Clandestine political meetings, refashioning style and rhythm: translating Catalan literature

What does it mean to translate a novel?

Translating is “not a matter of looking in a dictionary and finding word-for-word equivalents,” but instead, “what you've got to do is refashion the style,” Peter Bush tells Catalan News. “It's a question of finding a rhythm, a music that works in English the way the style of the original writer works in Catalan.”

Bush is one of the most prolific translators from Catalan into English, who has published translations of many historic greats from these shores, such as Josep Pla, Joan Sales, and Mercè Rodoreda. He has been awarded Catalonia’s highest civil distinction, the Creu de Sant Jordi, as well as the Premi Ramon Llull, for his work in sharing Catalan literature with the anglophone world. 

He says that the act of translating is “re-reading and re-reading a novel several times” and “interpreting it,” something echoed by Laura McGloughlin, another of the most active translators from Catalan to English working today, who has served as Translator in Residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation and has brought contemporary greats such as Llüisa Cunillé, Maria Barbal, Flavia Company, Toni Hill Gumbao, and Bel Olid to English readers.

For Laura, translating means “you're the closest reader of a novel,” because it means looking “at the nuts and bolts of the language.” Bush says that translating any such work “involves making hundreds of thousands, if not millions of choices.”

Both translators aim to “reproduce the effect” that the original work had in Catalan, “and recreate that effect for an English language reader,” as McGloughlin explains. 

“It’s not a mirror image, it's something that is developing out of a lot of chaos,” Bush points out, explaining ”a lot of chaos in the sense that you're taking these words by another writer and you're rethinking them, you're refashioning them, and this includes all kinds of research.” 

The translators say that they often have to look up political references, cultural references, who the original writer was, what they were doing in their life at the time, what was the social context surrounding them, and what they may have been thinking about. “All of that goes into a kind of magma in your brain. It's partly a conscious process, but partly an unconscious process.”

McGloughlin says it’s a particular “bugbear” of hers that a reader or a critic will read something they “trip over” and come to the conclusion that the translation is bad, without considering that “the author wanted you to trip over that, the author wanted it to be weird.” Indeed, such effects are employed by writers in certain passages or even entire works in any language.

Intimate knowledge 

Both Peter Bush and Laura McGloughlin agree that it is important to have an intimate knowledge of the society whose language you’re translating from. 

Bush tells Catalan News of his time as a “radical student” in Oxford when he befriended a Catalan Marxist with whom he was involved in setting up a political group in Barcelona, still under the Franco regime, they called the Workers' Revolutionary Party. “I visited Barcelona in ‘69 and ‘70 and gave talks, was in discussions with intellectuals and workers, about revolution and Marxism,” he says. “It was a group that Ken Loach was involved with, Tony Garnett, Vanessa Redgrave, Corinne Redgrave,” and others.

“All that experience is lived experience of the culture and the politics, which helps [in translating,]” he points out. “I've translated La plaça del diamant, Incerta gloria, Al vent de la nit, major works of the Spanish Civil War. When I was translating Incerta gloria (‘Uncertain Glory’), there are pages early on where the protagonists are basically radical students in 1930-31 in Barcelona and they're meeting in the basement of a bar and they're talking about revolution. When I read those pages, it kind of took me back to 1968, having very similar kinds of discussions.

McGloughlin also agrees that “it's important to have a local understanding” in order to catch “certain references, even very oblique to the cultural and political landscape.” She believes that her Irish heritage could mean she’s “more alive” to the “nuances” of the political nature of some of the language employed in Catalan literature. 

However, she also feels that it's “a two-way thing.” She says she’s bringing her own life experiences, points of view, and biases into the translating process which are unique to her. “I'm seeing something as important because I'm an Irish person, and there are certain parallels between the political landscape of Ireland and Spain, at different stages. And I’m alive to those things, whereas maybe a translator from a different place wouldn't necessarily see that as important, but might see something else.” 

Looking at contemporary Catalan literature, McGloughlin believes that writing from here has been shaped by a history from being “put in a position of defending itself against a dominant language” next door, and therefore “has had to be even more creative, more diverse, more enriched, has taken from other countries and enriched its own language” in order to survive and thrive. 

“Because of that, when you see the kind of things that were translated into Catalan, like Ulysses decades ago, it was because they were taking from other languages and kind of saying, ‘We can stand on the world stage and we can compete in the same way.’”