20 November 2008

Entry 10

Advocating for the book

I want to leave the text for a moment, if I may...

There's an aspect of the translator's job that I've not mentioned before, but which (especially I think in an English-speaking country) is a significant one.

Very often the translator is tasked not only with translating the book, but also with being, in a sense, its local advocate. Publishers not-infrequently buy books for translation without having been able to read the original – they may have read a bit in sample translation, will have commissioned a reader's report or two, received encouragement from an agent, may have read another book by the author or read this book translated into a more accessible third language, or whatever – but that is often all. No publishing house will have every potentially-translatable language well spoken among its staff.

And so it is with Agualusa, where Arcadia doesn't have a Portuguese speaker on staff and so the translator's job expands somewhat to be the book's expert representative in other non-translation matters.

I mention this now, because one thing that occupied me last night was thinking about the jacket for the book, which is being worked on as I write. I'm delighted that we have a great designer doing it – James Nunn, who's created such beautiful, striking images for our previous Agualusa books – but with neither Jim nor Arcadia able to read the book itself at this stage they rely on someone (in this case, me) who has to offer guidance on the jacket. Often at this point the translator is the one person in the equation in a position to do this.

So... What is the tone? (How do you actually describe the tone of a book?) What sort of colours? What does the main protagonist look like? Important themes, particularly striking images we might play with, recurring metaphors. Is the rain in the title an important image running through the book? And so on...

It's an interesting exercise (especially for someone with as little visual intelligence as I have) and makes you consider the book in a very different and quite particular way. One thing I felt quite strongly, for instance, is that while Lidia was the key protagonist and of course crucial to the story and should in some way be represented in the cover image, at the same time I knew I wouldn't be comfortable with too clear, too precise an image of her – because, yes, the book is about her, but it's also about her absence, about the search for her, and she's so often just out of shot, or out of focus, or seen from afar.

And I knew that to me it felt like the sort of book with a dark cover (politics, violence, urban settings, rain) rather than the lovely African sun burnishes we've had for our previous books. I may be quite wrong, and I find it hard to explain why I felt I had some idea of what would characterize an appropriate cover and what would not, but an interesting exercise.

So James is working on something now and I'm very much looking forward to it – I hope my e-mailed thoughts to him were useful, and I also hope he disregards many of them since actually he knows far better than I what would work – but as the book's representative in the UK (at least until we have a translation the publishers can read for themselves) it's good to have input.

And there's not much time – even though the book isn't published till the summer, the cover design has to be done soon – it has to go to the sales team, it may go into catalogues or other promotional material (it'll be up on Amazon long before publication date), and the book itself will I guess have to be ready to go to press towards the middle of March...

And talking about the schedule, just to let you know some plans: I'm hoping to have the first pass done in the middle of December (this is rather later than I'd hoped but my hard drive has just died and I have to re-do all the bits that couldn't be recovered and I don't want to talk about it...); and then have a month to fill in gaps, check things over, look words up and iron out things that sound funny. In mid-Jan I hope to have something I'm pleased with, and hopefully will then (this is the fun bit) go and spend a couple of days with Agualusa in Lisbon to talk it through ready for delivery at the end of January. That, at least, is the plan... (Ha ha.)

PS Apologies for the delay in answering some of your comments – I'm going to have to ask James S at Booktrust to re-send them to me as they've vanished (computer... hard-drive... grrr...) but I'll get to them soon. And a whole post about the word 'people' will follow before too long, too.

If you would like to comment on this blog, email translationblog@booktrust.org.uk

Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn