Journal of an Apprentice Translator
by Kirsten Giebutowski

August 26th

The first translation workshop met today and it’s true that I don’t need to be fluent in another language to participate. Almost none of us will be matched with a writer whose first language we speak, because many of the writers coming to spend the semester here are from Asia or the Middle East, and most of us in the class know only European languages. The writers will know English well enough for us to communicate with them. I hadn’t known Csezlaw Milosz sometimes worked this way, collaborating with non-Polish speakers on English translations of his poems. Something to tell the incredulous ones, who think this workshop sounds misguided.

September 2nd

Today we match ourselves up with the international writers. We each have to stand, writers and would-be translators, and give our name and what languages we know. Humbling for most of the translators, who aren’t fluent in another language. The writers have come from Saudi Arabia, China, Kuwait, Tanzania, Slovenia, Vietnam, Israel, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Korea, Libya, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Indonesia, and other countries I’m forgetting.

After we go around the room, we turn to each other and reintroduce ourselves. I’m sitting next to a young Palestinian woman and ask her name again. She says it a few times and I repeat back, then ask her to point to it on the list of writers we’ve been given with short profiles on them. Zahiye Kundos. I’m embarrassed not to see a star next to her name, as I’ve starred the writers I’m particularly curious about, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She looks at the beginning of her profile, “journalist, b. 1980,” and says, “No, that’s not right—I am not a journalist.” I cross out the word on my sheet and we smile at each other. When I ask what she’s working on, she says she writes nonfiction but has just started to write fiction and—do I want to go outside?

I follow her onto the porch where she takes a packet of tobacco from the back pocket of her jeans, rolls a cigarette, and offers it to me, holding out a thin bare arm with a brilliant blue thread bracelet at the wrist. Aside from the bracelet, she wears no jewelry and has an understated look—black tank top, hair loosely up. She’s so small she could pass for a teenager.

She tells me she’s from Jaffa. Up in the North, I think first, then realize I’m confusing it with Haifa. “On the coast, near Tel Aviv. We are living there together—Arabs and Jews—with no separation.” I tell her I know a few, a very few, Arabic phrases and say them to her. “Ana isme Kirsten. Ana min Amerika. Ana Amerikya.” I feel like a schoolchild but want to offer some indication of my interest in her culture. She seems amused, smiles and asks where I learned some Arabic. I’m not sure she follows my long explanation about how my Pakistani boyfriend speaks Urdu, and I wanted to learn it but Urdu classes are hard to find. I thought Arabic might be a good substitute, since they share a similar script, but I only went to the first class.

So we’ll work together. I hadn’t starred her name because I didn’t think I wanted to work with someone so young, but since I’m new to translation, maybe it’s better not to work with a more established writer. And I like her. Already I feel a kind of loyalty to her.

September 9th

Been practicing Zahiye’s name, saying it out loud in my apartment. It should go down at the end, not up—not ZaheeYA, more like ZaheeYUH. I am sensitive to the pronunciation of names, since people have such trouble with mine, and I want to earn her trust.

I’ve read a piece she translated herself, called “Large Sized Men’s Shoes,” and can’t tell whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. It’s a series of snapshots about a family—engaging, but confusing overall. I’m not sure whether to blame her spare style or the translation. I like the sound of the names in it: Hatem, Raad, Manal, Abed, Fidaa, Aziz, Yehia, Nivin. I don’t know how to place them all, but I like the sense of a large family, many generations. What questions to ask her? Some of the verb tenses seem off, and it’s unclear who many of the pronouns refer to, but I don’t want to cause offense by questioning what may be deliberate stylistic choices on her part.

September 14th

The piece is nonfiction. Hatem is her father, and she’s the main character, Fidaa, whose name isn’t given until the third page. We meet at Java House and sit outside to talk over coffee and her rolled cigarettes. I say, at last we have a sunny day, and she says, “Oh, I like the rainy days. I can’t work in the heat, with so much sun. Rainy days are good for writing.”

I notice again how small she is and how finely featured. A round face, an expressive mouth near to smiling much of the time. Midway through our meeting she pulls her wavy hair back and secures it with a chopstick from her bag.

I ask question after question, and as she patiently explains, I jot notes on my copy. Knowing now she’s Fidaa, conscious that she’s telling the story of her childhood, quickens my reading. I learn that her family lived at an elderly uncle’s house for a time, that two of his sons were in jail, one for standing up to an Israeli national security guard, the other for drug dealing. Fidaa has crooked teeth after a fall from a window and shouts at the mirror, “How can I show my face in the street?” As I read this part again, my awareness of Zahiye’s discolored front tooth embarrasses me. I realize her mouth forms the focus of her face for me, that it seems as though there’s something deliberate in the way her lips cover her teeth when she’s not speaking.

Affection flows between her and her uncle and father and brother, who has “pure eyes.” I feel longing for a life like hers with so many people in it, all those relatives who participate in each others’ everyday lives. In one part of the story, Hatem won’t let Fidaa take a school trip, says he can’t allow her to go because they are going to Gaza for a few days. A space after the exchange and the sentence that follows, “She looked at him,” prompts me to ask, what kind of look? What is the significance of the look? And I realize I have missed the point; the excuse her father has given is ridiculous, because they live in Israel and are denied access to Gaza.

I register shame that her being Palestinian awes me a little. It gives her authority, a firsthand knowledge of injustice I should feel lucky not to have. I am older than she is, but I feel younger, knowing that I still receive news of violent conflicts around the world as shocking, that on some level I have not yet accepted reality and am slow to move beyond childish astonishment and tears when I read the newspaper.

When I’ve finished with my questions, she pulls pictures from her wallet—family members from the story. Even the ones of her parents are two inch portraits, like the pictures taken of me in grade school.

September 21st

Today I arrive at Java House to find Zahiye outside having coffee with Antonio, a fiction writer from Colombia. I wonder whether there’s something between them. When I come back out from ordering, he’s gone.

We have a new project—the first chapter of the novella she’s writing and wants to read in just over a week’s time. All of the international writers must give a public reading, and hers is one of the first. She would like to read her newest work. I think it sounds risky to read from an unfinished piece for which there isn’t even a rough English translation, but I don’t want to disappoint her and remind myself it’s her decision what to read—let’s give it a try, I say, and see how far we get.

From her bag she pulls four and a half single spaced pages of Arabic, and I think maybe that’s manageable, but once we start I see how slow the process is and how economical the Arabic language. In English, it will be longer. The title, she says, is “Under the light of sleepy,” and I write this in my notebook. For now, I think, we will just try to get a rough translation down for me to get a sense of the whole chapter. She tells me it begins with a man speaking to a woman new to existence. He introduces her to her body but remains a nameless, disembodied voice. No quotation marks separate his speech from the narrator’s.

Zahiye speaks the Arabic text slowly into English, sometimes a whole sentence at once, more often a phrase at a time, sometimes one word at a time. Ending a sentence, she takes a breath and says, “point,” before continuing, and I take obscure pleasure in writing a period that has become a “point” for our purposes. I am her scribe and feel a kind of devotion in listening, waiting for her to offer the next word so that I may enter it on the page. When she cannot find an English word, I offer all the alternatives I can think of until she stops me and says, yes, that one.

A few sentences in, the unnamed voice makes reference to a skin condition on the woman’s feet. Zahiye doesn’t know the word in English and I’m drawing a blank. “It itches,” she says, smiling, “it happens in summer.” When I tell her I’m not sure and will try to figure it out later, she takes off her sandal and swings her foot out from the table, rests it against the wall and pulls her toes apart, “There—see? Between the toes?” I lean over and we are both looking so studiously at her feet we almost forget to laugh, but then we do. I am charmed that she has given the main character her own skin condition.

Once the woman in the story has been introduced to her body, she goes to sleep and wakes up to wander outside, observing people and trying to learn what it means to be human. In Arabic, you can bid someone goodnight with a word that means, “feel good when you wake up.” One word in Arabic balloons into six in English.

I like the strangeness of the story but wonder whether I’m getting things straight. The perspective shifts between third person omniscient and a close third person and, for a sentence, even goes into first person. When I ask Zahiye about the shift to first person, she says simply, yes, that’s how it is. “In English,” I say hesitantly, “this shift is abrupt. It stands out and may seem a bit strange.” She says, “That’s good—in Arabic it is strange also.” Her writing bends conventions, but I still need to distinguish between purposeful moments of discord and errors of translation.

Zahiye insists on buying my next cup of coffee and disappears inside before I can protest. When she returns, I ask about her bracelet. She says a friend got it for her in Sinai, and that at first she mistook the palest of its blue tones for white and didn’t want to wear it because it looked too much like the Israeli flag. A Bedouin girl made it—one of the girls you meet on the beach by the Red Sea who follow you shouting offers. The bracelets cost about 50 cents and sometimes a girl will sit and talk with you as she weaves one around your wrist. A trinket for tourists, but the vivid blue threads keep drawing my eyes.

Shortly after we refocus on our task, a middle-aged man approaches and asks if I remember him from John’s Grocery. I say no, then dimly recall a man following me around the store one day trying to talk to me. Perhaps he senses this because he pushes and says he’s sure he’s talked to me before. I say firmly I’m sorry, I don’t know him, he doesn’t look familiar, and turn back to Zahiye. I just want him to go away but worry, still, that I’ve been rude. At last he withdraws and I feel annoyed that this thing I don’t know how to react to should happen when I’m with Zahiye. She says that when such things happen to her, when strangers approach, she thinks the universe is telling her something through them. I like her thinking this, for putting generosity and imagination before discomfort.

Fueled by coffee, we push ourselves to the chapter’s end. We leave the café and walk a few blocks together before separating, but small talk is unavailable to me. I’ve just been told a story of four and a half pages over the course of four hours, sometimes word by word. I feel as though I have been physically inside it, something like the way I felt when I was a child and could enter into the pictures in my books. Different from just hearing a story told and imagining it, because I supplied words along the way; was I listening to the story or writing it?

September 23rd

Last night I turned the notes into a first draft, tweaking sentences as I went along, trying to make them work in English without changing their sense. “She took her legs speedily to the street taking her morning with lost body and one idea, a word which will flame her roof in the night” became, “She took her legs quickly to the street, meeting the morning unaware of her body, thinking only of an idea, a word to flame her roof in the night.” I will have to ask if she approves and whether “flame” is the word she intends, or should it be “light” or “illuminate?” I changed “speedily” to “quickly,” because “speedily” has a humorous echo in my ear, which doesn’t serve her story.

In class we have started looking at first drafts. Before discussion begins, the writer and translator say a few words. The writers all praise their translator’s work, which I find sweet but also amusing, since most of them can’t see how well their work reads in English. Then the writers read a portion of their work in its original language and we all listen to the sound of the Chinese or Hungarian or Arabic while reading along in the English translation, trying to catch a sense of tone and pacing from the sound alone. Finally, we respond to the piece we’re looking at in terms of how well it works in English. Often words or phrases that are awkward in English mark places the translator was unsure of the original meaning, but sometimes the original meaning is just difficult to say smoothly in English. Changes that attempt to improve the original are understood to be made in bad faith, so if the original has flaws, the translation will have flaws, too. Someone points out that in the publishing world, if a translated book reads poorly, the translator will be blamed for it. The solution is simple: only translate work you admire.

Our one assigned book for the class, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, offers nineteen translations of a four line poem written in classical Chinese in the 8 th century, with entertaining commentary by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz. Of a version of the poem translated by a pair of scholars in 1958, they write, “It never occurs to Chang and Walmsley that Wang could have written the equivalent of casts motley patterns on the jade—green mosses had he wanted to. He didn’t.” They call this “a classic example of the translator attempting to ‘improve’ the original. Such cases are not uncommon, and are the product of a translator’s unspoken contempt for the foreign poet.” “Contempt” seems a bit strong but I take their point. Another of the translations begins, “The empty mountain: to see no men,/Barely earminded of men talking” and continues in the same vein, which elicits the following one-liner from Weinberger, “To me this sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins on LSD.”

I’m oddly heartened by these examples of the many ways translations can go wrong and have. Also by the fact that the most successful translations of the poem come from American poets—not scholars of classical Chinese. “Translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem,” say Weinberger and Paz. I know that people who like to keep translations as literal as possible would find the word “reimagining” disquieting here, but, despite all apparent impertinence, (I think) I think this: if the translation doesn’t read well in English, no matter how faithfully it follows the original, it will be a failed translation, because no one will want to read it.

September 27th

Another four hours with Zahiye, going through the first draft. I was afraid of trying her patience by asking her repeatedly to explain certain parts. Each time I was hoping she would say something slightly different that would help me find new words. The woman in the story says after observing some other human beings, “I have to get close to these beings that have faces like me and things that connect their parts”—“Things that connect their parts?” Yes, that’s right, Zahiye says.

One part of the chapter looks like a poem on the page, with lines about a candle and a flame and the narrator looking for a light. To my ear, this is too conventional and clichéd for the rest of the piece, but I don’t know how to say so. Perhaps such language doesn’t sound as trite in Arabic as it does in English. I think of what can’t be written now in English, of words and images that have lost their meaning from overuse. You can’t talk about the beauty of nature like a Romantic poet, for one—some people can’t even read Romantic poems without finding them clichéd. We’re moving further away from our most elemental images. Nature’s beauty has to be mistrusted, which I suppose makes some sense, since we are alienating ourselves from the earth and our longing for reconnection is necessarily complicated by the part we all play in its destruction. Still, it bothers me some to think of approaching beauty by way of some edgy orientation, just to avoid sounding clichéd.

We don’t ask this of writers who aren’t writing in English. Writing from other parts of the world needn’t follow American conventions and dictates of taste to be admired here. Orhan Pamuk’s novels, for all their inventiveness and intricate plotting, sometimes seem flowery and overwritten to me, and yet I like them still. When I reach for a book originally written in another language, coming from another culture, I’m after difference, maybe especially in artistic values. I want a widening of possibilities.

Well, I don’t know what to do about the candle and the flame, but I did figure out the skin condition of the main character—athlete’s foot!

September 29th

At Java House again, the day before the reading. I spent an hour and a half entering changes from our last meeting but couldn’t figure out how to make the “candle/flame/ looking for the light” part work, so I suggest we leave it out for the reading. I think Zahiye is disappointed but she trusts my judgment, which makes me nervous, because I’m not sure I trust my judgment. I have agreed to read along with her tomorrow—she’ll read in Arabic and I’ll read the English translation. We decide where to break up the piece, which doesn’t take long, so we have time to chat about other things.

She asks about my boyfriend and I tell her again his name is Bilal. “A beautiful name,” she says, “the name of the first man to give the call to prayer.” I know this, but it’s good to talk with someone else who knows it and has no trouble saying his name. She asks if we plan to marry. I don’t mind her forwardness and tell her we’re thinking about it but must resolve some big questions first, about religion and where we would live. She waves them aside, “It is okay for him to marry you—you don’t have to be Muslim. It’s in the Qu’ran. He’s in London now? You can live there. How old are you both?” When I tell her she makes her final statement, “It is a good time for you to be married.” I find her straightforward opinion appealing, perhaps because nobody else I’ve talked to shares it.

Our meeting ends with a trip to a thrift store around the corner. Zahiye’s looking for a leather jacket and tries on a succession of them, all too large for her. One of them she insists I try and when she sees it fits, says I must buy it, it’s perfect on me, I have to get it. I almost give in because she’s so enthusiastic and I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but I’m not sure the jacket’s me. She finds a dark brown suede coat she likes and buys it, even though it’s a pinch too big. Walking out with her I remember a thrift store leather jacket I wore in my early twenties that was glamorous and shabby like the one I just tried on. Why not wear one now? Zahiye would laugh if she could hear my thoughts. Or maybe she’d just wonder why so much deliberation over something so trivial. I’ve never seen her indecisive, about her writing, about where to eat or what to buy. Would it be a gross interpretation to think that her life experience has made her less inclined to worry over trite decisions?

October 1st

I went through all of yesterday nervous for last night’s reading. Puja said afterwards, “Your hands were shaking like leaves!” but my voice didn’t shake, at least. Zahiye didn’t seem nervous at all. I think I would have been less so had I been reading my own work, but I felt a responsibility toward her, as the medium through which people were meeting her writing. When I read the words “athlete’s foot,” the audience chuckled, bewildering Zahiye. I had been so excited to find the right term that I hadn’t registered the note of humor it struck, appearing unexpectedly at the beginning of the piece.

A group of us, writers and translators, went to George’s to celebrate afterwards. Zahiye drank a whiskey, which I thought suited her—only a little in the glass but what’s there has punch. I talked with Antonio, who is an architect as well as a fiction writer in Colombia, and with Young Moon, who has translated Raymond Carver into Korean.

October 13th

Today we met with Ali, who joined the class late and now offers his services as an Arabic speaker to translators who need it. I think he was hoping to meet with Zahiye alone, because he joked to me over email that apparently she didn’t want to meet with a strange man by herself. By now, everybody has a crush on Zahiye. When I tell people which of the writers I’m working with, they all say how cool she is, how lucky I am.

Ali’s questions overlapped with my own, confirming that even knowing Arabic isn’t enough to fully understand this piece. Where the main character looks up at what I had described as “Moving lights” in the sky, it turns out the original reads closer to “Walking lights,” and connotes a holy presence. The holiness is there in the word that describes the light, and Ali and I couldn’t think of how to convey this as subtly in English. In a few places, too, the character “memorizes” the details of a face, as Zahiye had translated it for me, but Ali disliked the word, didn’t think you could “memorize a face” in English. He suggested “notes,” but I prefer “memorizes,” because Zahiye makes her own rules in this piece, and “notes” sounds stiff to my ear.

Maybe knowing the original language situates Ali in the camp who like their translations as literal as possible. But I can see ways in which sticking to a literal translation can lead in the wrong direction, with word choices and phrasings that sound odd to an English speaking ear and make the writing read like, well, bad writing. On the other hand, translations that preserve a sense of the original language can be enlivening. The strange English another language creates can crack open the English language and suggest new ways of writing.

Gregory Rabassa, translator, most notably of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, makes the point in his memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, that the translator’s word choice must be as personal as the author’s. He writes: “Ideally the author’s choice among the synonyms in his own language was made in a purposeful and conscious way. In most cases, however, and as it should be, it is made quite naturally and instinctively: ‘This is how I want to say it.’ The translator, too, should most usually work from this natural application of meaning: ‘This is how we say it in English.’” He makes a point, too, of declaring translation an art, which cannot be taught, rather than a craft. This would probably make the same people skeptical who are skeptical of my project for this class, but the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude in English gives his opinion a certain weight.

Nabokov speaks for the literalists in another book I’m reading, Daniel Weissbort’s From Russian with Love, about the author’s collaboration with Joseph Brodsky on English translations of his poems. Weissbort quotes Nabokov from an essay on translations of “Onegin” into English: “The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase. . . The term ‘literal translation’ is tautological since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody.” Strongly held theories, I think, grow out of personal history. I wonder whether it’s partly because I don’t know another language well enough to translate it literally, word for word, that I’m on the side of instinct and a freer hand. Nabokov’s reading of his beloved Russian writers in English was bound to frustrate him.

Whatever the translator’s philosophy, no matter how good the translation, something will be lost. And loss of meaning happens in other ways. Words, just by sitting there on the page long enough, change their meanings, lose connotations or take on new ones.

October 14th

Yesterday at Java House, Ali and Zahiye spoke mainly in Arabic. I didn’t mind because I love to hear it, though I still feel—logic aside—like I’m missing out on something particularly interesting when I hear people speaking another language. The sound of the Arabic drew a twenty-something guy named Joshua from a nearby table. He’d been in the Iraq war and learned Arabic there. Now he was studying in the playwrighting program, working on a play about the war. He listened to our translation talk for a while before entering the discussion, then asked for Zahiye’s email, that he might ask her a few questions about the Arabic in his play. She hesitated but said, okay, then muttered under her breath, “even though you were in the war.” And then he explained that his experience in the war had made him a pacifist, and I think we all breathed a sigh of relief.

Today it was our turn to be workshopped. The appearance of the word “uterus” in the piece provoked a long discussion about whether it ought to be “womb,” instead. In Arabic, there’s only one word for the place where a woman carries her baby, used in all contexts. In English, “uterus” sounds clinical and “womb” has mythical, New Agey connotations. Neither seems to hit the right register. The class remained divided, so in the end, as happens in so many of our workshops, I was advised to think about it more, consider all the factors, and make a decision. Zahiye said afterward that the word “uterus” sounded beautiful to her. For a moment, I stopped picturing the word as a label in Figure 1, The Female Reproductive System, and heard something musical instead.

Zahiye’s ears were with me tonight, too, when I read through an essay I’m writing about teaching college English. I didn’t like what I heard through her. Too much order, sentences that are too measured, obscuring the messiness of the situation where they should be giving voice to it. Not Zahiye’s ears—friendship would make her more generous than that—my own ears wishing I wrote with more of her daring, inviting the glorious successes and failures that come from being less careful.

November 8th

Zahiye and I met yesterday for the last time. I thought of a parting gift just before our meeting. It took her a minute to realize the connection to our work, but then she laughed: foot creme.

I asked if she’d spent a lot of time talking about politics here. I hadn’t asked her many questions myself, not wanting to make her feel as though being Palestinian was her most interesting aspect, wanting to talk with her first as a writer. But I realized that the whole time I had been listening for clues to how the conflict affects her. I told her about a Palestinian friend of mine who grew up in Morocco and tirelessly sends emails about the cause, seems sometimes swallowed up by it. She understood immediately, said, yes, that’s because he’s in exile. “When we’re living there, we are angry about the occupation but we don’t focus on it because there are so many other problems. . . drugs, poverty.” She said there was a period when she was so immersed in the conflict it left her unable to do anything else, but that she sees room now for different ways of dealing with it. She must have been born with the capacity to arrive at this judiciousness—experience alone cannot account for it.

November 11th

Zahiye and the rest of the international writers left a few days ago. I feel a little abandoned. Just the presence of someone from another country feels liberating to me, but I wonder how much of a place a person from somewhere else actually embodies and how much of my feeling refreshed by someone’s presence has to do with my own imaginings about where they’re from. However ridiculous it sounds, I do feel closer to Palestine for having met Zahiye, as though some of the land was still reflected in her eyes as they took in this new landscape.

Today I talk with a friend about choosing amongst translations of a particular book in the bookstore. She says she’s often unsure how to choose, and I surprise us both by saying that I assume if I don’t like a particular translation, it can’t be the right one. How presumptuous I sound. And yet, why not trust my own judgment? Scholars are never in agreement on which is the best and most accurate translation of, say, The Odyssey, so why shouldn’t I choose whichever translation most pleases my ear at that moment? My own judgment is changeable. Another day I may choose another translation, preferring its particular merits to the others’. Perhaps only the sum of all translated Odysseys begins to approach a faithful translation. Homer is fortunate to be retranslated every decade or so; most contemporary authors are stuck with one English translation, one interpretation of their work.

Translation can have more serious implications, of course, than deciding literary reputations, and I think of something I learned not so long ago—how misleading it is for the Muslim declaration of the faith to be translated, as it often is, “There is no god but Allah.” “Allah” is the word for God, so why isn’t it translated? Worded like this, it sounds as though Muslims worship some other god.

What power a translator has and yet, oddly, the work of translators goes largely unrecognized. Only a few become known for it. More find their labor in service to the original work rewarded by near invisibility in the finished book, their names in small print on the cover, if they appear there at all. I can’t read translated books now without thinking of their translators, whose hopes of a perfect translation are frustrated from the beginning but who believe in the attempt, who press their eyes and ears to the page as they read and then search for twin words, sounds, and rhythms, whose reading makes my reading possible.

Kirsten Giebutowski is a recent graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She has had essays published in The Boston Globe Magazine, Etude, and a chapbook called Indelible Companions, and one read on Iowa Public Radio. Right now she teaches English at a university in Ukraine.

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