Translating myself #2: On translation as movement
“The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages!”
-- Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Pakistani poet and translator
Hello.
Readers of yesterday's newsletter will have noticed that I did not share any details about the very exciting thing happening soon (only nine days to go).
Time, now, for the big reveal:
On 24 June, Maclehose Press will publish my translation of Violeta Among the Stars, an award-winning novel by Portuguese author Dulce Maria Cardoso.
This is only the second of Dulce's novels to be published in English. Her first,The Return, was published in the UK in 2016.
Violeta Among the Stars is a bold and breathtaking book.
It is a fierce meditation on womanhood and motherhood.
It is a wry reflection on Portugal's de-colonisation process of the 1970s, and on the disapointments of the country's revolution.
It is written in a single sentence, with the protagonist's recollections reeling and ricocheting as she lays trapped in the wreckage after her car veers off the motorway.
In Portuguese the book is called Os Meus Sentimentos. It was published in Portugal in 2005 (the author's second novel). Four years later it won the European Union Prize for Literature. It was, arguably, Dulce's big breakthough book.
*
This seems like the right moment to say something about how Violeta Among the Stars came to be published in English. This might involve, for instance, a few words on how I came to translate her earlier book, The Return.
I will get to that soon.
My earliest forays into translation, however, go back much further.
I described myself yesterday as a "Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-based Mexican". Born in Leeds to Mexican parents, raised in Mexico, and for over twenty years now a happy resident of this beautiful university town on the edge of the East Anglian Fens.
Why does that matter? I strongly believe that to grow up in one country, and then to move to another, is excellent preparation for the necessary work of building bridges between places, languages and cultures.
Many translators I know carry in their luggage a personal history of displacement, uprootedness, migrancy. We are always somewhere, thinking of somewhere else. While this may not be true of every fellow translator, it certainly planted a predisposition in me.
Consider, for a moment, the origin of the word "translate". It comes from the Latin, translationem, which is the act of carrying something across, removing, transporting. Centuries ago the word referred to the removal of a saint's body or relics to another location. So we translate (our bodies, our selves) across locations and landscapes as much as we translate (a text) across languages.
In her memoir Translation as Transhumance, the French translator and poet Mireille Gansell compares the translator's work to "the movement of huge flocks of words" between seasonal pastures. (You can read an excerpt, translated into English by Ros Schwarz, here).
Displacement. Uprootedness. Transhumance. Translation across borders, across cultures, across languages. These, too, are key themes in Dulce's novels. I will write more about that later.
For now, dear reader, I am interested in hearing about your own experiences of translating yourself -- from country to country, from language to language, from pasture to pasture...