They rewrite, recreate works of art in a new language, interpret, convey the feeling and musicality of the originals. They do it with great knowledge, with some imagination, a little bit of intuition, a lot of wisdom and a lot of sensitivity. They are literary translators, creators of new lives for books and the conduit for literature to cross language barriers and reach almost every corner of the world.
Joaquín Fernández-Valdés, Celia Filipetto, Victoria Alonso and Rosa Martínez-Alfaro are four of the most prestigious Spanish translators. They have in common a love for letters and languages ??that comes from far away. Fernández-Valdés was clear from the time he began his studies in Slavic Philology that he “wanted to translate the great writers of Russian literature.” “For some reason the Russian literary imagination was very close to me and my dream was to translate that world into my language,” he explains to La Vanguardia.
Now, that dream has come true, albeit with a large dose of effort and time. It took Leo Tolstoy six years to write War and Peace. Fernández-Valdés has dedicated “four years of incessant work” to translating it into Spanish for the Alba publishing house. “It is a work that poses great difficulties: due to its length, 1,700 pages, due to the enormous number of characters, more than 550, and settings.
And because of Tolstoy’s style, which contains a wide variety of linguistic registers, from the Frenchified Russian of the nobility to the cryptic language full of proverbs of the people, the abundance of vocabulary specific to 19th century Europe (armament, military ranks, uniforms …), and throughout the historical and philosophical level, which constitutes a fundamental part of the novel”, explains Fernández-Valdés, who speaks four languages, and who is also proud of works such as the translation of El pájaro de fuego and other Russian tales by Aleksandr Afanasiev (Red Fox Books).
When she was still in high school, Celia Filipetto already began to translate. She is fluent in Spanish, Catalan, English, Italian and the Venetian dialect of her parents. She started with texts of “all kinds” for various companies and a “natural evolution” led her to the publishing sector. It was Dorothy Parker’s stories, which she translated for the now-defunct Versal publishing house, that opened the door for her. Now, thanks to the work of Filipetto, the best-selling books by Elena Ferrante, published by Lumen, have reached Spanish readers.
“I owe a lot to Ferrante. I have met other translators of this author and we agree that since she was not present, we translators have gained a greater role. Ferrante’s prose is at the service of telling the story, even to the detriment of the beauty of the sentence, the important thing is that it does not give the reader a break so that they continue reading. It is one of the traits that I tried to maintain in the translation”, says Filipetto.
Victoria Alonso was always a great reader and in adolescence she had a crush on the English language which led her to the inevitable path of translation. She tells Alonso that she “chapurrea a few languages” and she is fluent in English and Spanish, which has made her the translator of literary stars like Arthur Miller or Margaret Atwood.
The Canadian writer “is a narrator with devilish humor and an agile style, very lexically rich, which combines cultism and colloquialism in equal parts,” says Alonso, for whom “reflecting her rhythm and her irony naturally forces us to go down the street and by reading, sharpening one’s eyes and hearing to capture those turns and expressions closer to orality than to writing”.
Miller is another matter entirely, because “translating the classics always entails a certain fear of the critical and academic apparatus” and because “theatrical directions do not always clarify their tones and silences, which forces us to give more free rein to free interpretation, which is sometimes a source of insecurity”.
Rosa Martínez Alfaro maintains that “a translator must have a good knowledge of the language he is translating and of the target language, many experiences and emotions that are only felt if they are experienced.” She, who is fluent in Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and French, has lived in Mozambique and translates for José Eduardo Agualusa from Angola and Mia Couto from Mozambique with extensive knowledge of Africa.
But despite this knowledge, it also faces challenges because “trying to reflect a geographically and culturally distant world requires the domestication of the text but without erasing its specificity” and because it is necessary to try “not to fall into exoticism, avoiding writing terms such as ‘populated’ or ‘tribe’”.
“The translation of Mia Couto’s work requires a careful approach, cultural sensitivity, and linguistic creativity to capture the poetic essence, subtleties, and cultural richness of her works,” he notes. And he adds that the challenge of Agualusa’s literature goes through “humor and puns that often depend on sonority, double meaning and specific cultural associations.”
