On not wanting to translate

On not wanting to translate

It’s fitting to start with a confession: I really did not want to translate that little blue book into English.

The little blue book I am referring to is called Estampas del Libro de Mormón. And it would have made sense that I should want to see it translated. Look, I understand the power of translation. Translation is the thing that allows ideas to flow across languages and cultures. Without it, cultures would become essentially endogamic, forever self-perpetuating the same set of relatively narrow ideas. Religions could not evolve (e.g., the Bible is a translation). They could not spread beyond their own borders (e.g., there would be no Buddhists in North America except for the rare speaker of a certain Middle Indo-Aryan koine). Philosophy would be the sport of a handful of polyglots who happen to be able to read Greek, Latin, German, French, and English. Scientific breakthroughs would be mostly confined to the societies that developed them. So I believe in translation.

In addition, I know that translation is what allows books to cross linguistic boundaries (e.g., Shakespeare would not be known outside of the Anglosphere without translation). I also know, thanks to Walter Benjamin, that translation allows for a text to have an afterlife of sorts. The translated text takes on a new body that allows it to live beyond the original text. (Think of the Bible again, where the original manuscripts no longer exits but the book gets reprinted and retranslated(!) year after year). So, of course I wanted my little blue book to reach beyond its linguistic boundaries and to enjoy an afterlife. But still, I was reluctant to translate it.

Now, when Renan Apolônio Silva approached me saying he had read the book and wanted to translate it into Portuguese, I was thrilled. The book would reach readers in Brazil and perhaps Portugal or even places like Cabo Verde. And when the little blue Spanish book became a little yellow Portuguese book, I felt something profound had taken place. The book had taken on a new form—it was beginning a Portuguese-language afterlife.

People then started asking me if I was going to translate into English. The problem was this, though: I have done a lot of translation in my life, both for money and for pleasure, and I love the feeling of recreating a text from scratch, but I also know that translation, especially literary translation, is exhausting. It is as fulfilling as it is emotionally and intellectually demanding.

Last summer (well, it was winter for me down in Uruguay) the Association for Mormon Letters gave Estampas del Libro de Mormón a Special Award in Fiction. I was beyond honored! I was then invited to participate in the reading that accompanied the awards. For that reading, I decided to translate three pages from the (about 800 words). Someone asked during the reading if Estampas del Libro de Mormón was forthcoming in English. I still said no.

The truth was I did not want to write the book all over again, and that’s what translation is. It is rewriting. And, if properly done by a human, it can take just as long as the original writing did. But, alas, I had already started, and now I felt compelled to do this thing I did not really want to do. So in the end I just quit fighting my rational brain and gave in to my beating heart.

That’s how the little blue book also became a little green book. And while the blue lost some things in turning green, it also gained some things. For example, on the one hand I could never find a satisfactory equivalent for the word estampas—“sketches” is an adequate but not full equivalent (as if such things existed). On the other hand, I asked Eric Jepson if he might review the English version of the book, and he pointed out a few things that led me to change not just the English translation but also the Spanish original. This translation thus provided not just an afterlife to but also a rebirth of the original.

And so, thanks to translation, the original lives on in blue but also in yellow and green. As I think about this, I am forced to end with a confession: I’m glad I’m a pushover.