So I found some of my old essays from my post grad years. It’s been nearly a decade and I’m pretty sure I only kept them because the scores look great, since out of the tens, if not hundreds of essays that I wrote, only a handful remain, and they are all marked 60, 70 or even 80+. One thing you need to know about UK postgrad grading system is that 70+ is A. For my programme, 70 is great and 80 is publishable.
One of the things that stand out, from the thin stapled stacks, is my translation of the “Madeleine episode” of Remembrance of Things Past, by Proust. I thought the wording would look embarrassing to the present me since so many years have passed and I’ve gained so much experience working as a professional translator/interpreter. But no. I was actually amazed by the past me.
I’m glad that I kept both the translation and the source text as reference in the essay so I can quote them here. Look at this sentence:
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
My translation was:
久远的过往会带走一切，人会死去，事物会消散，但味觉和嗅觉虽易碎却能长久地保有，更无形，更执着，更忠诚，就像灵魂一样，在留下的灰烬中，带着记忆、等待和希望，同时以渺小到几乎无法感触的躯体不屈不挠地承受起一座回忆的大山。
Compared to other versions, my sentence structure is slightly more loose. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. My version flows more natural (to me) and carries a melodic rhythm. I think the wording is poetic and it reads beautifully.
If I were to translate the same again now, I can’t say I will produce a better piece. The translations I do nowadays are more technical and, you can say, more boring – things like contracts, financial reports, press release, etc. They require more skills/techniques and less creativity. I can do 5 to 10k words of those per day. But for literature translation, I can’t give a definitive timeline, but it’s going to a much, much longer one.
I used to love to read novels and write little pieces for my own entertainment. And I’ve stopped that almost the same time I started my career as a professional interpreter/translator. I feel like I’ve lost touch with my literariness and “灵性” that used to be found in my writing. I remember particularly a comment from the lecturer who marked my first translation homework in the post grad programme. He said something like my wording is beautiful and I have the potential to be a good writer.
If I were to say what changed me, it would probably be the ideas that got hammered into my head when I just started working after graduation that we as translator only need to simply convert from the source text into the target and don’t need to overthink it. I understand where the person who said this was coming from. He probably didn’t trust the creativity of a recent graduate, and the materials we dealt with at that time were mostly for business. So I’m not saying the ideas are wrong. They may well apply to other types of translation. Just not for literature.
With the massive downtime inflicted by the COVID-19 situation, I’m hopeful to reconnect with the literature world a bit more, and the bit that has been dormant in myself for all these years.
I’d like to post some of my translations on this blog and I’ve emailed the publishers to ask if it’s so to do so. We’ll see 🙂
everywei 