Reading multiple choice

Reading multiple choice

The Sentence That Would Not Cross

An extract from a literary translator’s memoir about the months she spent on the opening sentence of a difficult novel.

You are going to read an extract from a book. For questions 1-6, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

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.

1. Why does the writer mention the eleven months she spent on the first sentence?

• A. to suggest that her methods are far slower than most translators’
• B. to complain that the rest of the chapter was rushed as a result
• C. to explain that a long struggle taught her a great deal about her work
• D. to show the care she gives to every sentence she translates

2. What made the opening sentence so hard to translate?

• A. Its central verb had two senses, both of which the author clearly meant.
• B. English has no vocabulary for describing an unhappy marriage.
• C. Its rhythm imitated walking in a way English grammar cannot copy.
• D. The author had chosen a rare word that dictionaries did not explain.

3. What does the writer mean when she says that a translation which explains ‘has lost its nerve’?

• A. It sacrifices the rhythm of the original for literal accuracy.
• B. It has been revised so many times that it no longer sounds natural.
• C. It reveals the translator’s fear of criticism from the author.
• D. It no longer trusts the reader to sense what the original implies.

4. How did the writer first react to Haas’s postcard?

• A. She was grateful that such a reserved author had bothered to reply at all.
• B. She found it unhelpful and suspected he was avoiding her question.
• C. She was amused by the contrast between his advice and the picture.
• D. She worried that her letter had offended him in some way.

5. What does ‘it’ refer to in ‘he had answered it precisely’ (paragraph 5)?

• A. the question she had asked him about how to translate the verb
• B. the puzzle of where the solution might be found in a dictionary
• C. the postcard that had been pinned above her desk for months
• D. the doubt she had felt about the value of writers’ advice

6. What is the writer’s main point in the last two paragraphs?

• A. Something is always lost in translation, and translators should be honest and open about it.
• B. Most of a translator’s work is routine and seldom deserves serious discussion.
• C. Authors tend to be more relaxed about changes to their work than translators fear.
• D. Translation can create as well as lose meaning, and its real concern goes beyond words.