Getting and spending

¶ 1 June 04

O! know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent…
—W. Shakespeare, 76th Sonnet

There are some words which, although commonplace, surprise you each time with how pleasant they are to say.

Like the word légume in French – that u right after the half swallow of the g which lingers warm and creamy in your throat, like carrot and rosemary soup in mid-winter. Or parsnips. See, I say parsnips and right away I can taste them, roasted to near caramel, in my mouth.

Lugubrious is excellent, sounding just like the mad loneliness of dark basements and cobweb moans in old horror flicks. Papillon and butterfly are equally flighty and fun to say, but libellule outshines dragonfly as something for kids to marvel at on a hot summer day.

Encyclopaedia is good because you always have to look up its spelling.

I always think nonplussed means the opposite of what it does. That “non” throws me off each time; it just sounds like it should mean unfrazzled. But it doesn’t, so… there you go.

The clinical words for genitalia are incredibly un-sexy. The word genitalia is the worst.

Then there are all those words that you hold dear because of the powerful associations they evoke, and you’re always a little disheartened when others don’t grasp their richness and the slew of allusions they contain. Lake… You know [starry nights, the cry of the loons, rough heat of sun-baked rock on bare skin], lake. Get it?

(Most powerful here are the associations we build with Christian names. I was forbidden to name my daughter Lea because that’s apparently a fat farm girl who, when mad at you, lobs dung with Olympic-level accuracy.)

I was tickled pink at the age of 6 when I discovered the word tintinnabulation, but had to let it go, never having managed to work it into a sentence.

In my awfully precious preteens, I loved saying awfully precious words like diaphanous, ubiquitous and concupiscent. Unfortunately, ubiquitous is now too, uh, ubiquitous, but diaphanous is still suitably annoying. Concupiscent, for some reason makes me think of Julian Barnes. As does the word armpits.

And it’s a curious process each time you learn a new word, the time it takes before you feel you “own” it.

You whisper it to yourself for a few days before building the courage to slip it into a sentence, anxious that it’s going to make a spectacle of itself and not mingle unnoticed in the crowd.

Once you have taken possession of a new word, you can then rise through the ranks and become one of those insufferable gits who say things like, What!? You mean you don’t know what omphaloskepsis means? Mooncalf.

Comment [15] 

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Market conditionals

¶ 30 May 04

The art of socialist realism was not only happy but also sexy. … Nowhere else was there so much faith in a bright future and the definitive victory of good over evil.

Nowhere else except in market-oriented culture. Most of today’s literary production bases its success on the simple socialist-realist idea of progress. Bookstore counters are heaped with books which contain one single idea: how to overcome personal disability, how to improve one’s own situation.

Books about blind people regaining their sight, fat people becoming thing, sick people recovering, poor people becoming rich, mutes speaking, alcoholics sobering up, unbelievers discovering faith, the unfortunate becoming lucky. All these books infect the reading public with the virus of belief in a bright personal future. And a bright personal future is at the same time a bright collective future, as Oprah Winfrey unambiguously suggests to her impressive world audience.

… Contemporary market literature is realistic, optimistic, joyful, sexy, explicitly or implicitly didactic, and intended for the broad reading masses. As such, it ideologically remoulds and educates the working people in the spirit of personal victory, the victory of some good over some evil. It is socialist realism.

From exiled Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic’s great and very funny critique of the publishing industry, Thank you for not reading: a series of essays, beautifully translated by Celia Hawkesworth. (Excerpts from other works here and here.)

Gossip is the last remaining form of concern for other people.

Comment [5] 

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Bits

¶ 26 May 04

My father and his two brothers all had chronic back problems. Sometimes, at family gatherings, if you walked into our living room you would have seen three unable to stand men in tuxedos stretched out supine on the floor, staring at the ceiling while chain smoking Rothmans, guzzling tumblers of scotch, boasting about real estate and debating whether to stock the pond with speckled or rainbow trout that year. Sparkling in evening gowns, their high on gin wives would kneel down from time to time to pop a smoked oyster in their mouths.

After a month of agonizing and consulting his bolder buddies, the little red-haired kid finally gathered enough gumption to approach the girl he had a crush on. Not so pretty, mom, but really smart so, you know. He asked if she’d go out with him. She said he wasn’t her type (but that, apparently, some punk with a perpetually runny nose was). Then, in an astonishing display of wherewithal, the kid went around to every girl in the schoolyard, saying, ‘hey, you want to go out with me? No? No problem. How about you? Or you. Want to go out with me?’

In the summer, when I was little, my aunt Barbara used to rise in the night, still asleep, put on her fur coat, and drive into town for ice cream. Usually orange pineapple.

The little red-haired kid and his friend Alfred have decided that they will not go out with any girl who only likes them for their looks.

I once met a man whose favourite colour was beige. He spent his Sundays creating a database for his VCR collection. He smuggled pink, coconut covered marshmallows into the house and fed them to his daughters on the sly. His wife did not love him but revelled in alluding to his mother’s (by then faded) celebrity.

A client e-mailed me today to ask whether I’d finished translating a document they hadn’t yet sent me.

God, I love Dean Allen.

Comment [3] 

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Mbuki-mvuki*

¶ 20 May 04

*Bantu word meaning take off your clothes and dance.

As you may have gathered from the total lack of verbosity hereabouts, our current state is one of sleepless frenzy.

Too much work and even more paperwork, and trying to second guess what lurks in the minds of bankers as they sit pink-shirted around their laminated tables to decide our fate; clickety click go the calculators as they grin at the prospect of 15 years of interest only payments.

I take it all much too personally.

The only fun on the work side of things has been a plunge into research on the Ming Dynasty, obese, opium-addicted emperors, over-compensating eunuchs and a rather fascinating Jesuit missionary and scholar by the name of Matteo Ricci who did not manage to convert Emperor Wanli to Christianity, but did get to fix his clocks.

Plus he made beautiful maps, and changed their traditional layout when asked by the Chinese why the heck their rather sizeable country was all squished into a corner like that.

It’s astonishing what some people accomplish in a lifetime (here, I get all smug if I manage to do both laundry and shopping in a single day).

Other than that, in the please help because my brain has reverted to its pre-natal state category:

I’ve received a request from a woman who is publishing a book on words that have no equivalent in English, asking for suggestions. (Once again proving that this is the kind of information I can produce only when it is unsolicited.)

Aside from the popular schadenfreude, gaia, esprit d’escalier, saudade and all those divine Yiddish words, the only ones I’ve come up with so far are:

From the German: Drachenfutter (a peace offering to a wife from a guilty husband) and Gemuetlich (the comfort and ease of a gathering of friends).

From the Japanese: shibui (ageing gracefully) and haragei (communication through body language).

The Dutch word meevaller (when things turn out better than expected) and from New Guinea : mokita (the thing that everybody knows but won’t admit).

Hmm, I just might use this last one next time we’re at the bank, as I fight the urge to utter the word “racketeering.”

Comment [26] 

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Recherché

¶ 11 May 04

I came upon two equally well-spoken, though seemingly contradictory, statements.

The first from Alexei Sayle:

Since I’ve become a full-time writer I get sent a good number of soon-to-be-published books. With many of them you get a strong sense of months spent on the internet or years passed in the British Library, meticulously researching the exact nature of monkey nut processing in Georgian England or the life of a dentist in Basingstoke.

It’s not just novice authors, either: in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral there are five whole pages devoted to how to make gloves. Unfortunately, coupled with this scrupulous fact-finding there is often a total neglect of the basic business of storytelling. Some of these writers forget that they are engaged in the business of creating fiction, inventing ideas, characters and places – they should be making exciting stuff up, when all they are doing is copying boring stuff down.

… well portrays an element of so much contemporary fiction that really gets my goat. Authors who apparently fear that they don’t really have anything to say, or that – drawing only on what they truly know – what they do have to say is so inane they feel compelled to embellish their narrative (i.e. mask their mediocrity) with the minutiae of a craft or cult or period of history that they’ve only just discovered.

The thickness of these parts of the tale so often jars with the “mere existence” portions and, at worst, sounds eerily like that bore you find at every party whose entire palaver is highlights from his mental library of trivia. The characters are stock and plain; only their work is potentially interesting – though its ultimate purpose is to act as filler, and provide the occasional cheap metaphor.

And he could not help but reflect that, yes indeed, life itself is sometimes like those ant colonies he spends his days examining. But, he wondered – and fearing the answer – was he a red or a termite ant?

(As we all know by now, one of the most risible examples of this approach to fiction is the perplexingly popular The Da Vinci Code, wherein not only does the author get his facts wrong and present ludicrous conspiracy theories as fact… but the poor chap can’t write for beans – his sole technique for creating tension being non-disclosure.)

The other quote is from Dubravka Ugresic:

In “Come Back, Cynics, All is Forgiven!” [Ugresic] offers a potent analysis of the current over-valuation of “ordinary accounts of ordinary people about ordinary things”. “The only thing that puzzles me,” she notes, “in this ardent return to reality, is reality itself” – a reality soapified, literalised, commodified, globalised. “The living Oprah is a mega-metaphor for the contemporary fetishisation of spontaneity and sincerity … Even the Croatian minister of defence, having happily avoided The Hague tribunal, was buried to the song ‘Candle in the Wind’.”

A new fascism dawns, based on obedience to worldwide market-based norms of ordinariness and sincerity. As she says, no wonder there are walls in many parts of eastern Europe graffiti’d with the words “Come back, communists, all is forgiven!”

Which, to me, is not entirely a contradiction of what Sayle is saying, but rather the other side of the coin, the other dulling trend in fiction which claims that any idea that’s ever passed through a (preferably celebrity) brain must be worthy of a printed page.

Style and the weight of experience, be gone. The lines between carefully crafted narratives that make your brain cogs spin and marvel, and marshmallow entertainment being eroded in the name of… god, I don’t know. Freedom? Democracy? Money? The global need to know what 14-year olds think of open-toed pumps?

The marketing hacks imposing unnatural selection to eradicate what those who don’t love a good read would snidely call “highbrow” then yawn… robbing the language of its full dominion, true authors of a forum, and those of us snobs who do crave a fine read of much-needed delights.

Comment [11] 

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Going native

¶ 6 May 04

You’re never entirely the same person in any two languages.

There’s inevitably one in which you feel most yourself – probably the one you grew up in. It’s the one where you can play with the rules, rage with eloquence, indulge in fancy and be most effectively sly. The one you think and mumble in when you’re sleepy and want to go home.

With each new language you begin to learn, you’ll find varying degrees of affinity – from flat out love and understanding to inexplicable aversion. I doubt any logic can account for our spontaneous reaction to the music of an unknown tongue – why some seem sexy, some jar the ear and others are a persistent source of mockery (the French imitating English sounds something like hey ya ya ok eekin ocking sure).

And a curious thing happens each time you’ve reached a certain point in your grasp of another tongue. You’ll notice that it heightens certain aspects of your mental make-up. Make you more brash or serene. In a sense overtaken by the language’s personality, by its cadence and poetry and interpretation of this mess of human existence. Those you love put a new spin on things, change your dreams and help it all make a tad more sense.

While your gesticulating hands take on a life of their own.

Comment [20] 

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Lippy service

¶ 2 May 04

To Sir Richard Fanshaw Upon His Translation of Pastor Fido

Such is our Pride, our Folly, or our Fate,
That few but such as cannot write, Translate.
But what in them is want of Art, or voice,
In thee is either Modesty or Choice.
[…] Less honour to create, than to redeem.
Nor ought a Genius less than his that writ,
Attempt Translation; for transplanted wit,
All the defects of air and soil doth share…

– Sir John Denham

Now literary translation is one thing and, to an extent, in a class by itself. The bulk of workaday translation is for business, not pleasure. Letters, contracts, websites, endless turgid reports, signage, ad campaigns… The blablabla that keeps us off the streets from 9 to 5.

A few days back, Margaret wrote a piece on the woes of educating translation clients, citing sometimes outrageous turnaround times and the fact that, too often, customers’ sole criterion for selecting/comparing translators is price.

Leading me to believe that the state of affairs in Germany is similar to the sorry one in France.

(And, no, I don’t think that all this excitement over an expanded EU is going to improve things any time soon – though I’d love to be wrong.)

Coming from an officially bilingual Canada where the translation industry is fairly well regulated and highly structured, I still battle with dismay at the slipshod state of things here in the land of bureaucracy.

And still gobsmacked to find things like this made public.

The bath-tub cast iron of large mother in 170 X 77 traditional and indémodable with a beach for the valves and fittings.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the work of cheap and nasty software… or the owner’s niece who’s studying English in High School, and getting straight Cs.)

There is a central translators’ syndicate here in France, the SFT, but to join you need only cough up the fees and prove that you’ve been working as a translator for at least a year. In no way required to prove that you’re any good at it. (I honestly don’t see the point.)

I suppose this state of disarray, and the spectrum from wankers to wizards, is true of a lot of businesses, and particularly for freelance workers. But still I’m flummoxed that people who spend so much on lunch, can be so stingy when hiring someone who provides a crucial element of their business – apparently perceiving translators as a necessary evil, at best.

On the flipside, of course, there are translators who are just plain incompetent but manage to get work because their customers are incapable of judging the final product (or because they charge 2 cents a word).

There was a comment to a recent posting here that I found quite telling:

I’m a contract writer for an insurance company and am responsible for “coordinating” the translation of said contracts. I have to confess to feeling rather frustrated when my translator comes back to me asking what we mean when we say “benefits payable on the death of the spouse will be payable to the employee’s estate if the employee is deceased and there’s no beneficiary designation.” He’s trying to understand it, for heaven’s sake. I, on the other hand, don’t want to understand it, as it just gives me a headache.
— cmb

I’m afraid my advice to cmb would be to get a new translator:the current one apparently stumped by very basic terminology.

Plus, now with the Internet there is no excuse for shoddy research, particularly for texts of a corporate or technological nature. I still marvel at the fact that, not so long ago, we had to rely near solely on books for our queries, along with the harassing of kindly industry experts (and that typewriters & white-out were the apex of technology).

So, I am very curious to find out how much attitudes towards translators differ from one country to the next, what the client-translator relationship is like in terms of communication, negotiating rates, turnaround time, understanding of the work performed, respect for the craft, etc.

I mean, honestly, how hard can it be to read a text in one language while typing it out in another?

Comment [7] 

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Bitchin’, whot?

¶ 29 April 04

What the cool kids are saying about us:

“Its like a bunch of college professors got together and smoked pot for a week. They bring up a bunch of stuff you probably wouldnt think about. I dont recommend this if you dont have a very large vocabulary.”

 

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Faux pas de deux

¶ 25 April 04

As my daughter has begun to moon seriously about boys, I’m now bracing myself for her first official date. The one where the mouth breather lopes to our door, baggy pants half down his butt, eyes dull of adolescent ennui as he grunts, ‘zalexhome?’

And wondering whether I can draw inspiration from how my father behaved on the momentous occasion of my own first date.

Get out your handkerchiefs.

I was 13, I guess, and he was a boy named Mark who lived down the street. We were going to the movies at 7.

I had only just begun to mutate from hardcore tomboy, so the mainstay of my panic and dread was the idea of having to be ladylike – assisted here by my brother who kept asking if I was sure Mark knew I wasn’t a guy. (And my sister freaking me out with stories of tongues and kissing and where hands may wander and grope.)

The afternoon hours a belly of butterflies, spent muscling into hated, dainty outfits, then padding down the hall to the full-length mirror, and my mother’s ‘goodness, is that what you’re wearing? Oh, and you mustn’t smell sweaty, darling…’

And on and on until 6:30 pm.

Gentle, kind and Clearasiled Mark arrives and we’re breathless, looking mostly at our shoes (and polish your shoes, dear; a boy notices that sort of thing) – ‘hi’ ‘hi’ ‘ha, ha, hi’ –wiping sweaty palms on our bums, goofy kid smiles flashy with braces.

Some agony later, it’s ‘wanna go?’ and, just then, my father enters the room.

Mark smiles so politely and straightens his tie, offers his moist hand to shake and lets the pater know that he works at Grand & Toy stationery two afternoons a week so, ‘Your daughter is in good hands.’

And my father, my tall and broad father with his deep rich man voice and who knows the full tizzy I’m in, keeps hold of the gulping boy’s hand and asks:

– So, Mark, are you much of a boxer?
– Um, sorry?
– Box. Do you box? Would you care to go a couple of rounds?
– … Sir?

Then father lets go the hand, walks into the kitchen and brings back two pairs of oven mitts, smiling, ‘Gail loves to box. Hell of a swing. Come on, sweetie, let’s show him what you’ve got.’

And he holds out the mitts to me, dead serious. I stare at them and stare and blush and,

– What?

Now he’s slipping on the second mitt, and his dukes are up,

– Come on!
– … What?

Clutching my pair of flower-patterned, heat resistant gloves and thinking that this would be as good a time as any to die. Then he punches me in the shoulder.

– Come on, come fill me in!

He keeps going and goading me, fancy footing and grinning around like Mohammed Ali as we’re trying to get past him. And I know he’s not going to stop.

So I’m mad and I spin around with my fist balled saying, ‘cut it out’ and swing, not aiming.

Then it’s ‘Oh jeez,’ from my dad as he crumbles to the ground.

I’d got him right in the solar plexus, and knocked his wind out. He’s on the floor, oven mitts rubbing his belly, and wheezing, ‘oh, boy.’

We don’t say a thing all the way to the theatre. Only Mark ducks during the film, each time I reach over for popcorn.

Beat that, Philip Larkin.

Comment [24] 

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The word

¶ 19 April 04

“Everyone assumes that their Bible is accurate,” Blum said. That may not necessarily be the case. “The average person is not in a good position to make a judgment whether the NIV is more accurate than the King James. They rely on their pastors, or articles in magazines,” he said.

Even then, people pick a Bible most often based on reasons other than a good translation.

The 36 Christian denominations affiliated with the National Council of Churches, align themselves with the favored New Revised Standard Version.

Others continue to savor the Shakespearean language of the 1611 King James.

According to Phoenix-based Ellison Research, Bible translation preferences correlate not only to denominational ties, but to politics. In a nationwide study released in 2002, 34 percent of more than 500 Protestant pastors identified the NIV as the version they personally rely on for most of their work.

For those with an evangelical theology the number rose to 47 percent using the NIV. Pastors with a mainline theology favored the NRSV (51 percent). Pentecostal or charismatic pastors chose the KJV (45 percent).

Political conservatives also liked the KJV, but only as much as they liked the NIV (35 percent.) Moderates preferred the NIV (43 percent) and liberals, the NRSV (71 percent).

Basing their work on the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts, a group of 100 scholars has published the “first major full translation of the Bible to be released in more than 30 years.”

Involved too in their task was whether or not to make certain nouns and pronouns gender neutral – i.e. whether to remain faithful to the original or bow to the pressures of PC – something which all into-English translators grapple with on a daily basis. It’s usually dealt with by deferring to the cure-all “they” and, when that just doesn’t cut it, forced to choose either “he” or “she” and add a footnote in a mealy-mouthed voice of half-authority, half-apologia – assuring all readers that you are not sexist, it’s just that s/he is like a fishhook to the eyes and brain.

(Further fine talk on this subject can be found here and here.)

As fascinating and open to debate as this whole story is, I have to confess that my first thought was: aw, man, now even Bible scholars use acronyms. Is nothing sacred?

Comment [22] 

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