Translating myself #12: In the beginning...
“Even the simplest word can never be rendered with its exact equivalent into another language.”
Kimon Friar, Greek-American translator
Hello.
Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted the mistake in the first paragraph of yesterday’s post – we are, in fact, in week 3 of 4 with these newsletters (not week 2), which I suspect will come as a relief to many of you.
Today is all about beginnings.
Such as this one, which I’m sure you’ve come across:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…”
The opening line of a novel has a lot of work to do. It might introduce a character, like this:
“Call me Ishmael.”
Or like this:
“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
Or even like this:
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
A novel’s first line sets the tone for what will follow. It can be reflective:
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
Or it can hint at the strangeness of the fictional world we are about to enter:
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
Sometimes, an opening line boldly sets out the novel’s entire premise:
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
It can also introduce us to the element of tension that will de driving the plot:
“Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”
Some novelists use the opening sentence to lay out an idea, or a theme, that will be central to the work, as in:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Or:
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’
One of my favourite opening sentences succeds in introducing the protagonist and signalling how the story might end:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
*
The opening line of Dulce Maria Cardoso’s The Return runs contrary to one of the principles of “good” writing I was taught at school: never start a sentence with a conjunction (And/Or/But). This is how she does it:
“But there are cherries in the Motherland.”
As a reader, and later as the translator, I found that first sentence disconcerting. Why not declare, more simply, “There are cherries in the Motherland”?
That “But”, however, is doing something important. It is telling us that we we are catching up with a story that is in mid-flow. We are joining a conversation that is already happening, and there is an urgency to that conversation. The effect is, quite deliberately, disorienting.
The first-person narrator, teenage Rui, is about to leave Angola, the country of his birth, and fly to safety in Portugal. He finds himself comparing the place where he lives to a place he has only ever learned about in textbooks – a land where beautiful girls wear cherries as earrings. He has never actually seen a cherry (or a Portuguese girl). He is nervous about leaving. But, then again, there are cherries in the Motherland…
So what about that other word: “Motherland”?
In the original Portuguese, Dulce uses the word “metrópole”. It refers to the centre of colonial power, Portugal, as opposed to the colonised fringe, Angola. The word is used 155 times in the novel – for Rui, it is a recurring idea (or, more precisely, a recurring ideal).
A literal translation of “metrópole” is “metropolis”. This seemed inadequate, given its association, in English, to the idea of a city. Instead, I hoped to find a word to describe a place weighted with the expectations of people yearning to belong there, even if they had never set foot in it.
“Mainland” suggests a continental mass in connection to its islands – not applicable to Portugal and Angola. “Homeland” sounded like a U.S. government department. “Fatherland” had, for me, some totalitarian overtones (Nazi Germany came to mind). On the other hand, “motherland” – a place that welcomes and embraces us, that offers shelter and sustenance…
“But there are cherries in the motherland.” Yes. That would do.
One final decision was pending.
Dulce’s “metrópole” is a lower case noun. But the “motherland” needed to be more than a simple geographic or bureacratic construct – it was a grand idea that loomed large over Rui’s imagination. Elise, the book’s editor, and I agreed that “Motherland” – capital “M” – reflected that grandness.
“But there are cherries in the Motherland.”
More on Dulce’s opening lines in my next newsletter. But in the meantime, dear reader (see what I did there?) – did you recognise the novels from which the opening lines above were taken? Answers tomorrow.