Kill Your Darlings

First, hello!

It’s been a while! This past year I have done a much greater amount of reading than is usual for me and haven't had as much time to devote to my blog. I had the honor and pleasure of judging, along with four colleagues, ALTA’s National Literary Translation Award in the prose category. We each read over sixty books in a couple of months. I was amazed at the variety and quality of the writing coming from so many different parts of the world. It was a highly informative and edifying experience.

After the judging period was over, I decided to pitch a list for Electric Literature of books to read in August, Women in Translation Month, and it was accepted. I did another substantial amount of reading in just a few weeks, as I was unable to use for the list the titles I had already read for the award. (The short reading time was not Electric Literature's fault. I had the idea at the last minute, and I was fortunate the editor accepted it.) I was impressed, again, by the quality and variety of works written by women around the world. The seven books I chose to profile have enriched me in profound ways: they transported me to other places and realities and revealed to me ways of writing, especially fiction, that I hadn’t encountered before.

Kill your darlings

In a recent conversation, a colleague was praising a translator for his ability to mimic the voice and style of each of the authors whose work he translates. My colleague added, "I know translators who produce high quality translations, but they all sound alike."

I believe that my job as a translator is, indeed, to mimic the voice and style of the author. And I am proud to say that Marilia Arnaud, whose work I have been translating for over ten years, has told me that when she reads my translations of her works, she sees her writing in them. Now, for the first time in many years I am translating the work of a new (to me) Brazilian author: Claudia Nina, a writer from Rio de Janeiro. And so my concern about recreating a literary text in ways that reflect the author’s unique voice and style is renewed, as my ability to do it is, again, put to the test.

Since that conversation with my colleague, I have been reassessing the ways in which I capture the author’s voice and style. I am attentive to the author’s choices of register, syntax, and punctuation, to the rhythm of the writing, to the feelings it arouses. And I follow the author’s cues, finding them both at the surface level and in deeper layers of meaning that I can discern through the very close reading that is required of all translators. I now realize, however, that I can be successful in recreating the original text in the author’s style and still insert too much of my own writing style--my habits and preferences--in my translations. I suspect this is one of the reasons why the work of a translator may sound alike book after book, even if the authors whose works are translated have remarkably different styles.

As I thought of this, I remembered a comment made a long time ago by Claudia Marzo, a Brazilian actress whose mother, Bette Faria, is also an actress. Marzo was sharing in an interview that she had on occasion called her mother out on using a gesture that was her own, not her character’s, in a telenovela. This is a good analogy for what I have come to question in my work as a literary translator. I do see my work as somewhat akin to acting: I am recreating a text that has its own voice but is rendered through my voice. I am lending my voice to the author, as actors lend their voices and their bodies to the characters they are playing. Although it is inevitable that the translator's style will seep into the text, the trick may be to include as many of the author's “gestures” and as few of the translator’s as possible.

I have been wondering which of the lexical choices I make reflect my own writing style, words and phrases I am particularly fond of and perhaps overuse. My darlings. I feel that I need to detect and kill them. I must consider more carefully if another equivalent may be more fitting in that particular work and less of a marker of my own writing style.

I have browsed through my translations of Arnaud’s work and spotted some darlings of mine (which you may find on this very page): a great deal, albeit, teeming with, perhaps (oh, how I love this one), indeed, precisely, sheer, utter, definitely, respond, certainly. Some of these are certainly (wink!) suitable in translations of Arnaud’s work, whose writing is highly polished and rarely includes direct dialogue. Claudia Nina usually writes in a similar way. She, too, has a polished, often lyrical style in her short stories and novels. I have translated some of her stories and have submitted them to literary magazines, and I have translated a sample of the novel Porcelain Landscape and will be pitching it to publishers. When it is time to translate the entire novel, I will definitely be very attentive to my own writing style as I compose the text so it doesn't sound just like my translations of Arnaud's work.

In Benedita, the novel that I will be translating next, Nina has adjusted her register to better fit her portrayal of brave, resilient characters with little or no schooling, living in a harsh environment. She incorporates an element of orality in her text, with plenty of colloquialisms, which brings us closer to these characters' experience. Nina "speaks" the way her characters speak. These elements in the writing stand out as unique in the original text and I am sure will stand out in my translation. Still, even in this register, which is very different from the register in Arnaud's works, I intend to be careful, again, not to repeat the style I used in translating Arnaud's work.

Different Versions of My Own Writing Style

How not to repeat the style I used in translating Arnaud's work as I translate the work of another author? How to avoid letting my personal style overshadow the author's so that my translations of one author's work won't sound the same as my translations of another author's? I see now that an exciting prospect is to create a different version of my own style for each author whose work I translate. In each version, I will still be using my voice, of course, but with different "gestures" I have created to mark it as the translations of a particular author's work. As I translate the work of Claudia Nina, I can test this out and see if I have indeed succeeded in using a version of my own writing style that is distinct from the style--the version--I used in translating Arnaud's work.

At the level of syntax, I know my translations of Nina's work will be different from my translations of Arnaud's. While both Nina's and Arnaud's sentences vary in length, Arnaud's tend to be longer than Nina's, and Arnaud rarely uses sentence fragments, whereas Nina uses them often. At the level of lexis, I will probably need to be more attentive to my choices as I translate Nina's works. This is where I will be keeping my darlings in check and using certain words and phrases more consistently to create this style--maybe instead of perhaps? Really instead of indeed? Less utter and sheer and more complete or completely? Or other equivalents entirely? This will be a process of discovery, and it promises to be a lot of fun.

I would love to hear what you think of this. Please leave a comment or ask me a question using the contact section of my site.