Translator's Introduction to Four Children, Two Dogs and Some Birds — Web Exclusive
By Margaret Jull Costa
Teolinda Gersão (1940-) is a writer of short stories and novels. She has won many prizes in her native Portugal, and has appeared in English in The Threepenny Review and in the Norton anthology New Sudden Fiction. Her short stories, like all great examples of the genre, compress whole lives into a few telling pages. The story I have translated (from the collection Histórias de ver e andar) is one woman's account of trying and failing to be the consummate career-woman and the perfect wife and mother. It brilliantly blends the real and the metaphorical worlds and is written with wry humor.
Teolinda's stories are not, at first glance, difficult to translate. The syntax is simple, the vocabulary is that of everyday life. However, because many of the stories, including this one, are first-person narratives, what the translator must endeavor to capture is the tone of voice. The question I must keep asking myself is: How would this person speak if she were speaking in English? Once I've made an initial version, translating becomes largely a matter of ensuring that the flavor and swing of the words is entirely English. Seamus Heaney, I think, once commented that English is very much a verbal language, and I'm often struck by what a difference a verb can make in a translation. English is a very concrete, physical language and our seemingly limitless array of verbs is part of that physicality. A few examples:
(a) "Deixam sempre morrer as tartarugas, dão comida demais aos peixes e assustam—se com os gritos das araras."
becomes:
"People somehow always manage to kill off pet tortoises, they overfeed the fish and find squawking parrots positively alarming."
(b) "vi a água sair dos lados em jactos finos. . ."
becomes:
"[I] saw the water spurt out on all sides in a fine spray. . .”
Often a noun phrase becomes verbal:
"ouvia as patas leves dos cães . . ."
becomes:
"I could hear the dogs padding lightly around. . ."
These are just tiny examples of the translation process, but every translation is also a transformation, and that transformation takes place through such word—by—word choices. After twenty years as a translator caught between letter and spirit, I am more and more aware of the delicate balancing act translators have to perform every day.
Margaret Jull Costa is a translator of Portuguese and Spanish fiction. She was the joint-winner of the Portuguese Translation Prize in 1992 for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa and was runner-up in 1996 and 2002 for The Relic by Eça de Queiroz and The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge. In recent years she has been noted for her work in translating the novels of José Saramago; in 2011, she won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for the third time with her translation of Saramago’s The Elephant's Journey.