9 February 2009
Entry 16
While we wait …
Just another holding note to say I’ve not disappeared from the face of the earth or just forgotten about the blog (or just missed another plane) but I’m waiting for some answers/comments/reaction from Agualusa to the text I sent him and won’t be able to make much progress till I’ve heard back from him.
(I do still have to finish and send him the final section of the text, and will do that this week.)
In the meantime, thanks for the comments that have been coming in. Some ingenious solutions to things I’d raised (including one involving a bit of sexual slang I had to look up on urbandictionary.com – oh, the things I’m learning…).
Paul Verhaeghen – winner of last year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Omega Minor (which he both wrote and translated, rather impressively) – wrote from the US with something new for ‘filho da puta/luta’; his solution was ‘son of a bitch / son of a gun’. And while he then said he thought actually it might be too subtle, I wonder whether there might not be something clever we can do with that ‘son of a gun’. For example, if she were to call him a ‘son of a gun’ (which is common enough to be reasonable), and he were to correct her with – not just a son of a gun, a son of the war; or not a son of a gun but of the gun; or something. Hmm, interesting…
Shane Newberry (a translator from Japanese to English) wrote from Australia with several suggestions for ‘De Mao em pior’, pointing out that it’s a shame to lose the specifically ‘Mao’ element (which we do with my Marx solution, and I agree it’s a pity). One suggestion I liked would involve a reference to the Mao content of the conversation making malcontents of its listeners. Will see what I can do with that…
Other correspondents in recent weeks have included Giorgio de Marchis, whom I’ve not met but who is José Eduardo’s Italian translator – who is set to translate My Father’s Wives this summer. (There are a few nice little traps he’s going to have deal with, but it’ll be a pleasure, I’m sure.) He pointed out the importance of not simply having your answers ready before you embark on a translation, but of being always attuned to the questions raised by the text as you go along.
Since I’m writing anyway, a couple of things in the book I still have to resolve that might be worth mentioning –
First is that I have to translate the epigraphs to the chapters. Which is a little different from translating anything else because they’re all quotations and in some case quotations from real people (eg. Agostinho Neto, Gabriel Garcia Marquez). In other words they’re things that may already exist in English – may have been published somewhere or other in English already – so this is slightly more a research job than a translation job. (In the past Agualusa has quoted things that were actually originally in English – Martin Luther King in The Book of Chameleons, say, or Breyten Breytenbach in My Father’s Wives – and rather than translating his Portuguese translation of MLK back into English it’s been a question of tracking down the original quote to use as it first appeared.)
And another question raised by these (see, Giorgio, I am paying attention) is what to do with the epigraphs that aren’t given in Portuguese – there’s one in Spanish, one in French – should I leave those as they are and assume all my readers can understand? Or just treat them as though they were all in Portuguese and translate them all into English?
The other thing big still pending resolution is the question of the book’s section headings. Each section has a noun heading: Poetry, Exile, Fear, Euphoria… Now, in Portuguese all these words have definite articles – only because they have to (as in French, say, you would call a chapter La Peur or L’Exil or La Poésie), whereas in English you don’t need the article. Poetry, Exile, Fear, are much better. But there are some headings that do require the definite article in English – the first chapter is O Princípio and the last is O Fim, and there’s A Busca, and O Dia Eterno in between – which are better as The Beginning, The End, The Search, The Eternal Day than Beginning, End, Search, Eternal Day. So I can either compromise and use definite articles for all of them (so half don’t sound quite right – ‘The Poetry’, ‘The Euphoria’) or use definite articles for none of them (so the other half don’t sound quite right – ‘Beginning’, ‘Search’) or do what’s best in each case but then lose the nice pattern that runs through them all in Portuguese. O Principio, A Poesia, A Busca, O Exilio, O Medo, A Fúria, O Fim, etc. become The Beginning, Poetry, The Search, Exile, Fear, Fury, The End. I don’t like any of the solutions right now but will just have to choose, I guess.
More when I’ve heard back from JEA.
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
