Happy International Translation Day everyone.
Funnily enough, I came across Tim Parks’ article, “The Writer–Translator Equation,” in the New York Review of Books only a few days prior to the celebration. The excitement, pain, sorrow and endless delays the author described in there made it fully relatable to me. Whilst the author didn’t have a contract, or a deadline, or another visible reason to push himself through that cruel ordeal, he felt that he was unable to escape it anyway. The main stipulation was simple yet in fact largely unattainable: just translate. Just do it. As ridiculously simple as it sounds, translation can be your heaven and your hell at the same time. And we all know why.
He did the job, but the revision turned into a complete nightmare: remember how Borges described the process of actual translating as both an act of amalgamation with the original writer and simultaneously a split from him? “To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and, consequently, less interesting—than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” And so there: Parks—and me, and you, who are using more than one language on a regular basis in your life, and all of us—have to go through the hell of revision of our own perception of what we, like those who re-position the word order of one language with the instruments of another, have done to the initial text.
