〖 Found in translation 〗
Found in translation
Found in translation
The reader will find, seeded throughout Issue Three, some translation tales from writers in Arabic, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish, finding their way into German, Greek, Italian, Serbian, English and more. These tales can be filed with (also in this issue) Oksana Forostyna’s parsing of « untranslatable » Ukrainian humor and with Alexander Wells’s defense of Denglisch (and Berlinglisch, and Globish).
Translation, as a topic, tends to invite polemic or lamentation. Does the ERB have a stance? Not really. Our premise is that translation finds as much as it loses. The ERB’s editorial assistants, Nienke Groskamp and Job Wester, asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
An inquiry into varieties of translational experience became a series of reflections on artful error and unexpected intimacy.
☞ Mona Kareem: « Bidoon » ➞ « Bedouin »
☞ Carlos Fonseca: « Para Ati » ➞ « Para ti »
☞ Agnes Lidbeck: Why are you so cold-hearted?
☞ Defne Suman: Borrowed time is borrowed money
☞ Hans von Trotha: Judge a book by its covers
☞ Iman Mersal: Panties of the people
☞ Krisztina Tóth: « droid » ➞ « druid »
☞ Lavinia Braniște: Overalls & eyeglasses
☞ Lydia Sandgren: Read between the stripes
We asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader of yours has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
In one chapter of my book Barcode, a Japanese border guard stands still like a « droid ». This was translated from Hungarian into German by an older gentleman who made the droid a « druid ». After publication, a German critic wrote me a message telling me that he had read the book and wondered what the hell a Celtic priest was doing as a Japanese border guard. The critic had a five-year-old running around with a toy lightsaber at home, so he immediately realized the druid was meant to be a droid. The translator had probably not been familiar with Star Wars.
I had a German reader report back that the symptoms of one of the characters in my book Pixel were more likely that of a frontal lobe brain tumor than a brain stem tumor. I was really grateful for it — I corrected it in the next edition of the original. Another reader wrote a letter in German complaining that a goat died in one chapter and that frogs were killed in another. He said that if I killed one more animal, he would stop reading my work because he was an animal rights activist. I often use animals as victims in my work, but I love animals and am an animal rights activist myself.
Many people in Hungary and abroad read a first-person perspective and assume the narrator is identical to the author. I like to collect and construct stories and rarely use purely autobiographical moments in my work. So it’s always surprising to me when readers assume that everything I write about has happened to me. A lady once remarked at a book signing in Paris that I must have had a very difficult life, because she thought that the fifteen different female narrators in Barcode were all me. A gentleman once brought me a very expensive bottle of champagne to console me for the same reason.
Krisztina Tóth is a Hungarian poet, novelist and translator. Her short stories and novels have been translated into eighteen languages. An English translation of Barcode was published by Jantar in March 2023, while A majom szeme is her latest work in Hungarian.