An appreciation on the art of translation
By Kent Harrington
“The original is unfaithful to the translation.” J.L. Borges
I don't remember now exactly when I first met Nordine Haddad, my French translator, and dear friend. But I do know it was on the telephone after he began translating my novel Dia De Los Muertos. I got a call from Paris one afternoon, at my place in California. I knew it must be very late -- in fact morning-- in France, and I imagined him, wearing wire rimmed glasses, sitting in some boho garret, pouring over a passage of mine. And it made me feel completed as an author. Let's face it, you write so people will read you …carefully. If they're doing it in Paris, c'est magnifique!
"Hello my name is Nordine Haddad your French translator." he said that first time, in a charming French accent, that reminded me of some MGM golden-age movie. The one where a soldier in the French resistance finds the American aviator strung up in a tree, dangling by his parachute straps. In the iconic scene, the wily Frenchman slinging his weapon over his shoulder, and lighting up a Gitanes, says something like:
"Mon ami, I will rescue you. It will require some effort, there are dangers, but we'll make it . . ." Of course in the movies he always spoke English!
"You mean Nazis?" The young American asks looking down at him wide eyed. The handsome Frenchman gives a slight shrug, exhales slowly and says.
"A minor distraction?"
This was just before the use of email between us, which Luddites would be shocked to know, has made our work much more spontaneous, and handmade I think. And -- on my part anyway-- oddly febrile in a good way. I can always bash off an email when I'm feeling particularly in need of someone who understands my work. Me writing with some puerile author complaint of the day. Nordine will answer me right away and I'll take heart just because he's there for me. (Very important to have someone like that in your life when you're a artist.) We used to have to use fax machines too. Nordine would send me his list of questions about the text via fax. ( I wish to God I still had them?) I would grab his questions off the fax machine quickly, like some stock speculator in the 1920's and begin frantically looking at the literary ticker tape for a Big Loss or a Big Win. Did my narrative have some impossible flaw and now, finally I would be found out!
Nordine was hired by a famous French Aristocrat, novelist and publisher who had bought the rights to my novel Dia De Los Muertos for publication in France. That book, the first book Nordine translated of mine, was very well received in France I am proud to say. And, of course, I didn't get paid when the book went into a second printing because the aristocrat in question went broke as a publisher right afterwards! But he, in fact, gave me something more important than money. He gave me a life-time friend and collaborator. What a wonderful world !
No one, I think, understands the anatomy of my novels, or my style, as completely as Nordine Haddad. If only because he's had to render each line from one culture to another. My English editors and readers don't have to do that-- to ponder each line the way Nordine has. And he's done it for six novels now! It is his opinion, and that of the famous Dennis Mcmillan, my American publisher, that I value the most and take to heart. If either one of them said a novel I'd written was somehow wrong headed, I would probably destroy it. Burn it like a dead Viking on his raft. On to Valhalla! Other's are listened too-- my line editor Clair Lamb for example-- but Nordine and Dennis's words have a finality for me. That's the kind of trust I have for them. At some point you have to trust people to tell you things you might not want to hear, if you want to succeed at all in what Dickens called "the battle of life".
How can anyone translate that feeling that we all get from a sentence in a novel when it is truly beautiful, and by the nature of literature, axiomatically complex in its effect on us emotionally? The sentence was rendered in one language after all, and the art of making that passage sing again is almost impossible isn't it? After all each language bares the full weight of the culture that produced it. And thank God there are profound differences between say French and English. Although now these differences, especially since the 60's, are shrinking as quickly as the polar ice caps. Whether we like it or not, English dominates the pop world, and has for decades. Britney Spears requires no translation. The movie Spiderman? Really what would be the point? There is nothing there to translate probably. American pop culture is all very well… obvious.
Novels, because they stand solely on the power of language, with no help from an image, are cultural throw backs to a time when language, and literature, was much more important than the image. The Image is now the cultural colossus, by which most popular entertainment is derived: TV, movies, You Tube, video games. How important, for example, is poetry to popular culture? Ask the Jonas brothers. Here is a lyric from one of their songs. Judge for yourself (Keep in mind that I am not trying to poke fun at the Jonas Brothers, but rather am simply trying to point out that their lyrics are probably not very important to their entertainment value when young girls see them on TV. What is important is the pictures of them, quiet literally their image, that's where their "language" complexity lies, not in their music, or what they are singing about.
Oohh This is an S.O.S.
Don't wanna second guess
This is the bottom line
It's true
I gave my all for you
Now my heart's in two
And I can't find the other half
It's like I'm walking on broken glass
Better believe I bled
Because of a novel's-- or even just a simple letter's-- inherent use of cultural/language, a successful translation of it can never be based on a simple mechanical act of trying to reproduce the syntax and grammar of one language with the other, weighing one similar word against the other. That would be simple minded and produce disastrous results. To succeed in translating a novel a very human and complex process has to occur with the translator's language/mind caught in the cross fire that I believe occurs at the very center of the brain where all points touch-- the word-processing chakra point. He or she must distil one word/history and find an analog "translation". In effect there can be no linear method of translating literature. There are instead a series of intersections where the translator's own experience with the foreign language intersects with his own experience with his mother tongue. It is there, at that point, where he or she is prepared to attach (recover?) and attach an emotional value to that foreign word or phrase and go from there deciding on something that works from the corresponding choices from the Mother tongue. What we have at best is an interpretation based both on emotional as well as objective criteria derived from complete integration, both sides of the brain working together on the problem Theoretically then, the number two, could, and should be, translated as the number one in some cases, depending on the culture, but it might be possible. Think of the phrase in English "three men on a match." In Swahili you may have to change the English phrase dramatically to another, and equally appropriate, idiomatic expression: "two men jump a lion?
Can you interpret something you don't understand, on an emotional level? I doubt it. A novel or poem is not a book of instructions for putting a desk together. We've all read those funny translations of "instructions" which are supposed to guide you through a process, instructions which come inside the box with the desk you bought from China. They are funniest -- and almost useless-- when the translator is literally taking words and matching them the way you might match algebraic equations. Someone once wrote me from an Asian country and asked if they could "self introduce themselves". Sounds bloody difficult. Hello, the person I'm pointing to is… well me! Words are not numbers. And the parts of areas of the brain that fire off when we use language are undoubtedly very integrated and complex. Say the English word Sex out loud and you'll get the idea of what I'm talking about. Did you have a complex reaction to the word? Are words then perhaps cerebral depth charges, the shrapnel they throw off, both emotional and symbolic? Probably. Dolts by definition take things literally don't they? Isn't that one of the definitions of stupid? (Notice that stupid implies inability to engage in some kind of complexity.) Words in any language definitely are not Symbols, in the strict sense of that word. They are open ended embodiments of complex mind-reasoning things operating on more than one level simultaneously. They have their own gravity and weather. And when you put them together in combinations called sentences, it gets even more magical.
Take the English word niggle in the following phrase. I was niggled by my bully of a boss. Niggle is a little word with a big footprint. I constructed this sentence to give you some idea of the problems any would-be translator runs up against. The phrase above, all though quite short, is complex. It's a kind of language experience that includes sound as an element, even if you just read it silently to yourself. There is word music made by niggle standing with, and against, bully of a boss.
It is the novelist's job to create these kind of word complexities that set something off in our brains that is magical and paints a picture. In this case I wanted you to get the idea of violence behind the boss's abuse, so I put the word bully against the word boss. The two words together create a left, right, jab-idea. To translate this English sentence into another language you would need to, not only find a word as delicious as niggle, but an onomatopoeia like bully against boss. It can be done, but not by just giving the words numerical weights (strict definitions) on some chart, and then seeking equalities. No way amigos. Bring your emotional, as well as your musical game, or stay home.
Let's do it in Spanish. I spoke Spanish before I spoke English as a child, at least that what I was told by my mother. So I'm pretty good at it, but even then, with my background in the language, I know it's going to be tough.
Me fastidio mi jefe matón.
Take my word for it, I wrote both sentences, and my translation does have some of the punch idea because of the word matón(bully), which carries an accent on the last syllable -- the punch idea I'm looking for. So, maybe, I get some thing of what I got from of bully of a boss. But fastidio is not delicious and playful like niggle is. The Spanish translations sounds a bit too serious to me. Big Problemo. And right now I have no solution for this translation. Fortunately for me too, I don't do this for a living. I'd starve!
There is a joke I tell when someone informs me they've never heard of my books, or me for that matter. Usually at some book fair, and always embarrassing!! I always say, smiling, feeling a little bit like an imposter, "Well I'm big in France. …Honest!" The fact is, that my work is successful there, and I know that in no small part-- in fact to a very large part-- it's due to Nordine Haddad. His intellect, grace and emotional intelligence have created their own new versions of my original novels. In short, Nordine must be axiomatically a great translator. Has he in fact improved my novels? Probably. I know he's caught mistakes! How do I know this? Because French readers have enjoyed my books and buy them. Proof is in the pudding dears. Nordine Haddad's translations have become works of art themselves because of the choices that he has made on every line.
Let's face it, it's a very hard job, and not everyone, who knows some English, should be asked to do it. And if they are asked to do it, they should be paid enough. Translation is not a charity service. It is, in the end, a business-- but wait, is it really? And here in lies the crux of the whole problem.
I really believe that it isn't and that's what I'm trying to get to. Literature is not a business-- it's an Art. No work of art is really a business. Now we have been placed on the horns of the Art Dilemma. Are you comfortable? You can't pay for a great translation any more than you can pay someone to produce a great work of art. Get it? Money has nothing to do with it! ( I know money may to be present, but it's not the deciding factor.) No one paid for the cave paintings at Lascaux. Or did they? We don't know, "Hey Hal! How about I give you twenty buffalo skins you paint my cave for me and the wife?" OK, but the artistry employed-- or not employed-- had nothing to do with the number of skins Hal got for the job. I think you understand what I'm trying to say. It was all about Hal.
So what about Nordine Haddad? Who is he? Well here is his short “autobiography”. I think it explains a great deal.
I was born in Paris in 1966, from a catholic French mother and a Kabyle (Algeria) father who had to flee his native country after the Algerian Independence in 1962, for he was considered a Harki. My algerian family was pro-French, as my grandfather, for instance, was a “garde-champêtre” (a sort of rural guard, employed by the French administration.)
My father met my mother in Paris that same year. He was 30 years old, and she was only 19. He was her first love, and they had two children together during the same year, 1966 (I was born the 4th of January, and my sister Nadia in December, the 19 th).
Unfortunately, they divorced four years later, and my sister and I were left at my mother’s request to our French grandparents care (after that my mother was deprived of her “mother’s rights”, as we say here. I have never seen her again....)
So, my sister and I were raised by our loving grandparents. My grandfather was a house painter and decorator, and also, like his own father, a magician and a puppeteer - with the famous Lyons Guignol (Guignol is the main character in a French puppet show, which has come to bear his name.) So, I had a very traveling-itinerant childhood for some years, from town to town, every week-end. My grandmother, of course, played opposite my grandfather on stage for the magician show. It was fun and joyous days... We also had a very rustic holiday house in Normandy, where I have my most radiant and cheerful childhood memories...
I discovered American literature at the late age of 15, through J.H Griffin (“Black Like Me”). Then, at the age of 18, I created a literature magazine called LOCUS. I was then studying plastic arts and literature in Paris. My favorite authors, at the time, were H.D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller and, above anyone else, the Welshman John Cowper Powys (I have translated his correspondence with Henry Miller in 1994 – my very first serious published translation !). I have learnt to love the English language with all those guys... Later, I passed my French baccalaureate, then an arts degree (French literature) in Paris XII University.
In 1988, at the age of 22, I traveled extensively in the south of England, then in Ireland. I love Ireland, really. (By the way, I don’t speak a word of Kabyle ! Or let’s say ten words...)
In 1989, I met Laurence. You know the rest...
It is interesting to note that both Nordine and I are bicultural, and that we have an Irish connection. My relatives, on my father's side, were from Ireland, on my mother's Guatemala. Notice that we also share the Latin sensibilities as I consider myself first and foremost, a Latin born in America. (I consider the Irish Latins too.) I think this must have created the right atmospherics for our close working relationship. The Latin/catholic sensibility is certainly something we share. If you're wondering what that means, it means that Latins -- unlike Protestants, or say Germans, Americans, English, don't base everything they do on money. And I don't mean the formal Catholic religion here, by the way, but rather the cultural aspects of being from a traditionally catholic country. I seriously doubt a non Latin, could translate Kent Harriongton to the outside world. I don't mean to imply that Latins are in any way superior to anyone else. They most certainly are not. However, they may acknowledge the magic in words and accept the untranslatable hiding in language more than others do. Black Americans, as a group, I think are the exception in the States, and are very aware of the magic and simple beauty in language art. They may take everything away from you as a slave, but you own the words you choose to coin. They have not forgotten this.
As I said above, Nordine and I used a fax machine in the early days of our work together. One day there were some drawings, made by Nordine, waiting form me in my fax machine. (I've included them below.) He used them to try and understand-- translate-- particular scenes in the novel Dia De Los Muertos and wanted to communicate with me using drawings! Brilliant! These drawings startled me with their beauty and sincerity. To me in many ways they are part of the book now. I knew then, at that moment, that Nordine Haddad was a special human being and that I was very privileged to have him working on my novel and to call him a friend. I think Nordine's drawings, done while translating Di De Los Muertos, explain everything I've tried to say about him as an artist and translator. The rest is untranslatable.
Kent Harrington
San Rafael
