My translation year begins with Jauría, Jordi Casanovas’s verbatim drama fashioned from the statements of the victim and perpetrators of the Pamplona gang rape case that shook Spain in 2016. Although not graphic, it is nevertheless harrowing to translate, with the text offering a claustrophobic insight into the way a group of peers normalized their violent misogyny, a normalization that was mirrored in the legal system and in wider Spanish society. I produce my first draft in a strange, distanced state, protecting myself from the traumatic potential of the text. I am a little wary when I embark on the second draft – will my disengagement show through in the translation? – but the translation is fundamentally sound.
While I worked on it, I was focused mostly on how to deal with the source script, which consists of pieces of verbatim text, taken from statements, court testimony and WhatsApp conversations. Transcribed dialogue is always strange, full of repetitions, false starts, grammatical slips, incoherence. There’s no easy way to reproduce this in translation – I’d argue it’s neither possible nor desirable – and what I aim for instead is something highly naturalistic but also, perhaps, more self-consciously ‘voicey’ than the original. I don’t think it makes much sense to talk of verbatim drama in translation. Better to accept, embrace even, the necessary transformation.
En ese momento estaba totalmente en shock, no sabía qué hacer, sólo quería que pasara y cerré los ojos para no enterarme de nada y que todo pasara rápido.
At that point, I was completely in shock, I didn’t know what to do, I just wanted it to be over and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t be aware of it, so it would all be over quickly.
Next up is a series of short texts for a longstanding client, a bioethics NGO for whom I translate press releases, newsletters and the like. I used to do more work for this client – extended academic pieces – but they cut back when they realized hardly anybody was reading these and decided, understandably, to direct their budget elsewhere. I often think back to those readerless texts. In their own way they taught me a valuable lesson about the need to appreciate and enjoy the inherent integrity of any translation assignment, the process, a job well done, regardless of feedback, recognition or public acknowledgement.
The middle of the month brings a fun little encounter. It comes to me through my website. A Canadian food writer, Taras Grescoe, is coming to Cadiz, where I live, to do some research on a piece he is writing about garum, the fermented fish sauce that Cadiz exported across the Roman Empire. It is having an unexpected revival as culinary archaeologists seek to recreate it in their labs, drawing on information in Roman cookery books and the remains of amphorae of garum recovered from Pompei, and innovative local chefs incorporate it into their cooking. Taras contacts me to ask if I can put him in touch with a local interpreter for some meetings he has scheduled. It’s short notice so instead I suggest that I accompany him and he can pay me in kind. I’m not an interpreter, I explain, but I’m au fait with the local cuisine and can handle the broadest of local accents. The next day we meet with a local chef whose accent is as thick as they come. I’m relieved to realise that my culinary vocabulary is on point, and I don’t hesitate before explaining that we are about to eat “flying-fish roe marinated in clementine juice”.
In between this assignment and the next one, I undergo some heavy duty dental work: the insertion of a screw that will eventually hold an implant in place. My jaw is swollen and I’m cursing my timing. I’m about to have a tasting menu at the best restaurant in town but I won’t be able to eat a thing. Fortunately, when I arrive, I realize that the tasting menu is also the perfect invalid food. Small servings of local fish (much of it raw), interspersed with fancy foams and mousses. The dinner ends with ice cream delicately flavoured with garum (fermented-fish ice cream, in other words). It is unexpectedly delicious.
My next project is a wodge of documentation for an invitation to tender for the contract to print biometric ID cards for a government in Central America. This is for a translation agency, the last one I work for. When I started out, agencies like this provided a large part of my income but this has changed as I’ve gradually built up a portfolio of direct clients and pursued my interest in literary translation. My rates have gone up and my availability has gone down, and our ways have slowly parted. This feels good although there is a tinge of sadness. The agency sector feels as if it’s in trouble, crushed by commoditisation, low rates, the misuse of machine translation. It’s true that it has colluded in these developments, of course, but I can’t help wondering if things could have gone differently.
My last project for the month is to finalize my translation of Crocodile Tears, a thriller by Uruguayan writer Mercedes Rosende, which will be published by Bitter Lemon Press in 2021. It’s a great piece of writing and it feels like a real privilege to be asked to translate it. I finished my first draft before Christmas, so I am revising. I try to spread the process out so I can go through several more versions with little rests between each stage, alternating between screen and paper, interspersing other jobs if possible. A lot of translators talk about doing a rough first draft that they would never show to anyone, then making far-reaching changes. I’ve even seen some translators refer to a deliberately hyper-literal first draft which is then improved. That’s not my process. For me, translation is at once both reading and writing and I strive to solve as many problems as I can first time round, chipping away until I’m more or less happy. Occasionally I leave a rough translation as a placeholder, but really this just another way of saying that I haven’t started the translation yet. And, of course, I make lots of changes as I go through versions two, three, four and more. But I don’t really see how either a genuinely rough translation or a hyper-literal one is compatible with the simultaneous attention to source and target that, for me, is the essence of translation. Each to their own, I guess.
One of the interesting things about translating from Spanish into English is that both languages operate in a transatlantic space. But it’s a mistake, I think, to get hung up on simplistic notions of British versus American English, let alone to map these onto European and Latin American Spanish. The reality, thankfully, is far more complex and interesting. Better for translators to view that variety as a resource to draw upon, something we can use to create voice, tone, contrast, rhythm…
Toma un pedazo de papa y lo sumerge en mayonesa, engulle, mira a su espalda, unta dulce de leche en dos dedos, la lengua chasquea, saborea, toma una albóndiga, salsa, devora, arroz, otra albóndiga, más salsa, mayonesa, labios, dientes, el dedo en la mermelada, chupa, sorbe, lengua, dedos, se da prisa y empuja, mira atrás, a la puerta, otro pedazo de pollo que traga casi sin masticar, dulce, puré, algo está mal, se apura, traga más, introduce todos los dedos en la salsa, paladar, lengua, labios, dientes, sorbe, traga, una vez, otra.
She takes a chunk of potato and dips it in the mayonnaise, swallows, looks behind her, smears two fingers with dulce de leche; she smacks her lips, takes a meatball, some sauce, devours it, rice, another meatball, more sauce, mayonnaise, lips, teeth, the finger in the jam, sucking, slurping, tongue, fingers; she’s in a hurry and pushes it down, she looks behind her, at the door; another piece of chicken, which she swallows almost without chewing; something’s wrong, she eats faster, swallows more, plunges all her fingers into the sauce; palate, lips, teeth; slurps, swallows, again and again.
On the last weekend of the month, I travel up to Madrid to see some theatre and meet up with some playwrights. On Friday I catch Jauría. It’s strange to see it being performed on stage in Spanish after I’ve spent so long hearing it in my head in English, but I’m also reassured. I come away with a strong sense that the English play in my head (and on the page) is true to the original version and that the differences are necessary and not a betrayal. On Saturday, I catch Inquilino, written, directed and performed by Paco Gámez, and a play I’m hoping to translate at some point this year. And on Sunday I meet up with a couple more writers and see Mariano Rochman’s Noches de hotel, another play I would like to have translated. (Realistic about the limits on my time and budget, I have instead put the playwright in touch with another translator.) On the train back to Cadiz, I resolve to visit Madrid or Barcelona every couple of months during 2020.