All writers are translators - Anne Rooney

 

Daniel Hahn's book with
random dinosaur

I've just finished reading Daniel Hahn's Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, and I think you should, too. It's a blow by blow account of his work as a literary translator, translating the slippery and enigmatic Never Did the Fire by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit. It unpicks the work of a translator with forensic detail in writing the same book as the original, but using entirely different words. If you are writer, particularly, but also if you are a reader, you will find this dissection of the craft fascinating and perhaps familiar.

All writers, whatever they write, set out with an idea of the perfect book they want to write. You can think of this as the Platonic "form" of the book. (If you've not come across Platonic forms and Plato's allegory of the cave, there's a quick explanation at the bottom of the post.) It is never possible to create that perfect book. Any actual book you write will be flawed. You won't find the perfect structure, the perfect words. Some of your ideas will be lost in transmission. Your hopes will be disappointed. But you will keep rewriting bits of your book in the attempt to edge closer to its elusive perfect form until either the delivery deadline is upon you or you get bored and give up. (No one ever tells aspiring writers this, by the way. They think they have to keep revising until the book is as they imgained it would be. The key to a successful writing career — as opposed to successful writing — is knowing when to give up.)

In this sense, then, all writers are translators. We are trying to translate that nebulous idea of the book, which is always perfect, into actual words. The words have to capture the essence of the book, not just details like story, character, setting, and so on. We don't choose one metaphor or analogy over another just because it's more precise but also because of the extra bits and pieces it carries with it. If I say something is "as black as nothing" you have a different impression from if I say something is "coal-black" — and not only because the second is a tired cliché. If I were Danny Hahn, I'd pause here to say that "coal-black" has a different meaning for me, a child who played in the coal bunker and carried in the coal we used to heat the house, from that is has for my children, who've possibly never even seen an actual piece of coal used in anger. You will have a vision of "black of nothing", or perhaps an apprehension. If you pause to think about it, you might say "nothing isn't black", which is both true and not true, or you will unpick the simile to find it says "nothing is black" which is comically ambiguous. It reminds me of the Big Knights episode which has the princess worried that the Big Knights "are afraid of nothing" means they are afraid of everything. And because I write a lot about space, "as black as nothing" reminds me of black holes, which are entirely the opposite of nothing, being crammed full of stuff, but which people think of as nothing. So you see every word and phrase we pick in writing our books helps to create their essence. Every word brings connotations, the conjunction of words brings new meaning, and even the gaps are fruitful ("that's how the light gets in", as Leonard Cohen says). 

The translator has a harder task because the Platonic form of the book exists already in another language. This means other people can see the ideal version, they can compare his book with that. For the rest of us, we are the only ones who can see how far short of the ideal our book falls. The trick is not to let on. 

Diacodexis, looking mournful,
neither running nor jumping

 

A fiction writer who creates something from scratch is less likely to think of themselves as a translator, but I routinely translate between adult/academic writing and language accessible to children. I take something like, "Diacodexis may have employed a combination of both cursorial and saltatorial habits" and translate to "Diacodexis could run, and if it wanted to, it could jump." Yes, I've dopped the "may have" — but it's rather taken for granted that most of what we say about long-extinct animals should come with that qualification.

In summary, I think all writers should read Danny's book as you will find a lot in it to identify with and a lot of insight into how those of us with the easier task of writing in just one language also work with words. Non-writers should read it, too, to appreciate what goes into this craft of ours. 

Plato's allegory of the cave (briefly, and only to serve my purposes; look it up for a full account: A group of people is imprisoned in a cave so that they can't see out but can only see the walls of the cave. Outside, the Sun shines on things moving by and casts shadows on the cave wall. The prisoners can only know these passing things/beings from their shadows, so their knowledge is imperfect. This is an allegory showing how what we perceive through our senses is only an imperfect rendition of reality. Real 'things' are the perfect 'forms' which we can't truly apprehend. But of course philosophers can because they use reason, not just their senses. [Yes, it's an advert for how great Plato (or possibly Socrates) was and how shit you are.] 

Anne Rooney

Out now: 

Little Monkey (illustrated by Caroline Rabeira) and Tiny Tadpole (illustrated by Qu Lan), Oxford University Press, August 2023