Catching fire, p.1
Catching Fire, page 1
Catching Fire:
A Translation Diary
Daniel Hahn
Catching Fire: A Translation Diary
For Diamela Eltit, and all the other writers
who have entrusted their precious work to me.
With thanks, and just occasional apologies.
Introduction
I am a literary translator.
OK, but what does that actually entail? Well, to put it most simply, my job is to read a book in language A, and write it again, in language B. I read with all the sensitivity, insight and analytical acumen I can bring to a text, and then I create a new thing, one that’s identical to the original book, except for all the words. A new thing, to allow a book I’ve loved to meet new readers.
One might imagine translation to be an intimidating thing, a sort of miracle of baffling complexity. But let’s not start there. Because on the most basic level, translation is those two things, each of them simple enough, after all: translation is reading, and translation is writing. In a sense, there’s really no more to it than that. Translators read a text, then write another text. Read something in Diamela Eltit’s Spanish, say, then write something in my English. Yes, doesn’t that sound simple enough?
When translators work on a text, then, they are typically in negotiation with two languages, but they engage with each of them altogether differently. Language A is the one they consume. Language B, they produce. Inhale… and exhale. Translators have to be – at the very least – brilliant readers in one, brilliant writers in the other. Each of these tasks can be demanding, obviously. You do whatever it takes to work out what’s happening in this line of Greek, Tamil, Welsh; to see what it is, the something that’s happening beyond the mere words of Language A; and then marshal all your sophisticated Language B skills to write that something, in Vietnamese, Korean, Dutch. So translators are hybrids – a particularly strange kind of reader, with a particularly strange kind of writer. They read through a film of words to that thing that lies behind them – and they write that thing. They read Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse – and beyond that veil of words, they find… a princess, and a pea. And they tell that story.
Of course, some translation actually is straight-forward. Flat, cliché-ridden writing can be pretty easy. Characterless prose stuffed with set phrases can be easy. Lazy, unoriginal writing can be easy. Anyone can do that. (Which is why so many do, alas.) Translating a hackneyed phrase, easily slipping out one tired old Urdu idiom and comfortably slipping in a dull English equivalent to replace it, is, like any cliché, money for old rope. But the good stuff is different. Good writing isn’t about easily interchangeable set phrases. That’s not the bit that sets the translator, or the reader, alight. Good writing, the writing that’s a joy to read or to translate, is new and unlikely, replacing cliché and formula with something altogether fresh, brightly lit and alive.
Any well-chosen word, when pressed into service, will do many things at once. It may be conveying semantic data, but it’ll also be doing it in a certain way – a tone of voice, diction with particular characteristics, the placing of stresses, the number of syllables. A whole web of cultural associations will trail after it. Echoes of other words. Sounds that help a reader understand what might not be explicit. Which is not to say that every writer does all these things deliberately and consciously, but if the writing is good then they’ll be there. And if the translation is good, they will all still be there after we’ve had our way with it – all those things will remain intact for a perceptive and curious new reader to discover. And unlike writing intended merely to convey data, artful literary writing is the kind where all those other things actually matter. So I want to keep them all in my translations. People think about translating as a process of de-coding, which it is; but it’s also about re-encoding. Not just deciphering a meaning, but reconstructing a new expression for it. And that second part, the intricate re-encoding, is usually the hard part – and why I love it.1
Sometimes the constraints we’re working to are particularly stringent. The whole novel has to be in iambic pentameter, or all of the words have to start with vowels, or it’s full of palindromes,2 or every eleventh word has to spell out the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. It might have pictures, so the new text needs to be in dynamic conversation with them, too. Or maybe it’s just been written by Diamela Eltit. But even something that’s not linguistically inventive or tricksy or showy or ludic will demand impossibilities from translation. We know this obviously about poetry – which I seldom translate, being basically a coward – but all prose that has artistry to it does just the same.
Even the very best translators will acknowledge this: essentially, theoretically, translation is impossible. It’s one of the paradoxes inherent in literary translation, I think. It’s easier to do it, or at least to do it well, once you’ve understood that in theory it cannot be done.
Which is fine. I’m totally sanguine about this impossibility.
I’ve seen maybe twenty Hamlets; some have been uninspired or incoherent, and some great, and with the great ones it is possible to assess and appreciate each for what it is, rather than the ways it falls short of impossible perfection. In reality, every performance is partial: a reading, an interpretation, and then an expression. Translations are just like that. They can be good, or very good, or really breathtakingly good – but there will always be something that they aren’t doing. Your performance of Hamlet might be ground-breaking, but there will always be something in the part that you weren’t able to contain within it, however sophisticated and capacious your reading.
Each individual performer of a play script or musical score finds different things in that source, renders it in a unique way. Can a translation be perfect, include everything that’s there? Of course it can’t. No more can a performance of the Goldberg Variations be perfect, no more can a production of King Lear, no more can a poem. Does that mean we don’t try? There’s no perfect translation of a single word, let alone a complex 48,000-word novel. Perfection isn’t even the metric we should be using to think about it. How tiresome to be still stuck with the idea that every translation should be measured against some notional perfect translation and always, inevitably found wanting. Instead of measuring it against its own aspirations or, well, against not existing at all.
If I asked you to complete the phrase BLANK in Translation, you would – just admit it – replace the BLANK with the word “Lost”. Translation is so often measured in terms of loss. But I think my work allows things to be Found in translation. Freed in translation. Recreated in translation. Reimagined. Reborn. Rediscovered, restored, revived in translation.
Umberto Eco called translation, “the art of failure”, after all, didn’t he? And fail we must, with every syllable, insofar as the fact that we’re changing it all means, you know, that we’re changing it – but far better one great actor’s interpretation of Hamlet than never to see it performed even a single astonishing, imperfect time.
Like an actor performing a part – a common metaphor for the work of a translator. Either that or we’re ventriloquists. Or ghost-writers, or bridge-builders, tightrope-walkers or conductors or smugglers or shadows or musical arrangers or chameleons. Every translator has a favourite metaphor to help to convey the rigours and joys of this strange profession, a metaphor that usefully captures the interpretative element, the flexibility, the dependent relation to the source text, the impossibilities and opportunities. None of these metaphors is more than a partial match, but they can be useful nonetheless.
My own personal go-to metaphor? Translation is like copying a work of art in a different medium. We’re art forgers attempting to reproduce an oil painting using only pencils, but so skilfully you won’t be able to tell the difference. Imagine copying a watercolour, but using pastels; or a charcoal picture, using only pen and ink. You want it to look the same, but you can’t just copy brushstroke by brushstroke; different media, like different languages, have different strengths and facilities. Different ways of creating an impression of light, or perspective, or density, or texture; languages are just the same. When writing a piece of English you have recourse to a different set of tools from those used by the Spanish-language artist – but you want the impression, somehow, to be unchanged. That “somehow” is wherein lies the skill and the apparent mystery, of course.
Because that’s what makes it hard, isn’t it? Making a cheese sandwich isn’t difficult, but making something that will fool you into thinking you’re eating a cheese sandwich using a set of ingredients that doesn’t include bread, butter or cheese but nonetheless precisely replicates the taste, smell, texture, aftertaste… When I embark on translating, say, a Chilean novel, I know I’ll have to recreate it as identically as I can, except – and here’s the trouble – I’m not allowed to use Spanish to do it. And English is not the same! There’s no word in one language that maps perfectly onto a word in another language, and every language has things it’s good at and things it just can’t handle. Replace French word x with English word y, you might find y a good, brilliant substitute; y might indeed be more interesting, doing more interesting things than x; but y is never x.
Now, a simple example. A basic word. You’ll learn early on in your French classes that a book is a livre, which is obviously true, and also completely not true at all. Book is certainly the basic word that English people use to describe this physical object sitting beside me on the desk (bits of printed paper boun d together along one edge); and as any dictionary will tell you, the default word a French person would use to tag that same object is livre. Or rather, le livre, because you’re far more likely to present the noun with the article in French. Not to be confused with the adjective libre, meaning free. Free to do something, that is; free of charge, in French, would be gratuit. As opposed to, say, costing a pound, which is also, wonderfully, a livre. Oh, and if it weighs a pound, that’s livre, too – but in that case, I think, the noun is now feminine? A good, multipurpose word, is livre! It does so many things. Only one of which is the same thing that book does – pointing at this object on my desk.
For an English speaker, our book overlaps in that one function (thing-on-desk), but then does all its own other things. It’s the basis of idioms (brought to book, throw the book at him, in his good books, take a leaf out of her book…); it’s a verb, meaning approximately the same as to make a reservation. It also sounds like “book”, rather than “livre” – book rhymes with crook and nook. (There’s a bookshop I like in Brighton called The Book Nook, so I feel that’s important.) It has the same long vowel sound as good; and, at least in my particular English, it doesn’t have the same vowel sound as boo or moon or food, though it looks like it ought to. If they asked me I could write a book, about the way you walk and whisper and look; which is all very well, but the charming sentiment only works if we’re operating in English. French books don’t rhyme with looks. French books rhyme with ivre (drunk); and French books are quite like lips, which are lèvres, or maybe hares, which are lièvres.
Every time we write a word, it does many things. Things to do with conveying data (=bound-paper-thing-on-desk!) but also conveying association, and sound. Even a word that doesn’t do the multiple semantic duties that book does, will still be one-syllable long or three, with big or small sounds, hard or soft, it will or won’t remind us of certain other words, it’ll relate in a certain rhythmic way to whatever comes before and after it; it might be a word that tastes like electricity, or, quite differently, a word that tastes like moon. (And as I mentioned, in literary translation, many of these things beyond hard meaning, things like sound and colour and texture, are significant.)
So – livre, lièvre, nook, electricity. Those are the words; always translatable in part, always untranslatable in their entirety. Each substitution loses sounds and associations, and gains new ones. The last book I translated had about 85,000 Portuguese words in it and 92,000 English words in the translation; if so much is lost and gained with each one of those little transfers, not to mention every potential comma (though I admit I almost certainly will mention them later), how can it possibly be the same book?
Translation would be significantly easier if we only had nouns and those nouns only meant one discrete object-thing each. There’s a thing – pages, binding, ink – on the desk; those people have a word for it, and so do we. But even then, we’d be assuming that the image that comes into your head when a reader in Manchester sees the word tree is the same as the image in conjured in a Brazilian person by árvore. Or that the associations of the straight-forward noun we call God/bird/musician/moon/tribe were the same as the semantically equivalent nouns in other languages. Well, so much for that. So – in short – even down on a word-by-word level, there’s no single word in one language that maps perfectly onto a word in another – not one. And every language has things it can do, and things it can’t.
Think, for example, of those languages whose word order is flexible, which might perhaps allow a writer to move all the verbs to the end of their respective phrases, and hence save up surprises, an effect that’s harder to achieve in English. An Anglophone translator like me can’t just neatly say “I went into town today, where I a movie watched, and a pair of shoes bought, and a quick cup of coffee and a sandwich poisoned.” So I would need to exercise a certain amount of ingenuity, putting in quite a lot of effort to muster up an effect that would have come very easily to the author of my source.
The former model and media star Katie Price – making a surprise appearance in this Introduction – is named as the author of a number of books. This kind of “authorship” is interesting to me. As The Sun newspaper reports it, “Katie is honest about the fact that she doesn’t write the books herself – she says she comes up with the plots and the characters before leaving the typing to someone else.” As a translator, I think “the typing” is quite important.
We translators have somebody else telling us what our sentence has to do – convey this piece of information about a character, say, but very succinctly, in a distinctive high-register voice with a slight note of scepticism, a sprig of parsley and some elegant phrasing that sets up the contrast with the abrupt shock sentence that follows – and we just have to figure out how to do it, using our language. We read book A, and then we write book… A. (Book A and book A having no words in common but being otherwise identical.)
It’s an incredibly writerly challenge. And the writing, for me – that’s the pleasure of it. It’s a piece of new writing, and a re-writing, at once. You might think of it as writing the book I believe the author would have written if they’d been writing a book in English. Or to put it another way, they are the ones who work out what the book is, it’s all them – I’m just the guy who comes in at the end to do their typing.
(Incidentally, I warmed to Hunter S. Thompson considerably when I learned that he typed out The Great Gatsby, end to end, before he’d ever written a book of his own, just to see what it felt like.)
Early-career writers are constantly being told that the most important thing they have to do is to find their voice; but one of the things that makes us translators different from, say, most novelists and poets, is that our struggle, when we embark on this career, is not to find our voice, but to lose it. By losing it – an art that really can be quite hard to master, you know, Elizabeth… – we can venture out unencumbered on the hunt for somebody else’s. But what is desirable is that the translated writer does indeed have his or her own distinctive voice-in-translation. (Just as an actor, being dubbed, is usually dubbed by the same voice-over performer, film after film; if you’re an Italian cinema-goer you don’t want the actor who looks like Russell Crowe suddenly to start speaking with the voice that over the years you’ve attached to Woody Allen.) Margaret Jull Costa’s Saramago translations are recognisable; her Javier Marías translations, too. But you’d never confuse one for the other. Each of those writers has his own English voice now, in just the same way that each has his voice in Portuguese or Spanish. And just as I would hope to recognise a passage of Saramago in Portuguese at two hundred yards, I’d expect to recognise a passage of Saramago-via-Margaret-Jull-Costa in English. In these versions Saramago is, if only temporarily, an English writer, the literary DNA that’s embedded in his/her new and hybrid voice coherent and unique.
And it’s never a neutral act, of course. It cannot happen without context, and it can’t happen without interpretation or personality, however much we may think we’re trying not to leave fingerprints. In her attempt to write the same thing a writer wrote, a translator will employ more or less of her own creativity and more or less of her own insightfulness and more or less of her own suppleness of language, ingeniously recreating all the things that Spanish does naturally but in another language that does all things differently. In short, writing someone else’s book, but backwards and in high heels.
Give two translators the same non-English text, we’ll come up with entirely different sets of English words, with versions in which every sentence is different. The individual variances themselves may be trivial, but great writing is composed of instances of brilliance that are cumulative even if they’re individually tiny: the spring in a flat poetic line moved one syllable this way or that, a half-breath that can have disproportionate, breath-taking effect. Defining the difference between talk and speak, or between little and small, might not be easy to do. And nor might it be easy to explain just what the difference is between “And so that afternoon he left.” and “And so, that afternoon, he left.” And yet those two tiny commas are significant in their effect. Do I use little or small, talk or speak, do I add the commas or don’t I? Each of these is among a thousand personal micro-choices that a translator will make.
