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ON TRANSLATING BADLY: SACRIFICING AUTHENTICITY OF
LANGUAGE IN THE INTEREST OF STORY AND CHARACTER
By Clare Sullivan
I
believe it is fair to say that translators are, by
and large, meticulous people. Fastidious.
Exacting. Fussy. But then in fairness we bear a
heavy responsibility: that of absorbing the full
intent of an author and rendering that intent, as
faithfully and authentically as possibly, in
another language. It is a task of broad
assimilation; in the case of a work like a novel,
the assimilation of philosophy, theme, plot, and
character as well as of language. Successful
translation is therefore a holistic act, one that
demands a total grasp of subject, from
overarching concept to the most minuscule
detail.
Yet for many of us, the multidimensionality
of the translating task becomes obscured by the
particulars of the languages we work in. We
obsess over individual words and phrases,
poring over dictionaries and thesauri in search
of the combination of syllables that conveys just
the right nuances of meaning, context, rhythm,
and sound. This is of course understandable, and
arguably the job description of a translator. Yet
in that obsession lies risk: of losing sight of the
larger elements of the story in a single-minded
pursuit of linguistic accuracy.
It is the kind of mistake I very nearly made
in the course of a recent project, the translation
of the novel Un martes como hoy (2004) by
Cecilia Urbina, whereby I failed to take into
account the background, intentions, and
limitations of one of the novel’s central
characters. The initial mistake, which was
rooted primarily in the dialogue, was an honest
one, springing from a translator’s instinct to
authentically render period language. Yet had I
not ultimately perceived the error, much of the
playfulness and feel of the original novel, to say
nothing of some of the larger thematic elements,
might well have been lost. The following essay
is the story of the error that nearly was.
Un martes como hoy
Un martes como hoy is a short novel, a
modern-day rendering of a Chaucerian frame
story. Just as in The Canterbury Tales, the
central characters are travelers: two sisters,
Márgara and Camila, and a man by the name of
David whom they meet one evening in a hotel
bar. All are Mexican, and in their own way,
story tellers. Stranded at various points in the
novel with very little to do, they pass long and
uneventful evenings imaginatively
reconstructing the history of one of the sisters’
long-lost ancestors: a mysterious greatgrandfather
by the name of Francisco
Videgaray. These portions of the novel, in
which the primary characters take turns adding
to a group fiction, are set in modern-day
Cambodia. The tale they tell takes place
primarily in the American Old West. Both plot
lines are romances, though of distinctly different
kinds: one an intellectual and semi-realistic love
triangle, the other a wild, cinematic fantasy.
The primary teller of the Old West storywithin-a-story
is David, who begins his
narrative with this interesting rhetorical appeal:
Francisco Videgaray lived the myth of the
Old West before it even existed. My source
(and he’s completely trustworthy) told me
that the idea we have of the West is a myth,
created in our collective imagination by
books and especially movies. Thus at the
end of the 19th century the Old West was
still a real place, with all the familiar figures,
but it hadn’t taken its place in the geography
of fantasy. Heroes abounded, and their
deeds, astonishing as they were, were
remembered. But the legend was still in the
making. The cowboys, the pioneers, the
gold-miners, the gunslingers, bad guys
maybe, if it isn’t too politically incorrect to
say so, the homesteaders and their mad races
to stake out the best plot of land, the Indians
Translation Review 13