In my continuing investigation of the movies of Jacques Rivette (lately Jeanne la pucelle and La Bande des quatre), I recently watched Va savoir and enjoyed it enough that I’ll doubtless be getting the Radiance Blu-ray, which has not only the theatrical cut that I saw — a mere two and a half hours — but the 3:44 director’s cut, which includes much more of the play-within-the-film, Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi (Italian text; translated by Samuel Putnam as As You Desire Me). Needless to say, I took time off from the movie to read the play, checking against the translation (my Italian is OK but not dependable), and I noticed one idiom that Putnam got wrong even though, as he says, “I have enjoyed the advantage of close association with Signor Pirandello himself, and I am indebted to him for constant encouragement and sympathy and for frequent and always helpful suggestions.” The plot concerns a woman, identified only as L’ignota ‘the Unknown,’ who may or may not be the wife of the Venetian Bruno — she disappeared a decade ago and has been presumed dead. When she is brought to Venice in that capacity, various squabbles ensue, and at one point the exasperated Zio Salesio says “Ma no! Io non c’entro piú! Son fuori causa, io, ormai! Tagliata la testa al toro, col tuo ritorno!” Putnam renders this as “No, no! I’m out of it! I’m out of the case, from now on! You put a crimp in everything with your return!” But tagliare la testa al toro, literally ‘to cut off the bull’s head,’ is an idiom meaning ‘to definitively settle a matter.’ (One would like to know how it arose!)
Unrelated, but I got a chuckle out of the title of a collection of the Parisian poetry of Boris Bozhnev (Russian Wikipedia, French), an émigré of the first (post-Revolution) wave: Вниз по мачехе, по Сене ‘Down stepmother Seine,’ a play on the famous song Вниз по матушке, по Волге ‘Down mother Volga.’ Clever!
There is an article here the origin of the idiom, with some primary source support from the decrees of the administration of Andrea Gritti. (LH readers can run the article through their favorite translator, if need be.) This same account is repeated in basically the same form elsewhere.
A great story, and it’s from Venice!
Zingarelli has something much simpler here.
The first citation in the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (here) is from Guarini, not Venetian in origin, but certainly active there on occasion.
The semantics of the expression don’t obviously follow for me from the Venetian story.
Don’t trust translators when they claim to have collaborated with the author. When in the 1950s Arno Schmidt pointed out how horrible Georg Goyert’s German translation of Ulysses was, the publisher claimed that Goyert had collaborated on the translation with Joyce. A few years later, when Joyce’s letters and Ellmann’s biography were published, it turned out that Joyce had been exasperated by Goyert’s incompetence (and he didn’t have the time to do more than remove some of the biggest mistakes).
The Venetian story sounds too cute to be true. Google Books finds it mentioned as mere speculation in an 1866 periodical, Il Giornale illustrato (vol. 2, p. 71).
The Venetian story sounds too cute to be true.
Yeah, it really does sound like a just-so story. But a good one!
In Hausa, you say ƙungurus kan kusu “off with the rat’s head!” to end a folk story.
https://languagehat.com/the-ludicrous-legacy-of-la-palice/#comment-4654749
Just ran across another stupid (non-)translation: I’m watching a documentary on Ennio Morricone (he wanted to be a doctor, but his father insisted he study the trumpet!), and when he says his first compositions were hunting music because his family had a record of Il franco cacciatore that he listened to over and over, that’s exactly what the subtitle says. For that to mean anything, you would have to know that it’s the Italian translation of Der Freischütz.
An early version of the Venetian story in Tommaso Buoni, Nuovo thesoro de’ proverbii italiani (1604, published in Venice), from p. 111 :