First Sentences

[Pause] A LitHub Radio Podcast I once saw a Lego metaphor for translation on some online forum somewhere I liked it, but it was slightly off and then I forgot it So I had to make up a new one. I've thought of a few versions I'm still trying to get it right Here is one version Imagine if you will that you have purchased the Hogwarts Castle Lego set You have given up the dining room table for this project You get about three quarters of the way through than a dog or a cat or maybe just a lurching adult bumps into it Broken, you weep, you've lost the instructions Many pieces are stuck on the floorboards Some are under the carpet So you rebuild Sans instructions You don't have enough pieces So you repurpose the space station gathering dust in the corner The Lego friends camper set and sort of shop you use all these things and the picture on the box to create a new and somewhat peculiar Hogwarts Castle It's made of the wrong materials and put together in a different way but it's oddly beguiling, this is translation That was Daisy Rockwell, reading the Lego metaphor From a series of poems she's written titled "Mixed Metaphores for Translation" A few of them were published in the Paris Review but Daisy has many more of her sleeve I love how these poems capture distinct visions of what a translator does and a few of our episodes will open with her reading them Now anyone who's been around kids knows that a good Lego build starts with a good base In a translation, this is the first sentence of a text First sentences are so often the most famous lines They're a place for a translator to make her mark and they can dictate the voice in which the book unfolds but has the importance of the first sentence been overly inflated This is the critic in her publics from the New York Review of Books in LitHub I'm your host, Marva Emre You're listening to Hawthorne's Como Conversation on Translation When I was speaking to some of you earlier you expressed your not surprised, surprise is too strong of a word but your interest that I had given you the Madeline passage as opposed to the much more famous and more hotly debated first sentence of the first volume of proofs There's so much emphasis in debates of her translation on the first sentence I'm curious to hear all of you weigh in on the over emphasis that's placed on first and last sentences by people either translating or judging translations formally or informally I don't think it's fair for me to begin because I think first sentences are really important and they're really really difficult because you're establishing the voice, the context, everything and if you have the first sentence I ever tried to translate which I first attempted 46 years ago and I'm finally sent into the publishers who finally bought it just before coming here and I'm still not sure that I'm happy with what I've done but this is what we're up against, hold on okay, so I don't have the Turkish in front of me but the crib for it is on the 12th of March when instead of burning picks and shovels the burning of people began at least to the extent that people can be burned by being thrown into prison there were a number of methods okay, well that's not a good way of starting it there's a problem about the 12th of March which means still 12th of March 1971 it was the first of the really infamous coups and people still refer to that time of military takeover as the 12th of March so that's context thing and then you have the proverb okay, so the proverb in Turkish is "Mart קبرномба צُرُّ" it calls them a Qürek, "Ya צُرُّ" you know that one? okay, which is really hard to translate that's like you heard it at rhymes March peeks through the door, makes picks and shovels burn and even in Turkish it leaves out the most important part the understood part of it is you burn the handles of the picks and shovels because you run out of fuel, other fuel and that's all, you know, that passive voice is an issue again here and also the greater meaning of the word "burn" in Turkish you burn somebody by betraying them and you burn by being caught so there's so many different meanings and what she's doing with this sentence is portraying the military as becoming desperate running out of other things to do and then burning the things that they'll need to grow the country again so I felt it was really important to figure out a way to bring that conceit through because that's what she goes on to shape the next few pages and any advice but I think that most important thing for me was because she has a very playful voice she's talking about terrible things, she's talking about the crushing of an entire generation she's talking about torture she is determined that she's not going to be frightened of the generals and so I need to establish that voice, you know, I'm talking about these things but I'm still laughing at them so, okay, any advice I think it's become like a hotline or something I need a hotline but I mean the issue when we have really, really famous first lines is that everybody is invested it's like saying that you have the real recipe for Texas chili, yeah? everybody has a view but as practicing translators bringing in books from other places, historical periods, and so on there's a host of other problems, some of them are to do with grammar, some of them are to do with context so you have the solution, I can tell No, I often have the same problem which is that Chinese novelists don't necessarily believe that first lines need to set the tone or grab your attention in the same way that we have and I often do need to do the same kind of reconstructive surgery in conversation with the author, say here are the expectations of English readers, their attention spans are shorter so you need to get them from the off but it is different with famous first lines I think that they are something that's stick in the imagination and then they exert a certain pressure I have made a habit of collecting check-off first lines because there are so many check-off versions and with the Seagull, the famous first lines, why do you always wear black? I'm in mourning for my life, I'm unhappy are the same in many translations but you can tell that at a certain point they started exerting pressure on more recent adapters who then tried to find creative solutions that would take them away from that to put their own stamp on the work otherwise why do we need another version of the Seagull? So you have John Donnelly going, "Oh, who died?" and "Anna Reese" again? What? Again? Black? Talking about bets, inverting it and having Marsha start with "All right then let's hear it" what's so wrong with black? That sounds so English Yes, well this is another whole separate discussion about check-off and the way he has been domesticated for theatrical production Word I don't like very much but it really does play Seagull Yes, I think a theatre, you know, and you have to suit the actors and so on and that's. And it's Vanessa Reggrave, yeah Yes, that's a whole other podcast probably And she won't say that I think also that we analyze a lot what a translator was doing with the first line and forget that the first line is something that the editors have a lot to do with too because it's part of the marketing so it's like the cover design, the title and then that first sentence is if somebody liked the title and the design or the heart of the author they pick it up and they open it and they read that first sentence so that first sentence is part of the marketing package as well which is not true of Scotland on Cree for somebody like that who wasn't working in our hyper capitalist system but nowadays it's very important and the first line is a thing that, you know, armchair translation critics will go after because it's right there and it's easy to go for and it's much harder to go after the big chunk 500 pages in that, you know, really needs a critique or something like that so the first line is something that we, as translators, control less than the rest of the book Well, I think if we find a solution then we're less likely to have to fight those battles Yeah But coming into translation from writing my own novels that's when I know from my own first line whether it's going to take me into the trans that will write the rest of the book So it's not something I feel I must do. It's something that I want to do because I want to enter into the other person's trance and generally I'll find in my own books too, my own novels too, when I go back to them, I cannot see it in the beginning. But the seed that may or may not grow is always somewhere unanswered question in that first passage. I wanted to just mention Caroline Bergval's extraordinary meditation on the first line of Dante's divine comedy, one of those lines that everyone can quote in. It's called "Via 48 Dante Variations," what she does is collect 47 English variations of the first line and just weave them together, the 48th of the title, being of course the poem that collects them all. I think that this is a wonderful reflection on the power of the first lines and how translators are in so many ways impacted by the previous translations and how we expect that text to sound. I think we can certainly hear that in the proof. But I wanted to touch on something that you just mentioned, worrying which is that the seed I think of the work is really so much in the first line. I think that's why the pressure is so much there and trying to understand what that first line is really doing. Your example has the extra complexity and this is a separate perhaps topic, but what do we do when there's something so significant like a date that anyone in the world in Turkey would know what that means, how we gloss that, footnote that, embed something in it, hope that they've read your translators note. In other words, how can we introduce the essential information for that date to resonate or a particular name or a particular place to resonate? I think those are real challenges for translators when a word holds so much more than just a word, a date, a place name in the original language. If I can read a sentence from Kiran Dello from one of his short stories, this is a sentence that I worked on for months, and it sets the tone for this very delightful moving theological story called Faith La Fade de, in which the first sentence encapsulates the entire ruin, the movement of the light, the question of interconnectedness of things. I felt like I had to identify the work of this syntax, Italian sentences can be and often are much longer than we sustain in English, and so one of my jobs, I think, as a translator is to understand if and when I could break up those sentences, not because of an attention span, but to make them do the same kind of work that they would do in English. In this sentence I felt had to be all held together, so here it goes. Her father was from the Palchetto regos, amans такo r frontal that did saltailate commemorative of an independence honour in the Vikings. You were tying a cross, the weight arm, and the hip� trabajar, feeling the elbow. Too simple. I did feel in this case that the light moving, the light and piece moving into this room had to encapsulate all of that. So into the priest's humble little room full of light and piece with its old Valenza bricks that here and there had lost their glaze and on which a rectangle of sunlight from the window stretched silently and softly through gold-fledged dust-mots on bricks stamped with crisp shadows of the embroidered curtains and even the green cage hanging from the shelf with the canary hopping about inside, their wafted the smell of just baked bread from the oven into the little courtyard below, a warm breath that melded with the damp odor of incense from the nearby chapel, and the pungent scent of lavender sprigs tucked among the linens in the old high boy. Really good. The sensual scent of this smell that rises up in permeates, which is going to be how this faith, this mysterious faith permeates every motion. You have these cascading clauses, and you have that sense of something wonderful happening as the cascade happens. And you spent months on it. So what were you doing during those months when you returned to the sentence? What were the difficulties? Trying to figure out how I could hold that cascade in a way that both made sense grammatically. In English, obviously, this demands a lot of attention, but it also created a trance at the same time. So I think my first approach was to say, "This is impossible to do." In English, let me figure out how I can perhaps break this up, but going back and reading again and again. So one of the things I was doing was losing myself in the trance of this story, being transported by the experience that the story itself is about a young priest who is preparing to go to his mentor, Elder Priest, and say that he is leaving the priesthood, and the priest sends him to just go speak to a woman first, an old woman, and that encounter changes him and makes him realize what the deep meaning of faith is. So it's a story that moves really in the interiority of this man's soul, but that is a transport within him that is provoked by all of these rich details of the nuts and the chicken and the grain that this woman brings. So the offerings of the world that come into the soul, kind of is like that, bruised in some way. So the more I understood the story, the more I realized that this particular sentence had to stay together. And just to accomplish that, grammatically, took a lot of work. Back to your opening sentence of that you're translating, are you going to keep the length of it? It seems like it. This one, because you found-- Is that the-- That particular one? No. I'm breaking every rule in my book in order to get going, what I want to get going, although I can't speak to the author. She died just before I read the book. But I don't want to make the decision alone. So what I've done is I've just sent in my recent solution. And I've not put a footnote because I just want it to flow. And especially when you're trying to set up a trance, a footnote is the last thing I want to do. I mean, obviously, one day I'll have something before me that I'll have to use a footnote for it. But it's the last thing I want to do. Well, I mean, as a writer, like to just go back to what you were saying, how as a writer yourself, you feel like there is an importance, a significance to the first sentence that sets up the trance. I do think that it's merited that the first sentence be important, not just because we're in a hyper-capitalistic system, and because it's the first line that editor reads and sets up whether they want to acquire the book or not. But I almost feel when I'm writing, I've gone through so many first sentences and scrapped it and thought to myself, like, "If I don't get the first sentence right, this whole book is cursed, and it will not go the way I want to. There's only one way to begin it, and I need to find the way to begin it. And if I don't begin it in the right way, then whatever will issue forth from the first sentence will not be good enough." But you write novels as well. So that is something that comes out of that partly, I would imagine. Well, I don't think of any first sentence like that, but my sort of worst sentence that I had to deal with was with Tirmof Sand. This was when I was trying to decide if I could translate it. And it comes up on the third page, I think, where the main character says she won't get out of bad. And she says, "Now I won't get up." And it's rests on this pan of that non-humorous variety that I was mentioning, where the word "frinow" when sort of slurred sounds like the feminine form of new, the adjective new. So she goes, "Keep saying no, no, no, no. I won't get out of bed." And then it can transform into, "I will, instead of I will not get out of bed, I will arise." I knew. Right? So I had to make it to pull that. I felt like that was what the whole book was about, rather than the first sentence. It was that Linchpin was this pun. And so if I could not figure out how to recreate that pun, then I couldn't translate the book that was what I decided. So I was sitting at my computer doing all kinds of crazy things, and literally stretching the language by putting it in. at lots of extra letters like "no" and the "ny-o-o-o" and things like that. I was doing that and my daughter was about nine at the time and she looked over my shoulder and she started laughing hysterically. And she got her eye pad and she took a picture of my screen and I felt so defeated. I'm turned to listen to some absurd exercise. Just a question about that because it sounds like you're doing something that I've done as well, which is in order to find solution, I've had to play around and go really far away from the sentence before me and then I come back to it. I don't think you just throw it up in the air all the way and then you start batting them around and see if what falls down and eventually you actually settle upon something which, and I think that even though it was absurd what I did, nobody laughed, which was important to me. Because it was not humorous, it was absurd but it wasn't a belly laugh kind of reaction. And there's an opposition there, you know, I will not. And it also is true that going back to Cognites that both now and new in English are very remotely Cognites to the Hindi ones in the heat and they are actually start with ends and are very distant relatives in the proto-Indo-European space. So like I was able to actually be a little bit Lydia Davis and go after Cognites. I mean I think with languages that are further from English, there are so many decisions that need to be made from the off with Chinese I often, like we'll do the first page in one tense or another. And then sometimes you only decide quite late on it and it's really annoying because you have to go back and change everything. But I do spend a lot of time at the beginning, not just on the first sentence but maybe the first chapter finding the voice. And I've heard other translators talking about the messy first draft and that's not so it. I can't do it. You have to get the voice, you have to get it before you can proceed. So yeah, it's a lot of time at the start just doing things like the book I translated that was told from the point of view of the donkey. I spent a lot of time deciding what the donkey's voice was because you don't want what I didn't want the donkey to say he or which is not open. But like the Chinese and in the end I went with the Chinese own onomatopoeia which is angji. But then I'll read us hearing it as a Chinese reader with the donkey wing angji. Or do they just see angji and go what is that but also he or doesn't work. So can I ask a question about anomatopoeia because that's one of the great beauties of Turkish. There's just so much of it and they'll have a word that they'll or sound that they'll repeat several times. And so certain authors I've translated make a lot of use of it and it's really hard to bring in. So what did you do? I kept the onomatopoeia as close to the Chinese as I could even where it would be unfamiliar and I feel like people just have to go with it. And you put in some scaffolding so it's clear what each sound is but I do feel it has an effect on the reader to understand that in other places in the world animals might not be thought to sound the same. I think it's good. It's an opportunity to bring the reader into another world, unfamiliar world, the world of the text that you're in. And the world of sound. I always have trouble in Indonesian whether to put something in past tense or present tense because the tenses don't work in the same way. In built into English grammar but in Indonesian you could have everything be like and I did I think I translated one novel and the author was like I'd like it to be all in present tense and I'm saying okay. But you know and it up being pretty good. Sorry just speaking of first sentences. I just pulled up the opening of one of the short stories from people from Bloomington by Boudidharma and this one is kind of like sort of a dark sinister story about people who have a very difficult child which resonated with me because I had a difficult first child. Sorry first child I know I'm scoring you by saying this. But you know it begins with like umur or es me amang bulumpanjang masih lima taon lebi tiga bulan and it says it's literally like or as that's his name which is zero backwards actually. Really wasn't that old or you know in age he's still only five years and three months but I think there's like a sort of sinister bent to it like in the course of the story the narrator tries to kill the child but there's a sense of like oh we hadn't you know we didn't have him for that long with us. We're only five years and three months and it kind of feels like oh we've had him forever but he's only five years and three months old and so I translated this as I took out the age part almost and I said or as hadn't even been with us for that long. He was only five years and three months old but it's just interesting to you know what you want to emphasize with that first sentence and how you want to draw people in. I would I sometimes cheer myself up by saying if you're translating into English from a non-Western language the distance is greater but there's also more room for the imagination to not bridge the gap but to do something new. I'm the most difficult passages I've had the ones that make me love the book and the language most yeah. I think I could just say adding on to that that translation is really the deepest form in the way of reading and so I find that as I work the messiness of that first draft isn't because I'm not seeking or trying that voice and going back but because I get to know the work so much more as I see into it and it's one of the great pleasures is that I'm not going to do that. The great pleasures is really having that intimate long sustained intimate time with another mind another culture and to go through that process again and again in various revisions to bring and to appreciate what is actually being accomplished in this language whether it's the alliterations or the syntax the references the silences of a text and how we also honor those. So I'm a question if you're writing in English after translating a lot well for me some of my sentences have become very long. I manage to vary them with short sentences but it's basically I feel much more free in English because I worked out ways of having a thread that goes through all of those different cascading phrases for example as as in your excerpt. So my sentence is much shorter because I'm so glad to be rid of those huge sentences so I can just have little tiny concise sentences. So you take really really long sentences and no I'm saying after I've been translating I go and write myself and I say yay at last I can just have little tiny sentences. I'm with you in the long sentences Maureen I've imported my pawn shop for commas slices into my own writing. And you know it's liberating you're kind of once you've seen how the constraints of English grammar don't have to apply how you can achieve certain effects if you just let go of what you were taught at school then. How does the beginning operate differently for those of you who are working in other forms and mediums we've been talking about the first sentence presumably of novels or short stories mostly Jeremy I know you gestured to check off. So I'm curious for those of you who work in poetry for those of you who work in the theater in translating plays or writing plays and Jenny you work on movie scripts and on subtitles. How is the conversation we're having a conversation that's very specific to a particular form in a particular medium or is it. I think for poetry all of the lines matter. And with theater my final draft is someone else's first draft so in a way I don't have to stress as much about getting the first line right because I know we're going to go into the rehearsal room and the director start getting things on the feet and we'll know immediately if it works or not doesn't need shifting and we'll mess around with this and. And you're moving as you say that. It's all very embodied isn't it yeah yeah yeah I would say in film and TV. So much is established by the visual as well whether you have lead in music what the set is what the lighting is that contributes to how the tone of that first. sentence is so not to say there's less pressure in any way on the first utterance of a film or a TV episode but there's other factors that are contributing to creating that mood, that tone, that set everything that is to follow. In a screenclimbed for this is also obviously true in your theater work that there's both the question of what someone will say and then how that line is delivered and so the final success in a sense of the translation of a translated script is how the actor delivers that. So there's different moments in the creation of a film when what that translation is doing has different responsibilities but in the end it's handed off to the actor. I agree, I mean I haven't translated it's in screenplays or anything but with poetry yes it's a very different process. I wanted to go back to Priest for one last moment. Yes please go back to Priest for one last moment. As my daughter would say I'd like to drop some Scott Montcreef lore. She doesn't talk about Scott Montcreef but she talks about dropping lore. I've always been kind of a stan of Scott Montcreef and I've written biography but one story that I always remind myself of when I'm having trouble with an author or feeling unappreciated because a lot of authors can't tell if your translation is good or not because they're so embedded even if their English is perfect. So embedded in their own text that all they see is this pale kind of imitation. So I remind myself of one of his stories which was that Priest didn't have very good English and he would read bits of it and he would quarrel with him and one of the things he really objected to was the title swans way because he thought it meant in the manner of swan and he thought it should be you know while walking past swan's house or something like something like really clumsy like that and it was just infuriating to Scott Montcreef but you know I just tried to remind myself that this iconic title swans way the author didn't care for at all and that that's just you know something we live with that we're creating a version that that they author might never appreciate or never have appreciated if they're not living. You've been listening to Hawthorne and his comal conversozione from the critic in her publics. I'm Marva Emre and I'd like to thank the staff at the Hawthorne and Foundation which is one of the largest funders of the literary arts in the US and UK. Thank you also to the Shapiro Center and the president's office at Wesleyan University, the New York Review of Books and Lit Hub. Thank you to our producers Mia Foster and Zachary Fine, to our wonderful editor Michelle Moses and to Danny Lensioni for her score. Join us tomorrow for a conversation on the perils of English as a global language.