When a book is translated, each version ends up being a different work, with an accumulated history, that of the language of origin, that of the destination and that of the translator himself. Even more so if it’s Irene Solà’s I gave you eyes and you looked at the darkness (Anagrama), with layers of research and a lot of linguistic work. Solà has explained to several of his translators his way of working and the sources of inspiration, be it books or images or the same landscape where the novel takes place, where they have even gone on an excursion. The translators, responsible for building stone by stone, word by word, their own version, have been able to enter the world of the author, almost the intimacy of her artist workshop, to approach her, 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 Ramon Llull Institute (IRL) coordinated by the professor and literary critic Iris Llop, who prepared a morning whole to enter the creative universe of the writer, who took some of the books that accompanied her in her research while weaving the narrative thread of the novel, some elementary to extract specific information from it, such as Folklore del Lluçanès or The folklore of Rupit i Pruit – which he mentions in a note at the end of the book – and others that served him to get inside an imaginary: “When you work on a book everything feeds you and you put on the operating table, and with each one you work in a different way, some you study and others are just to leaf through,” said the writer, who also talked about the people who helped her, “people who knows things and is very generous when she explains them to you”, from musicologists to cheese refiners, including medievalists and the geriatrician Nadina Latorre.
Llop and Solà also presented a “visual atlas” where the translators saw paintings that inspired the author, “a constellation of ideas, a pool of materials” from which part of the imagination that nourishes the novel emerges · it, with contemporary works such as those of Aleksandra Waliszenwska or older ones, 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’m interested in not fully understanding the images to stay with them and allow different readings”, because they are “ways of understanding the world different from ours”, among others because “today we think and dream in motion, almost cinematically, and even the static image is taken from another point of view”, he elaborated. For her, who studied Fine Arts and takes literature from the very side of art, images are essential to find 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. My advice: do it and enjoy it.” “The learning I do about how I write by reading my translations is brutal, even if I can only follow English and Spanish,” he acknowledged.
Each translator’s time is different. Concha Cardeñoso, for example, has already published the Spanish translation and can talk about the whole process, which begins by reading as she translates, “never before, this is how I maintain the illusion: you get up with the novel, you live with the novel and you go to sleep with the novel”.
One of the problems they have all encountered is to what extent to maintain the Catalanness of the work so that readers can reach it. For Mara Faye Lethem, who is revising the English version, “a translation is also a way of expanding the language, for example when you leave some phrases as a metaphor, while in other cases you look for one in your own language that it is analogous”, although first it is necessary to find out when it is a phrase specific to a place and time or an invention of the author… Lethem assured that “even if the United States seems very close, in some respects there is a lot of cultural distance”, as in the treatment of the demon in the novel. “Such a kind person who writes such dark things, and with a smile!”, he joked.
And apart from the linguistic registers – which in this novel are a challenge for everyone, Catalan readers included – the cultural differences are one of the most complex aspects. Adri Boon, translator into Dutch, explained that in his language the landscapes are marked because “in my country there are no mountains”. Krisztina Nemes, Hungarian translator – she earned a doctorate in history with a thesis on Jesús Moncada and Mequinensa and has translated, among others, Solà’s previous novels –, tries to “make the reader fly with the novel” , and that’s why “translation is an 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 he doubts whether in Hungarian there are many words of ‘this semantic field.
Rita Custódio recognized that “something is always lost”, but that they try to “maintain the reader’s interest without making it exotic”, and for this reason, Àlex Tarradellas – with whom he shares the Portuguese translation – said: “We bet to create a world”.
The Chinese Ma Kexing, who says that in order to translate, in addition to knowing about it, you need to put “love and passion” into it, she had started translating from Catalan trying to be very faithful to the words, but she realized that this put her things too difficult for the reader, and to her the linguistic and cultural distance just gives her “space to create and try to make Chinese readers perceive the same as Catalans, with their own rhythm”.
Amaranta Sbardella – remembers that she broke the news just after delivering a translation by Gabriel Ferrater -, who has already delivered her Italian translation but has some doubts, thinks that often “we look for a consistency that is not as necessary as we it seems”, just as 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 from it in favor of the text”.
The Swedish translator, Ellinor Broman, started learning Catalan after the age of 35 because she saw it as a job opportunity, and after Canto jo… she was about to stop translating from Catalan, but read the reviews , who praised her work, encouraged her to continue, and now, after having translated Eva Baltasar, she returns to Solà.
The guests at the FaberLlull were able to work alone and with the author for a while, but also to walk through the settings of the novel in the Guilleries and the Montseny and participated, on Saturday, in a reading of translations of the first paragraph of the novel at the Isop bookstore in 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, citing Ginzburg: “The translator must be an ant and a horse at the same time”.
