Translation Diary #17: On Terrorism Medieval and Modern

Source text: "Desde la otra orilla del Éufrates, que nunca volverá a cruzar, Abd al-Rahman presencia la degollación de su hermano y escucha, como paralizado en sueño, los gritos finales de su agonía y su terror."

My translation: From the far bank of the Euphrates, the one he would never cross again, ‘Abd al-Raḥman can just discern the beheading of his brother and hears his last cries of agony and his terror as though they were a nightmare in which he was trapped.

I'm going to continue to play with the clause about being sleep-paralyzed because I don't really like it as it is. (The editing is, I'm discovering, the biggest part of translating, but that's another issue.)

The reason I'm calling attention to this sentence now is because of how current it sounds: beheading emissaries of rival empires on the banks of the Euphrates. Might as well be ISIS. And it is that currency that is making me question my initial decision — which was not even a decision, really, as much as a reflexive resource to a cognate — to translate the Spanish terror as English terror rather than as any of the other synonyms I might use because of the way it doubles down the invocation of the modern "war on terror" and all its trappings.

Does changing the word make me less faithful to the original? Or perhaps more faithful, because it will not distract the reader by evoking the present day in the middle of an 8th-century history?

Translation Diary, Entry #16

"Por dondequiera que iba lo buscaban espías y ejecutores de sus enemigos..."

The word is literally executioner, but that's not quite the right English word to use. It implies something more stable and stationary than the situation described in the text so I need a slightly different word. We're talking about the Abbassids here and so I either really, really want to call them assassins or I really, really don't want to draw that into the mix.

Possession

I'm working on a translation project that begins with a discussion of writers becoming possessed by their subject matter. I'll write about it more concretely when it's official — things are looking good, but I don't want to jinx rights or contracts by being premature. But it's funny; I just read something about the author's work, and the scholar writing about it made her own sub-par translation of a few sentences of a different text he had written and that she was discussing. And I felt not possessed but possessive of his words in English. Reading his work rendered badly in English was more painful than a simple translation because I felt that I should somehow be the custodian of the form in the English language.

Translation Diary, Entry #15

Shit. Spanish distinguishes between Plague and plauge in a way that is not quite so neat to reproduce in English. I have never in my life (with the exception of my German for Reading course) thought about the capitalization of nouns as much as I am during this project.

Translation Diary, Entry #13 (which comes after entry #14 owing to an accounting error)

I hadn't noticed it any of the other times I'd read the book before this, but apparently the problem of how to translate "Historia" with a capital letter H is going to persist throughout the whole of this work. This time, I have rendered the sentence "...es possible que en ambos casos la Historia nos haya legado una mentira" as "...but another possibility is that in both cases "history" has left us only lies." I hate scare quotes, but it seems like a typographic solution to a typographic problem isn't necessarily a bad way to go.

Translation Diary, Entry #14

My grand translation project is the English version of a popular work of history in my area of expertise. Thus, the poor, battered English text that will ultimately result will inevitably mediate not only the author’s relationship to the subject but mine, as well. It is, of course, my task not to interfere in the former relationship, but that is not as clear-cut a task as it seems. Does it make my responsibility to the text, to the author or to the subject? How do I interpret not just the text, but the mandate, charged to me by the author, not to take liberty with his text? Perhaps this is a lesson in humility, a reminder that there is no single interpretation; perhaps it is a reminder that even a disagreement over a point of fact can be between two valid points, when the audiences for that fact are divergent. It’s not about the text, the author or the subject. A translation, maybe even more than the original composition is for its audience, for the purpose of making the text available to a wider audience. The text is just the instrument, but it is also a sterling instrument that must make it through untarnished.

My first instinct with this project was to research. But ultimately, surprisingly, the instinct to research is one that I’ve tamped down and not given into because it gets in the way of the finest details of the text. A careless translator could allow research to flatten out the fine-grain details and run roughshod over the nuances of the text, hitting the reader over the head with the information at the cost of the lyricism of the writing and the subtlety of an argument built up detail by detail. This text I am translating, early on, makes reference to a short story by Borges that purports to quote from the work of the French Orientalist Ernst Renan. I know Borges and I know Renan, but I don’t know if this particular reference is one of the ones that Borges invented from whole cloth and stuffed into the mouths of his literary versions of flesh and blood men. I had thought I would look into it and perhaps tweak the translation a bit, while remaining faithful to the text, depending on whether this is a real quotation from the real Renan or a made-up one from Borges’ Renan. But the ambiguity of not knowing whether the author of the quotation was Renan’s Renan or Borges’ is apt because the reference comes in the course of a discussion about the relationship between novel-writing and history-writing, a discussion that holds that the two are not all that different. In the space of this work, it doesn’t matter if this is a historical memory of Renan or a fictional invention because the two men are no different. Research, here, would eliminate an ambiguity that is not unimportant to the text.

There are other things external to the text within it. Turning to them is, I suppose, research, though of a different sort. There are quotations from the Qur’ān and from Arabic poetry that I am looking up and retranslating straight from the Arabic. This research does serve the English-language audience, giving them the same experience of reading a quotation translated directly from an Arabic text, rather than one distorted through an intermediary, that the Spanish-language audience has; it brings the experience of reading the translation in line with the experience of reading the original. There are also allusions to all sorts of other texts. The author writes in very long sentences which are perfect and undetectable in length in Spanish but just seem long in English. It bothered me until I returned to the Faulkner that the author refers to. If he was reading Faulkner while writing this book and thinking about characters whose lives are one long sentence consecutive to the next, then the phrasing choices have a significance greater than the stylistic differences that constitute good writing in one language versus in the other. This modified sort of research bears out in the more explicit details, as well: I don't like the first version of a sentence I transposed into English in which Joe Christmas is mentioned. There are a few possible ways I could revise the sentence to make it more euphonic but keep it faithful to the original. But to do that, I must have a better understanding of the analogy the author is making to Joe Christmas' experience, so I’m reading Faulkner as part of my translation project.

The research that a translator needs or ought to do is much less what is required of a scholar; I thought that this would make me feel hamstrung, but in fact, it's liberating in the way it allows the focus to be all on the text and on rendering it, unvarnished, for the reader.

Translation Diary, Entry #12

The Yale UP blog tackles the capital-H history problem I've been having:

Black Gotham 2.0

Here, an English professor writes about history with a lowercase h being one's personal history, and History with a capital H being the sorts of things that show up in the history books. It's theme and variation on where I was going with it, though I'm not yet sure how or whether or to what extent her take on this might be applicable to my translation challenge. I've written three sort of stream-of-consciousness posts on this topic now; I'm sure that one of these days the idea will coalesce and I'll be able to articulate both a theoretical solution as well as a practical one. Inshallah, anyway.

Translation Diary, Entry #11

This is a page from my draft.

I'm now in the process of reading my text, separate from the source text, and making sure that it really sounds like English. Then I'll go back and make sure I've not inadvertently corrupted anything. Where it says QUOTATION, it's not that I was stuck, but rather that I want to go back and translate that quotation from the original Arabic so that I'm not giving a Qur'ān translation mediated through a Spanish translation. What really caught my attention on this page, though, is in the sixth line from the bottom, where I completely inverted the order of three words: "gently rustling trees" becomes "trees gently rustling." It's interesting because often the adjective-noun order in Spanish and English are complete opposites. And while that's sort of what's happening here, I don't think it's Hispanizing syntax, or the desire to avoid it, that is guiding it; it's more just two options within the bounds of English syntax, and the one works better here than the other.

Translation Diary, Entry #10

Playing with punctuation and meaning:


The traces of the old arch-shaped brickwork remnants from when this was a minaret are still visible.


The traces of the old arch-shaped brickwork, remnants from when this was a minaret, are still visible.

Translation Diary, Entry #9.6

But sometimes it is about the vocabulary.

I have just translated the following sentence:

En un relato perfecto, aunque no muy celebrado, La busca de Averroes, Borges da noticia de un estupor semejante.

as

In Averroes' Search, a perfect if underrated short story, Borges makes his readers aware of a similar phenomenon.

Literally, it describes a stupor or enchantment or sense of admiration similar to the one described in the previous paragraph, a stupor or enchantment that is described with words like blithe and insouciant. The word phenomenon on its own doesn't necessarily indicate any of those concepts, except — except insofar as it is related to phenomenal, the sort of thing that either a stupor or an admirable quality is, and is redolent with the reverberations (to my ear, anyway, and I am undertaking this project on the strength and value of my ear) of phantasm, the sort of thing that can produce a stupor.

Translation Diary, Entry #9

It’s not about the vocabulary. Or it’s mainly not about the vocabulary, anyway. It’s about the syntax, the structure, about getting the text to stop being Spanish-shaped and getting it to start taking the shape of English.

Translation Diary, Entry #8

I always tell my students that translating a text is one way of interpreting it, that translation is just one more interpretive technique, like close reading or source criticism. As I'm working on my translation project, I'm appreciating more and more how much translating is also just like writing. Only this morning that's not a good appreciation. At the moment, I am working on the first of what will be at a minimum three revisions of the first chapter before I send it off to the author. For starters, I'm very much regretting having started with the first chapter, since that is the one that is most clearly written in the author's own voice, which I'm sure I'll have a better sense of once I've translated the whole rest of the book, the chapters that are less self-evidently written in his voice but that, obviously, of course, are. (In fact, I'm starting to suspect that in the end, I may chuck this whole first version of the first chapter and go back and retranslate it de novo. That does pose a bit of a problem for me now, though, since I'd told the author I'd get something to him by the end of the summer, which is fast approaching and still full of tasks yet to accomplish.) But for the moment, what I'm noticing is a real change in my own translation about five pages in. That's sort of the moment when my prose (or, rather, my English version of his prose) becomes fluid and consistent and less Spanish sounding; that's how long it took me to get myself into the text. So, just like with writing, the end result is in front of me and the first five pages are crap. But unlike something I'd written myself, I don't really have the option of throwing these away and starting from what's good. Writing is ultimately about editing; and so here, I'm going to have to adopt a more refined editorial practice than my usual slash, burn and start over.

Translation Diary, Entry #7b

Zinc sink poses a joint problem of cacophony and euphony that fregadero de cinc simply does not.

Translation Diary, Entry #7a

The capital-H History problem has reasserted itself.

La teología, dice Borges, es una rama de la literatura fantastica. ¿No es la Historia una rama de la novela, una ficción de sombras nacida del las ruinas de los libros...?


Theology, says Borges, is a branch of fantastical literature. So isn't History just a branch of novelistic writing, a fiction of shadows born out of the ruins of books...?

And this time I'm really unsure of how to handle it. In the last instance, I was able to treat History like a volume of a book that contains within it a sort of précis of capital-H History. But here, no, this is very clearly a reference to The Whole of History in its Fullness. A book solution would be tidy — aren't history books a subcategory of novels? — but I think it would miss some of the nuance that's there in the Spanish capital H.

I really don't know what I'm going to do about this one right now.

In another instance I can, once again, narrowly sidestep the issue, but only because we use definite articles differently in English than in Spanish; and that feels just a little bit like cheating:

La Histora es eso, una ficción nacida del gusto de saber lo que no puede recordarse...


History is just that, a fiction born from the desire to know what can't be remembered...

***

There's something else going on in this sentence: fiction (ficción) is juxtaposed against shadow (sombra), a fairly clear allusion to one of the most famous Spanish dramas of the so-called Golden Age, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The line in the play reads: "¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión. Una sombra, una ficción." (What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion. A shadow, a fiction.) Perhaps the comparable pair in English would be shadow and theme, or vision and theme, drawing upon an English play dealing with the same themes and written about thirty years earlier, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:


...a fictional theme built of shadows born amongst the ruins of books...?


(...the book-ruins? Separate issue, of course.)


In Calderón's play the prince Segismundo spends most of his life in a prison, and then, when he is exposed to the outside world only to be returned to his cell, speculates about the nature of the world and dreams and of what is real or not; Shakespeare portrays lovers and amateur actors whose fates and senses of reality are controlled by some fairies. The English words I am thinking about pulling in come from Puck's final speech in which he draws the audience into the play's unstable reality: "If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear, and this weak and idle theme no more yielding than a dream."

This is a text with many literary allusions; it'll be a real victory if I can translate them not absolutely ad litteram but more holistically — a kind of cultural translation —so that they evoke comparable English texts in the minds of English readers.

***

Just as a postscript, I saw Life is a Dream performed in Hebrew at the Khan Theater in Jerusalem in 2005; it was actually funnier in places in the Hebrew translation than it is in the original early modern Spanish. Secretly I'm always a little pleased when that happens, when the translation is funnier or cleverer or in some way more masterful with the target language than the original was with the source, when, to borrow a turn of phrase from a medieval polemic, the original is unfaithful to the translation.

Translation Diary, Entry #6

This one's grammar-heavy. Proceed at your own risk.

It's not as complicated as it might be if it were Arabic, but there is still a gender element in Spanish that doesn't exist in English and that bears on the decisions I am making as a translator.

In addition to the fact that nouns have gender and that adjectives agree with them in gender, there is another problem that, on the face of it is not one of grammatical gender but in effect becomes one: Spanish allows for a lot more uses of the passive than English does in ways that are not explicitly marked with gender but that require either a gender marking or a switch to the plural in English. 

"...escribió que quien penetra en ellas tiene la sensación de internarse en la oscuridad de  una selva sagrada."


"... he wrote that whoever enters has the feeling of interring himself in the dark of a sacred forest."

The issue in this sentence is not that the naves of the cathedral or the forest are marked as feminine; that's a simple issue that need not be blown up into a simplisticdiscussion of whether those things are regarded as more feminine types of spaces. Whatever. The issue is the description of the act of interring oneself in a sacred forest and how to refer back to the actor in the representation of that gesture.

While Spanish marks gender in many more ways than English does, this is a case where a passive action, becoming buried, can just as easily be rendered as an active, reflexive action. The particle se can be used in a whole variety of ways, including as an indirect object pronoun and as a marker of reflexive or passive verbal action. The difference between the passive se and the reflexive se can easily get lost in English translation, not because there is no way to distinguish them — there is, and in a text seminar, one would be expected to do so — but frequently because one of the two ways sounds like English and the other sounds like Spanish with English words. So what I translated in that initial translation in a reflexive way (interring himself) is actually a passive here (becoming interred).

I've noticed a tendency lately, particularly in new media writing but also among my students, that when people want to make their work sound more elevated than it is, they'll completely overuse "one" as a pronoun: "one has the feeling of interring oneself." Shudder. No. The last time I wrote a sentence like that was in the ninth grade. It's probably grammaticality technically correct, but it grates on my ears and sounds like it's been written by someone who hasn't read enough to know that it sounds funny. One has the feeling of interring himself, at a maximum. Or people have the feeling of interring themselves, if you want to leave a gendered pronoun out of it. Suffice it to say "one" is not a solution to this problem.

Although the experience is cast in somewhat more universal terms — the discovery by many people, many different types of people, by the platonic ideal of a person — at the heart if it, the author is a man and he is describing his own experience of the city of Córdoba, extrapolating from his own interaction with the city, so referring to this "one" as "himself" on the second and subsequent references is simply a correspondence with the reality that allowed the text to be written in the first place. Does it make the text less universal? Perhaps, but I don't think that's a change that it's within my purview to make. As much as I am tasked with making this text make sense to Anglophone American readers in a cultural sense as much as a linguistic one, I think that to gender-neutrify the text would be to impose a silliness of American sensibilities on a text that is a description of a very not-American experience and point of view. Even if a reader feels alienated by a narrative of a Spaniard of the male persuasion discovering this city, I don't think I'll have failed in the cultural aspect of my responsibilities.

Another option would be to leave the patient out of it entirely, and leave the passivity inherent in the Spanish in the English translation. And it's funny — it's taken me this much thinking it through and turning it over and over in my head to realize that this isn't one of those cases where the other kind of passivity renders a more idiomatic English; it's actually okay in a very literal way:

"... he wrote that anyone who enters has the sense of being buried in the dark of a sacred forest."

And that's how I've left it for now. Bit of a mountain out of a molehill, this one, in the end.

Translation Diary, Entry #5

I write all over my text while I'm working.

I also read aloud, which doesn't photograph as well and makes me look like a mad person when I decide to work in a cafe rather than in my office or at home.

Translation Diary, Entry #4

I find myself resorting more to Britishisms in my translation, things like "the only thing for it was to...", "each to each.". I've even used "rubbish." As a verb.

I don't know if these will stay in the final version. And I don' know if they're there now because there is something of a  European sensibility to the book that is better expressed in British English than in American.

Or perhaps it's because this book, and especially the introduction, is so clearly a labor of love, a book about a certain kind of love, quite literally and explicitly about possession, and I've only just fallen out of love with and become disposed by and from the Brit with whom I've spent the better part of the last decade as on-again-off-again, love-and-hate soulmates with benefits, but the link between love and English English hasn't fully reabsorbed itself into the inaccessible reaches of my mind. It's the relationship that has had the greatest impact of my adult life on my speech and language patterns and is now the only discernible scar of a deep wound. Who said scholarly work isn't deeply personal?

Perhaps it's a simpler issue, though. Maybe I just have a very plastic ear and need to stop watching reruns of Inspector Morse for the duration of this project.

Translation Diary, Entry #3

I wish that "motoring nomads" sounded less ridiculous in English.

Translation Diary, Entry #2

I am struggling with the capitalization in this phrase. I understand what it means (although even there, I could make an argument for any of several shades of meaning) but can't quite figure out how to render it in English to retain the purity of that meaning:

"... me daba cuenta de que no era hora todavía de encerrarse en una habitación rodeado de volúmenes de Historia." (...I realized that this wasn't the moment to shut myself into a room where I would be surrounded by volumes of History.)

The reference to Historia is, as we might say in English, History-with-a-capital-H. It is the concept and the totality of, well, History.

What I don't like about using History to render Historia is that by now, twenty-five years after the book was written, the capitalization of nouns that have to do with countries' glorious pasts is a rhetorical technique employed by the Tea Party, and I don't want to load this book with that kind of politics. So the simple, elegant, closest cognate solution is out because of the cultural connotations of capitalization in English that do not exist in the Spanish of a quarter-century ago. Or, as Walter Benjamin put it more eloquently, "Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own."

And so although the author's Historia refers to an abstract concept, I have chosen to give it a more concrete sense. I have translated it into English in a way that incorporates the "volúmenes" that precedes it in the original text, making it the books that contain the history so that I can retain the capital H and have it refer to the titles of such works, like Gibson's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Wellhausen's Geschichte Israels, works that still evoke an image of weighty tomes and authorities and that abstract totality of my author's Historia.

And so the phrase, in my translation, reads: "...I realized that this was not the moment to shut myself into a room, surrounded by Histories."

Translation Diary, Entry #1

It's interesting how easy it is, when translating, to fall, without even realizing it, into source language-isms that are barely perceptible and probably wouldn't even register as sounding wrong in the target language, but nonetheless, are ever so slightly off.

I just reflexively translated the phrase "como si apuntara un fusil" as "as if he were pointing a rifle" before catching myself and changing it to "as if he were aiming a rifle." You point a gun, but you aim a rifle, except if the euphony of the verb apuntar is already reverberating in your head. Then you point your rifle, and it's a misfire every time.