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« Para Ati » ➞ « Para ti »
19 April 2023
published in Issue Three
published in Issue Three
〖 Found in translation 〗
〖 Found in translation 〗
Found in translation
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?
I remember a strange story that happened to me when my first novel Colonel Lágrimas was translated into English. After an event in New York someone approached me to praise the translator, Megan McDowell, but also to point out a discrepancy. According to him, Megan had failed to grasp the true meaning behind the book’s dedication: Para Ati. She had translated it as For Ati, without realizing — according to this reader — that Para Ati truly meant, in a game of words: For you. In Spanish Para ti means « for you ». He thought this was a complex metafictional dedication that Megan had not quite grasped. I thanked him and praised his insight, as I didn’t have the courage to tell him that my wife’s name is Atalya, and we call her Ati, and that the dedication was simply that: a straightforward dedication to my wife.
Over the years, Megan McDowell and I have started thinking of translation as a rewriting and reediting of the original. Books are never truly finished, so we see it as a chance to reopen the editing process and rewrite a bit. I always wish the reader could see the changes we have made, as if they could sense the distance or the gap separating the original from the translation. I know it is impossible in many cases, but it is something that drives me while working on the translation: the idea of the reader being able to read the translation as an original. Megan is perhaps my most attentive reader and I have now incorporated her editing feedback into my own writing. So sometimes it feels as if the voice of the translator comes first.
Carlos Fonseca is a Costa Rican-Puerto Rican author and Assistant Professor in Postcolonial Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. His latest novel Austral (2022) was translated by Megan McDowell, and will be published in English in May by Macmillan Publishers.
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
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