12 December 2008

Entry 12

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After a little hiatus – for which, my apologies – I just wanted to respond to some of the emails you’ve been sending in.

First of all, some interesting suggestions for particular problems I asked about…

So, Filho da puta / Filho da luta first, then.

Alex had a couple of interesting ways out of it, one of which would be to keep the rhyme with ‘son of a bitch’ with something albeit a little more obscure, but then if necessary just explaining it; so have the response be something like:

“Much worse,” Zorro muttered. “A son of the ditch – I’m with the workers.”

Roland pointed out how straightforward this would be in French – fils de lutte – which is certainly something I’ve come across before, with Portuguese quirks that I can see exactly how to translate into French or Spanish but which simply can’t operate the same way in English.

My friend Carmo emailed from Portugal with another suggestion, which was the same I’d found myself, and I think is the one I’m going to go with. She suggested that instead of changing ‘filho da puta’ as one would naturally do from the literal ‘son of a whore’ to the more common equivalent ‘son of a bitch’, we instead keep it literal, which allows us to do this:

“You’re a reactionary,” she said. “A son of a whore.”
“Much worse,” Zorro muttered. ”A son of a war…”

Pretty good, no?

The ‘de Mao em pior’ seems to have been trickier. What I have to do is find another pun – inevitably it has to be a totally different one – that combines the elements of

a)    Communist icon
b)    Something bad and getting worse

And though I haven’t quite got the exact wording, the idea is to do something along the lines of “Personally I give this conversation extremely low Marx” – or similar. As I say, the wording’s not quite right, but using ‘Marx’ for ‘marks’ is the best I’ve got so far.

(One remaining problem with that, of course, is that the pun arises in dialogue and in my English version there’s no way of the listener knowing it’s a joke because ‘Marx’ and ‘marks’ sound identical – whereas in Portuguese ‘Mao’ and ‘mal’ are very similar but not identical – but that’s yet to be solved. Yikes…)

[Btw, a very interesting email from Paul Wilson drew my attention to another pun made on just the same phrase; he cited a friend who commented that getting ready for dinner in Germany might involve going from Bad to Wurst…]

Next, for pe/peo/peop. Sara suggested a couple of useful changes:

By making ‘heart’ into ‘hearts’ she cleverly suggests that the final noun will also be a plural; and she cut the final word after the very first letter – which hadn’t occurred to me – which intercepts it before the funny phonetics start, and allows you to read ‘p—’ as just the letter (‘puh’) or  as ‘pee…’ and still understand how it might be the beginning of ‘people’. So:

“on the broken wall someone had scrawled, in large red letters, ‘Rosengarten did not die! He lives on in the hearts of our p—’ ”

I think ‘the p—’ still rather than ‘our p—’, but this is the best solution yet, I think. She also added the ‘scrawled’ so as to avoid read/red, which is pretty neat too. Too far from the original, or not?

And while we’re on these solutions to particular problems, we had some suggestions for the anti-Belgian chant, too; here’s Alex’s:

Those who with the Flemish sup
Their hearts will fill with fear
Not we!
While Ninganessa is with us
We fear no tyranny!

Thanks for these, and your other suggestions – sorry not to be able to quote everyone’s…

In other messages…

The discussion about italics / footnotes / glossaries etc. continued. “Like you, I hate footnotes,” wrote Mahmud, a translator writing from Bangladesh; and I’m definitely with him on that; but leaning towards a glossary (both Anne and Jeremy liked this idea), having recently reviewed a translated book that used a glossary in this way and worked very well, I thought.

And the Primeiro de Maio Square (Celina’s preferred option) / May the First Square (as Jacqueline suggested) question continued to raise comments, including quite adamant ones (I’m glad I’m not the only person in the world to take this seriously…) from my friend Kit who made the sensible point that the First of May doesn’t mean anything specifically significant to English-language readers, unless it’s given as May-Day; so we could use May-Day Square, but only if the celebration that we know as May-Day (international workers etc.) is indeed the same thing the square was named for in Angola.

(In other words, if a country has a street named ‘23rd April Street’ because that happens to be their independence day, translating it to 23rd of April Street is meaningless, and Independence Day Street might be reasonable, and St George’s Day Street is incongruous nonsense.) From which I suppose we either stick with the Portuguese or we go with May-Day Square if indeed it’s referring to the same May-Day we all know. So… Anyone know anything about Angolan national holidays? I think it’s off to Wikipedia for me…

Finally, thanks to Celina for answering some of the queries I raised in my fifth post (in which I sped through the first draft and left doubts in the Portuguese – Isabel also had a thought about this, distinguishing ‘dog’ and ‘mutt’); she also asked an interesting question, which is “you’ve mentioned that you translate spontaneously, based on instinct so how is writing this blog affecting that process?” And now having acknowledged that interesting question I’m not going to answer it because I don’t know the answer, but I’ll think about it and might come back to it.

And I’ll also come back later to a question from Matthew about alliteration – this relates, I think, to something I mentioned in my 3rd post relating to the repeated consonants in the novel’s opening sentence, and which probably deserves more attention in a forthcoming post.

PS Thanks also to Jeremy for bringing my attention to a brilliant VQR interview with García Márquez – which you’ll find here – and in particular to a fascinating discussion of idiom (in this case, to do with recognising a particular sausage) towards the end.

PPS Matthew, who asked the alliteration question, also asked this, which is much easier to answer: “Do you ever feel that the richness and beauty of the original language is so great that the task before you is well nigh impossible?” The answer, of course, is “Yep, absolutely, all the time, every day, how could I not?” After all, I know Agualusa is a far better writer than I am a translator, and I know without even pausing to think about it that my versions of his books will be less good than his books. And yet I rely on the possibility that they could still be pretty good…

Yes, absolutely, keeping it just the same, losing nothing, is, indeed, impossible, I’m sure of that; but I’m sure too that creating something else that’s worth creating is not! If I didn’t believe at least that much, there would be no point in doing this job. But yes, it is sometimes pretty difficult, though! (Though my engineer friend Paul, on reading the blog, did point out that dealing with weld details is harder, so I should be grateful.)

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