Traducción

[Today’s level of machine translation is quite impressive.  But its success on typical materials  gives a false impression of its applicability to more marginal (literary, or SIGINT-cryptic) texts:  the increase in difficulty is non-linear.

An earlier post gave a shout-out to a German-to-English translation team.  I simply do not have time to illustrate their many instances of excellence (though if someone would like to fund such an effort, simply mail me a large package of Swiss Francs).  Herewith a Spanish-to-English case in which, in a letter to friends, I did take the time;  enjoy.]

After a month during which, inspired by an excellent class, I did nothing but Arapaho all the day long, a prospect of unlimited choice opened up, and I found myself reading, for the first time in years, a Spanish novel.  And discovered to my delight  that my Spanish is still entirely intact -- like a back room in which you store all your college mementos, and seldom enter:  but there it is, pristine.

The book in question is La Sombra del Viento, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.  A critical and commercial success, it’s an erudite spooky thriller, and a real page-turner;  I had the sensation, not of reading in Spanish, but of transparently accessing the plot.

Even at that, there were expressions I didn’t get.   And rather than snuffle around in dictionaries, I borrowed a translation.   Every since Gregory Rabasa won a National Book Award for his rendering of Rayuela, standards of Spanish-to-English translation have been very high (Garcia Marquez once said, jokingly or not I do not know, that he preferred Rabasa’s prose to his own).  And this book is no exception, expertly rendered by Lucia Graves. 

In the following instances, with one or two exceptions  I knew the meaning of each individual word, yet the full sense of the whole still eluded me until the linguist unpeeled it.

mis penas de sainete  =>  my melodramatic woes

Alabados sean los ojos!  =>  “Do mine eyes deceive me?”; and, in another chapter,  “Who is this I see before me?” [Note the Arabic cast of this idiom, btw.  More anon, ojalá.]

Yo me apunto a un bombardeo  =>  “I’ll eat anything that’s thrown at me.”

Quite.  =>  Come off it.

Con un médico  va que se mata.  =>  A doctor will do fine.

a medio No-Do  =>  during the newsreel

El argumento le traía al pairo.  =>  As far as he was concerned, the plot was superfluous .

que no le sepa mal  =>  Don’t let that upset you.

una visita al puesto de chucherías del vistíbulo  para reponer existencias.  =>  a visit to the candy stand in the lobby to take on supplies.

Ya será menos.  =>  Aren’t you exaggerating?

Tú calla, desgraciado, a ver si te pego una leche que te mando a La Rioja.  =>  Zip it, bonehead, or I’ll kick you all the way to the Rock of Gibraltar.

Una ha de hacer de tripas  corazón.   =>  You just have to rise above it and get on with things.  [Here the translator could not quite render that colloquial use of una -- like French on only feminine.]

una cupletera en salto de cama  =>  a music-hall siren in a negligee

unas pantorillas helénicas  =>  classically proportioned calves

Yo que vosotros llamaba a la policía.   =>  If I were you, I’d call the police.

Pues mire usted por dónde.  =>  Funny you should say that.

Dile que me diga el qué.  =>  Ask him to let me know what to do about it.

This is masterly.   It rather puts in its place our own dull workmanlike labor…