A few days
ago I was doing a literary translation workshop with French teenagers in
London, using as my English text a slice of Elizabeth Acevedo’s splendid, National-Book-Award-Winning
The Poet X, which I’ve had the
pleasure (/honour/ insane luck) of translating into French.
Elizabeth
Acevedo, in case you haven’t heard of her, is this remarkable spoken word poet
and writer:
The Poet X is the Künstlerroman of a young
Dominican-American woman who discovers spoken word poetry, rebels (selectively)
against her family, loves her brother, and loves, too, a sensitive young man in
her Biology class. She writes in a notebook, and she writes things about her
everyday life, such as church, food, masturbation, and street harassment:
(Transcr:
It happens when I'm at bodegas.
It happens when I'm at school.
It happens when I'm on the train.
It happens when I'm standing on the platform.
It happens when I'm sitting on the stoop.
It happens when I'm turning the corner.
It happens when I forget to be on guard.
It happens all the time.)
This is the poem I asked the French teenagers to translate (well, only the
first stanza – we only had an hour). As you can guess, there’s plenty of
fascinating challenges for a translator there, and we always begin by reading
the poem out loud, testing out different stresses, different rhythms, feeling
the beats and letting the sounds fill our mouths, before we start making decisions
about translation. I won’t focus on all the aspects in this blog post, but I
want to talk about one particularly interesting thing that came out of the
exercise.
The first
stanza, obviously, makes striking use of the anaphora ‘It happens’. What is ‘it’
that happens? It’s alluded to in the next stanza – touching, allusions,
compliments. The usual catcalling and groping sort of business.
How do you
translate that into French? Well, there’s at least one absolutely literal translation: ‘Ca
arrive’ (it happens). The problem is the hiatus (a hiatus is what happens when
you have to force a break between two similar-sounding vowels): Ca-arrive. That
a-a sounds fairly unpleasant to the
ear – this is what I think secretly, but of course I say nothing to the
teenagers ; it’s my opinion. But among the six groups that day, no one opted
for ‘Ca arrive’.
Two groups
opted for the next most literal option, ‘Ca m’arrive’
(It happens to me), which has the advantage
of getting rid of the hiatus. Interestingly, this option makes the victim
explicitly central in the French text – no way of avoiding this ‘m’ which explodes
from the front of the mouth and provides a nice labial echo to the ‘haPpens’ in
the English version. Full disclosure, this is the one I picked for my own
translation, too.
Another
table chose, interestingly, not to translate ‘It happens’ at all. Instead, they
started every single line directly with ‘Quand’ (when). The effect was
funny: the stanza becomes a bit of a riddle, to be solved in the very
last line. ‘When I’m there, when I’m there, when I’m there, when I’m there… It
happens’. More suspense, but less emphasis on the relentlessness of the
harassment.
Another
group opted for the hugely alliterative ‘Ca se passe’ (pronounced ‘Sasspass’),
which more or less means ‘It happens’. I like this solution, which
sounds like hissing, and preserves the plosive ‘P’ of ‘haPPens’. It is perhaps
the closest to the source text in both meaning and effect. I had considered it (and am still considering it) for my translation.
Another
group, finally, had an idea I hadn’t considered at all, and which I find
especially interesting. It is to begin each line with ‘Ils le font’, namely, ‘They
do it’ (with the ‘ils’ explicitly male in French). Complete change of focus all
of a sudden: the perpetrators are at the very beginning of the line, of each
line. The impersonal ‘it happens’, which makes it sound like it’s some kind of
unavoidable meteorological phenomenon, suddenly acquires a body (even several
bodies: a threatening army of bodies); it acquires malevolent agency, and it
acquires a gender.
A radical solution, which arguably lacks elegance in its sounds, but strongly signals the translator’s commitment to naming and blaming the perpetrators. Before you ask, the table who came up with this solution was composed exclusively of boys.
A radical solution, which arguably lacks elegance in its sounds, but strongly signals the translator’s commitment to naming and blaming the perpetrators. Before you ask, the table who came up with this solution was composed exclusively of boys.
What a world
of connotations separates ‘Ca m’arrive’, which focuses Acevedo’s text onto the
victim, ‘Ca se passe’, which renders the impersonal inevitability of the
original, and ‘Ils le font’, which foregrounds the harassers.
All three solutions
are acceptable, and all commit the translator differently. Those little decisional
acts we perform on a text we translate are what makes a translation a literary
practice, and a practice through which words have an effect on the world. Each
of those three poems would have a different effect on the world, because they
each focalise our attention differently.
Three ways of looking at street harassment. And I was of three minds.
Three ways of looking at street harassment. And I was of three minds.
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4 comments:
This is so fascinating, thank you (and the teens!).
Sounds like a great class! (I had to look up "stoop".)
Loved this post. My thanks to you all too.
I enjoyed this post, thank you.
My choice would be... 'ca se passe'.
For me, 'Ca m'arrive' and 'Ils le font' dilute the transition from stanza 1 to stanza 2.
The hiss within 'ca se passe' does seem to add some, er, female emphasis ?
But then, I'm not the intended reader of the translation.
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