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Challenging Italian sentence | ||
Tags: Comprehension/understanding | Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| flabbergasted Triglot Groupie Latvia Joined 6361 days ago 75 posts - 97 votes  Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Latvian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Persian | Message 1 of 16 19 March 2014 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Could anyone please help me with this rather obscure sentence from Giorgio Manganelli's
novel "Dall'Inferno"? "Lungo e fessile corpo, serpentesco, disossato, buono a sfuggir di mano a callido sectatore, che insegue per secare; viscida pelle que una mano trattiene, livida per raggelare prensili chele, baluginante, che abbagli e disadorni palpebre incaute" This is my tentative translation that makes little sense: "Long and ? body, serpentine, boneless; it might have slipped from the hands of a cunning ? who pursues in order to cut; slimy skin held by one hand, livid because it froze prehensile pincers, shimmering, that blind and disfigure incautious eyelids." 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| drygramul Tetraglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4473 days ago 165 posts - 269 votes Speaks: Persian, Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: French, Polish | Message 2 of 16 19 March 2014 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Fessile >> Frail
Sectatore >> Follower, disciple None of each is in use nowadays. I think the che in "che abbagli" has the meaning of "in order to". I can't make much sense of it neither and you did an impressive translation. Maybe the context would help, but it's quite cryptic to me. Edited by drygramul on 19 March 2014 at 7:11pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5233 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 3 of 16 19 March 2014 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Just because if it were me, I would want to be corrected. Should be "Neither is in use nowadays." You'll never find the phrase "none of each" in English. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| drygramul Tetraglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4473 days ago 165 posts - 269 votes Speaks: Persian, Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: French, Polish | Message 4 of 16 19 March 2014 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | ||
Glad you learned something. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| flabbergasted Triglot Groupie Latvia Joined 6361 days ago 75 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Latvian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Persian | Message 5 of 16 19 March 2014 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for the explication. It is quite a surrealist novel, so the obscurity is intended. I'm just not sure about the syntactic connections. Livida per raggelare prensili chele. What does that mean? Is the hand livid because it froze the pincers, or because it was frozen by them? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| drygramul Tetraglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4473 days ago 165 posts - 269 votes Speaks: Persian, Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: French, Polish | Message 6 of 16 19 March 2014 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you could post the previous paragraph, I might be able to help.
As you said, you're dealing with a surrealistic novel, so whatever he's describing has lost its concreteness, and he's focusing less on the picture and more on the style and on the perception of it. You're not sure about the syntactic connections, because they're not there. I have to guess for each sentence which is the subject or the object, the cause or the consequence. For secare is it la mano or il corpo? Which one is livida, la pelle o la mano? Or your dilemma. And as for the whole meaning, your guess is better than mine. The object of his description could be an infernal creature or a sexual allusion (I am not joking) or anything else. Edited by drygramul on 19 March 2014 at 11:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 16 20 March 2014 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it is about a coldblooded biologist (maybe under influence from Chinese cuisine) who is about to dissect a writhing and thoroughly unwilling snake. But I have no idea about why he should want to do that, only that it seems to be a messy affair.
The "che" in front of "abbagli" could be a rare, but attested literary variant of "perchè" with a final value and subjunctive, but it is also possible to see it as a normal relative pronoun in a clause with the same final meaning (which can be traced back to "per seccare") - the reference would then be the second instance of "mano". Edited by Iversen on 20 March 2014 at 12:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4670 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 16 20 March 2014 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
The "que" in
looks like a typo. The rest of it looks like a nightmare ... is the rest of the book written in the same style? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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