Deja, are you tempted to make it more interesting, or do translators take some kind of an oath to accurately represent the prim solemn tweeness of the original work?
This is as interesting a question as it is maddening. Let's see: the plasticity of the English language -- the particularities of its syntax, the richness of its lexicon (with its overabundance of words for very specific shades of meaning) -- stands in strong contrast to Romance languages like Portuguese -- which have somewhat narrower syntactic possibilities and a more modest lexicon.
Compared to English, Romance languages are a lot less malleable (as someone who writes in both I can attest that Portuguese feels "harder" to make look/sound good, while often I feel that English offers more possibilities for the articulation of ideas), and I feel that Romance languages don't encourage experimentation and risk-taking -- or at least don't reward it well. Meaning that I feel like English gives more leeway to pyrotechnics that still feel organic, natural, meaningful (I don't think we have a lot of authors that have successfully made "their" version of Portuguese, the way a lot of anglophone writers have made "their" version of English that we can recognize right from the first beats -- just from the top of my head Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo).
So (regardless of questions of taste or competence), just the fact that Mrs. Munro's text leans more to the overwrought side of things means that translating it to Portuguese will involve a great deal of streamlining anyway -- a lot less than if her text leaned more towards the "tame" (for example, more along the lines of Hemingway). By the time I have managed to convey the brunt of the meaning (with all the attendant shadings that I was able to preserve -- and I try to preserve as much as possible, always), the sentence structure will have changed so much, the lexical ornamentation will have been so considerably pruned (due to the already mentioned more modest lexicon at our disposal) that whatever personal touch which I might have considered... twee, will have fallen by the wayside already.
There are of course certain passages where the preciousness of her style comes expressed within fairly traditional syntactic structures, and these are the unavoidable sore spots where I have to make a decision: do I keep them, do I change them or do I get rid of them?
For instance, Mrs. Munro loves her some parataxis -- short clipped sentences connected by coordinating conjunctions (like "and", for instance). While I have seen it being employed to great advantage in English (probably coming down from the King James translation of the Bible, which was big on parataxis), in Portuguese this draws a lot of attention and so it is used sparingly, if ever.
So to finally answer your question: most of the time I try to -- not discard, but "dampen" the original effect a bit, hoping that it won't be so jarring in a language that feels a lot more "naked" such as Portuguese: adapting and making approximations to the original, using the resources from the target language and discarding things from the source language which, if they were translated closely, would probably draw the wrong kind of attention in the context of a more "conservative" language (but still, there's only so much one can to soften things; it might as well be that in the end I just end up with a half-assed Portuguese version of "primness". It could be, I don't know, my mind hurts just thinking about how hairsplittingly maddening this subject can get).
And then there are the few cases where just there wasn't much that I could do -- where a literal translation was available and anything else I'd try would veer off into "creation", and not "translation", and so it was off-limits. In these few painful cases, the Portuguese version of Mrs. Munro voice came off as close to the original as possible. What can one do? Some quick eye-rolling, some light cringing and we just keep on plowing.
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Topic: Oh no you dint! (Read 240770 times)