Margaret Jull Costa

In response to a question, her admission that her pleasure in translating wasn’t out of a particular interest in Spanish or Portuguese literature so much as it was an interest in the English language elicited a palpable reaction. Even if this seemed an obvious point, I felt I’d had an epiphany: a great translator is, first and foremost, a great reader – and, following that, a great writer as well.

Seraillon reports on a great talk by translator Margaret Jull Costa in San Francisco, a lecture organized by the Center for the Art of Translation.

Marías goes Penguin

Man, they look good. Here's the context.

'The spaghetti solitude of the giraffe'

What is one to make of ‘a solidão de esparguete da girafa’ on page one? Should I have translated that as ‘the spaghetti solitude of the giraffe’ rather than ‘the lofty, long-drawn-out solitude of the giraffe’, which was my final version? Does ‘spaghetti solitude’ mean anything in English? But then does ‘solidão de esparguete’ mean anything in Portuguese? Am I committing the translator’s cardinal sin of domesticating and explaining? Possibly, but those are the kinds of decisions I had to make all the time. Sometimes, the images slipped satisfyingly into English, for example, ’as cobras enrolavam-se em espirais moles de cagalhão’ became ‘cobras lay coiled in soft, dungy spirals’; sometimes I simply went with what was there: ‘no tanque dos hipopótamos inchava a lenta tranquilidade dos gordos’ became ‘the hippopotamus pool exuded the languid sloth of the obese’.

As a translator, you have to be endlessly alert and adaptable and also (one hopes) as endlessly inventive as the author, and in this book [The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes], you need to capture, if you can, the hypnotic quality of the prose.

– from "Interview With Margaret Jull Costa" by Sam Gordon, The White Review

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Whose disquiet is the most disquieting?

Searching online for a copy of The Book Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, I found there were several translations to choose from (by Margaret Jull Costa, Richard Zenith, Alfred Mac Adam, and Iain Watson). All four versions first appeared in 1991. My impression was that the Zenith (from Penguin) is the most "complete". The Jull Costa, which was reissued by Serpent's Tail, was a selection of the fragments. There are sites which compared excerpts from these translations side by side, but I'm not sure a well-worded choice excerpt will give a definitive edge to one version. One way to go around this is to buy more than one version, but that would be impractical.

I'm anticipating a group reading of this book, hosted by Tom (Wuthering Expectations), some time in the first quarter 2012. Borrowing from the library is not an option. I haven't seen a decent library since college. Used bookshops are also out of the question. I live in the province and the number of passable bookshops is ... nil. So I have to buy the books (online or in stores in Manila), or swap them, which is also like buying since I pay for the shipping.

Another factor that would influence my choice is the pricing. When comparing book prices, the two default sites I visit are:

The Book Depository - Based in UK, this seller is sent by heaven because the cost of shipping to many countries is FREE! Never mind that they sold their souls the company to Amazon. Never mind too that the publication date of US-published titles are delayed by a month or so, and that shipping to an island in the Philippines takes about a month. The prices often compare favorably against those of bookstores.

BookFinder.com - another heaven sent site. It's particularly useful when finding out of print titles.

I'm inclined toward getting the Zenith version. It could prove to be the most disquieting.

The most disquieting discovery I made however is this. Copies going for almost a thousand dollars.

(Date accessed 4 December 2011, 4:23 pm)

Celebrating José Saramago

  

Margaret Jull Costa's profile of José Saramago can be read "online only" at Granta. What caught my eye was her quote of Saramago in an interview, discussing the point where he realized a way to proceed more effectively with his storytelling, the very point of his transition to a "non-punctuated style".

I was already at the twentieth section of the book [Levantado do chão] and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that’s impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say ‘apparent’ since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.

I underlined "apparent spontaneity ...". It described a realistic style which I find very absorbing, a style in which method is closely tied to content and form. It's the same spontaneous style one can also detect in César Aira and Javier Marías. Spontaneity in these writers can be a result of a desire for "authenticity" (I use this term loosely, as it has many pitfalls).

Margaret Jull Costa analyzed this writing style (which is closer to that of Marías whom she also translated):
 

In reducing punctuation down to commas and full stops, in letting a sentence follow the natural digressions of thought, Saramago cuts himself free from the straitjacket of conventional realistic literature, allowing himself, as narrator, to carry the reader along on the wave of those thought processes, those digressions. [...]

One cannot help but see this egalitarian approach to both punctuation and narration as an expression of Saramago’s declared anarcho-communism and atheism, as cocking a snook at orthodoxy and authority, be it God or Government, and as a way of privileging the spoken voice, the ordinary human voice. [...]

Read more here.




(Image sources: Asymptote and The New York Times, from Small Memories; prae.hu)