Translating myself #14: Paradise (re)translated
"A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it."
John Millington Synge, Irish Writer (1871-1909)
Hello.
Yesterday I asked about your favourite opening line in a novel. Peter, a regular correspondent, wrote back with this:
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains."
I confess I had to look it up. It is the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), a book I read in secondary school but had not revisited since -- more's the pity.
I was instantly struck by the line's clean beauty, by its rhythm, and by the way a single sentence can instantly evoke a landscape and a mood. The opening of the novel is worth quoting in full:
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”
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But back to translation...
Another reader of these newsletters, and a dear friend, responded to Monday's newsletter about adapting and translating between different forms of self-expression.
Kate is a hugely talented painter and book illustrator, and the idea of creative acts as forms of translation resonated with her. One of her current projects involves adapting stories written about women in the 1800's into visual stories for children today. In another piece of work, she is translating into images the poetry of Cambridge-based teacher and poet Alison Binney -- collaboration (where possible) is often the cornestone for a succesful translation of any sort. She has even taken up the task of translating onto canvas someone else's holiday memories. Might this be translation in its purest form?
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My own limited entanglement with translation and the visual arts happened six years ago. A British publisher contacted me with a commission. The book that needed translating? John Milton's Paradise Lost, first published in 1667.
Further investigations revealed that what I was actually being asked to do was re-translate a graphic novel by the Spanish artist Pablo Auladell, based on Milton's celebrated poem. Auladell used charcoal and graphite to create the moody, monochrome images illustrating the fall of Man and the battle between Satan and God. The text in his (considerably abbreviated) version was taken directly from a Spanish translation of Milton's blank-verse epic.
My first task involved a close reading of Milton's original to identify the lines that Auladell had used (in Spanish) for his graphic novel. I then had to re-insert them into the English version of the graphic novel.
In other words, I was being commissioned to put the Milton back into Milton. There were occasional fragments of text that were not in the original poem, but which had been added for continuity, and which I did my best to render into "Miltonian" English.
It is perhaps the most unusual translation credit I can lay claim to -- but one that I am inordinately proud of. It is not every day that I get asked to translate a classic poet into his own language. I am still waiting for the e-mail asking if I'd like to translate Shakespeare into English...