Dominick’s failed effort to translate Domenico’s autobiography

Dominick’s failed effort to translate Domenico Tempesta’s manuscript begins as an act of love and ends as an unfinished promise. He wants to give Ma her father’s life story in a form she can read, but the project depends on a translator whose choices and circumstances he cannot control. When Ma dies, the manuscript remains untranslated, and the gift that seemed so simple at two in the morning has become one more thing he could not give her in time.

A Gift for Ma

The plan arrives suddenly while Dominick is asleep. He wakes at 2:00 A.M. with the idea of having Domenico’s life story translated, printed, and bound for Ma. He experiences its appeal as both simplicity and rightness: the manuscript already exists, the story belongs to her family, and a finished book might offer his dying mother a chance to encounter her father’s life. The gift is also time-sensitive. Ma has lymphoma, and Dominick’s hope is not merely to complete a project but to complete it while she is still well enough to enjoy it.

To find someone capable of translating the manuscript, Dominick goes to the university’s Department of Romance Languages. The search takes him through an hour of false leads and locked doors before he reaches Nedra Frank, the last name on the secretary’s list. The physical route to her office, up narrow steps to a half-landing in a stone building, gives the search the character of a small expedition. But the encounter that follows is less reassuring than the plan that sent him there: the project’s success will depend on a stranger’s scholarly judgment, schedule, and willingness to stay with a difficult text.

The Manuscript and Its Translator

Nedra identifies the manuscript as a mixture of standard Italian and what appears to her to be peasant Sicilian. She initially resists the commission, distinguishing the work she understands herself to be doing as a scholar from a translation ordered to suit a family’s wishes. Her comparison makes clear that she sees Dominick’s request as a kind of customization rather than a straightforward scholarly task. He is stung by the response and begins to withdraw, but Nedra asks to see the pages again and reconsider the job.

The practical terms expose how much labor the manuscript will require. Nedra offers to translate handwritten pages for eight dollars each and typed pages for sixteen, with an additional five dollars for each explanatory footnote. She points out that the typed pages are single-spaced, making them twice as much work, and notes that the handwriting is at least legible. She asks for four hundred dollars in advance and estimates that the translation will take a month or two around her already oppressive schedule. Dominick pays, but the agreement does not reassure him. He worries that she may abbreviate the manuscript or skip pages despite the fee, leaving him vulnerable to decisions about what will survive in English.

Nedra’s first silence compounds that unease. Dominick calls several times over the following weeks to check on progress or answer possible questions, but gets no response. When he eventually reaches her, she describes a translation that will not erase every trace of the source language. She intends to leave some Italian words and phrases intact to preserve what she calls the language’s music, and to keep certain proverbs with parenthetical approximations because they cannot be translated exactly. She plans to preserve very little of the Sicilian, however, describing that editorial choice as weeding a garden. The manuscript is therefore not simply being transferred from one language into another: it is being selected, shaped, and partly allowed to remain foreign.

Delay and Disagreement

Dominick’s questions are not only about the method. He wants to know whether Nedra likes Domenico, and she initially answers that a translator should remain objective because an emotional reaction might interfere with the work. After a brutal day, Dominick asks her to set that professional distance aside for once. She eventually tells him that she dislikes Domenico, whom she regards as pompous, misogynistic, and horrible. Her response confirms a tension already present in the commission: the translator is handling a family history whose central figure may repel her, while Dominick wants the work finished for a mother who loved or was connected to that man as his daughter.

Nedra warns Dominick to read the translation before deciding to share it with Ma and advises him not to promise too much yet. He is impatient, not because he has resolved how the manuscript should be rendered, but because he fears the time for giving it is running out. Meanwhile, Ray drives Ma to treatments at Yale–New Haven Hospital, stays with her, eats in the cafeteria, and rests in a chair beside her bed before returning north for his shift at Electric Boat. Dominick’s worry about Ray’s strain sits alongside his own effort to make something for Ma; each is trying to help in a different way, while neither can control the illness or the hours it consumes.

By March, the oncology team at Yale has begun to sound unconvincing to Dominick, and Ma is in near-constant pain. An old Polish priest and hospice volunteers provide what little comfort she has. Dominick’s work painting also claims the spring, and he does not return to the university until mid-April, when he has finally found the time and nerve to ask for his grandfather’s story back, finished or not. The delay is no longer an abstract scheduling problem. Ma’s condition is worsening, and the book’s intended reader may not have much time left.

The Unfinished Gift

Nedra is gone. Her office companion tells Dominick that she has withdrawn from the degree program for personal reasons; her desk is cleared and the bulletin board stripped bare. Dominick protests that she still has something important of his. The head of the department also cannot help directly. The head of humanities says she will try to locate Nedra and pass along his concerns, but the agreement was between the two of them, not the university. The university will not release Nedra’s forwarding address. The project’s dependence on one translator, initially a matter of expertise and convenience, has become the precise reason Dominick cannot recover the manuscript or learn what work has been done.

On May 1, 1987, Ma slips out of consciousness. Ray and Dominick keep vigil through the night as she breathes laboriously and repeatedly tries to pull away her oxygen mask. A hospice worker has told them that a person in a coma may still hear and understand, and that the family might give her permission to go. Ray cannot accept that suggestion. When he is down the hall, Dominick leans close to Ma and tells her he loves her, that she need not worry, and that he will take care of Ray; then he gives her permission to go. She dies without reading her father’s history. She also does not sit up to identify the man who fathered Dominick and Thomas. The hoped-for book and the hoped-for disclosure remain unrealized, and the failed translation becomes part of the larger loss: Ma’s death closes the possibility of presenting her with the family past Dominick had tried, belatedly, to make accessible.