The novelist has great sympathy for those taking her work abroad, perhaps because her own life has provided similar problems to decode
As it was the WG Sebald lecture, Margaret Atwood told her audience at the British Library, she was entitled to make it as freeform as Sebald’s writing, full of “peripatetic” wanderings, mixing up memoir with other genres, and just plain “odd”.
Though this was a warning not to expect a linear argument, let alone a theory of translation, her beguiling autobiographical digressions in Atwood in Translationland were not there just for fun. They illustrated that “we spend much of our childhood translating”; that it’s a universal activity, not one confined to professional translators. Atwood recalled a childhood divided between Ottawa (where her parents listened to bemusing BBC radio broadcasts) and a cabin in Quebec, where the local language was French and she would try to decode the writing on cereal packets.
Other puzzles included the symbols used in cartoon speech bubbles to indicate extreme emotion, hints of sex in murder mysteries, and phrases such as “interfered with” in newspaper crime reports (she blundered in decrypting “child molester”, Atwood said, assuming it meant a child willing to collect moles).
And then there was nonsense verse, such as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky (“helpfully some translation is provided, though by an egg”), which led her on to Alice saying to Humpty Dumpty: “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.” To which he replies: “The question is, which is to be master – that’s all.” She found in this exchange an encapsulation of two possibilities: are you “using language like a tool”, or is it impossible to control and even “processing” you like a computer?
Being a novelist, Atwood implied, is at once an attempt at mastery and a surrender of control, and more loss of control – being processed – is what paradoxically happens if you’re successful enough to be translated. Although she had some examples of daft questions she’d been asked by translators (“Is this funny or not funny?”), they were outnumbered by instances of difficulties her writing posed for them (“I’m always a nightmare – puns, jokes, neologisms”), and the challenges that all fiction presents.
Balancing readability and fidelity, deciding whether to incorporate foreign phrases or go for a “seamless” read, tackling slang, finding the right language for historical fiction or for protagonists who can be “a pig, an Orc, a rabbit, a vampire, a Mohican or a curlew”, getting round the peculiarities of particular tongues (Finnish, for example, has only gender-neutral pronouns) – “the choices that bedevil the writer bedevil the translator 10 times over. If a writer has a bad day, you can say, ‘At least I don’t have to do a freaking translation.’”
Far from depicting them as nuisances bound to distort her words, she viewed translators sympathetically, as serious Alices lost in bewildering Atwoodland, and potentially as her most intimate creative partners: “Nobody is going to be reading more closely than a translator. Some have picked up typos that editors have missed.”
via Books: Books blog + Written language | theguardian.com http://ift.tt/MEnoAI
