Translation

A pretty darn good piece on translation in the NYTBR. Here’s a good quote:

Rabassa[, the major translator of Latin AMerican magical realist texts,] is gently dismissive of the professionalized, theoretical approach to translation that has emerged of late, but his account of his own practice at first appears contradictory. At times he makes it sound as if it involves nothing more than ”just following the words.” In fact, his usual method is to translate a book without having read it through, the point being to translate the words, not some interpretation of the work as a whole. At other times, though, he speaks of translation as highly subjective, ”based on choice and a rather personal one at that.” What reconciles these extremes is a kind of intuitionism or even mysticism. Words like ”hunch” and ”instinct” crop up frequently. The trick, it seems, is to feel your way into a writer’s imagination, channel his spirit, until you become what Cortázar calls a paredro, or double, Sancho Panza to his Quixote, Hyde to his Jekyll. That way, when you follow your hunches, you will just be following the language, discovering rather than choosing the English words that (as Rabassa says in deflecting García Márquez’s praise) have been hiding behind the foreign ones. The whole thing, as Rabassa hints, sounds like magic realism, a transfiguration of the literal to reveal occult connections between worlds. It also sounds like something else. A practice that combines literal rendering with imaginative transfiguration: the word for that is art.

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