When a book is translated, each version ends up being a different work, with an accumulated history, that of the source language, the target language and that of the translator himself. Even more so if it is Et vaig donar ulls i vas mira les tenebres (Anagrama), by Irene Solà, with layers of research and a lot of language work. Solà has exposed a few of her translators to her way of working and her sources of inspiration, whether books or images or the same landscape where the novel takes place, where they have even taken an excursion. The translators, responsible for building stone by stone, word by word, her own version, have been able to enter the author’s world, almost the intimacy of her artist’s studio, share doubts and find solutions.
Last week, from Wednesday to Sunday, ten translators met with Solà at the FaberLlull residence in Olot, an initiative of the Institut Ramon Llull (IRL) coordinated by the professor and literary critic Iris Llop, who prepared an entire morning to enter the creative universe of the writer, who brought with her a few of the books that accompanied her in her research while she weaved the narrative thread of the novel, some basic to extracting concrete information, such as Folklore del Lluçanès or El folklore de Rupit i Pruit – which mentions in a note at the end of the book – and others that helped him get inside his imagination: “When you work on a book everything feeds you and you put it on the operating table, and with each one you work in a different way, some you study them and others are just for browsing,” said the writer, who also talked about the people who helped her, “people who know things and are very generous when they explain them to you,” from musicologists to cheese refiners to medievalists or the geriatrician Nadina. Tower.
Llop and Solà also presented a “visual atlas” in which the translators saw paintings that have inspired the author, “a constellation of ideas, a pool of materials” from which part of the imaginary that feeds the novel emerges, with contemporary works such as by Aleksandra Waliszenwska or older, by Marx Ernst, by Goya or even the Romanesque, representations of ghosts, the devil in many forms, covens of witches, wolves or simple landscapes with festive figures. “Sometimes I am interested in not fully understanding the images in order to stay in them and allow different readings,” because they are “ways of understanding the world that are different from ours,” among other reasons because “today we think and dream in movement, almost cinematically.” , and even the static image is taken from another point of view,” he deepened. For her, who studied Fine Arts and takes literature from the perspective of art itself, images are essential to find her language.
Solà is clear that translation is not simply matching one word with another, “it can also be creative”: “It is important that each translator feels the freedom to make whatever decisions they may have. My advice: do it and enjoy it.” “The learning I do about how I write by reading my translations is brutal, even though I can only follow the English and Spanish,” he acknowledged.
Each translator’s timing is different. Concha Cardeñoso, for example, has already published the translation into Spanish and was able to talk about the entire process, which always begins by reading as she translates, “never before, this is how I maintain the illusion: you wake up with the novel, you live with the novel and you “You are going to sleep with the novel.”
One of the problems that everyone has encountered is to what extent to maintain the Catalan nature of the work to reach readers. For Mara Faye Lethem, who is revising its English version, “a translation is also a way of expanding the language, for example when you leave some ready-made phrases as metaphor, while in other cases you look for one in the language itself that is analogous.” “, although first you have to find out when it is a phrase typical of a place and time or an invention of the author… Lethem assured that “although the United States seems very close, in some aspects there is a lot of cultural distance,” as in the treatment that the devil has in the novel. “Such a kind person who writes such dark things, and with a smile!” she joked.
And apart from the linguistic registers – which in this novel are a challenge for everyone, Catalan readers included –, cultural differences are one of the most complex aspects. Adri Boon, a Dutch translator, explained that in his language the landscapes are marked because “in my country there are no mountains.” Krisztina Nemes, a translator into Hungarian –she earned her doctorate in history with a thesis on Jesús Moncada and Mequinenza and has translated, among others, Solà’s previous novels–, tries to “make the reader fly with the novel,” and that is why “translation is a opportunity for creation”, as Solà defends, but at the same time he thinks about how to convey to the reader the nuances between “darkness, darkness, blackness…”, and doubts whether there are many words in this semantic field in Hungarian.
Rita Custódio recognizes that “something is always lost,” but that they try to “maintain the reader’s interest without making it exotic,” and that is why Àlex Tarradellas – with whom she shares the Portuguese translation – said: “We are committed to creating a world.”
The Chinese Mi Kexing, who assures that to translate in addition to knowledge you must put “love and passion”, had begun to translate from Catalan trying to be very faithful to the words, but she realized that this made things too difficult for the reader, and the linguistic and cultural distance precisely gives her “space to create and try to make Chinese readers perceive the same as Catalan readers, with their own rhythm.”
Amaranta Sbardella – she remembers that her water broke just after delivering a translation by Gabriel Ferrater –, who has already delivered her translation into Italian but has some doubts, thinks that often “we look for a coherence that is not as necessary as it seems to us”, just like Nemes said that “sometimes you are afraid to move away from the original so that it is understood,” and Lethem completed that in fact “you move away in favor of the text.”
The Swedish translator Ellinor Broman started learning Catalan after she was 35 because she saw it as a job opportunity, and after Canto jo… she was on the verge of giving up translating Catalan, but reading the critics, who praised her work, encouraged her to continue, and now, after having translated Eva Baltasar, she returns to Solà.
The guests at FaberLlull were able to work at times alone and at times with the author, but also walk through settings of the novel in Guilleries and Montseny and participated, on Saturday, in a reading of translations of the first paragraph of the novel in the bookstore Isop of Olot.
Thus, they were able to show that both in translation and in writing, as Solà said, “there is a head part and a stomach part.” Or, according to Sbardella quoting Ginzburg: “The translator has to be an ant and a horse at the same time.”
Catalan version, here
