{"id":2495,"date":"2012-12-10T03:01:51","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T07:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=2495"},"modified":"2015-11-10T11:12:05","modified_gmt":"2015-11-10T15:12:05","slug":"adriana-hunter-in-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2012\/12\/10\/adriana-hunter-in-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Adriana Hunter: Discovering Fresh Climates<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Adriana
\nphoto: Peirene Press<\/font><\/p>\n

Over the last decade or so, Adriana Hunter has become one of the leading English-language translators of contemporary French literature, but with Climates<\/i><\/a>, she’s taken on something new, or rather something not so new—André Maurois wrote Climats<\/i> in the late 1920s, and it was a bestselling sensation not just in France but throughout Europe when it was first published. (At the time, it was brought to the United States as Atmosphere of Love<\/i>; in the 1980s, a new translation appeared under the title The Climates of Love<\/i>.) In this guest essay, Hunter talks about the challenges she faced in making a novel that’s nearly 85 years old “fresher” while staying true to the language conventions of the era.<\/p>\n

\n

My \u00e2\u20ac\u0153way in\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to translating any book is its narrative voice. I hear a voice and get a feel for its tone, rhythms and word patterns. André Maurois\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Climates of Love<\/i> was a little more complicated because there are two narrators, Philippe and Isabelle, as well as less formal extracts from Philippe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s private notebooks and from letters. On top of this, there is the question of period: Climates<\/i> was written in the 1920s, and my publisher had asked me to update the prose, making it feel fresher but without anachronisms (infatuation and jealousy probably feel the same now as they did a century ago, but other sensibilities and constraints in the book are very specific to the characters\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 era, and I was keen to respect these).<\/p>\n

Having previously translated only contemporary writers, I found the question of period and anachronism an enjoyable new challenge. In Maurois\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s original, even the dialogue can sound like writerly prose whereas in a lot of contemporary fiction even the prose sounds like colloquial dialogue. I wanted to strike a balance, making the prose accessible but still with the poise and restraint of another era. I hope this sentence from the first page illustrates this:<\/p>\n

\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153That is the charm of new acquaintances: the hope that, in their eyes and by denying the truth, we can transform a past that we wish had been happier.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which might have sounded more natural as:<\/p>\n

\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nice about meeting new people, you can always hope that—if you deny the truth yourself—you can make them believe your past was happier than it was.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a perfectly valid translation, but look at those modern contractions (that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s), those muscular dashes around a clause and that gangling repetition of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153was\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. It just doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sound like someone from Philippe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s background in the 1920s. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

On the other hand, I introduced contractions and colloquialisms into dialogue to make the characters come alive. Even here, though, there are distinctions between them: in Chapter XX, I have the formal Philippe ask his cousin Renée \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Have you never thought of marrying?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when a different character might have used the contraction \u00e2\u20ac\u0153haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you ever thought of marrying?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), but I do use contractions in Ren\u00c3\u00a9e\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reply: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m independent, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never met a man I really liked.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The fact that I \u00e2\u20ac\u0153make\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Philippe speak in a different way to Renée is my response to their different characters, it is how I hear them. <\/p>\n

I use the same technique with the different narrative voices in the book. I could be analytical and plan a different style for each voice before starting the translation, but I work the other way around: I go straight into translating the material, trusting my spontaneous response to the original book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s voices. Many writers say books and characters write themselves and, miraculously, the same thing seems to happen with translation: the different voices emerge and establish their identity. When I edit my work I can choose to highlight this effect by ensuring two different voices don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t share any syntactical tics or unusual word choices, but the groundwork is just a gut reaction.<\/p>\n

Another consideration with this book (a first for me) is that it had already been translated into English. I made a point of not looking at this existing translation. I wanted to avoid the temptation of peeking at how they had coped with difficult passages, and I certainly didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want this version to influence mine in one of two ways: I might—consciously or not—plagiarize it or, conversely, I might stray from my spontaneous response to Maurois\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s text in order not to copy it. I needed to approach Maurois\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book as I would any other translation, as a piece of French writing, not as one French text and one English one that I had to splice together along with my own version to form a bizarre multi-parented love-child!<\/p>\n

Climates of Love<\/i> was a pleasure to translate, and I really hope I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be offered the opportunity to work on more classics like this\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

photo: Peirene Press Over the last decade or so, Adriana Hunter has become one of the leading English-language translators of contemporary French literature, but with Climates, she’s taken on something new, or rather something not so new—André Maurois wrote Climats in the late 1920s, and it was a bestselling sensation not just in France but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[492,491,493],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2495"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3776,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions\/3776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}