Tale of the Translated Writer

Conforme prometido, a conferência sobre tradução:

Tale of the Translated Writer

Ce înseamnă să fii tradus? Scriitorul tradus – cititor cultural aproape involuntar What being translated means? The translated writer as almost involuntary cultural reader

Rui Zink, scriitor portughez

A Micaela Ghitescu, por razões óbvias

1

What is literature? I’d say literature is the realm of uncertainty. By telling stories and dancing with words, literature deals with this nonstop flowing energy called language. For a language is a living thing. And each living creature is a co-creator of language.

At least in my country, there is a funny twist to translation. “Technical translations” are handsomely paid. “Literary translations” not as much. How can that be? It cannot be! (And yet, as many things in our world, it is.)

In this crisis industry, a literary translator is informally assumed to be not so much a poet as a beast of burden. We live in the age of glorified accountants being the top-paid human beings. (Spoiler: recently a newspaper noted that one Portuguese CEO made 90 times the salary of an average worker in that very company.) It’s OK, it’s only money. Unfortunately, we live also in a time where money is the currency for value. 

By the way, I’m not quoting some Zizek style radical philosopher or post-Marxist buff but one of the foremost Hollywood actresses and, now, a director. I just happened to stumble yesterday upon a marvelous interview with Jodie Foster about her new film, Money Monster: “We all know money and value are different things. However, I get used to forget that. Many people think they have value because they have money. Or they feel they are worthless because they don’t have it.”

2

What is literature? I’m sorry, this question appears to be too heavy. Maybe we can narrow it down a bit: What is a literary text? A literary text is… No no no, let’s narrow it down a bit more, let’s make a more practical question out of it. Practical times demand practical answers, right? OK, here it goes then: When does a literary text happens?

I’d say, and I presume not too be too wrong (after doing the bloody thing for some 30-odd years), that a literary text happens—or is on the verge of happening—when there are doubts about its meaning.

If the message is clear, it is a pragmatic text. “Please, can I have more water? Thank you.” If the message is somehow unclear, the problems begin—but also literature may begin.

A second trait of literature is that you cannot separate sound from meaning, form from content. In a normal communicative speech act you do that easily: there are nearly as many ways to ask for a cup of coffee as there are in Portugal to cook codfish. (Traditionally we stop counting at a thousand.)

A third trait is that form may very well be more important than the content. Or, as Hjelmslev half-guessed decades ago, in a literary piece content can be the form and form can be the content.

We could add a fourth trait: literature at its best tries to deal, through words, with what cannot be said—grasped—with words.   

There are more traits, or laws, but let’s stay with the first three for now.

 3

Now, translation is a surgical operation by which one disembodies the text—literally takes away its flesh and tries to do something impossible, or at least from the realm of alchemy: to take it away limb by limb and reassemble it perfectly, although with different parts in the place where the originals were.

This cannot be done—and it is not done. Traduttore, traditore. Something is lost in the way. Or a lot is lost. But also, sometimes, something is gained. Traduttore, Creatore!

Here Chaim Potok’s warning comes to my mind: “How to love and respect what we are taught to dissect? That is everyone’s problem nowadays.”

However, translation has no other choice but to break the second Law, or trait: “In a literary text, thou cannot separate form from content.” That is the only way to achieve a superior goal: to give others, in another linguistic code or system, the chance to enjoy that work.

Although, of course, that work is no longer that work.

Translation can be described as the process of, by changing form and content and shape and weight in a given body, teleport that body into another language-world, without blemish, faithfully, without moving one single note out of place.

It would be easier to rebuild a Lego city blindfolded, for at least there we have the same pieces as in the first place.

Here, in the process of translating, the splitting of the atom is the way not to split that unity: you tear apart the text in order to “beam it up, Scotty” into our language.

Translators are famous for their modesty. Very seldom the translator’s name is on the book cover. Well, I’m sorry to say it but I have to say it: translators are a bit like Frankenstein. I mean, like the baron dr. Victor von Frankenstein. They tear a body apart and believe, that by doing that, they can bring it back to life.

Now, how humble is that?

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Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus is, as we all know, the saint patron of translators. But I think our saint should be Sisyphus—Saint Sisyphus.

For the sad fact is: translating is a doomed-to-fail task. And yet it needs to be done. Without translators, books that demand to travel would not travel. In a way, translators are more important than writers. Or, at least, more cosmopolitan. Translaters are the one who make a text travel. A Finnish mobile phone manufacturer may have branded the slogan “Nokia: connecting people”. But it’s not Nokia who’s connecting worlds. It’s translators. If you use the right tone of voice, there is a ring to it: Translators: connecting worlds.  

In any language, a book is sort like a play. Without a reader, it’s an inert, comatose object. However, in a translation, the issue is more complicated: the reader has to listen to the work of a player, someone who could read the notes on the page and turn them into intelligible music.

For, as Céline put it, a literary work is music.

How to dislocate/relocate this music living body from one water to the other, from one instrument to the other, without losing it? Without losing its body, its soul, its sound?

It is an impossible task. Absolutely impossible with some writers more than with others. And yet it has to be made.

The book is an inert object. A thing. A thing that comes to life whenever it finds a reader. You don’t have to push a button—well, you do, if it is an e-book. But, basically, a book is slightly better than Sleeping Beauty: you don’t have to kiss it to come back to life, only to gaze, to pay attention, to start reading.

And, in translation, a book is like music. It needs an interpreter, someone to play it for us. Sometimes, it happens for the book to gain a strength, a spirit, a soul—the Portuguese word is animar-se, from the Latin animus, anima—you wonder if it was there, in such perfection, in first place.

Try listen to the same Shakespeare monologue by a great actor and then a not so good interpreter. You will notice the difference.

The same goes for translation. As a living writer lucky enough to be translated whilst I live, I’ve seen my work be the subject of good, bad and quite mediocre translations. Sometimes I can read my bit—like so many Portuguese and Romanians, I love language and I speak reasonably well (although with a heavy accent) a few. With others—Bengali, Japanese, Hebrew, I just suspect sometimes the translation is quite good when readers give a great feedback. Other times, I fear, I get an otherwise impression when readers who become friends sheepishly mutter that “Well, Rui, don’t take me wrong, I liked your book, I just didn’t get that part about the Greek Indians”. And I say: “What Greek Indians? Oh, you mean the Indians from the Creek tribe!”

And so on. It’s not always easy being a translated writer.

However, it is even worse to be a literary translator. For it is an impossible, sisyphian task. Doomed to fail—and yet, when things work out, a splendid failure.

5

And then, I always try to remember why I write. Or why one should write. Literature, I mean. You write in your own language. You not only “write a story”, you also tinker, play, with the sounds and hidden places of your language. When it comes to literature, I’m sorry to say the husband of Mrs. Clinton was wrong: it’s not “the economy, stupid”; it’s the language. The language. It’s the language, stupid.

In some bookstores there usually is a sensible and quite practical distinction: a set of shelves for ‘literature’ and another for ‘fiction’. Fiction is when the main part is the plot, literature when there is craftman’s work over the language. Usually, best-sellers are written in a sort of nondescript language, a white mesh, easily translated. Sort of technical storytelling, or marketing Esperanto.

And I’m a Portuguese writer writing in Portuguese. Not a Romanian writer. It makes life more difficult than in I wrote in English? It may well be. “International success”, at least. But we are not here, armed with this light weaponry—pen and paper—to have “international success”, although many of my misguided colleagues would disagree; we are here to honor our language. And to argue with our ancestors and contemporaries. In this specific language.

The writer is never a cosmopolite. The translator is—not the writer.     

I repeat:

Translation is not the goal of writing. You write in your own language; you write your language. 

In a way, indeed, writing is a celebration of the tribe. Language as something that unites and—hélàs—also separates. 

Writing is a good thing, and yet not always. It should be an act of generosity, but it not always is such. It should be turned to the outside world, although it can be too much of an ego-trip. It celebrates humankind, but it also means out the country as nation, nation as language: us as different from them. 

Now, translation? Translation is a bridge. A good bridge. And yet, a bridge between what not always wanted to cross that bridge.

Yes, sometimes a literary work doesn’t want to be translated—it resists translation, it makes the translator’s task difficult.

6

We live in a time of translation, although not always the translation that I think we need. I’m lucky, I have great translators—and, at least in Romania, an audience. But as it is easier and easier to translate rubbish and to print what only 20 years ago would be an anomaly—i.e., Anglo-saxon countries’ cooks and chefs teaching the world how to eat properly in the book versions of their TV shows—it tends to be more difficult to translate from languages with less economic, political and military power. The publishing world succumbed to the television era, and numbers and hard-selling techniques tend to overthrown what used to be a slightly slower, gentle world. The publishing house owner demands results, faster and faster. It is a sad yet obvious fact: more and more, we have in the publishing world people working in the outskirts of the text and… not caring about the text, only its marketing. And in this world, the winner takes it all, as Abba puts it. (By the way, for the younger ones who are clueless about what I’m talking about: Abba is a Swedish pop ultra-easy-listening group that turned into an international success by singing in English.) It is easier to publish a thousand lousy books in Portuguese than a good Romanian one. My numbers, however, may be wrong. “A thousand times” may be far away from the actual truth.  

We have promoters, we have agents, we have a whole circus of buzz:

“I didn’t read it but heard this book is very good!”

“Apparently is a winner!”

And my favorite: “It seems Spielberg already bought the film rights!”

Wait, I have an even better favorite: “And look how beautiful the author is! He/She has a very marketable face!”

I swear I heard it all—could I invent such silliness? I have imagination, right, but not as much in order to invent this nonsense. And yet this nonsense is a rule of sorts.  

Luckily we still have the translator from languages other than the language of Star Trek aliens. And the proofreader. And the close-reading editor. But they lost power in the publishing world. Decision-making has more and more to do with what is outside the book than with what is inside the book: the written word and, occasionally, the wondrous translation from a written language into another written language.

7

What is the translator’s proper approach to a literary text then? Love. Right: love.

Now, some people will say “love” is not a translation technique, or a tool, or a methodology. Up to a point, one is right. Love is energy, not a material shape—however, just as its opposite hate, it can take very practical shapes. Hate is a negative force expertly talented to the use of many material tools—knifes, guns, stones, missiles—in order to fulfill its purpose. The same goes for love as a positive fuel: I do believe that love for a book is the main tool for its translator. Of course, technique, knowledge of both languages, superb writing in the language of arrival and so on are tantamount. However, love is the core energy that will help the translator as a reader understand the main issues in the book-to-translate. Love is the main source of power to keep going even when common sense would advise the translator to go do other stuff. Other stuff better paid, less hard, easier to deal with. Something else where the cards are dealt a bit more generously.

If literature is the realm of uncertainty, then how can a translation be certain? The translator is an interpreter that has to get it right. But what is it to “get it right” when we’re talking about a living body—a body made of words, a living body whose breath are strings of words? How can one translate the pace, the economy, the precision, the beauty, the double-entendre, the multiple meanings and innuendos?

A sample, and non-literary just to make things easier: how to translate “Pet Shop Boys” into Romanian and Portuguese? Look at the pace: 1/2/3! Now try to say it in your native language. Băieți de la Magazinul de Animale. 

How can a translation be faithful to the playfulness of the author in the ur-text? Impossible! Maybe then, if the task is impossible (the more impossible the more the writer plays with the language) then maybe we should aim at a different goal. Not a more modest one, just a more achievable one: not to be faithful to the author’s playfulness, but to honor the author’s work. To render, in our language, what was done to and into the other language.

One of the childish and stupidest things in our time is an unfortunate penchant of the publishing world to follow the worst fashion tendencies. I shall stress it again: the publishing world is in too many hands that care not for the text. The overwhelming pressure of the agents and scouts, marketeers and publishers that, mainly from the high towers of the anglo-saxon world, pushes writers more and more to write in a sort of blank language, easy to translate, posing no trouble, absent of unnecessary “localisms” tolerated only if as folkloric decorative kitsch. The same goes for subjects: I fear the day when Portuguese writers will follow the fate of our best singers: to write about fado & saudade industry, in order to please what our clientele expectes from us.    

It is sad.

Luckily, there are translators and sympathetic editors resisting the trend. And yet the trend is hard to fight back against. If I may use a military metaphor, the air supremacy is undeniable. One knows that some languages are sexier for publishers (many of them self-proclaimed guides, as benevolent tyrants often perceive themselves, to the audience’s whims and will) as well as some locations and sites. Is this unfortunate? It is as it is. I my experience, one shouldn’t be complaining all the time or one will become a professional complainer.  

A translator is, sometimes, someone who loves a written text more than its author. Like a foster mother or stepfather who takes more care of a child than its “natural parent”. I had this chance with the Romanian language. Foster parents can be better parents. They chose to be, it was not “an accident” in a drunken night. Writers may claim they don’t know where their ideas or stories came from. Translators can’t afford that nonsense.

The translator as stepfather or foster mother. I like the idea. Children’s literature is filled with tales of evil stepmothers. But we know better now.

8

Being translated? It is moving, touching. It is an honor, it is weird. It can also be painful. Now, there is good pain and bad pain. Good pain: when something marvelous you were not expecting happens. Bad pain: when you suspect that, out of vanity, you allowed for your work to be butchered.

I have a few bad memories: a German publisher (mr. Weidle) who “edited” without my permission my novel. It never happened to me before. Maybe he improved the thing. But he should have asked me permission.

A play put onstage by an amateur group where the only thing I recognized was my name—and even that wasn’t spelled right.

A translation into an exotic language where the translator not once asked me a single question. I am very afraid of people who has no doubts.

As for the Romanian language, I only have wonderful memories. Let me tell you a bit about my experience of having my work—up to now five of my books, a world record—translated into Romanian.

Some 10 years ago, I received a call from Micaela Ghitescu, whom I had briefly met when, in the 80’s, still a young writer-to-be, she visited my mentors. Real writers. Now in the XXI century, close to three decades after our first meeting, more than a call it was a summons: “Rui, this is Micaela Ghitescu. I’m in Lisbon, and I’m meeting a former student of mine, Anca Milu. Can you meet us?”

When I met them, Anca was this smiling woman in her early forties, a.k.a my age, and Micaela Ghistescu said, smiling but also drily: “I think it is time for you to be translated into Romanian.”

Now, you must understand. For me Micaela was a legend. She was also very similar, in her antics, in the moral fortitude she transpired, to some of the Portuguese writers I most admired and emulated: namely, poets Alberto Pimenta and Ana Hatherly. Whatever criticism came out of them I accepted. I still do, although Ana is no longer among us but in her outsdanding body of work.

I’m not sure if what I understood is what Ms. Ghitescu meant, but if it was so I agreed: years before I was still too young, too green—now, coming of age, reaching l’“âge de raison”—I was ripe to be dealt unto Romanian. Anca Milu enjoyed one of my most difficult books as an author, O Suplente, and a publisher was willing to accept it.

I was very happy, thus a few months later I sent to Micaela Ghitescu, as a gift—a pure token of gratitude—a small unpretentious novella I’d written on the joys of reading. It was just that—a token of gratitude.

What happened is that Micaela Ghitescu loved the small book with a joy I had not seen in my Portuguese publishers, and in a very few readers. Oh, some teachers thought it nice to give it their students, but it was no success. Actually, it had not been the subject of a single—a single—review.

But Micaela Ghitescu found it “a gem”--that is the blurb on the cover of the most recent reprint—and, being a shorter book, it was published at about the same time as the other.

All of a sudden, I had two books published in Romanian and by two major publishers: in Curtea Veche Banca de Rezerve by Anca Milu (2009), and in Humanitas Cititorul dín Pestera by Micaela Ghitescu (2008).

I didn’t knew by then, but Micaela Ghitescu was about to become my translator and Humanitas my publisher.

Plus, There was interest of making an audiobook out Cititorul. It was made. There were reprints. I was told now samples of the book are part of a school reader. Wow.

I’d love to have it here at home too. Too bad I don’t.

Followed A Espera (Astetpaera), Destinacja Turistica, Instalarea Fricii.     

I really don’t know why my books work in Romanian. I certainly didn’t do anything for it.

9

In the meantime, I went three times to Romania. I attended the Neptun Days and Nights of Literature. I saw Ovid’s last home at Constança. I made good friends. I spoke several times with students. I am now friends with some Romanian writers besides Anca and Micaela. I know reasonably well my editor, Denisa Comanescu. I want to get translated into Portuguese the writer Radu Pareschivescu.

I went to Timisoara. I am Amicus Romaniae, a beautiful invention by former Cultural Director Virgil Mihaiui, and continued nowadays by the excellent and dynamic Romanian cultural representation in Lisbon, namely Gelu Savonea.

I became friends with writer Mihai Zamfir, artist Cela Neamtu and even introduced an exhibition entitled “Blouse Roumaine, Femme Roumaine”.

I attended a wonderful luncheon at king Carol’s former residence in Estoril. I have responsibilities. I was in Belgrade two weeks ago and I couldn’t help but talk about my Romanian experience as well as my Portuguese one.

Two years ago, Micaela Ghitescu published her Memories.

I give you a glimpse, in Corneliu Popa’s translation:

Já lá vão mais de quatro décadas desde a publicação da minha primeira tradução da língua portuguesa: O Crime do Padre Amaro, de Eça de Queiroz. Na altura nem ousei escrever-lhe um prefácio, muito embora o autor, um dos grandes clássicos portugueses, o merecesse. Fiquei-me por um breve nota bio-bibliográfica. Muitas alusões, sobretudo topográficas, relacionadas, por exemplo, com Lisboa (nomes de bairros, de cafés literários frequentados por escritores, ou o famoso Museu de Arte Antiga, chamado no romance de “Museu das Janelas Verdes”, segundo o nome da rua onde se encontra), provocavam-me perplexidades. A minha sorte foi que, por se tratar duma grande escritor com um estilo impecável, a tradução fluiu.

I am now working for the book to be published in Portuguese, for it is not only a life memory of Micaela Ghitescu but also a memory of more than four decades of translating—of loving—the Portuguese literature and bringing it home.     

I may even, one of these days, learn Romanian.

Thank you for your attention, muito obrigado, mulţumesc.