlords. The destitute are more invisible now, but it’s easy enough to make out the visitors from the impoverished countryside, in their faded blue Mao jackets and dusty shoes, gazing at the super-malls on Nanjing Lu and the throbbing neon lights of Pudong. The novelist Wang Anyi, sitting in the lobby of my hotel in one of the kitsch towers of Pudong, said: ‘There is no culture here!’ I’m not sure culture is what’s wanted in this sleek new part of the city, built in less than a decade on the once desolate mudflats across the river from the Bund, and designed to symbolise the wealth and power of a globalising China. Postmodern skyscrapers dwarf the Bund’s domes and clock towers, which were once a reassuring sight to taipans and straw-hatted tourists arriving from Europe. Gleaming new industrial parks – with landscaped gardens – sprawl across the suburbs. Shanghai has regained its role as the engine of the Chinese economy and the premier city of Asian capitalism.

Da leggere.