Scrittore, traditore
Thus goes the act of translation on a good day:
Halfway through the first sentence, you’ve slipped into the author’s mind. You know exactly what she’s trying to say and where she’s going, adopted her tone and style. Sleek in that skin, you’re reading and typing at the same high speed – a cocky two sentences ahead of yourself in the stretch. Even when the author falters, words trip on clumsy, you smooth as you go without flinching. Oh, baby, you’ve got razzmatazz; you’re a fine-tuned machine, a jazzman high on it, your fingers are flying, electrified mind an open dictionary, a manual of style… your punctuation alone could stand in for poet laureate that day.
So fine and fun, you’d almost do it for free.
Translating on a bad day, however, is like trying to fire up an exhausted Ford Pinto in –40° weather, a painful put putter, and stalling each time at the stop lights.
On these days of whacking a scythe through the lost author’s vague thoughts couched in cliché and convoluted nonsense, of sentences following only sequentially and ne’er a logical progression, the dogs get an extra long walk. They gallop and bounce as you’re blind to the landscape – dreading the return to that queer dark jungle of a text, certain of boas and sand traps.
The rest of the morning spent slugging away and wondering too often whether it’s too early yet for lunch.
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Comment
- And so also the job of programmer, musician, designer, and c. Marvelously put!
— listless May 6, 8:35pm # - Hope that doesn’t happen very often, though, otherwise I might just give up and study journalism instead.
— Marie in Barcelona May 7, 12:33am # - Sometimes I can convince myself that the hard days make the good ones possible.
I read the title while Marcello Mastriani was talking to Yvonne Furneaux in La Dolce Vita on the little TV at my side. A correspondence that has never happened to me before.
Word-overlay – reading a word right as someone in the ambient surround says it – always gives me a big cognitive goose.
— vernaculo May 7, 9:38am # - I work as a teacher and, yeah, I have extremes of those great days where we magically all come together from the start and our minds move forward through the subject so beautifully, building as we go. Everyone’s turned on and hungry to add to it. And on the other end those days where everyone is feeling crappy in their own little world, bored with the universe and everyone’s speaking chinese. Like pulling teeth while talking to the wall. Most days are somewhere between the two.
— mara May 8, 6:05pm # - beautiful, gail, as ever. same could be said of reading a score (except never as eloquently as you!)
— ruth May 8, 8:46pm #
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