11 Odd Things Learned in the Course of Translation

--tidbits picked up in translating Beyond the Islands (Alicia Yánez Cossío) and Trafalgar (Angélica Gorodischer)--

Some days, translation is like a treasure hunt, a sanctioned scavenge after curious words and unfamiliar allusions. (Happily, I'm a fan of dictionaries and reference books; my dictionary stand is a prized possession.) When the project's finished, some of those definitions and associations slip back out of mind and beyond memory, but others linger. These details may already have been known to many of you, but they were new to me.

Boulevard Oroño

Riddle or rest?

1. Aerugo is another word for verdigris (a green or bluish patina formed on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces exposed to the atmosphere for long periods of time).
2. A tero is a Southern lapwing, a loud-voiced bird common in South America. 
3. Rosario's Oroño Boulevard is indeed lined with "cold, serious, heavy houses, with grilles but without gardens, maybe at the most a tile patio paved like the sidewalk" -- and also with palm trees, Sphinx benches, and Sunday strollers. 
4. José de Villamil, born in New Orleans in 1788, later became an advocate for Ecuadorian independence and was the first governor of the Galápagos islands.
5. Baby's breath is also called gypsophila.
6. A pair of embracing skeletons, found in an 8000-year-old burial site on the Santa Elena Peninsula (Ecuador), have been called the pre-ceramic Adam and Eve or Los Amantes de Sumpa.
7. Newell's Old Boys (one of Rosario's soccer teams--early team of Lionel Messi) can also be spelled Ñuls.
8. Aguamala is a word for jellyfish (not nasty water).
9. Opuntia is a prickly pear.
10. Cheviot is a fine, wool fabric. Also a breed of sheep.
11. And Trafalgar is not only a the name of a battle, and--in Gorodischer's stories--a proper name, but the title of a Bee Gees song.

I'm getting ready to start a new project. I wonder what I'll learn this time around?

Verbicide, the misunderstood crime

The word of the day (happy result of a dictionary detour) is:  

verbicide

1. the willful distortion or depreciation of the original meaning of a word.
2. a person who willfully distorts the meaning of a word.

Note the deliberation: verbicide is a sin of commission. This isn't malapropism, mistaken identity, well-meaning thought getting out ahead of vocabulary. Destructive of language, destructive of meaning, verbicide might be a form of lying. A cause of loss, occasion for mourning, for fury. 

But I especially like the second meaning, the thought that one might be a verbicide. What might a verbicide wear, how might she try to conceal her crimes? Is there a Most Wanted list?

Now, cross-checking this definition in the little electronic dictionary embedded in my word processor, no verbicide appears. The closest options are herbicide and vermicide. Worm poison, plant poison-- lots of poisons in the world. No human agents of destruction (think parricide, fratricide) in those definitions. Just substances, slick and dangerous and, one hopes, sparingly applied. But verbicide goes unmentioned, unrecorded--the forgotten crime, the silent killer.

Riffing on verbicide, it's true, might lead me down that slippery slope, that primrose path paved with good intentions to the hell of depreciated or distorted meanings, decapitated verbs, slaughtered adjectives. And what of the adverb, so frequently maligned by the authors of writing how-to books? Who will protect hopefully, quickly, brilliantly?

Verbicide: stop it, prevent it, punish it! You can't be too careful.

I have never said of anyone, "He is an unrepentant verbicide," but I will be looking for my chance to do so.

So, what is a chapbook?

My brother just asked. And before I fired off something snappy, I checked the hefty  Random House Dictionary of the English Language that I keep on the dictionary stand in my study. According to which, a chapbook is:

1. a small book or pamphlet of popular tales, ballads, etc., formerly hawked about by chapmen. 2. a small book or pamphlet, often of poetry.

A chapman, if you're wondering, is a  peddler.

Not too long ago (okay, probably longer than I think--I'm always losing track of this kind of thing) Poets and Writers ran a feature or two on DIY chapbooks of varying sorts. I was tempted, and I kept the magazine issues on the bottom shelf of that dictionary stand, but I haven't made one yet.

I might, though. In grade school, we had a Young Authors Fair when we all made books. Each kid wrote her stories or poems, illustrated as necessary, and then we made the covers, sewing the pages together (probably stapling, sometimes) and folding fabric or red-flocked wallpaper out of one of those heavy sample books over the cardboard. It was the best. I loved the whole event. All our books would be laid out on tables in the gym, and our parents would file through to ooh and aah. It felt totally real--we had made real books.

I kept making books long after grade school, though I haven't done much for a while. Still, I've been thinking about a bookbinding class. Just as art supplies lure me with their ranked rainbows in open boxes--just take one new colored pencil, or maybe two; just like candy--the bookbinding supplies on the next shelf sing out, You, too, could do this. Use your words this way.

I never developed much patience or skill with fabric crafts or wood. I couldn't build a dictionary stand like the one my grandfather made. But I do like paper. I like the juxtaposition of the handcrafted and the high-tech. Even as I type this on my snazzy laptop, I'm thinking about the gorgeous paper scraps I've been hoarding all these years, waiting for a project. Perhaps we can have both, at least for a while--the e-book and the pamphlet of handmade paper sewn with spider silk.

There won't be spider silk, but my chapbook, Detours, I'm happy to say, will soon be available from Burnside Review. More on that to follow--detour ahead!

Cookbooks--a translator's best friend

Maybe I just tend to translate books full of food, even elaborate meals (the Virgin's Jubilee breakfast in La Virgen Pipona/The Potbellied Virgin being a favorite example) but I have found, mostly by chance, that international cookbooks provide a wealth of information for the translator. Plenty of ingredients--herbs, spices, cuts of meat--have straightforward parallels across languages, but many do not. Prepared dishes can be harder to indentify, and a lush, full-color illustration of the finished stew or conserve can be invaluable. Pictures can be especially helpful in a monolingual, source-language cookbook-- so that's what they're eating! Then there are the multi-lingual glossaries, the explanations of staples and procedures that might be daunting to a cook unfamiliar with the cuisine described. 

Not to be overlooked: the tangential fun of reading cookbooks. So many wonderful dishes to imagine without all the tedious chopping. One of my favorites carries a blurb that proclaims it a MUST for the bookshelf of any serious cook. I'm not really a serious cook. Grim, maybe, heating bean and cheese tortillas at a gallop before fencing classes or recorder lessons. But I like to dabble. Imaginary cooking requires little skill and only modest self-control to keep the snacking demons in check. And if I finally identify an elusive pastry, it even counts as work, not woolgathering.

I suppose it's a matter of seeing "dictionary" in the broadest possible sense--the plant books I've mentioned before, compendia of mythological creatures and little-known saints, forgotten movie reviews. Today's library trip had a specific goal: cookbooks from or about Argentina. There weren't too many in my local library but there were, I hope, just enough to get the characters through their breakfasts and on with the story. Maybe I'll even try cooking a new dish or two in preparation.

My Grandmother's Dictionary Stand

My grandfather was a woodworker, and one of the things he built for my grandmother was a dictionary stand. It has shelves for smaller books and a hinged, inclined top to hold a large book open. In their different ways, my grandparents both loved words. My grandfather was a storyteller who regaled guests at our wedding with a cautionary tale about doing a post-mortem on a dead calf en route to a dance when he and my grandmother were still newlyweds (we married on their 56^th anniversary). My grandmother was a reader and a writer of long, many-paged letters on yellow legal pads, letters that spread into the margins and around the corners and occasionally onto the envelopes. 

When my grandmother died, I received the dictionary stand. It is a perfect piece of furniture. It carries for me family legacies of wordsmithing and of making things by hand--and it is darned useful. It holds books I've had for years, close to hand. The fat dictionary that came with the stand is opened far more frequently than it would ever be on an ordinary shelf. The stand holds the first Spanish-English dictionary I bought in college, at the recommendation of a professor who became a mentor and good friend.

I use online dictionaries. I go to the library and use big, fat, old printed dictionaries. There are new editions of some of my dictionaries, and I covet those. But adding new entries generally means letting some fall by the wayside--for instance, the most recent Pequeño Larousse ilustrado no longer has a full page of fencing diagrams. So I want to add to my collection, not replace anything. From a practical standpoint, translators need old dictionaries as well as new: not everything we work on was written last night. And dictionaries, like other books, also accumulate the marks of reading, and that's important, too.

I'm working on a new translation project today, so out comes that Spanish-English dictionary, and by chance I find a pencil underlining from a previous project. I'm surprised I remember--it's just a little squiggle under the word--except that it was a word in one of the many proverbs included in The Potbellied Virgin, proverbs that were both a challenge and a puzzle. Those proverbs have left their traces, too. I think I'm more inclined to look for proverbs and sayings since working on that novel, both to use them and just to think about them. Certain sayings and favorite words become part of a family's legacy as well. My husband and children, who otherwise speak no German, have all learned one of my other grandmother's favorite sayings. I tuck it, in spirit, onto my dictionary stand along with the books.