What I Love About Translating

What I love about translating stories is that I don’t have to worry about conflict, character, setting or how it should end: the author handles all that grunt work. Like any true sidewalk superintendent, I have opinions about how the story should have been written, but I don’t have to begin with that daunting blank page.

I sift Spanish fiction’s ready-made bread mix through my English sieve, trying to make the resulting loaf match the original. My challenges are tone and style, more than content, and I spend an abundance of time on tasty matters like syntax and word choice. My best reward is the author saying, “I was hearing my own voice, but in English.”

In his essay “The Experience of Literary Translation,” Simon Leys outlines translator requirements: “No other literary activity demands so total a mastery of the language in which one is working… It is desirable to understand the language of the original, but it is indispensable to master the target language.” His italics. Here’s another thing I love about translation: my English better be top notch; my Spanish can be sketchy. In fact, there are examples aplenty of good translations done with little knowledge of the original language.

Literary translation requires different skills than those demanded of, say, court interpreters. As a Spanish teacher, I was in a sweat when asked to translate for a Spanish-speaking parent. Simultaneous translation is not my forte. Furthermore, the parent in question usually needed to be told something like, “your son is failing three classes,” and I had enough trouble doing that in English. I’d be likely to say, “las notas de su hijo no son buenos,” and let it go at that.

I came to Spanish teaching by the back door, neither majored in languages nor spent my junior year abroad. My Spanish was acquired by taking random classes, accidentally adding up to enough hours to teach it. Its development was aided (handicapped?) by the equally accidental method of marrying into a Colorado family that spoke a Spanglish version of it. During my decade in that world, I learned useful profanity and fun expressions like “dale gas, comps,” which more or less means, “you go, bro.”

Certainly some of the brightest and best translators know the language of the original well, but I share a trump card with all the best: I’m a writer. That’s what I love most about translating: it’s writing. Edith Grossman: “…not all writers can be translators, but I assure you that every competent translator has to be a writer, because that is what we do.”

Leys mentions St. Jerome, “the patron saint of our fellowship.” Jerome translated the Bible into the Latin version known as the Vulgate in the 4^th century and deserved sainthood for that monumental accomplishment. He formulated the translator fellowship’s golden rule: non verbum e verbo, sed sensum esprimere de senso. Render the sense rather than the words of the text. That directive is undisputed among us, but it occurs to me: if Jerome was sainted for his work, the likes of W.S. Merwin should be a candidate for his Purgatorio, Edith Grossman for her Don Quixote, and clearly the late Seamus Heaney for his Beowulf. Who do you contact in Rome to get that going?

You may understand the original perfectly, but unless you’re a writer, you won’t be able to heed St. Jerome’s charge and render it well in your own language. Non-writers often do literal translations, which are often grotesque. Mark Twain gives us splendid examples of that in his hysterical essay “The Awful German Language.” After explaining and complaining at some length about gender in German, he gives his own literal, tongue-in-cheek translation of a German tale:

            …see the Snow, how he drifts along, and oh the Mud, how deep he is!

Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket…

Twain has ideas for reforming the German language, including “reorganize the sexes, and distribute them according to the will of the Creator. This as a tribute of respect, if nothing else.” The poor Fishwife is neuter, you see, and Twain thought that quite unfair.

Translating fiction is satisfying, creative, and in some respects risk-free. Someone can say, that’s a perverse story, or I don’t like how it ends and I just smile. No skin off my nose. Yeah, I say to the critic, it is perverse, isn’t it, or, I would have ended the story with him slamming the door in her face, myself. But look, forget what it’s about: did you notice how you couldn’t tell it wasn’t written in English to begin with? That’s the part I did.