29 September 2008
Entry 1
Translation – like most kinds of writing, like most kinds of artistic creation – tends not to expose itself to an audience till it has reached its finished form. A reader is encouraged to read a finished book – which may be a third, fifth, or fiftieth draft, which has been worked and re-worked, corrected, questioned, edited, polished and proofed – and to disregard the imperfect stages that have preceded this final one. You are requested kindly to keep well away from the rehearsal room until the performers and production team have their show ready for public viewing, if you please.
In this blog I hope to examine the translation process, working through a novel from my own first launching into a first draft, right up to publication. It’s not a blog about the life of a translator – musings about translation generally, reports of events I’ve attended or readings I’ve given, people I’ve met at launch parties, books I’ve read – but intimately about a single piece of translation work, which I hope will bring you closer to the experience, to the pleasures it brings and the questions it raises.
I am just about to embark on the translation of Estação das Chuvas by José Eduardo Agualusa, a wonderful Angolan novelist I’ve been privileged to work with a few times before. This book – our fourth together – presents a search for the story of Angolan poet Lídia do Carmo Ferreira; but it’s also the story of many other people who spin into and out of her life and the narrator’s; and each has his own rich back-story told, and each engages with the setting – the state of their country through the second half of the 20th century.
In this blog I hope to examine the translation process, working through a novel from my own first launching into a first draft, right up to publication
It looks back at Lídia’s childhood, back through her family’s history, through narrative but interspersed with passages from interviews with Lídia later in life, carrying through to her unexplained failure to appear at the launch of her last book… It opens on the night of Angola’s independence in 1975 – a day of celebration which would also mark the beginning of a two-decade civil war…
So over the coming weeks I will be using this blog to record my work on this book, posting as I go. I’ll be exploring challenges particular to this book and this writer, his voice and language and the world he evokes, presenting specific problems as they arise, and perhaps asking you to help with creative ways of solving some of them too.
Our publishers Arcadia Books, José Eduardo and I have only just agreed on which of his many fine books to tackle next – trying to balance our judgments of the relative books’ qualities with the demands of particular accessibility and appeal to English-language readers (it’s about Angolan politics, among other things – will it be too unfamiliar?). Not to mention the question of how well this piece of writing will work in English. So far I have read Estação das Chuvas just once – but this was some years ago, and only rapidly, and today I remember little of it, and nothing at all of how the story develops and ends. And so far I’ve translated the first couple of pages as a sample for Arcadia, again a few years back. Here’s that opening:
That night Lídia dreamt of the sea. It was a deep sea, dark and full of slow creatures that seemed to be made of that same sad light you see at dusk. Lídia didn’t know where she was, but she knew that they were jellyfish. As she awoke she could still make them out moving across the walls, and it was then that she remembered her grandmother, Dona Josephine do Carmo Ferreira, a.k.a. Nga Fina Diá Makulussu, a famous interpreter of dreams. According to the old lady, to dream about the sea was to dream about death.
She opened her eyes and saw the great pendulum clock hanging on the wall. It was twenty minutes past midnight. Angola was already independent. She thought about this, and wondered at her being there, lying in that bed, in the old house of the Ingombotas. What was she doing in that country? A useless question, that tormented her every day.
But at that moment it had another meaning: what was she doing there?
She was lucid and felt nothing, neither the bitterness of the defeated nor the euphoria of the victors (it was both at once that night). ‘It’s the night of praying mantis,’ she thought. And she saw herself, newborn, with a large praying mantis resting on her chest.
When she was small, old Jacinto had talked to her about it: ‘Not long after you were born your mother looked over at you and saw a huge praying mantis on your chest.’ Much later, grandmother Fina had retold the episode. She had said to her, ‘Life will swallow you up.’
Grandmother Fina had turned 105 that month, but remained a practical, solid woman, just as she had always been. Lídia believed in everything she said, including her premonitions. She considered waking her grandmother to tell her of the dream, but she didn’t move. She had no strength. She inhaled the quicombo-perfumed air deeply, and felt lighter. A distant, round rumbling drifted to her ears; she couldn’t separate the different sounds but knew that they were gunshots, explosions, cries of pain, of fury, of delight. Almost all were sounds of rage, but there must have been some groans of love too, the barking of dogs, the deep sound of beating hearts. Lídia thought about Viriato de Cruz, she thought about death, she thought that beyond her closed bedroom windows life was carrying on. She sat up in bed, stretched her hand out and took from her nightstand a little black-covered notebook, one of those long notebooks that grocers use to pencil down the day’s accounts.
‘Life is happening out there,’ she wrote. She crossed the line out and wrote again: ‘Out there life was happening / In all its brutal splendour.’
Then she put a circle round the two lines and added the date: “11th November, 1975”.
It’s a start… For a translator it’s a gentle start, a nice, straight-forward opening, I think. And engaging and intriguing enough, I hope, to hook people in for page two. More to come…
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
