10 November 2008
Entry 8
Finding a voice
Dialogue can be difficult. That much is obvious, I suppose. The difficulty lies not only in making the way the characters talk sound plausible, but also making them sound distinctive one from another, making them recognisable, characterful.
We all have words we like more or less than others when we speak (I referred in a previous post to a writer’s pet vocabulary too); we might naturally speak more or less formally, with older or newer words – in English we might tend towards the Anglo-Saxon or the Latinate; we probably contract our words when speaking aloud – ‘don’t’ for ‘do not’, ‘isn’t’ for ‘is not’, and so on. Our language is precisely of its time, and of our background, and it’s local too.
And there’s the question of accent, of course, which is conveyed in written dialogue, too. Again, are the words contracted because of the way they’re spoken? Are we in London and dropping our aitches? Are words elided or each one enunciated (and spelled out) in full?
Think about what different things you get from
“Good evening, Mr Bond.”
and
“Evenin’ Mr Bond.” (“We’ve a-bin hexpectin’ you…”)
Or
“Well, hello. How are you?”
and
“Well, ’allo. ’ow are ya?”
(Incidentally I remember noticing that certain characters in children’s books tended to say not Hello or Hallo, but ‘Hullo’, which was somehow instantly friendlier…)
Mercifully Estação das Chuvas has very little in the way of dialogue; but there’s one voice that’s important to get absolutely right, which is that of Lídia herself. As you may remember from the bit of text I was working on for my fifth post, there are various points in the book where the story is filled out by transcripts of interviews with Lídia, so we do ‘hear’ her speaking rather a lot. So the task is to identify what sort of voice she has in Portuguese (formal or colloquial, high or low register, standardised spelling or reflecting some particular accent, fluent or broken up, long sentences and well-paced or hesitant, etc.) and replicating that in English somehow.
The passage I’ll show you now is one of those interviews, which is Chapter Eight of the fourth little section of the book. As I go I’ll underline a few of the words I’m going to comment on afterwards. Here it is:
Lídia chooses her words carefully (being a very good journalist), and we have to do the same on her behalf.
How did the world react to the 15th of March?
The revolt of March 15th and the subsequent revolt of the Portuguese launched Angola into the heart of the world’s attention. The UPA, notwithstanding their receipt of American support, managed to arouse sympathies in certain sectors of the revolutionary left, forcing the MPLA to radicalize their position. In interviews and statements to the American press, Holden Roberto denounced them as a group of communists ENFEUDADO [Anyone have a good word for being in a feudal relationship? Enfiefed? Anyone?] to Moscow. At the same time, realising that the UPA would never be able to assert themselves nationally and internationally as long as they were tied to the old ideals of restoring the Kingdom of Congo, having been present at its creation, Roberto tried to establish alliances with other groups and individuals of different ethnic origin; and this was how the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, the FNLA, was born. In hallway discussions the directors of the FNLA characterised them as the children of the colonisers, mulattos and whites, who wanted to usurp power from their parents. It was the best definition I’ve heard of the MPLA to this day.
Maybe it is a good definition. But it’s worth remembering that in the United States or in Latin America it was also the children of the colonisers who brought about independence.
That’s true, but they were careful to eliminate the Indians first. Whatever the case, the FNLA sought to emphasize our petit-bourgeois origins, insinuating that not one of us had links to the rural masses and that we weren’t capable for this reason of structuring a movement of armed action against Portuguese domination. Frantz Fanon, who at the time was held in very high regard by the European left, owing to his support for Algerian independentists, was one of the first personalities to defend this position.
How was it that the MPLA reacted to these kinds of accusation?
In 1962 the Portuguese Communist Party managed – with Soviet support – to liberate Agostinho Neto and he was elected President of the MPLA at National Conference, now in Kinshasa where the leadership of the movement had been transferred. It was clearly a manoeuvre to silence the UPA’s insinuations. Neto was black, he was the son of a protestant pastor and had great popular support from Catete, the area he was from. Beside this, his imprisonment in 1960 had made him a hero of international recognition. In Paris there was even a petition demanding the Portuguese government to free him. Sartre signed it, for example.
At that point there was still nobody disputing Agostinho Neto’s leadership?
Nobody! Except, of course, for Viriato da Cruz. Viriato never accepted the decision of National Conference. He was mad with rage: “This man’s an autocrat!”, he shouted in the middle of a meeting, pointing his finger at Neto. He was completely alone. Mário de Andrade and all our companions from Conakry remained silent. Some stood up to denounce him as an opportunist or a radical. And I, I hardly knew what was going on, I got on a plane and flew to Kinshasa in an attempt to reconcile the two positions. I didn’t succeed at all. Viriato thought we were against him because he was a mestizo, and Neto, with that bovine obstinacy of his, refused to have his name at the top of a list on which Viriato’s name appeared.
(Interview with Lídia do Carmo Ferreira, Luanda, 23 May 1990)
Lídia chooses her words carefully (being a very good journalist), and we have to do the same on her behalf. There are no obvious pronunciation markers (so I don’t feel the need to drop aitches etc.) Her language is rarely flowery-formal, but it doesn’t lapse into informality, either. The ‘subsequent revolt’ is a bit richer than the Portuguese (which is closer to a simple ‘later’); and ‘the heart of the world’s attention’ is too much, too – there’s nothing more flowering than ‘the centre of…’ in the original. Oh, and for the same reason ‘notwithstanding their receipt…’ has just got to go.
‘Independentists’ is a pretty remarkable word, but it’s pretty conspicuous in Portuguese too, I think, so I’d keep it even if it’s a bit weightier than we might expect from its surroundings.
Now, while Lídia’s not casual, I’d still elide certain very common words to make her sound like a natural speaker as she does in Portuguese – That’s true, I didn’t succeed, best definition I’ve heard; but I’m tempted to change ‘we weren’t capable’ to ‘we were not capable’ just because of where the emphasis falls in the sentence. (On the other hand the whole of that sentence could use some rearranging in English, so we’ll see.)
‘Mulatto’ and ‘Mestizo’ are more straight-forward words to Lídia than to us – can we keep them or should we find some other equivalent that would sound less foreign in English speech, which might require some paraphrasing?
I wonder if there’s something subliminal we’re encouraged to read into Lídia (or the way she speaks) about the fact that I’ve spelled emphasize and radicalize the American way?
And that I’ve capitalised (or capitalized) the word ‘President’?
In Portuguese Agostinho Neto is ‘liberado’, but is a straight-forward Anglo-Saxon ‘freed’ a less conspicuous – and more natural – words here than ‘liberated’? Likewise the leadership of the movement had been ‘transferido’, which would be simpler in English as ‘moved’ (again, Anglo-Saxon rather than Latinate) but for the fact that ‘the movement had been moved…’ sounds daft…
And these two sound quite different too, I think: “Except, of course, for Viriato da Cruz.” “Except, of course, Viriato da Cruz.”
The semi-colon after ‘origin’ in the first answer is mine – I’ve repunctuated that because the big sentence felt unwieldy in English. But I wonder whether that changes the sense we get of the flow of her speech?
And what about ‘companions’ – do we know enough about Lídia to judge whether she’d call them ‘comrades’, perhaps?
I could go on and on…
I should acknowledge, incidentally, that while I’m drawing attention to lots of little details, I think you do as a translator (just as you do as a writer) come to know a character’s voice very well as you go along, and are soon knowing how s/he would express something more or less by instinct without having to rationalise all these word-by-word decisions.
OK, a couple of communist jokes in my next post. They’re funny. In Portuguese, at least.
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
