10 October 2008
Entry 3
Putting a bit more flesh on the bones of my last post now:
The first is the question about how you know when something is right, when after a little playing around with alternatives you know you’ve got it. For me, there’s only one way to measure that, and that’s by reading it aloud.
Last night I read from my translations of Agualusa’s work at a great live literature event called Plum, hosted by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williamson at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, and took the opportunity to read not only passages from the three published books, but also the opening to Estação das Chuvas, the piece I included in my first post. I don’t think I’ve read from a translation-in-progress before, and for all my concern it sounded good, I think, quite fluent – Agualusa is such a pleasure to read aloud! – and all the rhythms felt very natural.
That night Lídia dreamt of the sea. It was a deep sea, dark and full of slow creatures that seemed to be made of that same sad light you see at dusk. Lídia didn’t know where she was, but she knew that they were jellyfish. As she awoke she could still make them out moving across the walls, and it was then that she remembered her grandmother, Dona Josephine do Carmo Ferreira, a.k.a. Nga Fina Diá Makulussu, a famous interpreter of dreams. According to the old lady, to dream about the sea was to dream about death.
Then I came home and read the same passage aloud in Portuguese. (Which I would never do in public, as my accent is horrible…) And it sounded totally different. Smoother, humming, it felt as though it were all m’s and n’s and l’s. And indeed, look at this first line – even if you know no Portuguese, just look at the letters that constitute it: Naquela noite Lídia sonhou com o mar.
I wonder if I’ve done what I’m always afraid of doing, produced something that reads well but at the cost of forgetting some of its kinship to the original?
I’ll worry about that later.
A lot of the questions I ask now won’t be answered till much later in the book, when I get a sense of what is regular stylistically and what it anomalous
I mentioned in my last post too the issue of local specific words/things that my readers won’t know, and I gave the example of quicombo – this exotic something that in that first extract was perfuming the air in Lídia’s room as the novel opens.
The alternatives would be to find a closeish translation (it’s a kind of wood, so a reasonable alternative – a scented wood – sandalwood? rosewood? It’s neither of these, quite…); to retain quicombo in the Portuguese and maybe italicise it so it’s obviously foreign and assume it doesn’t much matter if no one knows (my usual inclination); or to footnote it – “A wood with which beds used to be made because it was believed that its intense scent repelled insects.”
That last solution seems the least appealing – a very distracting thing to a reader. But… rather curiously, there’s a footnote, with just that text, in the original edition too. This makes things more complicated.
I’m working from a Brazilian edition of the book, so was the footnote added to help non-Angolan Portuguese-language readers deal with a very local word? Or do these appear in every edition of the book, for the original reader (whoever that is) too? In other words, is it a footnote from Agualusa, part of his writing of the novel, or something added by a trying-to-be-helpful foreign publisher?
If Brazilian readers need footnotes, should we assume that English-language ones must surely need them too? Or is there a distinction to be drawn between readers in Brazil who speak the language and therefore assume to be able to understand everything and so need the odd bit of help, and those of us who are culturally and linguistically much further away who might expect a little bit of exotic mystery to the details of what they’re reading, and therefore could just get away with an unannotated ‘quicombo’, and assume it’s something interesting and heavily perfumed and local and that’s all they need to know to give them the colour of the scene?
Hmm. I’ll write to ask Agualusa about how this works in the edition of this book read in Angola. (It’s such a luxury having an obliging author at the other end of e-mail…) And will return to this issue when I have an answer.
How this is resolved will also depend on how things pan out later, because flicking forward in this edition I can see lots of footnotes to come. It may be something that makes sense as a stylistic part of the book. A lot of the questions I ask now won’t be answered till much later in the book, when I get a sense of what is regular stylistically and what it anomalous – this applies to vocabulary, to tone, to questions of local particularity – everything, really. There’s a little bit of groping in the dark about the start of this process, hoping that nothing I do is going to be proved thoroughly inappropriate as things progress…
And talking about things progressing, I really have to start chapter two…
No Largo Primeiro de Maio, o Presidente falava à multidão.
On Primeiro de Maio Square, the President was talking to the crowd.
Talking, or speaking? Primeiro de Maio Square, or First of May Square? Anyone?
More next week.
PS Thanks to everyone who’s emailed in response to the first couple of posts, and glad you’re finding it interesting. We don’t currently have a regular comments facility set up, but I’ll try and respond to questions you raise as I go.
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
