17 October 2008
Entry 4
Other work has meant I haven’t made much progress this week, but a couple of observations from the few pages I’ve done. Both are obvious, common-sense, but they’re worth having in mind…
First, then, is to report how smug I felt working on pages 31 and 32. The vocabulary on these pages included the following words:
casuarinas
funge
nespereira
gindungo
They are, respectively, a kind of shrub (the same word can be used in English); a dish common in Angola that is made with manioc paste (to which I referred a couple of posts ago); the tree on which medlar-fruit grow; and a spicy kind of chilli berry.
Now, my vocabulary in Portuguese is actually not all that extensive (shameful to say), but these are all words I knew without having to look them up. Because they’re all words I’ve come across repeatedly in my work on earlier Agualusa novels. They’re words that are all very much a part of Agualusa’s world; they’re words employed in standard Portuguese and yet which may never be heard in Lisbon or Rio – words with particular local freight, that are part of the furniture of one particular place, but not another.
They’re a clear indication, then, of that particular local-ness of writing (which makes the task of someone with Brazilian Portuguese translating an Angolan novel difficult, but translating his fourth Angolan novel rather easier…).
But also of the distinctiveness of the linguistic tools any individual writer uses. Over the page a beautiful woman with a long gazelle neck is described – a long gazelle neck is the most Agualusa-like of phrases. (There’s a woman with one in Creole too, as it happens.) These little things are like literary fingerprints – Agualusa only writes like Agualusa, and that’s something no one else can do quite the same. He has words he particularly likes and other he doesn’t, he has rhythms that are uniquely his own, he has ways of describing that aren’t like Doris Lessing describes things or Thomas Hardy describes things or Jerome K Jerome describes things.
(Btw, when I was with him in a workshop this summer I mentioned a particular word which I felt I kept finding deployed in his books, which kept coming up again and again, and having mentioned it I think made him self-conscious about it… So I’ll not repeat it as I know he’s reading this blog… Clearly the insistent and beady attentions of a translator can be most destructive to the flowing of un-self-conscious prose…)
My job, then, is to find an equivalent language in English – an equivalent set of linguistic habits, heartbeats, eccentricities, flavours – to match the uniqueness of Agualusa’s literary DNA. I don’t think about that consciously while I do it, of course, but finding peculiar old friends like funge and nespereiras in this new book is a good reminder.
A note too on the voice of this particular book, or I should perhaps say ‘voices’. Because different bits of the book are told in different ways – sometimes third-person narrative, sometimes the transcript of an interview with the main character, etc – so one thing I’ll have to keep an eye on is that the subtle differences in language between the two are respected in the translation – the newspaper articles have to sound like articles, the political speeches have to sound like speeches, the interview transcripts like real dialogue, and so on.
As with so many of these things, it’s not something readers notice until it goes wrong.
If a character picks up a newspaper and reads the headline “Retail slump set to continue, warns PM”, it just sounds right, it sounds like a newspaper headline, and the register isn’t something you even think about. (There’s a joke to be made here about ‘just doesn’t register’, but I’m ignoring it.)
Whereas if a character picks up a newspaper and reads a headline which says, “Anyway, so Gord said basically he reckons people’re not gonna be doin’ lots of shopping for a while yet, which I’m sure you’ll agree is pretty crap news for all of us, really, see?” you’d wonder how a bit of second-rate dialogue suddenly crept into a sentence about a newspaper headline.
Yes, this is an unrealistically extreme example, obviously, but the cheap effect I hope makes the point – while it’s much more subtle in reality, there is a very distinct right and wrong register, and in a book that switches very quickly between modes it’s worth being reminded of the functions of each in the English. Just something to keep an ear out for as we go…
(Likewise the main character will need – each character will need – a speaking voice, a voice of her own, just as she has in the original. I’m sure I’ll discuss this before too long.)
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
