Translating myself #13: More beginnings...
“Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes”
Günter Grass, novelist
Hello.
Yesterday I shared some thoughts on translating the opening line in Dulce Maria Cardoso's The Return.
This series of newsletters was instigated by the publication, last week, of my translation of Dulce's Violeta Among the Stars. Its first line is even more succinct. It is, in fact, a single word:
"inesperadamente"
The literal translation from Portuguese is "unexpectedly". Lower case. No punctuation.
Once again Dulce drops us in to a story in media res. Once again, that opening line -- that single word -- will repeat itself throughout the book, echoing and resonating like an obsessive refrain.
Not only is it the very first line in the novel -- it is also the very last. Moments of surprise bookend a life remembered and reimagined after a car crash.
I was not convinced that "unexpectedly" was the right choice for a single word that needs to carry the weight of opening and closing the novel. It felt too long. Too ungainly. Too cumbersome. Too composite.
What other word might place a reader straight into the scene of the tragedy, conveying its unexpectedness and abruptness? What other word might convey the surprise and urgency of a the catstrophic, life-changing moment?
Reader, I chose this:
"suddenly"
I like its sharpness and concision. I like the way it hisses before unrolling like a dark road at night. I like how it grabs my attention, and immediately makes me ask: suddenly... what?
I am now pleasurably immersed in translating Dulce's latest novel, Eliete, and have already had to grapple with its characteristically sudden and unexpected opening. I may have to revisit my choices later, in the context of the finished draft, but at the moment it reads (profanity warning):
"I am what I am and Salazar can go fuck himself."
*
I hope you enjoyed yesterday's compilation of opening sentences. How many did you recognise? I promised to reveal the sources today, so here they are:
...
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...”
~Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
...
“Call me Ishmael.”
~Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Or The Whale)
...
“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
...
“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.”
~J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
...
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
...
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
~George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
...
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
~Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (tr. Edwin and Willa Muir)
...
“Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”
~E.B. White, Charlotte's Web
...
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
...
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"
~ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
...
"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."
~ Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (tr. Gregory Rabassa)
*
But now you tell me: what are your own favourite opening lines?
Until tomorrow.