7 October 2008
Entry 2
Before I get into detail on the text of my Estação das Chuvas translation, I thought it might be worth sharing a few concerns I have as I set out, attempting to forestall a few general problems I anticipate coming across in these months’ work. (Though it’s salutary to note that the most complicated problems arising never turn out to be the ones I’ve managed to anticipate…)
Having done a few of Agualusa’s books before, I know that one issue that will undoubtedly arise is how to deal with cultural particularities of the Angolan setting, a setting we have to assume unfamiliar to most Anglophone readers. What to do with the shorthand references to local dishes, for example – these books are full of such things – and whether to gloss them extensively, to footnote them (to be avoided at all costs, surely?), or simply to retain the words in the original and assume that even if people don’t know them it doesn’t always matter.
For example, to say “He served himself a plate of funge…”, or to explain what exactly funge is at the risk of interrupting the flow? In the opening passage I quoted last week, there’s the word quicombo – should I explain what it is (which might be awkward), or leave it in the original and assume that this adds something useful colourfully tonally even while the precise meaning or reference might not be all that important.
There are plot and contextual issues of this kind, too; much of Agualusa’s writing is not only embedded in the physical and cultural Angolan setting (local birds, recipes, rivers, music), but also in its history and politics, with references dropped to names of people, organisations, political parties or significant events with which my readers will not – I’m assuming – be conversant.
On the whole I find Agualusa’s sentences sit very well in English, but is that because I’m venturing too far away from the original cadences?
This book in particular works within a very particular modern political context, and depends on knowing and understanding certain things about how systems operate and who is who – that’s potentially a trouble to be solved if we possibly can, if the reading experience is going to be comparably rich to that of an Angolan reader. In that same opening passage, then, most readers of this blog would have no way of knowing whether Lídia do Carmo Ferreira is or was a real person appropriated by the author for his fiction, or his creation; and you never know, that might be significant.
(Just while I think about it, I should mention too in the interest of full disclosure that one of the difficulties I anticipate for this translation is the writing of a blog about it. Like most people I know who do this kind of work, I find I do a lot of it by instinct and without examining what I do; having to do think about what’s happening in the process, and finding a way of articulating it, may prove be really hard… Interesting, though, or so I tell myself…)
So… There will be linguistic snags, too – and while I can’t predict what exactly they’ll be I know they’ll be there and can guess at least at the types of problems Agualusa will have created for me and his other translators to sweat over. He is a writer who likes to play with his words, who likes little verbal games, who likes poems and song lyrics; this book, like all his books, will be well sprinkled with this sort of thing, and each one will require a new and creative solution if something of the effect is to be retained in my necessarily imperfect version.
And there are more macro-scale linguistic issues too, broad questions of tone, of cadence, of how the sentences read in English, how the whole things will be made to feel like a piece of writing in English – and yet still attached to its former self in Portuguese – and not some odd hybrid… Getting that quite right is always tricky (and particularly hard to define and describe), always a worry and potentially a problem. On the whole I find Agualusa’s sentences sit very well in English, but is that because I’m venturing too far away from the original cadences, and creating a piece of English writing no longer properly moored to its original?
(I remember one sentence in my first Agualusa book – Creole - which seemed so very right, seemed to sit so well in English, and it wasn’t till after publication that I realised it was because I’d inadvertently let myself roam too freely away from Agualusa’s sentence and more or less hijacked a sentence from My Fair Lady to fill the gap…)
Though a difficult question to answer clearly, it’s one of paramount importance: does it all sound just right, and how does one know? What to look for?
So to begin at the beginning, does that first passage quoted last week work as smoothly as it should? There’s only one way to find out.
More on Friday.
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
