Dear Reader #3: Translation, shmanslation
Some say that it’s the winters that bring about gloom and lethargy. While the lack of Vitamin D doesn’t do one a whole world of good, I find that it’s August that kills my energy more than any other month. The lights are slowly dimming, but the temperature is still climbing and the reservations are still flowing in like Malort shots at last call. No wonder, then, that I’ve had to wrestle my motivation and energy from the gaping maws of summer depression for the past week. How is one supposed to rewrite a manuscript in these conditions, I tell you?
It's days like these where I want nothing more than to curl up with a mug of tea and a book of poetry—my literary poison of choice recently. As I’m still getting to know Federico García Lorca, I’m also getting to know my opinions on how all these guys translated Lorca in the first place.
My Spanish, well, no es exactamente perfecto, but it does the job well enough that I can catch glimmers of recognition in the big, fat bilingual collection of poetry I snagged at my local bookstore (gracias, two semesters of college Spanish). But it doesn’t take a fluent speaker to notice when a translator chose to mess with punctuation, mainly by inserting or removing exclamation marks from the original. Nor do you need to have an entire Spanish-English dictionary memorized to tell when they chose to translate the same sentence several different ways…
Take “Serenade” from Songs, for example. Lorca repeats the phrase, “se mueren de amor los ramos” four times. Alan S. Trueblood, in his translation of Songs featured in Collected Poems as arranged by Christopher Maurer… Well, almost every time, he’s got a different way of translating it. “For love bouquets either “are fading,” “are starved,” or “die”(511). Like, artistically, I understand the intention behind these shifting words, but to me, it comes off as injecting artistic intent that the original didn’t contain. Sure, the essence of Lorca may be there, but you’re not using the same kind of tools that Lorca did. Is it really Lorca’s “Serenade” anymore when you play so inconclusively with your diction, Trueblood?
Perhaps this is a sign from the universe that I ought to brush up on my Spanish and simply stop expecting this much from translators. (As an aside, I can’t think about the muddy world of translation without thinking about a certain disappointing work of fiction that shan’t be named, but which regardless let me down immeasurably. IYKYK.)
Thankfully, even with the disappointment of translated poetry, this week hasn’t been a complete letdown. After doing the math on Telford, I realized that not only have I successfully shaved off almost five thousand words, but in terms of wordcount, I’m 70% complete with rewrites! Hopefully I shall wrap up my structural revisions soon and be on my merry way of tightening up the language before sending her off for querying. Spitting three times—tfoo tfoo tfoo! Here’s hoping I get more done this week…
All the best, my dear readers, and may your favorite foreign poets be translated fairly.
-Noga
