10 March 2009
Entry 18
Consulting the oracle
Some progress to report!
On Saturday night I drove up to Bath, where Agualusa and I had an event to do at the literature festival there the following day. And took advantage of our being together to force him to do some text work…
We spent probably about three hours (maybe a little more) on Sunday morning and evening, working through various queries – some large and general, some small questions of regional vocabulary – covering about the first three-quarters of the book. (The rest will have to be mopped up by email, as it got late and we got too bleary-eyed to be useful at the end of a very long day…)
At the event JEA had talked about how hard it sometimes is to answer questions about his own work – why he chose to use word x rather than word y – so under those circumstances he was very tolerant of my dozens and dozens of requests for him to explain himself, to tell me what a line is meant to mean, what he’s trying to do here or what he’s suggesting there.
I won’t go through everything we talked about, but will mention just three points we discussed which all raise the same general question.
1) In Portuguese the noun ‘tarde’ can mean ‘afternoon’ anytime or earlyish ‘evening’. So when you have a neutral sentence opener like “One TARDE he went out to meet Antonio…” should it be an English afternoon or evening?
Sometimes it’s obvious from the context – in one case someone’s eyes are burning in the darkness, so if it’s dark then we can probably assume it’s more ‘evening’ than ‘afternoon’; but more usually there’s no contextual clue like this. So I asked JEA, each time the word occurred, to tell me which he meant – to describe the sort of time of day he had in his imagination writing the scene, so I could (of necessity) be a little more specific in English than he had to be in Portuguese.
2) A character called Francisco – Xico, for short – is at a meeting where his comrades are each choosing nicknames; he tries to think of a suitable quimbundo word (he doesn’t want them to think he’s Portuguese), but can’t think of anything that will work. He ends up blurting out the first word he thinks of – bitacaia – and hence becomes known, unfortunately, as ‘Xico Bitacaia’. I say unfortunately, because a ‘bitacaia’ isn’t something attractive or heroic, it’s a particularly unpleasant sort of insect – pulex penetrans – that burrows under the skin in a most irritating sort of way. (Its English name – I had to look this one up – is the ‘chigoe flea’. Anyone know this?)
I asked JEA if he had any objection to my changing the contracted form used for Francisco from ‘Xico’ to ‘Chico’, which is essentially the same but would be more recognisable to English-language readers. It also has the very pleasing side-effect that our character is now lumbered with the nickname Chigoe Chico. Nice, no?
3) And I had some annoying chicken trouble to solve. There’s a nice little sequence discussing angels (good), demons (bad), and chickens (neither, but also have wings); and how you don’t always know whether somebody is an angel or a demon or just a chicken… (Trust me, it makes more sense in the book.)
The problem is, of course, that there are associations to calling someone a ‘chicken’ in English that there aren’t in Portuguese – it’s hard to describe someone as a complete chicken without suggesting a cowardice that isn’t anything to do with what we’re trying to convey. So I wanted to change chicken for another bird (keeping the wings is important). So a pigeon, perhaps? JEA suggested a dove, but that too has particular unhelpful associations. We settled on ‘parrot’, because the ‘talking’ association makes sense in this context. But here’s my question:
Would I have dared to make this change of bird myself without JEA’s agreement? It may seem a small change but it does alter the image – and it also loses a connection to other chicken images in the book (we talked at our event about the recurrence of chickens in his work…) – so it’s not insubstantial. It would seem quite presumptuous to make this replacement unilaterally, I think.
And would I have changed Xico to Chico – Xico Bitacaia to Chigoe Chico – without JEA’s approval?
And what would I have done with all the ‘tarde’ scene-settings if I couldn’t check with the author just what he had in his head?
I’ve usually been in the fortunate position of having an author to consult – an author who is living, and obliging, and on email – which both helps to clarify unclear things but also allows me to be freer with the things I change (it does seem paradoxical that the fact that the author is looking over my shoulder – and indeed, reading this blog – means that I can be less faithful to his original, rather than feeling I have to be more so); but what do I do, in comparable instances, when I’m working on a book by someone no longer alive, or who doesn’t want to help? There’ll be a whole new set of problems then…
But for now I’ll continue to take advantage of my good fortune and get JEA to respond by email to my queries for the remaining quarter of the book. And then it must go to the publishers as it’s really very late. We publish in May!
PS We spent some of our time in Bath with James Nunn who’s designing the jacket for the book (and has done the lovely jackets for the last couple, too); we talked about the current drafts, which are nice-looking but haven’t yet quite got to the point where they perfectly capture the book. I’m emailing him a draft of the book tonight for him to have a read and see what else he comes up with – when we have something we’re all happy with I’ll ask him if I can put it up on here for you to look at too.
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
