29 March 2009

Entry 19

So very close …

Final stretch almost done now. Over the last week or so I’ve extracted answers to all my final queries from JEA, who has been very busy but kindly found the time to help a lot, as he always does. He explained things that I hadn’t been able to get my head round; he gave his blessing to little bits where I wanted to make a change, usually just adding a little explanatory phrase within the text to help non-Angolan readers with context; and we went back and forth on a few things that weren’t absolutely obvious, such as (with apologies to the squeamish among you) which verb would best suit the action of a bulldozer on a lot of human heads.

(Incidentally, my questions for JEA are usually of a basic linguistic nature – help me, I don’t understand this word … – rather than a matter of questioning him on the accuracy of his own work, but this isn’t the case for all translators, especially those with better Portuguese than mine and more expertise in other useful subjects. He’s just received what sounded like a very involved query from his German translator, working on My Father’s Wives, who thought the symptoms of a very specific car breakdown scene were not consistent with his detailed knowledge of how cars work in the real world. My questions are never that clever.)

I’ve also now been through and resolved all the outstanding queries I had for myself – usually where I knew the meaning of the Portuguese but hadn’t worked out how to recreate it in English; for example, where there was a play on words in the original without an obvious equivalent in the English, so it just needed some time sitting down and wrangling into a solution …There are now solutions to all of these problems, some of which I’m very proud of, some of which are basically adequate and will just have to do (and if I have a eureka moment in the coming weeks I can always amend at proof stage …).

I’ve removed the last of the footnotes and dragged the information, where necessary, into the body of the text. (The footnotes in my edition were apparently unique to the Brazilian version and weren’t in the original Portuguese, so there’s no reason to keep them, which I’m pleased about.) The only footnotes remaining now are those that are, as it were, bibliographic, where there’s a quote from one of Lídia’s poems, or from someone else, and the footnote is there simply to give the reference.

I’ve also worked out which 1948 America film one of the characters is considering going to see. The titles in English and Portuguese don’t quite correspond, so this involved a little detective work …

And I’ve been to the British Library to check out a few quotes from Senghor so they’re reproduced in their standard English translation.

And other little bits of all kinds. The very final three things I’ve resolved (to give you some idea) are the naming of one of the characters, the confused tangle of political acronyms, and some adjectival issues concerning breasts:

1) Character name: There’s a character in the book who’s properly called Ana de Piedade Castro de Magalhães but referred to always as ‘Anita Voa-Baixinho’: ‘Anita’ as the diminutive for Ana, and ‘Voa-Baixinho’ meaning sort of ‘Flying Low’.

This one is now my only remaining query-to-myself in the whole book: at the moment she’s nicknamed ‘Low-Slung Anita’ (I like ‘low-slung’, suggesting she’s rather sagging, past her best), but I still wonder if she shouldn’t be ‘Low-Slung Annie’ instead? To me, ‘Low-Slung Annie’ sounds like she should be a tired old madam in a brothel, perhaps in a western or something. And indeed, this character of ours is an aging madam in a brothel, and though calling her Annie sounds a bit American it seems (as a diminutive of Ana) quite legitimate to me. I think that’s the last query answered, actually. Low-Slung Annie. I’ll know for sure if it works when I read it through.

2) Acronyms. There are lots of them. For political parties, for militia groups, armies, security services, etc. So I’ve just put together a little glossary – a three-line explanation of how the main ones relate to one another (MPLA and UNITA fight alongside one another for Angola’s independence; then after independence they begin to fight each other instead, in a civil war, with the MPLA in government and UNITA the rebels) and a brief explanation of each acronym. It’s less intrusive than footnotes, but it’s an important kindness to readers who could otherwise be enormously confused when they’re supposed to remember which is which of the FAPLA, EPLA, FALA, MPLA, FNLA etc.

3) Breasts. On two occasions female characters are described as having ‘altos’ breasts. This ‘altos’ means the breasts are ‘high’, the idea being just the opposite of the sagging, low-slung Anita, in other words. My problem is that having unthinkingly used the adjective ‘high’ in my first draft, when subsequently reading through I had visions of a character whose ‘high breasts’ are high in the sense of being ‘high up’, unusually placed, in some anatomical anomaly, perhaps just below the chin …

So I clearly need another adjective. ‘Raised’ and ‘lifted’ both sound as though they’ve been lifted artificially. And before you suggest it, ‘pert’ is a ludicrous word. The closest I’ve got is something like ‘firm’, which is obviously not really an equivalent word – being about consistency/solidity rather than outside appearance – but at least conveys the right kind of breasts to a reader. The English-language version has, in other words visually equivalent breasts to the original, even if they aren’t linguistically/adjectivally equivalent. Translation is a weird job.

So, all done.

Well, all done except for the most important stage of all.

Tomorrow when I wake up I’m going to read the English book, from start to finish. Some bits I’ll read aloud, probably. Unless there’s something that really troubles me I expect not to make any reference to the Portuguese original; I assume that that source-target relationship is strong now; so what’s left is the question of being sure that what we have is a good, smooth piece of English writing. So I’ll read it end to end – just as I would anything written in English – and mark any little tweaks, polishing as I go; and then all being well it will be on its way over to the publishers by the end of the day.

Will report back. Fingers crossed.

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