The greatest difficulty of translation for me is having to sit in front of my laptop for minutes, not knowing how to translate that one sentence from Japanese into English. So I wasn’t too fond of what I read in Carpenter’s lecture Jumping Into the Pond: “You play with the sound and ideas until something clicks.”
Playing with ideas is something I am frankly scared of. In the examples she gave, Carpenter had to try countless number of ideas before she could settle on something that “clicked”. It’s a time-consuming process with so much uncertainty! But Carpenter is more open-minded than I am. She frames the translation process as a coloring book: rather than worry about which crayon to use, Carpenter enjoys exploring every possible color like a child. Part of the job of a translator, then, is to pluck up the courage to try different options until something clicks.
The last time I felt excited to translate difficult-looking texts into natural-sounding sentences must have been a long time ago. It turned out that I was anxious about what other people thought about my translation, just like any creative writing or any arts that I once created. The pressure of finding the most accurate translation might have gotten the better of me. But it would be a lie to say that I didn’t enjoy translation like a child would enjoy coloring books! The poems that I had to translate this week required the most creativity by far, and I enjoyed the variety of options and strategies I had. Perhaps this contradicting feeling explains why I am so scared of translation. It’s a very complex relationship, after all.
- Marcus
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