EDUCATION
“ A happily ever after ?”
THE CHALLENGES , REWARDS AND IMPORTANCE OF TRANSLATING CHILDREN ’ S LITERATURE
WORDS MICHAEL PRYKE PICTURES GIGI GIANELLA
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Once upon a time ” is a good place to start a story . You know that you are in safe hands with ‘ Once upon a time ’ – the hands of a storyteller , a writer , perhaps a translator . Good stories , in English at least , start with ‘ Once upon a time ’.
If we were in Armenia , Azerbaijan , Georgia or Turkey , we would begin our story ‘ There was , and there was not ’. These neighbouring countries , with unconnected language groups , with entrenched hostility along their borders , borders defended by heroes who will not live happily ever after ; in all these places , so defiantly different , they start their stories in the same way : There was , and there was not .
Once upon a time there was a writer , a translator , a publisher and a child . The writer wrote , the translator translated , the publisher published , and the child read what they had made , and they all lived happily ever after . The end . If only it were so simple .
Translation is a strange thing ; translators are strange people , too . A translator is a consumer of one language , producer of another . Translators are hybrids – mixing a particularly strange kind of reader with a particularly strange kind of writer . They read through a film of words to that thing that lies behind them – and they write that thing . The stock phrases , the formulaic opening is , to a translator , like any cliché – money for old rope . ( Or “ Easy bread ” if we were in Warsaw ). Good stories might start with “ Once upon a time ”, and they might end with “ happily ever after ”, but it is what comes between that sets the translator , and the reader , alight . Good writing is the new , the unlikely , replacing cliché and formula with something altogether fresh , brightly lit and alive .
This is why translators , too , need to be alive , to get the job done properly . Google Translate is excellent at a certain kind of thing – but it cannot do voice . It creates translations based on probability – it examines its massive data resource and calculates what is most likely intended . But if good writing is about the unlikely , the freshly reimagined , about doing things without common precedent , then Google – bless it – Google cannot do good writing . It cannot do interesting texture , sound , taste , poise . It cannot , simply cannot , do voice . Writers do voice , and it is the voice that does the enchantment . It is in the story , yes , but also in the story ’ s telling .
And so we come to writing . Gregory Rabassa has described translating as ‘ the purest form of writing ’. It is the ‘ purest ’
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