Dei Layborer

As an aspiring(?) translator, historical sources are often a prime source for texts that both warrant translation and are free from intellectual property issues. But they also bring their own difficulties, even beyond the differences in language that can arise over long periods of time.

Every year, much of the U.S. celebrates Columbus Day, in honor of Christopher Columbus. While I at least (vaguely) know the history behind the holiday, it’s nonetheless beyond my understanding why it’s still A Thing. This sort of vague incomprehension is my usual reaction to this country’s hypocrisy.

Anyway, my supplemental response to all this is usually to think about how more people/ need to read Bartolomé de las Casas (or Casaus, as he reminds us). From there it’s a short journey to reminding myself that I’ve thought about translating his most famous work for years.

Wording

One of the stumbling stones unique to this project is how. Not in the broader sense, but more specifically what approach I want to take. I’ve been stymied in the past by a feeling that I would need to be very aggressive in my translation, by which I mean changing more than I typically like to. This is because, to a modern reader, de las Casas’ prose sucks.

Okay, this is of course disingenuous. It’s not that he was actually a bad writer, it’s just that Spanish prose from the mid-17th century is very different from Spanish writing of the 20th or 21st century, much less present-day English. But that means having to change a lot more than I’ve wanted to in order to make my translation readable. And readability matters, especially when my whole purpose for translating this is to try to have de las Casas’ arguments (and descriptions) be compelling to a modern audience.

Translation is, in my view, all in the name: it is a bringing over of something. This is where our word “translate” comes from: Latin trānslātus, a participle of trānsferre (“to bear/carry across”). The equivalent word in Spanish, traducir, comes from a similar but not identical root: Latin traducĕre (“to make something pass from one place to another”). As another aside, Russian’s word переводить is a compound of the prefix п(е)ре-, which means “over, across, afresh” and the verb водить, meaning “to lead, to drive” (used when traveling by any vehicle, for example). Russian verbs of motion are wild, but that’s for another day.

This “bringing over” always requires adjustment, some changes. It’s why you can’t just go one word at a time, but goes even beyond that. You have to be conscious of the context, the tone, and what the author is really trying to get at. And you have to do all this while, in one of my rules for myself, producing something that cannot be identified as a translation based on the resulting text alone.

Tone seems to be a particular pitfall when going from a Romance language to English. Because of History, English often has two versions of a given word: one Germanic, one Romance (Latinate). The latter are often words that end in -tion, for example. Also because of that history, the Latinate form tends to be more formal, to say nothing of sometimes taking on some additional nuance or connotation. For example, we have Germanic “job” or “calling” vs. Romance “vocation” or “profession.” Wikipedia conveniently has a list.

But Spanish doesn’t generally have this. The vast majority of Spanish’s vocabulary comes directly from Latin, and so you’ll see instances of -tion words (-ción in Spanish) far more frequently. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the prose is formal; it’s simply what the author has to work with. When I’ve looked through English translations of Spanish works that I know, however, the English often comes across as a great deal more formal than I believe the original Spanish to be.

This problem is compounded when dealing with something older. We often forget that, say, the King James Bible was not archaic to the people writing it. In translating the New Testament, I believe it’s entirely appropriate to have Jesus use contractions when speaking. Much of the Greek text of the New Testament is straightforward, even plain (especially Mark, which sounds almost child-like sometimes). So for text like de las Casas’, because his Spanish prose is archaic, there’ll always be a temptation when translating it to make the English text similarly old-fashioned. But this ignores the context in which it was written, as it would not have come across as old or archaic to someone reading it at the time it was put to paper.

There’s another potential pitfall when going from Spanish to English, namely cognates. Many of those -tion/-ción words I mentioned mean very similar things, but they may not always be used the same way. Take this example from a modern Spanish text I’m also working on translating (more on that another day). The verb originar (to originate) is used to refer to something creating tensions between two political factions. I could render this as “originating” those tensions, but that’s not a common usage of the word, even in an academic setting, so I’m probably better off going with something else.

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Returning to my qualms about changing too much, I’ve simply decided I need to get over it. My rendition will thus be freer than it might’ve been several years ago, while still being true to the underlying content. In many cases this may simply mean leaving out one of multiple times he repeats the same phrase (with at most a small variation), because that is something that present-day English-speaking readers find repetitive rather than augmentative.

For an example of what I mean, de las Casas loves duplication. When he wants to emphasize something, he’ll frequently use two synonymous adjectives (or adverbs or verbs) for this purpose. For example, at the start of his narrative of the original discovery of the “Indies” (mainly Hispaniola and the surrounding islands), he talks about “the great [or large] and infinite islands nearby [to Hispaniola].” I think most English-speaking editors would see this as unnecessarily repetitive or duplicative (see?), even if the words he uses do have slightly different shades of meaning. This last point means it’s that much harder to know when exactly a description is superfluous.

Returning to my example of cognates, he also uses the word “depopulate” a lot, which at least to me sounds kinda funny. It’s clear what it means, but it’s basically never used in English writing to my experience (even in history or academia), meaning I have to find various ways to say the same thing. It’s easy to get stuck not wanting to translate one word into more than one, but that’s of course impossible, and would lead to a lousy translation.

A related difficulty is where sentence (and even paragraph) breaks should happen. You’ve probably read something in English from the 19th or early 20th centuries, and noticed that their sentences tended to be considerably longer than how we write now. This is something I’m guilty of in my own English-language writing. Well, 16th-century Spanish goes even further. For example, here’s the final sentence of the “argument” from the Brief Account:

Él lo hizo, y viendo algunos años después muchos insensibles hombres (que la codicia y ambición ha hecho degenerar del ser hombres, y sus facinorosas obras traído en reprobado sentido) que, no contentos con las traiciones y maldades que han cometido, despoblando con exquisitas especies de crueldad aquel orbe, importunaban al Rey por licencia y autoridad para tornarlas a cometer, y otras peores (si peores pudiesen ser), acordó presentar esta suma de lo que cerca desto escribió al Príncipe nuestro señor, para que Su Alteza fuese en que se les denegase, y parecióle cosa conveniente ponella en molde por que Su Alteza la leyese con más facilidad.

Again, this is one sentence. And to be clear, it does flow as one, even if it requires a little more working memory usage on the part of the reader. If I were to leave it as one sentence in my translation, however, it would be something like this:

[de las Casas] did so, and seeing that some years later many thoughtless men (whom greed and ambition had made degenerate from their humanity, and their criminal acts bringing them to evil) were, not content with the betrayals and evils they have committed, depopulating that sphere with singular types of cruelty, were asking the King for license and authority to return to committing these and other worse acts (if worse could exist), agreed to present this summary of what regarding all this he wrote to the Prince our Lord, so that His Highness [the King] influenced him to deny it, and it seemed helpful to put it in a form such that His Highness could read it more easily.

That is a lot of predicates. To be clear, Spanish prose has more rules dealing with pronouns, so the its and thises which I’ve rendered literally are much less ambiguous in the original. But even were I to correct for those, it’s still a bit of a mess. So my first pass at cleaning things up would be:

[de las Casas] did so, and saw that many years later, many thoughtless men (whom greed and ambition had made degenerate from their humanity, and whose criminal acts brought them to evil) were not content with the betrayals and evils they had already committed, committing singular types of cruelty. So much so that they were asking the King for license to return to them and other worse acts (if such were possible). De las Casas therefore agreed to present this summary of what he had written to the Prince our Lord, so that His Highness [the King] would influence the Prince to deny this evil request. To this end, it seemed beneficial to arrange it in such a way that His Highness could read it more easily.

Again, this is a first draft and still needs some cleanup. But I hope it’s easier and clearer, and also that it demonstrates just how much needs to change to get there. This passage went from one sentence to four, which also requires occasionally adding or altering transitions between phrases so that things flow in a way that makes sense.

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The ultimate question, as with any art, comes down to successfulness (or a lack thereof). How successful will I be in bringing de las Casas’ words across both a linguistic divide and a temporal one? How successful will those words be in moving the reader? On some level I’m doubtless asking myself will it matter? There’s really no way to answer any of these. Just as with drawing, it’s possible to get too close to your work, with the result of either seeing too many of its flaws or too few.

It’ll be quite awhile before this project is finished, assuming I actually do finish it. I bounce between things a great deal, and this particular translation is slow going even compared to others. It’s easy to get intimidated on many fronts, both questioning my abilities and whether there’s any point in doing this at all. I’ve had at least some success on my more contemporary translation, and I’m hoping this will, well, translate to A Brief History.

And truth be told, you never know what will happen. I have three translations from English to Spanish that have been officially published. The first was two of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories, the second (or third) is The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. In both cases, I’d posted what amounts to drafts of the translations online, and the publishers reached out to me. Someone I work with recently had a novel published the same way; he’d been releasing chapters for free as he wrote them, and a publisher came along who wanted to sell them. And if nothing else, keeping up my abilities with another language is never wasted time, especially one like Spanish that I find myself using regularly in day-to-day life.

Of course, other effects could be forthcoming that I never know about. This is where I’ve been struggling of late: this sort of faith that I am causing something positive that I’ll never know about. It’s sort of like the author who’s never appreciated until long after they’re gone. How much solace could they get from this hope or even belief that one day, thousands of people will read what they wrote and be moved by it?

It’s certainly a pretty empty meal for me. There are, I’m sure, better ways of looking at things I work on and all that, but it’s not just a dial in my brain I can turn. I remember hearing or reading once recently that the journey of (religious) faith included a period of all but losing it, so maybe that’s just where I am in this particular flavor of belief or hope or whatever you want to call it.

Until next time, Internet.