For the past few months I've been translating I'm Leona, a long and sprightly novel by Gail Hareven, from Hebrew to English. Like other translators with whom I've compared notes, I seldom read a book through before I translate it, so in effect I've been reading the book as I go along, a very slow, thorough reading.
Gail Hareven used a first-person narrator, who is telling her own story in her own words, so, as the author, she faced the difficulty of inventing another voice, of acting another role, of being someone else.
In fact, authors of fiction always do this, even when they are purportedly writing in their own voices as themselves. Aharon Appelfeld, an author whom I have translated extensively, the implied author whose voice narrates his books, is not exactly the real man, Aharon Appelfeld. Indeed, in the book of his that I translated most recently, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, the story is told by a first-person narrator, whose first name is actually the same as Aharon's, but whose story is quite different.
The translator also writes in a voice other than his own, not exactly an invented voice, like that of a character in a novel, but a kind of imitated or imagined voice, trying to write the way the author in the source language might write in the target language.
Translation, especially literary translation, is an intense experience, sometimes very tiring, because of the emotional demands it makes. A friend of mine who is a psychologist, has spoken to me about the difficulty of constantly making decisions, something that affects busy executives, for example, and makes them burn out. In fact, the translator, too, is constantly making decisions: Which one of a number of close synonyms is best to render a certain word? Should one keep the word-order of the original, though it might sound a bit strange in English? Does one have the right to fix up a sentence or a passage that seems as if it could have been better written? The requirement to make decisions is constant, though they might not seem to be important decisions to an outsider, and although many of them are micro-decisions (e.g. should I split a sentence in two or combine two sentences in one with a conjunction?), they have a cumulative effect.
But even more exhausting than the constant need to make decisions is the need to inhabit another person's creative mind. An ordinary reader can distance herself from the work she is reading, even decide to close the book and read something else - but the translator has to live in the book, and, once he has taken on the assignment, he can't really afford to lose interest in it or reject it.
In fact I am enjoying I'm Leona as I read it. Gail Hareven writes cleverly and with energy, the book is imaginative, the narrator/protagonist is interesting and unpredictable (young and developing rapidly), and I'm very curious as to where all these adventures will lead. The book is both entertaining and serious.
The hours I spend daily with this task are intense and demanding, enjoyable but with an enjoyment I can't share with anyone. When I watch a TV series with my wife in the evening, we share the experience, we discuss it with each other, we decide together whether the series is worth continuing with, we speculate about what might happen in the next episode. That's the fun of doing something with someone else. But translation, like original writing, is an isolated and isolating occupation.
Sometimes, after I've been working on a translation, I just want to withdraw into myself even more, because I know I can't tell anyone else what it was like.
Gail Hareven used a first-person narrator, who is telling her own story in her own words, so, as the author, she faced the difficulty of inventing another voice, of acting another role, of being someone else.
In fact, authors of fiction always do this, even when they are purportedly writing in their own voices as themselves. Aharon Appelfeld, an author whom I have translated extensively, the implied author whose voice narrates his books, is not exactly the real man, Aharon Appelfeld. Indeed, in the book of his that I translated most recently, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, the story is told by a first-person narrator, whose first name is actually the same as Aharon's, but whose story is quite different.
The translator also writes in a voice other than his own, not exactly an invented voice, like that of a character in a novel, but a kind of imitated or imagined voice, trying to write the way the author in the source language might write in the target language.
Translation, especially literary translation, is an intense experience, sometimes very tiring, because of the emotional demands it makes. A friend of mine who is a psychologist, has spoken to me about the difficulty of constantly making decisions, something that affects busy executives, for example, and makes them burn out. In fact, the translator, too, is constantly making decisions: Which one of a number of close synonyms is best to render a certain word? Should one keep the word-order of the original, though it might sound a bit strange in English? Does one have the right to fix up a sentence or a passage that seems as if it could have been better written? The requirement to make decisions is constant, though they might not seem to be important decisions to an outsider, and although many of them are micro-decisions (e.g. should I split a sentence in two or combine two sentences in one with a conjunction?), they have a cumulative effect.
But even more exhausting than the constant need to make decisions is the need to inhabit another person's creative mind. An ordinary reader can distance herself from the work she is reading, even decide to close the book and read something else - but the translator has to live in the book, and, once he has taken on the assignment, he can't really afford to lose interest in it or reject it.
In fact I am enjoying I'm Leona as I read it. Gail Hareven writes cleverly and with energy, the book is imaginative, the narrator/protagonist is interesting and unpredictable (young and developing rapidly), and I'm very curious as to where all these adventures will lead. The book is both entertaining and serious.
The hours I spend daily with this task are intense and demanding, enjoyable but with an enjoyment I can't share with anyone. When I watch a TV series with my wife in the evening, we share the experience, we discuss it with each other, we decide together whether the series is worth continuing with, we speculate about what might happen in the next episode. That's the fun of doing something with someone else. But translation, like original writing, is an isolated and isolating occupation.
Sometimes, after I've been working on a translation, I just want to withdraw into myself even more, because I know I can't tell anyone else what it was like.
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