Translucency:
Notes on the Translation
Process
The first step, naturally, is selection. After deciding that I want to engage with Don Quixote—to try my hand at a classic among classics, a canon within the canon—I must choose only a fragment from among the 126 chapters stretched out over roughly 1000 pages. As it is the element of self-awareness in Cervantes’s writing that I find most captivating, my first thought is to translate the moment, shortly after the iconic scene in which Don Quixote attempts to battle the windmills, in which Cervantes claims to have discovered a manuscript of the tale in Arabic and thus establishes the novel as a kind of pseudotranslation. But, after comparison with several chapters, I decide instead to work on Part II, Chapter LXII, a section in which Cervantes achieves a unique synthesis of narrative and commentary.
I begin—after typing out the text in its entirety—with a literal translation. Speed and forward motion are imperative on this first pass if I am to gain a sense of the chapter as a whole; there will be time to care for the trees once the forest has been planted. I do not expect perfect solutions at this stage. Rather, in order to combat my natural inclinations to belabor critical moments, I advance through a process of erasure: splitting paragraphs into their component clauses, I delete each sentence as soon as I have a rough English version that reproduces all of its factual details.
In the second pass, I begin to smooth out the awkward phrasing that comes out of this process, check for consistency in my choices, and highlight the moments of cultural specificity that present the most challenge for English translation. In Chapter LXII, certain critical moments that I have marked are references to Barcelona’s Day of San Juan (“aquel festivo día”), references to cuisines that have evolved (manjar blanco and albondiguillas), acknowledgement of the Spanish Inquisition, and axiomatic phrases (“su San Martín se le llegará como a cada puerco”). I also note the frequent references to units of currency toward the end—as well as mentions of texts such as Pastor Fido, Aminta, Luz del alma—which I will have to decide whether to translate or leave in the original.
My focus shifts in the next revision toward the voice of each character within the narrative. After establishing a neutral tone for the narrator, I work to differentiate Don Quixote and Sancho by giving the former an exaggerated sense of formality and introducing more contractions in the latter’s speech to make it sound more colloquial. At this stage I am able to read the text in English in isolation from the original, and I therefore begin to take more formal liberties and departures from literal translation, shifting subclauses and breaking up excessively long sentences in order to maximize the legibility of my writing.
The final pass requires recitation: I must hear the text to understand whether it is truly complete. I do not believe it is possible to remove oneself entirely from the work one is translating, just as one cannot produce an original text that is perfectly objective; reading my translation aloud permits me to notice and revise moments where the idiosyncrasies of my voice, rather than my enthusiasm, is coloring the text. The final component that I add is a brief series of endnotes in which I provide further information on details that, due to their cultural specificity, cannot be translated directly but may be valuable to readers approaching the text with a historical interest.
Ideology
I title this reflective section “translucency” as an etymological shift away from the idea that a translation can ever be entirely transparent. Where transparency suggests that an original can be seen through the translation without alteration, translucency suggests that the light of the original language shines through the translation, but the content of the work is colored by the passage of time. The more brilliant the original work is, the stronger the image that is filtered through the lens of translation can be.
Translating a classic literary work like Don Quixote requires a greater sense of responsibility on the part of the translator, but it also means participating in a dialogue with past writers; the sheer number of translations and interpretations that such texts invite speaks to the infinite volume of ideas under the surface—the fact that it is impossible to reread a classic without discovering something new in plain sight. Classic novels exist, in a way, outside of time: however accurately they may portray a particular moment, their true brilliance lies in the universality of their themes. Hence, I do not seek to uproot readers and transport them to early 17th-century Spain, nor do I mean to adapt Cervantes’s imagined story to inhabit the contemporary world. My goal, instead, is to allow the text and its modern reader to meet in the middle; although I have modernized the language to some extent, I hope that English-speaking readers will remain aware of the foreignness of the text while being immersed in Cervantes’s story.