“But we were growing up and it was necessary to learn, or so my dad told us after he sent Abel to inspect the gully up to the dam—the water from the garden spout had dwindled, perhaps because of a collapsed bank or some rotten branch blocking the stream—only for Abel to return while we were helping beat beans in the yard and announce, with his hoe on his shoulder, that he’d found Balão, news that made us drop our sticks and run to him and ask why he hadn’t brought our horse with him and whether Balão was far away or nearby. Abel responded that the only way he could have brought Balão was if he dragged him since our horse was dead. The two of us were struck dumb. I didn’t know if we cried or cursed Abel, judging him somehow guilty, not for Balão’s death, but for the malice of finding him dead.”

 

The above passage is from a short story by the 20^th century Brazilian writer José J. Veiga and serves hopefully as an example of the choices a translator faces and what I am trying to illustrate through my summer Digital Publishing Fellowship.

 

A bit of context on the passage: This is from a story titled “A Invernada do Sossego” (roughly “The Long Winter of Quiet”) by the Brazilian author José J. Veiga, the same writer I brought in for our first round. The above passage occurs near the outset of Veiga’s story. The narrator and his brother Benício are children growing up on their family’s ranch in Goaias, a mostly rural, agrarian state in the center of Brazil. Their favorite horse Balão has gone missing and this is the moment where they find out his fate.

 

What makes José J. Veiga the author challenging to translate is the amount of regionalized and anachronistic language he uses, language particular to agrarian settings, actions, and tools that I am unfamiliar with. (I assume many contemporary readers would be less familiar with these as well, this book having been published in 1959.) Thus, I find myself continually attending to how to render the expressions, idioms, and vernacular networks in Veiga’s work, without exotifying them or overly smoothing them over so that they read as familiar to a contemporary readership. My approach to these phrases also determines how much the translation chooses to rationalize, clarify, or expand upon what might be unclear in the original.

 

Where is the unusual or jargony language in this passage? When Abel returns with his news, the two brothers are described as helping “bater feijão.” This translates literally into “beating beans.” What does that mean? According to YouTube, “bater feijão” refers to separating beans from bean pods by thwacking them with sticks; in the videos I’ve watched, men move in a rhythmic circle around the pile of beans. While doing so, they sing as a way to mark time for their thwacks. In my first translation, I translated “bater feijão” as threshing beans, since it gives the sense of separating bean from pod and provides an easier gloss. In a later version, I kept the more literal but unusual sounding “beating beans.” I did this in part to hew closer to the vernacular and in part to give a more accurate sense of the action—both the hitting of beans with a literal stick and the indication of a rhythm or tempo in “beat.” I also wanted to give a sense of the brothers’ connection in this passage (even though the narrator’s brother Benício is not mentioned by name here). The story’s plot hinges on the narrator believing what his brother believes—that is, the two of them are in sync and this synchronicity seems in part due to the closeness with which they co-exist on their family’s farm. In this case, a verb that stresses that rhythmic link—i.e. “beat”—seems valuable. However, you could argue that the verb’s strangeness overwhelms the reader’s intuition of the action described and understanding of the brothers’ closeness. Yet “beating beans” also can’t help but sound euphemistic and might lead to unwanted associations or connotations.

 

Ultimately, I chose to go with the more rationalized though perhaps inaccurate “threshing beans,” which is where the idea for my summer project comes in. What if there were a way to present the reader with the context and significance of a certain phrase without slowing down the reader’s experience? What if readers themselves could have some agency in the way they choose to proceed with the passage—whether they opt for “beating” or “threshing”—in a way that mirrors some of the decision-making process that the translator encounters? Could that provide a more immersive or educational reading experience, or would it prove excessively mediated and tedious? These are the questions I’m still trying to figure out.

 

Recently, in one of the distractions that consume negligible but not insignificant parts of my day, I was reading a Twitter thread about what’s the best way to “tell someone to f— off in a work email.” The responses were numerous and ranged in levels of passive aggression and snark—“I am sorry we have not reached an understanding”; “Please see my emails from these dates that reference the matter…” One user suggested simply signing the email “Best,” since everyone knows that such a clipped, short reply means the same as telling someone to go kick rocks. Nearly all the suggested replies were euphemistic, even somehow the one that was just a GIF of Gordon Ramsay cursing out an unseen reality show contestant; such is the nature of the work email.

 

The thread made me think of my own situation, not only because I myself sign my emails “Best,” but because of my project this summer with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio: I am attempting to create a website that will track or illustrate the decisions a translator faces when translating a text from its source language to its target language. In many ways, these decisions are what we face a myriad of times each day, even while operating within a supposedly single language. We live within multiple discourses, toggle and translate between different audiences and registers. Telling someone to “f— off” over email vs. a friend over text vs. a stranger on Twitter will engender different replies; even here, over a blog post, I am choosing to substitute hyphens for the letters u, c, and k and that too is a type of translation. While we may think we’re operating within a single language, each language is of course made of languages—it is a plural, shifting thing, both private and public. My aim for my summer project is to show how the translator(s)—often seen as an invisible, ancillary figure—has their own biases, histories, and predilections that affect a text and determine the transformation within its language. In doing so, I hope to encourage a more sustained investigation on the part of both readers and translators into how these subjectivities inform the delivery of a text. My hope as well is to encourage an understanding that while translations are necessarily pliable—i.e. that there is no one objectively accurate rendering of a text—that pliancy still depends on an accurate understanding of the nuances and subtleties of the source language. I can easily imagine a translation misreading “f— off” as “f— you,” yet the difference between adverb and direct object there is marked. The former is an assertion or defense of one’s own boundaries and limits; the latter is more liable to read as a personal attack. It’s important to me that a translation document not just its choices, but how those choices are informed through context and interpretation.

 

I’m excited to keep working on this project as the course continues—even though this summer has flown by!—and to consider the ways a digital setting can contribute to and sharpen an understanding of the choices referred to above.