Translating myself #16: Foreignness in translation
“A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (translator unknown)
Hello.
This is the final week of my pop-up newsletter series. I’m very grateful to you for coming along, for reading some of my thoughts, and for sharing some of yours. If you would like to see previous issues, the archive is available here.
I ended last week pondering when and why translators might choose to “tame” or “domesticate” a text in order to make it more accessible to readers. Sometimes, however, maintaining a sense of the foreigness is essential to the spirit of the original work.
I have been reading Kate Briggs’ delightful book-length essay about translation, This Little Art. It opens with her meditations on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Briggs is particularly interested in a scene in the novel during which the characters, who are speaking in German (though, of course, she is quoting from the English-language translation), suddenly switch into French.
Mann’s original includes, in French, the brief exchanges that follow. One of the key points about the exchanges is that they reveal how the protagonist, Hans Castorp, is not very confident when speaking French.
How does a translator from the German approach this problem? Leave the French in, verbatim? Translate the French into English? Perhaps italicise it, to show it is somehow different from the rest of the text? Add an explanatory footnote? But if the extraneous language is translated into English, how best to convey that the character is not very proficient in that other language?
The earliest translation of The Magic Mountain (Helen Lowe-Porter, 1927) leaves the French text in as it was – with the obvious risk of losing (even if only briefly) a reader who can’t follow it. A much more recent version, by John E. Woods (1995), pursues the more inclusive approach, flagging up in a translator’s note that certain conversations are taking place in French.
Translating Dulce Maria Cardoso’s work has posed similar conundrums for me. Take, for instance, The Return, which tells the story of Rui, a teenage boy who has to flee his birthplace of Angola after its independence from Portugal, and finds himself stranded in a hotel outside Lisbon along with thousands of other “returnees”.
One of the things he has brought with him, along with the family suitcases, is the language he spoke in Angola – Portuguese peppered with Kimbundu expressions: the word for marijuana (liamba), the word for brothel (munhungu), the slang for buttocks (mataco) and many others.
The challenge was in translating the novel into English, while conveying to English-language readers the foreignness of the words and expressions brought by Rui and his fellow returnees.
A reader of the Portuguese original would have encountered these foreign words, and gleaned their meaning from the context. It felt important to retain in the English translation the same “foreignness” that those words evoked.
Rather than trying to artificially replicate the sense of “otherness” in English (perhaps using American slang?) I left the words in the original Kimbundu. The one nod to readability (a departure from Dulce’s original) was to italicise those words and expressions to clearly set them apart.
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I faced a similar issue while working on Violeta Among the Stars. Violeta’s mother – an uncaring and distant character – frequently uses French expressions to show others how well educated she is.
“Bêtises, ma chérie, bêtises”, she exclaims. “La chauffage, Baltazar,” she shouts at her husband. A lady must always be “chic, très chic”, she says to Violeta, who she calls “mon ange”.
So should these constant and repetitive refrains be translated into English – as Woods did with Mann’s Magic Mountain? For me the answer was, decidedly, no.
The French phrases, dropped into even the most inocuous conversations, illustrate the mother’s snobishness better than many pages of exposition. They instantly tell a reader something important about the character.
Reader – I left the French in!
And as with The Return, the single concession to flagging up the foreigness was to italicise the foreign idioms.
After all, although it is a translator’s job to convey one language (or more) into another, sometimes preserving the otherness in the source material is crucial.