Translating myself #15: On taming texts in translation
Hello.
Today I’d like to go back to remarks made by a reader in response to one of my earliest posts.
Reflecting on my fleeting encounter with Portugal’s ill-termpered Nobel laureate, Ángeles – a university lecturer and translator from English into Spanish – asked whether I had ever felt the need to “tame” a text or, on the contrary, to deliberately accentuate its strangeness.
The degree to which we “domesticate” a text to make it more intelligible to readers is central to a translator’s work. It was a question I grappled with constantly while working on Violeta Among the Stars, which is a wild experiment in prose.
Written in a single meandering sentence, Violeta’s stream-of-consciousness narration is constantly interrupted by intruding memories, unfinished thoughts and half-formed ideas. The narrative jumps back and forth in time with no warning. Speech is often not attributed, leaving the reader to piece together who is speaking to whom – and when – from the context.
The effect can be jarring, at first, but the roughness is quite intentional. As Dulce said at last week’s launch event, the novel is about memory, and memory is never linear – it is a constant pile-up of recollections, ruminations and regrets. Our memory is a permanent car-crash.
So as I worked through the translation I had to resist the impulse to sanitise the text – to “tame” it – for readability. Would it matter hugely, for instance, if I introduced a “he said” or “she said”? Should I try to complete some of the truncated fragments of speech or thought that pop up repeatedly? Might I (the horror!) insert a full stop?
I have explained before how I tried to avoid being too literal in translating the novel. Yet there is a strangeness, an abruptness, in the original Portuguese that I felt it was essential to preserve. Listening to Dulce talk about what she set out to do with the novel all those years ago confirms that this was, in fact, the right approach.
I was reassured in this by Elise, the book’s editor, who agreed that trying to smooth things over – trying to domesticate the seemingly ungovernable prose – would go against one of the book’s key features. She was perhaps less worried than I was about alienating readers, reminding me that most people who read literary fiction are now used to being challenged by experimental prose in works like Lucy Ellman’s award-wining, one-sentence novel, Ducks, Newburyport.
For a taste of the end result – in all its deliberately disorienting roughness – you can read my translation of the novel’s opening pages here.
As a reader – and as a translator – the best way to tackle this novel is to immerse yourself and go with the flow of Violeta’s voice. The strange quirks, interruptions and detours begin to make sense as you go along.
But now I’d love to know what you think. Are you happy to be challenged by experimental prose? And if so, do you have any favourite examples?
Thank you for reading these newsletters about translation. Next week will be the last. Until then, I hope you have a lovely weekend.