Films, Literary Translation, Recommendations, Translation, TV series

New Words #9: Meet My Pal Hyacinthe

Folks, it’s high time I introduced you to this fine fellow.

A nineteenth-century lithograph depicting an older man with a large white mustache sitting on the floor and playing a small stringed instrument. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Merimee_Hyacinthe_Maglanovich_la_Guzla.jpg
Lithograph of “Hyacinthe Maglanovich” by F. G. Levrault, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

There he is, in all his glory: Hyacinthe Maglanovich, outlaw turned cowherd, renowned poet, virtuoso of the gusle, the finest bard in all of Dalmatia, and my unlikely companion through the early days of the Covid pandemic.

Hyacinthe is a central figure in La Guzla, a notorious collection of “Illyrian” folklore and travel narratives published in France in 1827. It was not, as originally claimed, the product of an anonymous translator’s effort to share what he’d learned while traveling in his mother’s homeland, but an early work of fiction by French author Prosper Mérimée, whose familiarity with the Balkans was . . . well, “minimal” would be putting it generously.

I first read La Guzla in grad school and was charmed by the sheer audacity and improbable success of Mérimée’s endeavor. These stories are melodramatic to the point of absurdity, and they rely heavily on Western European stereotypes of an exotic and unknowable “other” living beyond the Alps, yet readers bought it. I don’t mean people literally bought the book—it was far from a popular success—but certain folks who ought to have known better fell for the hoax. Scholars of Slavic literature attempted to translate the tales back into their “original” language, and Pushkin translated a selection of them into Russian. Even after the volume’s claims of authenticity had been disproven, Mary Shelley translated a few of the tales into English and wrote glowingly of the author’s depiction of “the rustic and barbarous manners” of the region’s inhabitants, their “wild energy,” and the near absence of “any vestige of civilization” in the narrative. (Yikes, Mary.) Aside from short excerpts, however, La Guzla had never been published in English.

Three years ago this week, I hurriedly returned home from an ill-timed trip to France and figured I’d use my two weeks of quarantine to get started on a project that had been on the back burner for too long: revisiting La Guzla with a view to translating it. The book was both more fun and more complex than I’d recalled. I still found the phony folklore and Hyacinthe’s convoluted biography enjoyable, but I was most intrigued by the copious footnotes provided by the alleged translator, whose often erroneous explanations of the tales’ history and their cultural and geographical context reveal more about him—the book’s anonymous and nearly invisible main character—than about his supposed area of expertise.

As La Guzla made its way into English as Songs for the Gusle, I had to contend with the existence of the internet, which presents both a resource and a challenge that Mérimée couldn’t have anticipated, especially when it comes to proper nouns. When Mérimée’s narrator told nineteenth-century readers that he traveled to a village called Poghoschiamy, they had no reason to question it, but a reader today can google that name and easily discover that it does not exist outside the context of La Guzla. Likewise, Mérimée’s contemporaries would not have balked at the Frenchification of character names like Hyacinthe and Jeannot, but an English-speaking reader today would find it more believable that Hijacint and Vanja (rather than Hyacinth and Johnny) were cavorting around the Adriatic coast in the early nineteenth century.

My goal, then, became to present character and place names that would feel plausibly authentic (Croatian-adjacent?) to most English-speaking readers without, of course, actually being authentic, which is impossible. (At one point in the translation process, I had a Post-it at my desk that read: “Don’t put more effort into this than Mérimée did.”) Was “Poghoschiamy” a French spelling of the actual village of Pakoštane? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s plausible enough. Googling it won’t spoil anyone’s suspension of disbelief. Mérimée probably threw a dart at an old Italian map and misspelled what he saw on it. Stop thinking about it! Just say Pakoštane!

The official release date of Songs for the Gusle is this coming Tuesday, March 21, and pre-orders are available at a discount through Monday. In the meantime, feel free to read an excerpt here and watch me read one of the fake folktales (minus the all-important footnotes) here. And please spread the word to anyone who might like to spice up their bookshelves with some tragic elopements, historically questionable assassinations, and practical tips for dealing with the vampires in your neighborhood.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) is the first Irish film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and that milestone hardly seems sufficient. As David Fear noted in his review for Rolling Stone, “In a just world, it would be up for a dozen other categories as well.” The film is full of sensitive performances and gorgeous cinematography, and the screenplay is a brilliant adaptation of Claire Keegan’s story Foster. Check out this interviewwith director and screenwriter Colm Bairéad about the process of adapting an English-language story into an Irish-language film, then watching it find a global audience.

The Reluctant Traveler (Apple TV+) follows Eugene Levy to some of the world’s most unique hotels, which his producers force him to leave so he can interact with the locals and have adventures he finds terrifying. (“The words seaand plane,” he notes during his stay in the Maldives, “only make me think of the words plunge and debris.”) Along the way, he befriends an orphaned elephant, steps into a typhoon simulator, and brushes up on his guitar skills to accompany a fado performance. The whole thing is delightful. And speaking of delightful . . .

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, your eyes are puffy because you’ve just sobbed your way through An Cailín Ciúin, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats, who provided invaluable editorial assistance on Songs for the Gusle.

A dilute tortoiseshell cat is sitting, more or less like a person, on a couch. She is holding a black ballpoint pen between her toes.
Alexis is a paws-on line editor.
A tuxedo cat sits on the photographer’s lap, on which a manuscript printout is partially visible. The cat looks over his shoulder up at the photographer with adoration.
David thought this draft was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. To be fair, he says that about everything I write.

Thanks as always for reading! See you back here soon.

Laura

Books, Recommendations, Translation, TV series, Writing

New Words #8: Why the Computers Aren’t Coming for My Job

This is not a newsletter about ChatGPT (if you want to read one of those, I’d recommend this one), but our topic this time around was prompted by reports of the chatbot just plain making up “facts.” That has disturbing implications—if there’s one thing we’ve already got plenty of, it’s online misinformation—but it didn’t surprise me. After all, for nearly two decades, I’ve been bombarded with confident-sounding nonsense spewed by the translation apps that supposedly threatened to render my work obsolete.

Credit where credit’s due: Google Translate and similar tools have improved somewhat since the ubiquitous “paper jam” / “mermelada de papel” screenshot was taken. But being programmed to recognize commonly used two-word phrases is not the same thing as understanding context, much less recognizing nuances or errors in a source text.

And source texts have plenty of errors, of course! I find all sorts of factual errors in source texts written by humans on a regular basis: tourist attractions listed with the wrong locations, inconsistent spellings of people’s names (think Alison/Allison and Brian/Bryan) in legal documents, and government-issued identification with obvious typos. These things happen!

What matters is how we handle errors like these. If I’m translating a text that claims the Crocker Art Museum is located in San Francisco, and I know it’s actually in Sacramento, here’s what happens: I ask my client for clarification, they are mildly embarrassed (but much less so than if they’d published the text with the error!), the error gets corrected in both languages, and we all go on with our day. If that same text is entrusted to Google Translate, you know what happens? No fact-checking, that’s for sure. If you tell Google Translate the Berlin Wall was a mural in Paris painted by Banksy in 1856, it will not question the accuracy of your statement.

Just like Google Translate, ChatGPT was not designed to care about Northern California, Banksy, or you. These tools are meant to produce grammatical and plausible-sounding language and no more. They might provide an answer to every question you ask them, but that doesn’t mean those answers are worthy of your attention.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure. This time I’m suggesting a streaming series and a short story collection that are remarkably effective in balancing pathos with laugh-out-loud humor.

The new Apple TV+ series Shrinking is centered around three therapists and their social circle. Major characters are struggling with grief, Parkinson’s disease, and PTSD, yet the tone leans more toward comedy than drama. Some of the subplots are less than compelling early on, but now, about halfway through the first season, they are being woven together in rewarding ways. Even before that, though, I was more than happy to stick with a show that lingers on such moments of absurd beauty as Jessica Williams’s astonishingly layered reading of the line “ruh-roh,” Jason Segel’s attempt to scale a fence, and Harrison Ford’s . . . well, I guess I’ll single out the Sugar Ray carpool karaoke, but every moment he’s on screen looks like the most fun he’s had in his entire life.

Gwen E. Kirby’s debut collection, Shit Cassandra Saw, bounces among genres and forms and offers a mix of historical and contemporary settings, but the stories are united by a sensibility that finds humor in tragedy (and vice versa). If you’re wondering whether this is up your alley, check out the story that lends the collection its name—full title “Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at That Point Fuck Them Anyway”—in SmokeLong Quarterly.

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Two cats are napping on a white blanket. One, a dilute tortie, is in the foreground, lying on her side with her belly exposed and her head at the right-hand side of the image. Her tuxedo brother is also stretched out, with his head at the left-hand side of the image and a hind leg propped on his sister’s side.
Adopt a bonded pair! They’ll play and snuggle together and use each other as footstools!

We got through the longest/shortest month, folks! A quick reminder: Songs for the Gusle, my translation of Prosper Mérimée’s bizarre and genre-agnostic 1827 hoax, La Guzla, is out March 21. In my next newsletter, I’ll share more about the book and what motivated me to translate it. It’s available for pre-order at a 20% discount now through March 20, so go get that deal!

Laura

Books, Irish, Language Acquisition, Links, Recommendations, TV series, Writing

New Words #4: Force of Habit

Here’s a story about making things a little more complicated than they need to be—on purpose. Later this week, I’ll take the final set of exams in my Irish translation program, and even though I’ll need to submit my answers in a Word doc within a time limit, I’ll write about half of each exam by hand before I type a word. (Don’t worry! I did the same thing the last two semesters, and it all worked out!) The reason is simple: my written Irish is way more accurate when I write by hand.

a hand holding a black pen writing in a notebook
Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

Here’s an example: I can’t spell the word aghaidh unless I can see it in my own handwriting. (If you’re wondering how that’s pronounced, think of the yg in bygone, and you’ll be close enough.) It’s equivalent to the English noun face, but it’s also part of several common expressions: ar aghaidh is equivalent to forward or aheadin aghaidhmeans againstle haghaidh is akin to for the purpose of . . . This is a high-frequency word. If I’m just typing it, I second-guess the placement of every letter between the first aand the last h, making an utter mess of things. When taking an exam without access to spell-check, I could waste lots of time agonizing over details like this one. But look at the note I made before attempting to type this paragraph:

the word “aghaidh,” handwritten in black on a white background
Look how pretty!

I don’t think I could misspell it by hand even if I tried. The loops just feel right this way. And once I’m looking at the word in my own handwriting, copying it onto the keyboard is a cinch.

At this point you might be assuming that I favor writing by hand in general—that perhaps I’m the type of person who would draft a novel on legal pads. As it happens, I have repeatedly tried to write and translate fiction by hand, but I find it maddeningly slow. In English, my touch typing is fast enough that I can pretty much keep up with the pace at which I’m thinking. I’m able to type with about the same speed and accuracy in French and Spanish, which I learned in my teens and twenties in courses with a mixture of typed and handwritten assignments.

It’s no mystery why Irish is the outlier here: it’s because of the way I was introduced to the language. My first exposure to Irish was in an intensive program with a strong focus on conversation and no computers in the classrooms. I took tons of notes by hand in class, but aside from looking up individual words in online dictionaries, I had no reason to type in Irish until I had decent conversational proficiency—by which point Irish seems to have settled into a different slot in my brain than my other languages.

And you know what? It’s fine. Writing by hand feels like an unnecessary hurdle to me in other situations, but in this case, doing “more work” actually saves me time and stress.

Share New Words

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is the story of a woman in her thirties who finds it impossible to meet the societal expectations placed on women in Japanese society but thrives in the highly regimented environment of her workplace, a Tokyo convenience store (konbini). I also recommend Lit Hub’s interview with the author—an enjoyable read before or after the novel itself.

On Twitter and Instagram, @CatsOfYore posts beautiful and quirky vintage photos, paintings, and sculptures of cats and their people. The account owner is also a great advocate for the adoption of cats with feline immunodeficiency virus, and she posts regularly about her own healthy, active, FIV+ cat. The whole thing is heartwarming and delightful.

Finally, if you need to catch up with the final season of Derry Girls (now available on Netflix in the United States), do that! If you’ve finished watching and would like some more time with those goofballs, check out the special episode of The Great British Bake Off in which five cast members attempt to prepare a New Year’s feast. The results are as charmingly chaotic as you might imagine (“I can honestly say you are five of the most troublesome people we’ve ever had in the tent”). On Netflix US, you can find it in the third season of The Great British Baking Show: Holidays under the title “The Great Festive Baking Show.”

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Left: a dilute tortoiseshell cat is sitting calmly on a white windowsill, looking out the window. Right: an artificial Christmas tree through the branches of which a tuxedo cat’s head and paws are vaguely visible.
A throwback to December 2020, when I put up an artificial tree. Alexis didn’t care. David cared very, very much.

All the best for a happy and healthy holiday season. See you back here in early January!

Laura

Irish, Language Acquisition, Links, Literary Translation, Translation, TV series

New Words #2: Complicated as 1, 2, 3

Has there been an uptick lately in clickbait about “untranslatable” terms? Maybe the algorithms are just increasingly determined to lure me in. Either way, I’m not falling for it.

I suspect this focus on untranslatability leads people to believe that the challenges of translation are concentrated in a handful of terms per language, which isn’t the case at all. In fact, the grammatical impacts of simple, everyday concepts in a given language can affect its syntax, rhythms, and sounds in ways present as much of a challenge to translators as they do to language learners.

To illustrate this, let’s imagine we want to describe in Irish what we see in the photo below.

two bees on a pink flower
Photo by Esperanza Doronila on Unsplash

First, we’ll need some basic vocabulary.

bee: beach

small: beag

small bees: beacha beaga

This might seem reasonably straightforward so far. As is the case in many other European languages, the adjective follows the noun, and both words are made plural, in this case by adding -a. Simple enough! So if we want to say exactly how many small bees, we’ll just state the number and follow it up with “beacha beaga,” right?

Not so fast. English speakers are accustomed to thinking of singular vs. plural as a binary concept; any quantity greater than one is plural. (“This recipe calls for one and a quarter cups of sugar.”) But many languages treat small quantities as their own separate category.

In Irish, if we’re talking about anywhere from two to six bees, we’re going to use the singular form of the noun with the plural form of the adjective. Yup! Oh, and they’re also getting lenited; that means the “b-” becomes a “bh-” (pronounced v). So no, “two small bees” aren’t “dhá beacha beaga”; they’re “dhá bheach bheaga.”

But wait! That was for numbers two through six. What if we have seven, eight, nine, or ten bees? Well, the adjective is still plural and lenited. But the noun? It’s still singular, but instead of lenition, we’ll use eclipsis, which means the “b-” becomes “mb-” (pronounced m). So “seven small bees” are “seacht mbeach bheaga.”

To summarize:

Come on, Laura, counting in Irish can’t be all that complicated. Surely these rules still apply even if you’re working with quantities greater than, say, nineteen? Not exactly. Well, do they apply if you’re counting people? LOL, no.

At this point you might be wondering what difference this makes when it comes time to translate. Two small bees are two small bees, right? Well—translators, say it with me!—it depends on the context.

If you’re working with a factual, informative text, such as a caption for that photo of two small bees on a flower, then yes, the thought process is fairly straightforward. The goal is to state the idea of “two small bees” so that it is clear and comprehensible to readers of the target language. That might not be quite as simple as it sounds; perhaps the target language has multiple words for “bee” or the target readers are most familiar with a bee species that conjures a different image in readers’ minds than the source text intended. Even so, the options available to the translator are likely to be few in number, and the decision-making process shouldn’t be especially draining.

If you’re working with an expressive text, such as poetry, fiction, or personal essay, things might get more complicated. Let’s say we’re translating a picture book from Irish into English. The author’s choice to include “dhá bheach bheaga” in the story might have been motivated by the alliteration. Maybe that’s the whole reason why there are two of them rather than seven—because “seacht mbeach bheaga” wouldn’t be alliterative! Maybe the whole book is organized around alliterative phrases! That sounds delightful for the reader and nightmarish for the translator. If you need to translate the text so that the same illustrations can be used, it’s unlikely you can translate those phrases directly while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the book. So perhaps you’ll decide those are “baby bees” or “itty-bitty bees.”

All this for three words that will never show up on a list of “untranslatable” terms—and a similar challenge awaits on every page of that picture book.

A Humble Suggestion

In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure.

If the writers in your life are crankier than usual, that might be because November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and they’re trying to write 50,000 words in thirty days. I’m technically a NaNo rebel this year because I’m trying to use the positive peer pressure to finish the first draft of a novel already in progress rather than starting from scratch on November 1. Either way, it’s tough! NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit that works with writers of all ages; if you have K-12 teachers or students in your life, check out their programming for young writers.

The Hulu series Reboot has finished its first season, and it’s brilliant. The premise: Hulu greenlights an edgy reboot of an early 2000s network sitcom. The original cast members’ reunion is not exactly joyous, a generational conflict is playing out in the writers’ room, it’s anybody’s guess who is actually in charge of this production, and everything is hilarious. Seriously, go binge-watch the whole season right now. (Unless you’re doing NaNo, in which case you should be writing.)

Here, Look at My Cats

The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.

Cat mór i mbosca beag / A big cat in a small box
My assistant lends a helpful paw as I review Irish grammar

That’s all for now. See you when these 50,000 words are done!

Laura

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