The Art of Translation – The New York Times

The first example comes from the Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor’s 2017 novel, “Hurricane Season,” a murder mystery wrapped around a critique of state corruption. The plot unfolds as a continuous restating of the facts by those involved in the crime.

It’s a story told in village hearsay, and it hangs on the author’s ability to create distinct and credible voices for her characters. A successful translation has to carry those voices over to English.

These are the first lines of a chapter that follows a character named Munra, a sort of lovable (though highly unreliable) fool. Munra isn’t speaking here, but the narrator is channeling him.

Here, just for reference, is how Google Translate renders the lines in English. I’m often asked if machine translation services or A.I. will put human translators out of a job. It doesn’t keep me up at night.

So how would I turn this into a human translation? Let’s start with the first part.

I’d definitely get rid of this ploddingly literal repetition.

Nobody would say “the truth, the truth, the truth” in English.

But some kind of repetition is crucial. It’s how the third-person narrator gives us the feeling that we’re inside Munra’s head. Without it, the translation is faithful to the meaning of the Spanish clause, but it feels stale, spiritless, not faithful to the voice.

Munra, in this moment, is insistent; that opening (“La verdad, la verdad, la verdad”) seeks to persuade.

Maybe one repetition, plus an emphatic adjective, could get that across.

And a contraction should make this bit feel more conversational.

Now it just about passes for something someone might say …

… but not this character.

This next try is something of a joke, but it shows you where my mind goes: Sometimes translation is almost like a session of free association.

I mentioned that Munra is trying to persuade here, but because I read the whole book before I started translating it, I know more: He’s actually providing a witness statement.

Even so, my nod to the courts of law reveals this information too quickly and inelegantly, in a way that the original does not. It’s a reckless translation.

Back to the drawing board.

Could I swap an adverb for a noun? I think we’re starting to hear a voice emerging, but it’s too formal for this character.

What’s more, the rhythm doesn’t hold. Obviously not every line of a novel has to scan, but the three rushed syllables of “anything” at the end of this clause are deeply unsatisfying to my ear.

I’ve managed to get rid of that adverb, but only by introducing a set phrase.

It may seem like quite a liberty to bring God into the picture, but consider the second part of the original: “por su madre que en paz descanse, por lo más sagrado que él no vio nada.” Munra is swearing on his dead mother, and on “the most sacred thing.”

And what’s “the most sacred thing,” if not God?

Here is how the scene concludes.

Everything before the colon is easy enough.

But the last two words are another story. They deftly bring out what action alone cannot — Mara’s essential hubris, self-consciousness and internalized superiority. The whole scene turns on these words, and I need to find a way to capture their pointedly ambiguous tone.

“Alegría” means “joy,” “happiness” or “merriment.” Alegría, alegría — it should be so simple!

Except none of those nouns makes for a vaguely credible exclamation in any tone of voice.

There’s another possible reading.

The common construction “Qué alegría” literally means “What joy” but translates as something like “How wonderful.” Maybe I can extrapolate the adjective and repeat it.

It’s not bad, and it sounds like speech, but from a more literary perspective — considering the novel’s themes — I’m loath to replace a metaphysically rich abstract noun like “joy” with an adjective.

A note on punctuation: It goes against instinct not to add an exclamation mark to this sentence, but the choice of a period in the original is striking, part of what creates that unreadable tone, so for me it must be mimicked.

How about this? I like how colloquial it is as a phrase. I can really hear this woman saying it.

The problem is, without the exclamation mark, it sounds like it’s dripping with sarcasm. That locks down the tone, rather than leaving several possible readings open. On that basis, I rule it out.

This is quite a leap from “Joy, joy,” but I see this character as wanting above all to keep up appearances, to have a successful party. The longed-for piscos have been sprayed all over the kitchen, but there’s still champagne.

I think this is a passable, if a little heavy-handed, translation, relevant to the context and conveying the character’s mood, while sounding natural to English readers. But I think I can do better.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

“Cheers” is a helpfully open-ended sort of phrase, and as a noun “cheer” is, if not exactly a cognate, certainly allied in meaning to “joy,” “happiness” and “merriment.”

But I don’t really hear Mara saying it twice. It feels too flat for this woman sweeping into her reception room to lavish champagne on her guests. The rhythm needs picking up.

When a word or short line takes me this long to translate, there’s always some resignation at the end.

But for now, I’m satisfied.