Catching fire, p.5
Catching Fire, page 5
(So long as you’re not trying to translate it, of course, in which case it’s still brilliant but also simultaneously a bit of a nightmare. Good writers can be really annoying like that.15)
* * *
13 When I wrote this entry for the blog, somebody I’m not going to name (but it was Sam) accidentally published it with the title “Why Tired Translators Are Annoying”. Yeah, “accidentally”.
14 Worth noting that the U.S. equivalent phrase – “That’s what she said…” – leaves no such room for ambiguity.
15 If any of my writers are reading this, I’m OBVIOUSLY not talking about you. Only the other ones. You aren’t annoying at all.
8 February (2)
Hot on the heels of that last post about inflected adjectives (adjectives that adjust slightly to match the noun they’re describing), this message has come in from my friend Vineet:
Gosh, such a tricky subject (and I empathise). As a translator from French, I come across this all the time – this and the perennial chestnut of “tu” versus “vous”. In many ways – not wishing to sound defeatist – the tu/vous distinction is one that I’ve now learnt just to live with, in as much as elegant solutions to the problem are hard to find. And the issue of inflected adjectives reflecting gender sometimes veers in that direction (I find) because the insertion of a “btw I’m male/female” can end up being so intrusive, or so hard to insert with stealth, that in the cost/benefit analysis it’s not worth doing. I guess it’s the kind of calculation that translators make every five minutes. I looked back at a recent novel with a similar challenge in the opening chapter, where the gender is revealed by the word “nourrie” (as in “breastfed”). The French reader knows at once that we are talking about a little girl. In my translation I glided over this one – leaving it as “breastfed” – as, helpfully, the narrator herself states, barely half a page later, that she is now a “little girl of five” or similar. So I just let the English reader wait a tad longer than the French one to find out. That said, the book itself was called The Woman Who Didn’t Grow Old, and the entire thing is in the first person, so although not a given, I’d suggest that any reader picking it up is going to assume it’s a female voice.
Decisions, decisions. I sometimes think that’s what I should be – a “decider”, not a “translator”. (“Decider” being uninflected in English, as you’ll know.)
Yes, everything is case-by-case, and in the example Vineet mentions, if the English naturally has the reveal only half a page later, that doesn’t seem a problem – better in that instance to have a very slight lag than trying to shoehorn in some extra information to correspond to the moment the French reader would get it – seems like the right call. But as he says, in our role as deciders/decidresses,16 we’re having to make versions of this calculation all the time.
Oh, and having made a fuss about the way gendered adjectives are problematic, I’ve just run into the Spanish adjective “imperturbable” which is causing me problems because it’s not gendered. Honestly, there’s no pleasing some people.
* * *
16 Microsoft Word is clearly not keen on gendering nouns either, and wants to know whether perhaps I’m writing about “desi dresses”?
12 February
To the, or…
One of the most common words in my first drafts is “[the]”.
Not “the”, you understand, but “[the]”. Each time it appears, it’s telling me that there’s a definite article in the original, but that I don’t know what to do about it. As I imagine has become clear to you by now, my first drafts are all about deferring decisions, and this is one of the regular troublemakers.
In one sense, this should of course be easiest of words to translate: a, o, as and os are all Portuguese words that mean the in English. Just as la, le and les do in French; and la, el, las, los in Spanish. But anybody who’s ever moved between two languages will know that they aren’t precisely equivalent sets of words, matching like for like, but whole systems that operate quite differently. Knowing how to translate a word as simple as a definite article doesn’t mean merely knowing what a definite article looks like in the other language and replacing it with your own definite article; more than that, it requires knowing how that other language actually uses them. And Spanish – like Portuguese, like French – uses them quite differently from English. Just because.
In very brief: these languages use all definite articles in the same places where we use them in English; but they also use them in places where we don’t. So a definite article in that other language might indicate the need for one in English; or alternatively it might indicate no such thing.
(The opposite is true in a language like Russian, which doesn’t have articles at all, so the absence of one could suggest the absence of one in English. Or, again, you know, not.)
“I like ice cream”, rendered into some of those Romance languages, becomes “I like the ice cream”; whereas the English “I like the ice cream”, well, that would be – ah, OK, that’s “I like the ice cream”, too. So when a definite article appears in a piece of writing in one of those languages, how is a poor translator to know which it is? If it’s not totally clear, a normal reader can slip over it, not snagging on the slight ambiguity (what a luxury to be a normal reader!), but the translator needs actively to choose. Is this character really saying that they like chips, or that they like the chips?
Context often tells you a lot, of course. If the preceding question was “What’s your favourite food?”, the answer is probably “I like chips”. If a child is being asked “What do you think of this lovely meal granny has prepared for you?”, the answer is probably “I like the chips”. (Unless the meal in question doesn’t involve any chips, and the child is being petulant, in which case “I like chips” will probably do it.)
On page 18 of this novel, there’s a classic case, for which my current translation reads “[The] rice goes well with [the] bread.” Either a general statement, then, or an observation about a specific meal. In this case, when I come to the second draft, it’ll likely be obvious – the characters are having dinner, and (probably) that’s what the narrator is referring to.
The fact I haven’t yet had my lunch might explain why I do seem to be tending towards the food examples.
In the opening section of the book, the part I quoted at length last week, there’s a moment when these characters are either talking about death, in abstraction, or talking about the death – because a specific death, Franco’s, has just been mentioned. In theory it could be either, but in English it makes a difference, and so based on various factors (context, characters, probability), I need to make a decision. To the, or not to the?17
This discrepancy in how articles get used is an example – a pretty obvious one – of how languages function differently. But I’m mentioning it because I hope it’ll illustrate something of the process I’ve been describing, too. While my hurtling first draft really doesn’t slow down to make decisions of this kind, that doesn’t mean it’s totally inattentive, because while I don’t need to solve problems, I do need to know they’re there. So long as I remain alert to problems as I read, and especially alert to ambiguities, this should stop me from making any decisions inadvertently. (In another book, a character introduced a young man as her “boyfriend” or as her “fiancé”, depending. The first draft didn’t just plump for whichever came to me first, it said “This is my boyfriend/fiancé”, so I knew there was a decision that needed confronting at some point, and I wouldn’t accidentally miss it.)
The first draft, then, doesn’t just allow for doubt, it tunes into it, it positively encourages it. It just makes sure every possible doubt is left unresolved but recorded.
Today’s draft pages include:
“They were talking/chatting”
“I look at you from the edge of the bed and I have doubts/I hesitate.”
“but seemed surprisingly resistant/hardy”
“I could see it in his/her/your eyes”
(and obviously a lot of [the]s)
In each case, a little ambiguity flared up along my way, and I had to be sufficiently alert so as to avoid inadvertently shutting down any possibilities too early; so I registered it, just enough to put a pin in it before racing on.
* * *
17 And no, this entire entry wasn’t just so I could make that joke – honest.
13 February
I’ve just received a message from Anne R., who quotes from my entry of January 28th, in which I wrote: “I’ve instinctively gone with a hundred years rather than one hundred years. Why? Because… I don’t know.” Anne responds:
Of course you do. It’s rhythm. You’re retaining the rhythm of the Spanish here, and in One Hundred Years of Solitude the title replicates the strong initial stress by using One instead of A.
Yeah, Anne’s right, of course rhythm is a big part of it. And examining the workings of the line will reveal that. When I say I don’t know, I guess what I really meant was that I don’t stop to think about it – I go with what feels right, and while I probably could explain the decision if I chose to turn back and look at it, most of the time I don’t allow it any such deliberate intention.
Anne makes the point, also, that “All writing is translation, in a sense…”, and yes, it’s true that what I’ve just said is like most kinds of writing, of course. (Anne is a writer herself.) The fact that you don’t think about your choice of word A rather than word B doesn’t mean the choice is irrelevant, but only that it doesn’t always require deliberate intent, weighing up pros and cons for each word and comma – I know when the rhythm is just right even without counting syllables. One of the curiosities of this diary is that it requires examining and articulating a process that so often happens almost entirely by instinct. What I don’t yet know is whether that examination/articulation will make the choices any more deliberate and might therefore actually change the translation itself. We shall see…
14 February
Distractions
Nothing at all is going to be happening to my translation this week. And so I will have nothing to report.
I’ve got proofs for a couple of other books to sign off, and two other short translations to get done, and a couple of project proposals, and a lot of meetings, and a promising new Netflix series to watch, so I know I won’t get a chance to work on Diamela’s novel for a bit.
I suppose I could pretend I’m still doing it, and just write a couple of entries about translationy things in very general terms, but, well, I did say in my introduction that I would tell you the truth, and the truth is that you don’t always get to focus on one main project uninterrupted, and sometimes things get in the way, and I’m afraid that’s the sort of week this is going to be. Such is the freelance life!
But I’m still well on course to hit the targets on my schedule, so I can afford a week of other work distractions without fretting too much. I’ll be back to this book next Monday and will resume the diary then with a status report.
Have a good week!
21 February
Back to the Book
Well, I’m back, after a week being kept busy on other projects.
I’m not going to report back in any detail on the other stuff I was working on, as I really do want this diary to be about the specific book and documenting the process of its translation, rather than general musings about the translator’s life, which I think would be even more self-indulgent. All I will say, then, is that in addition to reading proofs etc., I did spend some of the week doing some other translating, and at least a part of it was working on a small collection of poems, and that – contrary to all expectations and my usual mild allergy to translating poetry – I did in fact survive the experience. So here I am again.
Back at the first draft. What with other assorted distractions, my aim is to get it finished by about March 8th, a couple of weeks from now. (Remember that I’m racing through without doing any of the hard bits, and also that the book is very short. The full novel will come to something like 30,000 words.18 To give you a sense of what that means: if you’ve been reading this diary, you’ll have read 9,750 words of my ramblings already.)
When I returned to the drafting this morning after a week away, I recognised a phenomenon that always hits me around this stage in the first draft. Two things happen simultaneously, seemingly in a tussle with each other: I start really hating the process, and I start really loving the book.
I mentioned at the start of this diary that I was embarking on this novel without having read much of it – and the reassuring news is, well, wow, it’s really good. When we get to later stages in the process and I have some more polished work to share with you, I hope you’ll see why – it’s mesmerising. I’m totally engrossed in the rhythms of this voice, and the detail. But at the same time, the longer I’m at first-draft stage and the more aware I am of how beautifully Diamela’s original book seems to be developing before my eyes, the bigger the gap between the two seems to become, and more impatient I get at this process I’m engaged in. It feels like translating is just slowing down the thing I want to do which is simply read the book at pace and take all the stimulation it offers and not worry about anything else.
So I really want the first draft to be over. Then I can start the detailed work of moulding it into something that I hope will be just as mesmerising in English as the Spanish is proving to be. At the moment I’m just hacking bits of rock that are very approximately the right size out of the quarry, and no one ever became a sculptor in order to do that bit – all the real artistry of shaping it is yet to come, and for me, the finer the work, and the closer it gets to being tinkered into finished form, well, the happier I am working on it.
Which is to say: I’m going to be grumpy for a couple of weeks. I need to remind myself that then the fun begins, of course – but in the meantime, I’m producing stuff like this:
I could say now that an [some?] organic reason IMPULSÓ [impelled?] me. I was carrying within my body a biological MALESTAR that INCITÓ [or impelled here?] me to PROMOVER the first crisis. I don’t remember/cannot recall my pain, I don’t know which organ, which point on/in the body. Later, when the meeting/encounter was finished, I fell into a state of ESTUPOR. But you [tú], the SECRETARIO, the MAS HABILITADO of us, did not express a trace of disgust/distaste [trace of distaste ?? X], you answered serenely and managed, in a way, to re-establish [an?] equilibrium [/balance]. Years later, when the unknowns [/the mysteries?] between us had already been brought/knocked down, I understood that you had acted [no – presumably that I had acted?] COMO UNA PARTE TUYO, that it was you who had [you were the one who had?] pushed me in some mysterious way to produce the [that?] disturbance, [that thing] which you so needed [in order] to validate your PRECISIÓN [?].
You’d be hard pressed to recognise with any confidence that we’re talking about a great novel – or indeed that translation is a delightful process – from those words. But I know it’s the price to pay. The first draft sets up all the rest.
This is also, it must be said, where the impostor syndrome tends to kick in. I’m pretty happy editing my work, taking something bad and making it better, but until I can get down to doing that, I’m just running on faith. This is going to be good? Ever? Really? Seems unlikely…
Ugh, such a long way to go.
In the meantime, I mentioned in response to some conversations on Twitter that I’d write about why the title was causing trouble, too, so I’ll do that in the next entry, to take my mind off the ENDLESS AND ANNOYING first draft.
* * *
18 Oh, how wrong you were. (Ed.)
24 February
Never Again?
It often happens that titles change as a book moves between its first incarnation and its rebirth in a new language. Titles can be among the hardest things to translate, not least because they’re often doing a great deal, very economically. You have one word, or a couple, or maybe as many as half a dozen, which have to sound good and intriguing (titles, like jacket designs, are part of the publisher’s marketing proposition just as much as they’re a part of the writer’s work of art), there might cleverly be a couple of different ways of reading this title, it should tell you something about the book (a steer to the reader about what aspect is especially important), and so on. Finding the right formulation to do all those things concisely is hard enough in just one language, let alone in a way that can work identically well in more than one. So, as I said, they sometimes have to change.
(Only last week I was involved in a long e-mail debate with an author, editor and publisher trying to find a new title for a novel that we hoped would do everything each of us wanted perfectly. We failed, obviously.)
For Diamela’s book, I’ve not had any conversation with the publishers in which the possibility of completely changing the title has come up, nor have I mooted it with Diamela herself, so I’m assuming that – hoping that – we’re going to aim to make a close English version of the original title work. That original, as I mentioned way back in the first entry, is
Jamás el fuego nunca
So, middle things first: el fuego means “the fire”. That part at least is weirdly easy. Even the definite article! But now what?
Well, Jamás means “never”.
And nunca means “never”.
And so you can see, right away, my first problem.
There’s not a huge amount of clear blue water between the two words in Spanish, but the usage is slightly different; the important thing for you to know is that basically the former sounds a bit more emphatic than the latter – and yet “never” is the English word that would come most readily to hand in both cases.
