Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

In-Translation

by Janet Berliner

The words “Ich bin Blau” in German, directly translated, mean “I am blue.” But try saying that in passing to someone on the streets of Berlin and see what happens. A lot of laughter, or at the least giggling is what happens because, colloquially, “Ich bin Blau” means “I am drunk.”

What, you ask, does that have to do with writing?

First and most significantly, it speaks to the importance of word choice. Translating scenes, emotions, plots and stories into words that convey exactly what we want them to. It’s not possible to succeed 100% of the time, of course, since words convey different shades of meaning to different people, depending on their experience–and eyesight, for that matter.

I may see ticks on a dog, for example, and approach with care; someone whose glasses have been ground under the heel of the bad guy might miss that, and end up a corpse with tick fever. The trusty detective, knowing that, could come to a conclusion not obvious to everyone: The corpse has ticks. There are no ticks in the vicinity, so chances are the person was killed elsewhere.

But wait. I digress. What I really want to talk about is the art and craft of translation, be it from a flesh and blood happening put onto the page, a novel to film, or one language to another.

I looked up ‘translation’ in my trusty Roget’s Thesaurus. The most prominent equivalent was translation=mutation. I find that shocking.

It happens that, as the child of an immigrant family, raised in a bilingual country, I grew up speaking five languages. In ‘75, I translated a German engineering textbook into English. Mutation was the very last thing my lords of the (large) checkbook wanted from me. My mandate was to translate it exactly, warts and all. If I saw better ways to say things, I was to ignore them. The voice had to be that of the dry scientist who wrote the book. Four or five engineers had tried to do the job and failed. I succeeded because I understood the instruction. Mutation was the last thing they wanted.

As I look back at the work I’ve done, I find particular satisfaction in seeing copies in other languages. I don’t recognize my name in the Greek edition of David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible and I only understand the photos in the Chinese edition, which opens with a photo of David levitating me. But to know that the levitation was also done as a life-size cut-out standing in bookstores all over Beijing and noticing that the Czechs add -ova to the end of my name is fun.

Seeing how the British translated the cover of SNAPSHOTS: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction is a kick. (Look at the cover description below, punsters.) The US edition has a wonderful old sepia photograph of three generations, a street snapshot of my grandmother, my mother, and me at three. The British edition has a little girl wearing her mother’s very-much-too-large shoes. The way the graphics are done on the latter, you’re almost bound to think of the soft core series, Red Shoe Diary. What is the book? It’s a collection/selection of some of the best Mother-Daughter fiction you could ever read. Classic stories, which Joyce Carol Oates and I chose with great care, and a few originals. It’s still selling well over there, so I guess the image on the cover, though mutated, didn’t turn out to be a problem.

Because I can, I enjoy reading originals and translations side-by-side. More often than not, they are awful; sometimes they are excellent. Strangely, I think the two most accurate translations I’ve read are the works of Günter Grass (Dog Years and his poetry in particular) and Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Two opposite ends of the spectrum. Then there are the cases where translation doesn’t go quite as smoothly.

One friend of mine, Rick Steinberg, recently showed me the Dutch cover of his book Nobody’s Safe. The title was translated as Brandkluis, which my Dutch son-in-law tells me means fire vault. Apparently, they thought that the apostrophe s was possessive, and the book was about a safe with no owner, rather than secret government conspiracies at Area 51.

In the case of my own recently released Spanish edition, Los Hijos Del Crepusculo (Children of the Dusk for those who don’t know their Spanish), the cover is of a little girl in a nightgown holding her teddy bear while she watches the sun set over the ocean. Very pretty, and a little ominous, but what it has to do with a Nazi concentration camp on an island near Madagascar or a man possessed by a dybbuk is anybody’s guess.

Not that I’m complaining. I love having the book available to as many people as possible.

So, why not get the translation and cover proofs prepublication and have them read by someone you trust?

Sounds good in theory, but I wish you joy of it. Contracts and pleas notwithstanding, much if not most of the time you’ll be lucky to see a copy of your foreign edition post-publication. The best you can hope for is that your foreign publisher simply uses the cover from the American edition, or the British edition, or you’re lucky and get one of the foreign covers that’s actually better (it does happen, but it’s not as funny).

I guess what I’m saying is, get used to it. The fantasy of foreign sales sometimes does become reality, but there are also times when that reality becomes horrific–no matter what the genre. The best you can do is laugh.

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