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Books in Translation
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From: Marc Aronson <75664.3110>
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 17:21:43 -0500
Nice to have the floor handed to me. The problems in translation, especially those issues of rough and smooth, became very large and complicated with the two Holocaust books Ginny mentioned: Ana Novac's THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF MY YOUTH and Eva Roubickova's WE'RE ALIVE AND LIFE GOES ON.
Ana's book was translated from French. In France it was published as an adult book and won a prize. Ana herself had twice translated it from her original notes in Hungarian into French -- the second time because she felt her French was so much better that she could be truer to the original than she had once been. But even the Hungarian was a kind of translation, because in the camps she kepts notes on scraps of paper. Those notes were often highly compressed digests in which a sentence would stand for much more which she did not have the resources to set down. Then, when she was given some paper, she rewrote her notes as a fuller text.
So here was the question for us: the tone of this diary written in hell by a 14 year old gone is very sophisticated. What is that sophistication? Is it what Ana as an accomplished adult French playwright uses? Is it what layers of adult revision added on to an original? Or is it faithful to the original?
We asked her to photocopy the original pages, but most were too fragile to be photographed or were in a museum that would not give them up. She sent us some pages, but a Hungarianist could barely read the tiny script. We could not compare the French with the original, only with the bawlderized edition published by the (then) Communist Hungarian government in the 60s, or the German translation of the first French edition, which we found in the Holocaust Museum.
The problem here was that the book seemed too smooth for a child's diary. But Ana insisted that she was the kind of girl who lived in her notebook (she had been in a sanitarium before the war, and had been devoted to writing). It would be wrong to artificially make her prose more
"childlike" but we had to keep questioning her to satisfy outselves that it was a real diary, not an adult memoir.
So, back to translation, with a document like this, we have more than literary responsibilities, we have an obligation to history. But what happens when someone's diary does not fit our sense of what a diary could be?
All I can say as an answer, is that George Newman, the translator, would spend days deciding which word to use, weighing one against the other. He sent it all to her, but only Ana's husband reads English.
If anyone has read this book, or any other translated diary (leaving aside the obvious case) I wonder how you responded to the tone. As with fiction, I want to open the question of how much we allow books that come from very different times and places to be different and how much we judge them as if they were written by or for modern American teenagers.
Marc Aronson
Received on Mon 09 Mar 1998 04:21:43 PM CST
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 17:21:43 -0500
Nice to have the floor handed to me. The problems in translation, especially those issues of rough and smooth, became very large and complicated with the two Holocaust books Ginny mentioned: Ana Novac's THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF MY YOUTH and Eva Roubickova's WE'RE ALIVE AND LIFE GOES ON.
Ana's book was translated from French. In France it was published as an adult book and won a prize. Ana herself had twice translated it from her original notes in Hungarian into French -- the second time because she felt her French was so much better that she could be truer to the original than she had once been. But even the Hungarian was a kind of translation, because in the camps she kepts notes on scraps of paper. Those notes were often highly compressed digests in which a sentence would stand for much more which she did not have the resources to set down. Then, when she was given some paper, she rewrote her notes as a fuller text.
So here was the question for us: the tone of this diary written in hell by a 14 year old gone is very sophisticated. What is that sophistication? Is it what Ana as an accomplished adult French playwright uses? Is it what layers of adult revision added on to an original? Or is it faithful to the original?
We asked her to photocopy the original pages, but most were too fragile to be photographed or were in a museum that would not give them up. She sent us some pages, but a Hungarianist could barely read the tiny script. We could not compare the French with the original, only with the bawlderized edition published by the (then) Communist Hungarian government in the 60s, or the German translation of the first French edition, which we found in the Holocaust Museum.
The problem here was that the book seemed too smooth for a child's diary. But Ana insisted that she was the kind of girl who lived in her notebook (she had been in a sanitarium before the war, and had been devoted to writing). It would be wrong to artificially make her prose more
"childlike" but we had to keep questioning her to satisfy outselves that it was a real diary, not an adult memoir.
So, back to translation, with a document like this, we have more than literary responsibilities, we have an obligation to history. But what happens when someone's diary does not fit our sense of what a diary could be?
All I can say as an answer, is that George Newman, the translator, would spend days deciding which word to use, weighing one against the other. He sent it all to her, but only Ana's husband reads English.
If anyone has read this book, or any other translated diary (leaving aside the obvious case) I wonder how you responded to the tone. As with fiction, I want to open the question of how much we allow books that come from very different times and places to be different and how much we judge them as if they were written by or for modern American teenagers.
Marc Aronson
Received on Mon 09 Mar 1998 04:21:43 PM CST
