13 April 2009

Entry 23

Rounding up

Now that things are coming to an end (sob …), I thought I ought to allow myself a post with a few musings about the blog itself (solipsistic, moi?).

I’ve avoided going back and re-reading my posts as I’ve gone along, to try and avoid it being too self-referential and to encourage it to be as closely as possible a true reflection of the translation work that was actually happening. (Even at the risk of asking questions I’ve never got round to answering, etc.) But I have no doubt that – in certain respects at least – the translation process has been affected by the blog. The thing itself redefined by the very fact of its being observed, as it were.

I don’t mean that the translation text is massively different to what I would have produced unwatched – I suspect I would have ended up with mostly the same words. But the process of getting there has been changed in two ways, I think.

The first is just a logistical one – the timing has been affected. I might on a usual book rush through a translation in a matter of a few intensely busy weeks, and then do nothing on it for several months while I worked on something else, and then come back to it ages later for a polish, and then again nothing till proofs months after that.

This time the process has been evened out, with a much more regular drip-drip attention, with some sort of progress most weeks, and only relatively brief periods of neglect; and even on a week without much progress to report I’ve thought about it at least enough to produce a post on something – to answer your emails, or to make some general points, or whatever. The shape of the work has been affected by the fact that, frankly, I thought if I did nothing for three months it’d be hard to expect anyone following this blog not to give up on it pretty quickly.

And the second change is to do with my awareness of what I’m doing. I think I said quite early on that most of the time I spend translating I’m not particularly deliberate, not particularly consciously aware of what I’m doing, of the choices I’m making, and so on. It has been odd obliging myself to change this habit – both making myself identify the issues as they arise (and not just go with the usual momentum and simply work straight through them without stopping to think consciously) and also making myself consider how this choice/problem might be articulated (especially to readers who may or not be Portuguese speakers, or indeed who may or not be professional translators themselves). It turns out that describing a process that happens in your head is difficult. I probably shouldn’t be surprised by that.

So as I’ve said, I’ve not done much re-reading of old posts, so I don’t know to what extent my attempts to describe the issues that have come up, the choices I’ve been obliged to make, have in fact been successful – whether they’ve evoked something that resembles my real experience of this wonderful job, or whether it’s been largely baffling to anyone who isn’t a translator, a Portuguese speaker, or ideally both.

When I set out on this blog I hoped it might get people thinking about what the process of translating a novel might consist of, and so ideally it might encourage readers to think about process whenever reading translations. It may or not have done that. I will be reading through all the past 22 posts this week and see what I think.

But casting my mind back now, I rather hope the blog has had another effect, too, which is to celebrate the quality of the original writing – every time I’ve raised some problem, whether obvious or subtle, in producing an English word or phrase, it is invariably a reflection of the sophistication, ambition and precision of what the original novel is doing. I don’t know if I’ve said this before in the blog, but I admire Agualusa’s writing hugely, and I do hope that this enthusiasm has come across in previous posts – and I hope it’s helped to encourage some new readers to try him out too.

I’m always reluctant to read over my old writing – specially something like this which has been written pretty spur-of-the-moment and unedited – but I really do want to read over the whole sequence of posts now. The main reason is that Arcadia and I have talked about whether we might publish the whole of this blog as a sort of appendix to the book. It’s an interesting idea, I think – a sort of Translator’s Diary, which you’d read having read the translation itself.

If we do it, I think it would only work if it is just as it’s appeared here on the site, not edited or adapted or polished – a record of the translation process (and the blogging process too, I guess) that reflects all the start-stop of the process, the repetitions, the unproductive morning when I missed my plane, the problems whose solutions I was honestly never quite satisfied with, and of course the contributions from those of you kind enough to write in with comments, questions and suggestions.

So I’ll read it all through this week, as I say, and if it seems to make some approximate sense, it will go into the book.

[Obviously you may already be reading this in the book, in which case you’ll know what we decided, and you can give a wry smile as you appreciate the real meta-something nature of this whole section. (Meta-what – anyone?)]

Anyway, we’re nearly there. The draft is complete, my doubts have been resolved, the editor’s queries answered, the text should also be set now ready for proofing, and a great jacket designed and agreed. We will probably proofread this week, and then off to the printers. I’ll let you know when that’s happened, when my work on this book is finally done!

And just a mention: my only other related task this week is to start reading JEA’s just-completed new novel which he has emailed me (it’s out in Portuguese next month, I think) and about which he’s very enthusiastic; if it’s as good as it sounds my next step is to write a report about it to suggest to Arcadia that we get started on that one next, now that Rainy Season (Arcadia’s Agualusa book 4) is about to be put to bed. It’s called Barroco Tropical. So – for our book 5, in 2010 – how’s Tropical Baroque as a title?

If you would like to comment on this blog, email translationblog@booktrust.org.uk

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