Lost (and Won) in Translation

My fantastic sister sent me an "extra" birthday present which made me burst out laughing and then cackle chuckle with delight.

That's right, it's none other than the New York Times best-selling novel that every 19th century literature professor worth her salt will be reading this summer: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I haven't cracked it opened yet because I'm saving it for our trip to New York. I figure that even though I'll be traveling with two children and therefore completely unable to read anything on the plane, I will have at least a few loooong hotel evenings where the lights are out at 8:15 and Husband and I are trying to amuse ourselves without awakening the little darlings. A nice meaty (oops! sorry) zombie novel seems like just the thing.

Since I haven't read it, I can't tell you anything more about it than I did back when I first marveled over its impending release.

However, I can share a fascinating project of translating a bit of Austen's famous novel into another language. The effort was made by a college student working to translate the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice into Ojibwe for a class assignment. A colleague of mine sent me the link. Here's the original opening sentence:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

The author of the project writes:

"An interpretive translation would be:

It is true living knowledge that when a man alone has something of value, women may want to walk with him."

What I find most interesting, though, is the cultural note that gets appended:

* Cultural Note: The concept of wanting a wife as a possession (noun) is not readily translatable into Anishinaabemowin. Instead, the Anishinaabe way of viewing relationships is through action. For this reason, the common metaphor for marriage is two people who want to walk with one another. Of course, this does render the subtle humor of the British English unreadable. The joke in Austen's words is that a single man with money is viewed by others as more marketable and therefore needs a wife, perhaps to help spend his treasure. If a very fluent translator were to wish to write a similarly humorous line in Anishinaabemowin the humor would have to be found in the walk, perhaps along a road. Caring nothing for fortune, one might write, "When a man walks alone, it is universally understood that he is looking, and most likely he is looking for a woman willing to walk with him."

Isn't it amazing to think about how difficult it is to translate something like irony from one language to another? It impresses me on so many levels. First, that Austen's work has such brilliant subtlety to it that literal translations make no sense. Second, that translators who do a good job really are tremendous. Having read Pablo Neruda's poetry only in translation, and felt so moved by its beauty, I can only imagine what a job it must have been to preserve its essence in another language. And, on a larger level, it puts me in further awe of people who speak more than one language and can move between them seamlessly.

You can check out the whole Ojibwe translation project here.