14 November 2008

Entry 9

Two communist puns

Puns. These are the sorts of thing that make me send Agualusa resentful e-mails at four in the morning.

(As he’s someone who loves language, they’re just the sort of thing that make dealing with a writer like him something of a hazard.)

There’s no point trying to deal with wordplay literally in a translation, of course, so the hope is to find something which retains the effect, and retains the important components of the joke, even if the precise meaning of the joke itself must be a little different.

I’m going to give you a couple I’m dealing with in this book.

The first chapter of part five ends with this little bit of dialogue – I’ll part-translate it, and give it to you in mixed Engl-Portuguese first…

“You’re a reactionary,” she said. “A filho da puta.”
“Much worse,” Zorro muttered. “A filho da luta”

‘Filho da puta’ is literally ‘son of the whore’ – and it’s used just as we’d use ‘son of a bitch’.

‘Filho da luta’ means ‘son of the fight/struggle’. They’re almost identical – and rhyming in Portuguese. It’s a good line.

Whereas

“You’re a reactionary,” she said. “A son of a bitch.”
“Much worse,” Zorro muttered. “A son of the struggle.”

is – to put it politely – not very funny and not very clever. Suggestions?

And here’s another, possibly harder still.

A couple are listening to some people talking at great length about matters communist. After a time she leans over and whispers in his ear…

“This conversation is going de Mao a pior…”

Which literally means, it’s going from Mao to worse. But the only reason it’s funny (and if you don’t speak Portuguese you just have to trust me, it is funny) is because in Portuguese mal (bad) sounds an awful lot like Mao (Mao). So it’s very, very close in sound to being “going from bad to worse”, except that it’s niftily a joke about long-winded communists too.

Again, in English “This conversation of going from Mao to worse” is not funny. It’s just odd.

I’ve got one possible solution to this one, which is about half-adequate, but I won’t tell you now as it will I think distort how you think about it. I’ll email it to James at Booktrust for safe-keeping and will tell you later, but meantime, any suggestions for how to replicate the effect in English?

Send your thoughts to translationblog@booktrust.org.uk

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