Catching Fire

A Translation Diary

Daniel Hahn

• Publisher: Charco Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781913867256
• eBook ISBN: 9781913867263
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

An energizing real-time journey through the translation of Never Did the Fire and the process of literary translation.

In Catching Fire, the translation of Diamela Eltit's Never Did the Fire unfolds in real time as a conversation between works of art, illuminating both in the process. The problems and pleasures of conveying literature into another language—what happens when you meet a pun? a double entendre?—are met by translator Daniel Hahn's humor, deftness, and deep appreciation for what sets Eltit's work apart, and his evolving understanding of what this particular novel is trying to do.

Daniel Hahn

Catching Fire: A Translation Diary

For Diamela Eltit, and all the other writers

who have entrusted their precious work to me.

With thanks, and just occasional apologies.

Introduction

I am a literary translator.

OK, but what does that actually entail? Well, to put it most simply, my job is to read a book in language A, and write it again, in language B. I read with all the sensitivity, insight and analytical acumen I can bring to a text, and then I create a new thing, one that’s identical to the original book, except for all the words. A new thing, to allow a book I’ve loved to meet new readers.

One might imagine translation to be an intimidating thing, a sort of miracle of baffling complexity. But let’s not start there. Because on the most basic level, translation is those two things, each of them simple enough, after all: translation is reading, and translation is writing. In a sense, there’s really no more to it than that. Translators read a text, then write another text. Read something in Diamela Eltit’s Spanish, say, then write something in my English. Yes, doesn’t that sound simple enough?

When translators work on a text, then, they are typically in negotiation with two languages, but they engage with each of them altogether differently. Language A is the one they consume. Language B, they produce. Inhale… and exhale. Translators have to be – at the very least – brilliant readers in one, brilliant writers in the other. Each of these tasks can be demanding, obviously. You do whatever it takes to work out what’s happening in this line of Greek, Tamil, Welsh; to see what it is, the something that’s happening beyond the mere words of Language A; and then marshal all your sophisticated Language B skills to write that something, in Vietnamese, Korean, Dutch. So translators are hybrids – a particularly strange kind of reader, with a particularly strange kind of writer. They read through a film of words to that thing that lies behind them – and they write that thing. They read Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse – and beyond that veil of words, they find… a princess, and a pea. And they tell that story.

Of course, some translation actually is straight-forward. Flat, cliché-ridden writing can be pretty easy. Characterless prose stuffed with set phrases can be easy. Lazy, unoriginal writing can be easy. Anyone can do that. (Which is why so many do, alas.) Translating a hackneyed phrase, easily slipping out one tired old Urdu idiom and comfortably slipping in a dull English equivalent to replace it, is, like any cliché, money for old rope. But the good stuff is different. Good writing isn’t about easily interchangeable set phrases. That’s not the bit that sets the translator, or the reader, alight. Good writing, the writing that’s a joy to read or to translate, is new and unlikely, replacing cliché and formula with something altogether fresh, brightly lit and alive.

Any well-chosen word, when pressed into service, will do many things at once. It may be conveying semantic data, but it’ll also be doing it in a certain way – a tone of voice, diction with particular characteristics, the placing of stresses, the number of syllables. A whole web of cultural associations will trail after it. Echoes of other words. Sounds that help a reader understand what might not be explicit. Which is not to say that every writer does all these things deliberately and consciously, but if the writing is good then they’ll be there. And if the translation is good, they will all still be there after we’ve had our way with it – all those things will remain intact for a perceptive and curious new reader to discover. And unlike writing intended merely to convey data, artful literary writing is the kind where all those other things actually matter. So I want to keep them all in my translations. People think about translating as a process of de-coding, which it is; but it’s also about re-encoding. Not just deciphering a meaning, but reconstructing a new expression for it. And that second part, the intricate re-encoding, is usually the hard part – and why I love it.1

Sometimes the constraints we’re working to are particularly stringent. The whole novel has to be in iambic pentameter, or all of the words have to start with vowels, or it’s full of palindromes,2 or every eleventh word has to spell out the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. It might have pictures, so the new text needs to be in dynamic conversation with them, too. Or maybe it’s just been written by Diamela Eltit. But even something that’s not linguistically inventive or tricksy or showy or ludic will demand impossibilities from translation. We know this obviously about poetry – which I seldom translate, being basically a coward – but all prose that has artistry to it does just the same.

Even the very best translators will acknowledge this: essentially, theoretically, translation is impossible. It’s one of the paradoxes inherent in literary translation, I think. It’s easier to do it, or at least to do it well, once you’ve understood that in theory it cannot be done.

Which is fine. I’m totally sanguine about this impossibility.

I’ve seen maybe twenty Hamlets; some have been uninspired or incoherent, and some great, and with the great ones it is possible to assess and appreciate each for what it is, rather than the ways it falls short of impossible perfection. In reality, every performance is partial: a reading, an interpretation, and then an expression. Translations are just like that. They can be good, or very good, or really breathtakingly good – but there will always be something that they aren’t doing. Your performance of Hamlet might be ground-breaking, but there will always be something in the part that you weren’t able to contain within it, however sophisticated and capacious your reading.

Each individual performer of a play script or musical score finds different things in that source, renders it in a unique way. Can a translation be perfect, include everything that’s there? Of course it can’t. No more can a performance of the Goldberg Variations be perfect, no more can a production of King Lear, no more can a poem. Does that mean we don’t try? There’s no perfect translation of a single word, let alone a complex 48,000-word novel. Perfection isn’t even the metric we should be using to think about it. How tiresome to be still stuck with the idea that every translation should be measured against some notional perfect translation and always, inevitably found wanting. Instead of measuring it against its own aspirations or, well, against not existing at all.

If I asked you to complete the phrase BLANK in Translation, you would – just admit it – replace t...

Table of contents

• Catching Fire: A Translation Diary
• Index