Food for thought: talking to Tim Parks about translation as reading and writing (1)

I recently had to write a short piece to accompany a translation of mine and found myself torn between discussing the big issues I felt I “ought” to talk about (shifting narrative perspectives, cultural references, etc.) and the more nitty-gritty questions that, for me, represented the real challenges of the translation. But when I started trying to write about those nitty-gritty questions, I struggled to do more than point out some interesting word choices. I was left wondering how I could write about translation without either indulging in vague theorisation or getting lost in a mass of unedifying detail. I decided to ask Tim Parks if he could help save me from my impending writer’s block.

TP

I hear you. In fact when we read the literature on translation aimed at a wider public – I’m thinking of something like Eco’s Experiences in Translation – it often seems that translation involves providing terribly clever solutions to hopelessly thorny problems: puns, wordplay, allusive references etc. Whereas our experience of the job is quite different and has much more to do with crafting sentences and paragraphs in a way that feels effective and faithful.

Maybe one interesting way to look at it is to think of all the things you have to bring to a book – or just a sentence – to read it properly, to let it happen as completely as possible; and then the skills you need to have it happen again in the language you’re translating into. The list, or lists, would be long, but maybe worth compiling, suggesting a range and meshing of competences in both languages that rarely get mentioned in the translation discussion.

TG

A daunting task! Obviously the first thing you have to bring to a book is competence in the source language (vocabulary, grammar and so on) but also an awareness of things like nuance, connotation, pragmatics. Then there is what we might call cultural knowledge. Not an encyclopaedic knowledge, perhaps, but at least an awareness of the way a piece of writing might draw on its cultural context. Finally, there are skills I find it harder to put my finger on, interpretative or deductive.

TP

Nabokov once claimed that “Anyone who wishes to attempt a translation of Pushkin’s Onegin should acquire exact information in regard to a number of relevant subjects, such as the Fables of Krïlov, Byron’s works, French poets of the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, Pushkin’s biography, banking games, Russian songs related to divination, Russian military ranks of the time as compared to western European and American ones, the difference between cranberry and lingenberry, the rules of the English pistol duel as used in Russia, and the Russian language.”

It’s excessive obviously. Perhaps he’s joking. But I suppose what he’s saying is you have to bring an awful lot of knowledge, experience and life to books to get the most out of them and then, as a translator, try to take it into another language. But why not look at one short famous sentence in English to nail this, the opening to Orwell’s 1984:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

To read that, in the sense of getting the kick out of it the author meant us to get, you have to be familiar with April and English weather, and the idea that spring is a positive moment. You have to know what it means for a clock to strike and have experienced situations where you’re in a town and can hear more than one clock striking. You have to know that clocks don’t strike thirteen, that thirteen is an unlucky number, that in the context of 1948 when the book was written the 24-hour clock was only used in military, not civilian situations. I suppose those who’ve studied English literature will also be aware of a couple of famous English texts that start in April: The Canterbury Tales, and The Wasteland. On the grammatical side you need to know of the definite article of unique reference – “the clocks” meaning not those we have spoken of before, but the ones in the place where we are – and the particular function of the past progressive – this is something going on in background, into which very likely a particular action is about to be inserted. And maybe above all you have to be familiar with the function of irony, whereby what is actually stated is only a limited part of a more significant but unspoken communication, the fun being in the reader’s cottoning on to this. You read it and go, “uh oh, trouble coming”, even though no trouble is mentioned.

So when the first Italian translation gave “Era una fresca limpida giornata d’aprile e gli orologi segnavano l’una” (literally, “It was a cool clear April day, and the clocks indicated one”), an awful lot is being missed. In fact you notice now that that “bright cold day” has both a positive and negative side, which disappears in “cool clear”. There’s no sign of trouble in the Italian at all.

TG

But is it really necessary to bring quite so much knowledge to a translation? With your Orwell sentence, surely all one needs to capture are the militarised connotations of the 24-hour clock, the disjunction between that and the world that we normally associate with “striking clocks”, and the fact that a “bright cold day” might be double-edged? That seems enough to be getting on with in one short sentence, particularly when we also have to put it into our target language.

TP

Wait a second. Let’s distinguish between the knowledge we need to bring to read the text well, and then the business of translating it. A wide-awake English reader will grasp the ominous application of the 24-hour clock, but in Italy, which was the first country to use the system back in the 1890s and where it has never been associated with militarism, that is going to be lost. Nothing you can do. So if we’re passing now from the reading to the writing, we have to think how much of what we’ve read, what we’ve experienced, can be conveyed in the translation. We move from immersion in one world to construction in another.

TG

Point taken, but we don’t address these source text issues (linguistic or cultural) in isolation. They are part of a wider translation process that involves both reading and writing, attending to the demands of the source text as we create a version of it in another language. So while we are thinking about such things as the meaning, the connotations, the rhythm and the cultural references of the source text, we are also thinking about all of those issues with respect to our translation. And we use all of those things to feel our way towards solutions, to eliminate some options, to come up with others.

TP

I agree with this, and it does bring up the question of whether a translator ever has a reader’s experience of the book in hand, especially if they simply open the pages and start translating. I recently heard a famous translator say that this is what she does. I would like to insist that until we’ve read at least a fair chunk of the book and experienced it as readers, savoured it, relished it, got the smell of it, as all the knowledge we have meets the words on the page, then we don’t really know what we’re translating or what we’re aiming for. We’re treating language as code, just decoding and re-encoding. And that goes for any piece of translation, not just novels and fiction.

TG

Well, you often hear people say “the key to being a good translator is writing well in your target language” but that strikes me as a dreadful oversimplification. It’s true you need to have a good turn of phrase and a wide vocabulary at your fingertips, but you also need to engage in problem-solving, playing off semantics against pragmatics, you need to prioritise and you have to be adaptable.

TP

What about this formulation? Once we have read and really got close to the text, then writing well in the target language is a huge asset, but only in so far as it is at the service of the impulse to recreate the experience we had on our initial reading.

TG

Okay. In that spirit, let me share something I’m working on at the moment which, I think illustrates the way reading and translation feed into each other. This is from the opening scene of a Uruguayan thriller*, in which some women are visiting their husbands and boyfriends in prison:

Las mujeres abren viejas cajas de helado que ahora contienen guiso de fideo cucuzú o milanesas fibrosas o polenta con tuco, sacan bolsas con bananas, paquetes de yerba y de tabaco, mandarinas y limones, sobres de Jugolín.

A literal translation of this might go as follows:

The women open old ice cream boxes that now contain cucuzú noodle stew or fibrous breaded cutlets or polenta with tuco, they take out bags with bananas, packets of yerba and of tobacco, mandarins and lemons, sachets of Jugolín.

TP

No lack of tasty realia!

TG

Exactly. If I was feeling Nabokovian, I could say all sorts of things about this, but I’ll restrict myself to the following: cucuzú noodles are not noodles at all but a kind of small round pasta that is peculiar to Uruguay; tuco is mince with tomato sauce, what we might call Bolognese…

TP

But we hardly want to take Bologna to Montevideo.

TG

Right. And Jugolin is a brand name for a soluble fruit drink, but is now used generically for any such drink. The list represents the typical food of the Uruguayan poor.

TP

Got it. So we need to get that across, that this food is local, exotic to us, ordinary to them, without throwing the reader too much, but without turning it into pie and chips, as it were.

TG

Certainly the literal translation isn’t much use at all. I want my version to be accurate, I want to keep something of the Uruguayan flavour…

TP

To risk a pun…

TG

… and I need to guard against the danger that the English reader will simply find the food wholesome and excitingly exotic, and miss the way that it reinforces the predicament of the prisoners by reflecting their humble social origins. And of course the final version should reproduce the rhythm and flow of the original.

TP

That perception of the food defining the class of person in a society other than our own sounds like the tricky thing, the thing that the Uruguayan reader is going to get and appreciate and the English reader could easily miss. Let’s hear what you put. And let’s see the Spanish, or Uruguayan, again beside it.

Las mujeres abren viejas cajas de helado que ahora contienen guiso de fideo cucuzú o milanesas fibrosas o polenta con tuco, sacan bolsas con bananas, paquetes de yerba y de tabaco, mandarinas y limones, sobres de Jugolín.

The women open old ice cream containers that are now filled with cold pasta stew, tough breaded cutlets and polenta with meat sauce; they bring out bananas, packets of yerba mate and tobacco, lemons and mandarins, soft drink sachets.

I’m sure you’re going to talk us through this, but a couple of comments. You’ve done your reading and now you’re making hundreds of small decisions to have this kick off in English. The food certainly looks both exotic and unattractive. The cold pasta stew and tough breaded cutlets are enough to turn off my appetite. (Funny here, having talked about the Bolognese that the Spanish for cutlet has the Italian reference, milanesas). You’ve left us with something I don’t understand at all – yerba mate – which is fine, it’s just one thing, I can handle it. It reminds me I’m in South America. Tobacco alongside lemons and mandarins sounds very working class Latin. Soft drink sachets has a convincing sound, the alliteration helps, even if I’ve never come across them and don’t really want to.

So is this the final version, or is there stuff you’re unhappy with?

TG

It’s pretty much the final version, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the copy editor choked on my yerba mate.I still wonder if I’m overstepping the bounds by specifying that the pasta stew is cold. And I’d love to have used the word “schnitzel” to refer to the breaded cutlets but it felt geographically distracting (and then I started hearing “tough schnitzel!” as an idiom). Perhaps I’m overthinking things, though, and depriving myself of the best option.

There are also things that I’m quite pleased with, and these are the kinds of things that no reader (or reviewer) is likely to notice directly but which, one hopes, have a cumulative effect. An obvious one is the inversion of mandarinas y limones as lemons and mandarins to help the English flow.

Another is my omission of the bags. In the original, these are “bolsas con…” (bags with) and the effect is chaotic: there are lots of bags containing lots of things. That use of “with” struck me as very strange in English and I translated it as “bags of”, but that replaced the chaos with neat compartmentalisation. Then I tried to replace the preposition with a verb (bags containing, bags holding etc.) But that felt like overkill. So in the end I just got rid of the bag.

TP

All these decisions seem smart to me, cold stew included. Can I just pretend I’m the publisher’s editor and make a couple of suggestions in the first part of the sentence?

Here’s your translation again…

The women open old ice cream containers that are now filled with cold pasta stew…

The word I least liked in this very homely, busy scene is ‘containers’, which sounds a little clinical, and I wonder if we could change that for a more earthy ‘tubs’. Also, the ‘that are now’ is all redundant and since these words are not helping the rhythm of the English maybe we could let them go. So we have

The women open old ice cream tubs filled with cold pasta stew,

It feels a little chunkier. The closer the ice-cream gets to the cold pasta the more you know you don’t want to try this.

TG

I like both of those suggestions. They feel very much in keeping with what I’m trying to do with the text. And they’re a nice illustration of why the input of a sympathetic editor is so important. When you reach the Oscar Wilde stage (spending a whole day putting in and then removing a comma), it’s time to turn the text over to someone else.

TP

And time for us to close this blog, I think. But since you’ve got me going on the subject, the nitty-gritty of writing and editing, I’d love to do another, shorter perhaps, looking at a couple of passages where the main issues are not, as here, lexical, but syntactical. And questions of focusing. How do we understand where the emphasis falls in a sentence and how do we construct the syntax of the translation to get similar effects? This is something I’m planning to concentrate on in my January course in Florence so it’s very much on my mind at the moment.

Translation check up with Tim Parks, 13-17 January, 2020.
FENYSIA, Palazzo Pucci – Via de’ Pucci, 4, 50122 Firenze, Italy.

The English translation of Miserere de los cocodrilos (Mercedes Rosende) will be published as Crocodile Tears (tr. Tim Gutteridge) by Bitter Lemon Press in 2020.