UMBERTO ECO

1. UMBERTO ECO born January 5, 1932, Alessandria, Italy died February 19, 2016, Milan

2. I. Author Information/ Biography • Umberto Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the Italian region of Piedmont. • Young Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside during the Second World War. • Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works.

3. I. Author Information/ Biography • His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin: a gift from the heavens), which was given to his grandfather by a city official. • His father came from a family of thirteen children, and was very keen of Umberto to read Law, but instead he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature. • Umberto's thesis was on the topic of Thomas Aquinas and this earned him a BA in philosophy in 1954. In that period, Eco abandoned the Roman Catholic Church after a crisis of faith.

4. I. Author Information/ Biography • Following this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for RAI, Radiotelevisione Italiana, the state broadcasting station, he also became a lecturer at the University of Turin (1956–64). • A group of avant-garde artists—painters, musicians, writers—whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63) became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career.

5. I. Author Information/ Biography • This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico di San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. • In September 1962, he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he has a son and a daughter. He divides his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Rimini. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.

7. II. Importance • Italian literary critic, semiotics professor, storyteller, essayist, writer, translator, intellectual, novelist, philosopher, journalist, a mix of erudition and profoundness. • All of these made him one of the authors who are more apt to speak about translation, particularly about translation in that complex field that is literature, his own playground. • An ambitious reader in his childhood of everything from classic novels to comics, he went on to become a scholar of aesthetics and semiotics, working as a professor at the University of Bologna. Many of his writings in criticism, history and communication have been translated into various foreign languages.

8. II. Importance • When his medieval-themed novel The Name of the Rose appeared in 1980, Eco became an international literary star. It was an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. • He later wrote other novels, including Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. His novel The Prague Cemetery, released in 2010, was a best-seller.He has explored the connections between philosophy, fantasy and reality in this bestselling novel.

10. Eco’s Literary Point of View • Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he publishedOpera aperta (translated into English as "The Open Work"). In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. • Eco also wrote academic texts, children's books and essays. He was founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione (Department of Media Studies) at the University of the Republic of San Marino.

11. Eco’s Literary Point of View • According to scholar, literature which limits one's potential understanding to a single, direct line(the closed)text, remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind, society and life (open texts) are the liveliest and best. Eco came to these positions through study of language and semiotics, rather than from psychology or historical analysis.

12. Eco’s Literary Point of View • Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with many translations. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cited James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.

14. Eco and Translation • Eco argues that translation is not about comparing two languages, but about the interpretation of a text in two different languages, thus involving a shift between cultures. • An author whose works have appeared in many languages, Eco is also the translator of the style from French into Italian.

15. Eco and Translation • As he convincingly demonstrates, a translation can express an evident deep sense of a text even when violating both lexical and referential faithfulness. • Depicting translation as a semiotic task, he uses a wide range of source materials as illustration: the translations of his own and other novels, translations of the dialogue of American films into Italian, and various versions of the Bible. In the second part of his study he deals with translation theories proposed by Jakobson, Steiner, Peirce, and others.

16. In his articleIn Experiences in Translation,Eco extracts some basic rules for a decent translation of a book, which can be summarized in some points: • First, a translationis not simply the comprehension and an interpretation of a text. • Second, an interpretation introduces us to multiple possible “worlds”: an idea that Eco, as semiotics professor, had always underlined in his essays.

17. Third, in the translation of a book it seems legitimate to violate some rules in order to produce the same effect the original author intended. Eco talks about a principle he calls “multiple transaction” when trying to distinguish and to choose between the various layers tangled inside a text.

18. Eco and Translation • Some other rules: the translation can be more complex than the original text. Strange, isn’t it? • But it can actually happen. In the Italian language there is only one word for the concept of nephew, while in English we could have niece, nephew, grandson or granddaughter, which define more precisely the family relationships and the sex of the person. Moreover, a translation can be compared with a Rebus: this kind of riddle has multiple layers, from letters to images, and it can be used as a model for the various layers of a story.

19. Overall, Eco identifies the different types of interpretive acts that count as translation. A significant new typology emerges, based on his insistence on a common-sense approach and the necessity of taking a critical stance.

20. Yani; • Genel gösterge dizgelerini çözümlemeye ve kültür olaylarını göstergebilim açısından görmeye çalışan Eco, göstergenin hiçbir zaman mutlak son anlamının elde edilemeyeceğine dair bir sav içeren “sınırsız anlam” fikrini geliştirir. Eco, göstergebilim üzerinde henüz pek yoğunlaşmadığı 1975 öncesi dönemde yayınladığı Opera Aperta’yı (Açık Yapıt) eserinde her tür sanat yapıtının bir niteliği olarak gördüğü “açıklık” kavramına odaklanır. Eco’ya göre sanat yapıtları, açıklık  niteliklerinden dolayı pek çok farklı yoruma izin verirler. 

21. Bu doğrultuda Eco, bir anlatım içeriğinin yorumlanabilir olduğunu söyler. Dumanı gördüğünde biri ateşten söz ettiğinde, ona ne kastettiği sorulabilir. O da, ateşi; imgesini göstererek, sözel bir tanım yaparak, ya da yaşanılan bir olayı hatırlatarak bir açıklama yapabilir. Aynı şekilde, “Atila” adı söylendiğinde, bu adın anlamının ne olduğu sorulabilir; o zaman cevap verecek kimsenin bize Atila’yı bulup getirmesi gerekmez. Bunu bir biçimde açıklayabilir yine de; örneğin, dün tanıştığım adam ya da bu kedinin sahibi der; bahçedeki heykeli yontmuş olan sanatçı ya da başını şöyle şöyle tutarak yürüyen adam gibi bir açıklama yapar. Bu durumda yalnızca her yorum içeriği tanımlamakla kalmaz, aynı zamanda, kendi usulünce, onun hakkında daha çok şey bilir kılar bizi. (Eco, 1997a:73-75)