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Every word, then, must be heard, understood, interpreted and,
finally, rewritten. Contrary to the perception of too many readers,
translators are writers, not verbally clever secretaries. Writers create
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national literatures with their language, but world literature is written
by translators, said the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for literature,
José Saramago, at a gathering in May of 2003 (Appel 40). The ob-
vious imperatives are first the purely technical aspects, that is to say a
thorough knowledge of source language and target language. Included
but more playful and more difficult, too, is working with idioms, word
play, double entendres, and proverbs, the latter being a particularly
common facet of African literature, which forms much of the body of
my translation work, where the literal almost never works and the
search for an appropriate equivalent becomes one of the many great
challenges.
Ideally, the translator should translate into his or her mother
tongue, as I always stressed to my students at NYU. Just to prove that
we don t always practice what we preach, I myself set a bad example,
since I translate from my third language, French, and from my mother
tongue, Dutch, into English, which is actually my second language.
Since of these two source languages one is Romance and the other
Germanic, I discover time and again how different are the difficulties
that arise when dealing with either one or the other. At the same time,
because the roots of English are approximately 50% Romance (25%
Latin and 25% French) and 40% Germanic, there is an extremely
interesting double exposure that takes place, constantly increasing the
awareness of the intricacies of the English language and its connec-
tions to both of its ancestors. One quickly realizes why, counting the
dictionary s main entries only, the English vocabulary is almost triple
that of French 600,000 words in English versus 200,000 in French,
although depending on the researchers, their approaches, and their
conclusions, these are extremely rough estimates and continually un-
der debate. There are two problems here: too often the choice of Eng-
lish synonyms for a French or Dutch word is enormous and the effort
lies in finding the closest one, and inevitably it is never exactly what
the original means. We may find solace in the words of Peter Roget,
of Roget s Thesaurus fame, who [n]ever quite intended [it] as a book
of synonyms, thinking there really was no such thing given the
unique meaning of every word (Mallon). It is an unalterable fact that
certain words cannot ever be translated, even when the source vocab-
ulary is far smaller than the English. There is an exact word for eve-
rything but not always for the same thing in every language. One very
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common word, for instance, and a favorite example of mine is the
Dutch word gezellig, which means as much as cozy, at ease, warm,
friendly, comfortable, used for an evening with friends, a dinner in a
restaurant, the description of someone s living room, a specific at-
mosphere, but absolutely untranslatable by one single English word.
How can this be? Are we as humans not more alike than different and
don t we all know that feeling of gezelligheid? Why, then, does Eng-
lish not have a word for it? But so it is and we must find a way around
it, time and again.
Titles often pose a major problem. Publishers almost always pre-
fer something that will sell, that is to say, something catchy. The
translator prefers something beautiful. The first two novels by African
writers that I translated were Le Bel Immonde by V. Y. Mudimbe and
Le Baobab fou by Ken Bugul. I always make an effort to get to know
personally the authors I translate, if only to be able to go to the very
source for answers to whatever queries I will undoubtedly have, and
more often than not I have been fortunate enough to succeed. With the
Mudimbe book, I put together list after list of possible translations of
the word bel and the word immonde. Nothing worked. The results
were either quite plebeian, a bit sleazy, or downright boring. I con-
sulted with Mudimbe, we toyed with various titles, and neither of us
liked what we came up with. He advised me to keep going with the
novel and perhaps I would find something in the text itself. Halfway
through I came upon the phrase avant la naissance de la lune, and by
the light of that moon came the revelation. I contacted Mudimbe and
suggested Before the Birth of the Moon. He was as enthusiastic as I,
and it did become the title of the published translation. With Ken
Bugul s novel, the baobab tree in the title obviously had to be main-
tained, as it is such an important character in her book and, having
gone mad and then died, is the primary participant in the final pages.
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