Reading multiple choice

It took me eleven months to translate the first sentence of Teodor Haas’s The Salt Orchard, and about three weeks to translate the rest of the opening chapter. I mention this not to boast of my diligence, which would be an odd thing to boast about, but because those eleven months taught me more about my trade than the previous fifteen years had.

The sentence itself is not long. In the original it runs to nineteen words and describes a woman walking home along a canal at dusk. What makes it impossible is that Haas has built it around a single verb that, in his language, means both ‘to carry’ and ‘to endure’, and he plainly intends both meanings at once. The woman is carrying shopping; she is also enduring a marriage. English, which has an abundance of words for almost everything, has no word that does both jobs. Every version I produced chose one meaning and quietly smothered the other.

My first instinct, I am ashamed to say, was to cheat. I added a second verb, so that the woman ‘carried and endured’, and for a few days I was rather pleased with myself. Then I read the sentence aloud. It sounded like a legal document, or a hymn written by a committee. Haas’s sentence moves with the rhythm of someone walking; mine stopped dead in the middle to explain itself. A translation that explains is, almost by definition, a translation that has lost its nerve.

I wrote to Haas, who was then in his late seventies and by reputation not fond of translators. His reply came three months later, on a postcard showing a provincial railway station. There was no greeting and no signature, only two short lines in green ink. ‘You worry too much about the word,’ he wrote. ‘Worry about the woman.’ I pinned it above my desk, where it remained for the rest of the project, and where, I confess, it irritated me intensely for several weeks. It seemed the sort of cryptic advice that writers give when they cannot be bothered to answer the question.

It was only later that I understood he had answered it precisely. I had been treating the sentence as a puzzle with a correct solution hidden somewhere in the dictionary. Haas was telling me that the double meaning was not located in the verb at all but in the whole situation: the canal, the dusk, the weight of the bags. If English could not hold both meanings in one word, perhaps it could spread them across the sentence. In the version that was eventually published, the woman ‘bore her shopping home along the canal’. ‘Bore’ does not quite mean ‘endured’, but it leans towards it, and the slow, heavy vowels do the rest. A reader who notices nothing will still, I hope, feel something.

Translators are often asked whether anything is ‘lost in translation’, usually in a tone suggesting that the answer is obviously yes and that we ought to be embarrassed about it. The honest answer is that something is always lost and something, occasionally, is found. My ‘bore’ carries an echo of tedium (the woman is bored as well as burdened) which is not in Haas’s original, and which I would not have dared to put there deliberately. When I pointed this out to him, rather nervously, he said he wished he had thought of it.

I do not want to romanticise the process. Most of translating a novel is unglamorous work: checking the names of fish, establishing whether a character’s coat is grey or merely greyish, deciding for the fortieth time whether to keep an untranslatable word in italics. Nobody writes memoirs about italics. Nor, I suspect, would anybody read them. But every so often a sentence refuses to cross the border, and you are forced to ask what, exactly, you are trying to carry across. In my experience, it is rarely the words.