Three-country summary and antan/yesteryear
Hi,
I'm just back from Romania/Italy/Spain – not in Valencia, as I made sure to tell my mother. Despite one stolen wallet and a lot of vending machine Oreos as the only vegan option, on a language-freak level I had a ball. I got to speak Italian, Spanish, a little German and French, a tiny bit of Romanian, and even a few snippets of Irish, mainly by telling my Halloween audience how to say 'Oíche Shamhna shona duit/daoibh'.
People in Spain managed to talk about things besides the floods – you do, that's the reality, you cope – but the disaster was everywhere on the radio, in overheard conversations, in every newspaper headline. My experience of travel is totally different when I understand the language. If I hadn't spoken Spanish, I'd have sipped my morning coffee without knowing that the woman beside me was detailing to her interlocutor exactly how the bridges had collapsed. I'd have seen on her face that something was wrong, but I wouldn't have heard each specific word. In some cold, antiseptic tourist sense, I'd have had a nicer time – but it's a ruthless little word in its own way, 'nice', and really I want nothing to do with it. That's why, whenever I travel, I study as much of the language as I can in advance. I spoke Spanish anyway, so no special efforts were required on that front, but I'd learned some Romanian and Slovak especially for a couple of literary festivals earlier in the month and was glad I had. (I did truly enjoy Spain, I must stress. The news from Valencia would have reached me wherever I was, and Spaniards are great company, especially the ones who are – to my surprise and delight – impassioned proponents of Irish Studies.)
My visit to Logroño and Burgos was also the first time I've had any significant difficulty moving between Italian and Spanish. In Berlin, it's not a problem; I might occasionally let slip a 'de' instead of a 'di' or vice versa, but by and large I can stay in whichever one I want to. But I speak Italian far more often than Spanish there, and neither context is hugely immersive; it's only three or four hours of thinking in Italian/Spanish, and then I go back to German or English or whatever. All this makes it easy enough to compartmentalise. On these two recent back-to-back work trips, though, my brain was functioning in Italian for several days straight, then in Spanish for another few. This seems to have triggered a more stubborn gear shift. When I arrived in Spain, Italian kept coming out. By the time I'd finally settled into the Spanish, I met an Italian. I thought: Yes, let us return to the tongue of Dante. But I really struggled. Within five days, Spanish had become the easier option.
This is information, and it's good to have. I'm not feeling fatalistic about it. I don't suffer from any theoretical or conceptual confusion between the two – writing emails in either language, I do not forget which protocols to apply – so it's only a question of muscle memory when speaking on the fly. In future my plan is to deliberately think in Spanish every morning when in Italy, and in Italian every morning in Spain, to preserve my flexibility between the two.
It's the first time it's occurred to me that thinking is a form of practice. I mentally swap between my six languages pretty often, but it's generally just to kill time. When I'm stuck in a waiting room, I describe the situation to myself in whichever language feels rustiest – the thoughts are slower that way, which paradoxically makes time speed up. When I have to sit through a boring speech, I simultaneously translate it in my head. Actual simultaneous translators are the most palpably stressed individuals I've ever met – especially when they're coping with the Roadrunner-paced paragraph-long sentences that I am powerless not to come out with in English, no matter how fervently I promise them beforehand that I won't – but doing it internally to amuse myself is good craic.
The thinking can be meditative, too. My inner monologue in English is hectic; switching channel calms me. I cycle through the languages in the order I learned them when I'm struggling to fall asleep. Ní mór dom codladh mais il m'est très difficile de le faire …
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All these continental literary events kept prompting me to think about translation. Authors are often asked whether they mind it. My short answer is no, I think my translation publishers are great, and not just because they give me money. My long answer is that I know certain nuances will change, but trust my translators to keep the text's greater interests at heart. I often think of an illustrative example: the 15th-century French poet Villon used the archaic word 'antan' in his 'Ballade des Dames du temps jadis', while Rossetti invented the word 'yesteryear' to get the same concept across in his 19th-century English translation. From a purist's perspective, you can't go around making up whole new words to translate old-fashioned ones. But 'Where are the snows of yesteryear?' is the only translated line of Villon's that's infiltrated anglophone popular culture, just as the phrase All Quiet on the Western Front – a very loose take on Im Westen nichts Neues – has become Remarque's English-language calling card. Indeed, Rossetti's 'yesteryear' was such an instantly classic coinage that it now sounds archaic itself to the modern ear.
(The 'antan'/'yesteryear' question is precisely the sort of use case I envisage for this platform. Who of sound mind would ever pay me to write about this?)
A partner can be loyal without being faithful, and faithful without being loyal. So it goes with translations. A faithful translation tries to transpose the text literally, if not word for word then at least phrase for phrase. Which is impossible, obviously, but it's the aim. Meanwhile, a loyal translation cares more about the text's interests, i.e. how it actually fares among readers. The debate between fidelity and loyalty rages all around us, not without its elements of colonialist condescension in cases like Han Kang's: journalists write about Han as some passive entity, when in fact she has personally approved her allegedly meddlesome English translations.
So you can do that, sometimes; you can ask the author. But if they're dead — Barthesianly or medically — then you're on your own. And here's where the translation/relationships analogy breaks down: you can't tell the original text what you're doing, let alone ask if it minds. Since we can't give the text veto power over liaisons entered into a shared Google doc – with lilac for the primary partner, emerald for the secondary and taupe for Brian who is truly just along for the ride – a translator may well be doomed to cheat.
Villon was that genre of figure with whom I can most deeply empathise: a mad bitch. Aged 24, he killed a priest in a brawl and fled Paris, proceeding to live a wretched-slash-wayward life. At 31 he was condemned to hang after yet another fight; the French parliament overturned the decision but banished him, and then he disappeared. In the decades and centuries following his exodus, his legend rose, his texts standing partly on their own merit and partly on their creator's raucous myth. All that to say, he's a poet who deserves to be known, and Rossetti's eccentric translation choice has ensured that the anglosphere will never forget pauvre Villon.
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It is rather cold in Berlin now. I have various unpleasant practical things to do. What else? I'm reading L'Effondrement by Édouard Louis, tinkering with my third novel for the umpteenth time and hoping to stay put here as long as I can.
Till the next time,
– N.