28 November 2008

Entry 11

Pe? Peo? Peopl?

I mentioned the other day that I was going to post on the word ‘people’. I’ve come across a problem I don’t remember having encountered before. It’s not, though, a problem of semantics, but of spelling and the way the word is constructed compared to how it’s pronounced.

So… there’s a scene in the novel that ends with the following paragraph (as I’ve done in the past, I’ll leave the few troublesome words untranslated for now):

A few months later, a group calling themselves the Rosengarten Committee detonated a bomb close to the American embassy, in Brasilia. On the broken wall a sentence could be read, in large red letters: “Rosengarten did not die! He lives no coração do po…” That was where the sentence was cut off by the explosion.

The graffiti line in full would have been no coração do povo, meaning ‘in the heart of the people’. Although the word ‘povo’ is cut in half by the explosion, it’s quite clear what ‘po…’ is referring to.

And now look at the English:

“Rosengarten did not die! He lives in the heart of the pe…”

(Huh?)

The heart of the peo? The peop?

The problem for me here, you see, is that because the word ‘people’ is so peculiarly spelled, if you break off early you’re left with a part of a word which doesn’t in fact sound like the first half of the word we know as ‘people’ (since we do ‘hear’ words as we read, I think), or indeed of anything. As you read the possibilities you hear ‘the heart of the peh’ (a short vowel as in pen/pep/pet), or ‘the heart of the pea-oh’, or ‘the heart of the pea-opp’, not ‘the heart of the peep’, which is what we need to be in the reader’s head for it to be obvious what the graffiti is saying.

If the word were properly were spelled ‘peeple’ (which would be nice and tidy) then ‘He lives in the heart of the peep…’ would suggest the right thing. But I’m not sure pe/peo/peop do. I suppose it could be ‘the heart of the peopl…’ but just trimming a letter off the end doesn’t have quite the same effect, I think, as slashing the word right down the middle.

Another alternative would be to restructure the phrase, to something like: “He lives in the people’s hearts”.

But (yes, you guessed it) that doesn’t work in English either. Because ‘hearts’ is spelled unhelpfully too.

‘He lives in the people’s he…’? ‘Or the people’s hea…’?

(This could be trying to suggest ‘head’ just as easily, and again the sound is wrong. You hear ‘hee’ or heh’ but certainly not ‘har’ from either of these.)

He lives in the people’s hear…?

No. Still wrong.

Hmm.

PS Looking at it again, I don’t much like “could be read in large red letters”, either, by the way. Though spelled differently they sound the same, and if you do hear words in your head as you read it’s jarring. Another little thing on the list to solve…

[Web editor's note: apologies for the late posting of this entry. Translator and editor have both suffered computer crises in the last week or two.]

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