Daniel Hahn on translating Paulo Scott'sNowhere PeopleTranslated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (And Other Stories, 2014)

Different books present different challenges to a translator. That much is probablyobvious. And these difficulties fall into two broad categories: for some books, theproblem is, essentially, figuring out what's going on in the original; for others,it's—having done that—recreating the effect in the new language. Translation is both areading and a writing, and each of these processes can be more or less tricky. So whatmade my latest translation, Paulo Scott's Nowhere People (Habitante irreal in theoriginal), such a challenge? Well, in this case, it was everything. All of it. The reading,the writing. The syntax. The words, the punctuation. Even the title. There was nothingabout it that was straightforward. And so being a translator—and therefore vocationallypredisposed to like anything resembling an attempt at the impossible—I loved it.

I first read Nowhere People at the urging of my publisher friend, Stefan Tobler fromAnd Other Stories, who was considering acquiring it. I read it in a hotel room in Korea,rather memorably, and was stunned by it. It was the first time I'd read this brilliantwriter, and the first time I'd read a story like it, and I was eager to see it find its way intoEnglish, into the hands of Anglophone readers. (This is a common motivation fortranslators, I think: I've read a great book, I'd like other people to be able to read it who

currently cannot.) If I could be a part of that transit myself, so much the better. Andthen Stefan bought the book, and he asked me to translate it; there followed the typicaltranslator's response: yikes, that would be really, really difficult—yes, please! (I know,it's just the way we are.)

One of the first things to say about this book is that it's not, for the most part, difficult toread. It has a great clarity to it, it's all told in very sharp focus, the writing is not obscureor elusive or digressive or obstructive. And yet, and yet.

Let me talk you through the first sentence, and see if I can explain one of my recurringtroubles. The book opens, in fact, with an eight-page kind of footnote, providingsomething like a back-story, which ends with the protagonist, Paulo, driving along theBR-116 highway in the pouring rain, spotting a girl huddled on the verge, but driving on.Only then do we have the first chapter, opening thus:

A few kilometres further down the road and refusing to admit that, for a moment, hisnerve had failed him and that the sight of the girl had struck him like almost nothingelse in his life, Paulo imagines that some lorry (even though not a single vehicle haspassed him going in the opposite direction) must have stopped already and offered hera lift.

Some things to point out, then. There is no comma after "down the road," despite theabrupt change in direction that follows. The "refusing to admit that . . . " constructionmeans that the main verb—"imagines"—is severely delayed. The parenthesis comes at areally peculiar place in the sentence (it makes sense as a train of thought—the word"lorry" prompts an aside that there haven't been any vehicles) but it's simply not wherewe would normally break a line. These things are all tricky—and this, remember, isproperly speaking the first sentence in the book. We don't get eased into this style at all.And yet is it really difficult to follow? I don't think it is, not really. There are ways itmight have been rephrased, restructured, reordered to make it closer to more commonusage, but even now it's not difficult to follow the sense, I think.

Which is exactly the trouble. I needed to create sentences to match Paulo's, which canbreak or shift direction in surprising places, shift tense or perspective, and yet read asthough there's always a clear thread leading you through them. And I had to resist thetemptation to simplify, which would be cheating. Yes, I could in theory tidy up asentence like this (move a phrase, add an obliging comma), but with anuncompromising piece of prose like Paulo's, who am I to start compromising in myEnglish version of it?

I spent so long tinkering with that first sentence. And with many, many other sprawling,springy sentences like it. Though to be fair to the original, they certainly aren't all thatawkward. (By which I mean, also, good.)

Writing the translation may not be the least of my worries, but it is certainly the last;before it comes the process of reading the original and figuring out what the hell is goingon (before working out how to write the damn thing again in my language). My usualpractice, when I have the choice, is not to read a book before I start translating it—Iprefer just to launch myself at the first page and discover it as I go—but in this case I

had done a full read already and somehow not noticed what was going to be difficultabout it. It's only when you're doing the translating that the devilish detail makes itselfknown, and a sentence which you sort-of basically kind-of more-or-less understood (toall intents and purposes), becomes intransigent when you want to pin it down exactly,to splay it out on your workbench and pick it apart to discover its mysteries, in orderthat you might attempt to create an identical living thing of your own.

Paulo Scott has—and his characters have—a slightly different Portuguese to mine;different in local terms (for one thing, he and they are from Porto Alegre, in thesouthern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, where I have never been), with theoccasional unfamiliar idiom, and so on. This is a common enough problem. Added tothis, there's his occasional use of somewhat eccentric phrasing to potent effect. But torecreate the meanings of the idioms and the effects of the phrasing in your translation,you first have to understand them, not approximately but precisely, in the original. Ispend quite a lot of my first drafts feeling pretty stupid. Maybe I shouldn't be atranslator if I can't even understand what this damn thing means!

What else? Well, there are cultural sensitivities to rethink for my readers, which willtransform Paulo's "índia" slightly anxiously into my "indigenous girl." Then there are allthe cultural references I don't know. It's generally assumed that a translator is supposedto know the culture of the language he translates from, but in practice you often have tofake it, especially if you're translating from widely spread languages like mine. In thepast two years I've translated books from Brazil, Spain, Angola, France, Guatemala,Canada, Portugal—I'm supposed to know every aspect of all of them intimately? No,when you become a translator you just learn pretty quickly to befriend your nearestsearch engine and never to stray too far from it. For this book, a combination ofjudicious Googling and Wikipedia-ing helped me to understand exactly what colour"durepoxi" grey is. And what the characteristics of "farroupilha" sandwiches are. Andwhat are "cajazeiras," or "michês"? My editors and I learned some surprisingskateboarding terminology, too. An online dictionary of gaúcho (that is, Rio Grande doSul) slang was duly bookmarked. I now know what "bombachas" are, I know what itmeans to call someone "chiru." (Don't bother asking Google this one, it'll tell you theanswer is "Tibetan antelope," which it isn't.) Next time I translate a book from PortoAlegre I'll have a head-start and it will all be really easy. Honest.

When you reach the point in your quest for answers where you discover that theall-knowing Internet does not, in fact, know everything, there is only one thing to bedone. You ask your mother. I have, very conveniently, a Brazilian mother, and she isused to being drafted in to rescue me when I'm adrift in a scrappy draft and flounderingto put things into order. (And when she doesn't know the answer, at least that reassuresme that my failure to understand the writer's phrasing isn't just my own inadequacywith the language, that there might be something unusual at play this time.) And then,when it becomes clear to you that even your mother is not infallible—it's one of thosetraumatic growing-up moments—and there are still doubts in your mind which even Shecannot settle, it's then that you have recourse to the ultimate authority, and you askGod. Or, to put it another way, the Author.

Only the Author can tell you really how big He means the girl's "barraca" to be—is it akind of hut? A shack? Or just a tent? (This example is recurring, and significant.)

The first thing Paulo did when I wrote to him saying, "Help!"—not in quite that tone,because you have to avoid any risk of the author losing all confidence in you—was tosend me an attachment with all the questions one of his other translators had askedhim, with the answers he'd provided. In here, he said, I might find the answers to someof mine. The document ran to thirty-two pages.

(It's not just me! Hooray!)

About half of my queries were answered there. (Ah, so "Mister Faiado" is just anaccented play on "falhado"—I see!) But there were things she'd asked that seemedentirely obvious to me and I wasn't sure why she needed help (maybe she didn't have aBrazilian mother?); others she didn't ask and I couldn't understand why. How could shehave known these things? How could she have understood that sentence whoseworkings seemed so mysterious? Was I just being stupid again? There's one thing abouttaking on a task you know by definition to be impossible: it can engender a certainamount of self-doubt.

(Or maybe that is just me?)

Because all translation is impossible, we know that. We have to pretend it isn't, that it'spossible for an Anglophone who writes in English (an Angloscribe?) to write exactly thesame book as a Lusophone writer (erm, Lusoscribe . . . )—exactly the same—while usingnone of the same words, and while keeping the entire process of transition invisible.And yet we pretend, and we expect our readers to do the same. I expected you to readthat quoted opening line as though you were reading Paulo's writing, not mine. I expectyou to read this novel—about a young law student in Porto Alegre and an indigenous girlhe meets by the side of the road, in a world I know nothing of (though there's a phaseset in London, which made it easier for a Londoner like me)—and believe that you arereading Habitante irreal, and not Nowhere People.

Which reminds me—that title. "Unreal Inhabitant" would be a closer translation of theoriginal title. This is a book about dispossession, about people struggling to put downnew roots after their old ones have been yanked up, so the title suits. But it just soundswrong in English, doesn't it? The replacement we finally went with—after much e-mailtraffic between Paulo and Stefan and Sophie at And Other Stories—was NowherePeople. I liked it, and still do. I have a bit of previous with changing my mind abouttitles, but I think this one's a keeper. My friend Catherine would later make the wryobservation that it's not a bad way of describing the lot of the invisible translator, either.

I wrote my translation of Habitante irreal—sorry, Nowhere People—slowly andcarefully. After a quick first draft, this meant many slow-and-careful re-reads andre-edits, wrangling all the many trouble-spots. There's that famous Oscar Wilde quote:"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma.In the afternoon I put it back again."—it was a bit like that. One draft had a comma afterthat seventh word, when I couldn't resist the temptation to over-clarify; then I'd repentand tell myself to trust the author and took it out again for the next. Then put it back,then took it out. In again; out again. (I suspect you could track this havering all the waythrough the process—even-numbered drafts with a comma, odd-numbered drafts

without . . . ) At a certain moment—a moment quite some time after my deadline, Iconfess—I gave up, stopped tinkering, and sent it in to the publishers. And then the editbegan.

Like most writers I know—translators and other kind of writers, too—I love beingwell-edited. It's like, I don't know, getting a window cleaned, perhaps. The viewafterwards isn't a different view to the one before, it's just a little brighter somehow.Free of those slight smudges you hadn't really noticed were there, but now,suddenly—just look! Hardly different and yet somehow it's all so sharp, everything isjust more clearly itself. Beautiful. The job of cleaning up this particular translation fell toAna Fletcher, who happens also to speak Portuguese. So Ana was able not only to bringa new eye (and occasionally a figurative scouring brush) to my English writing, but alsofrom time to time to refer back to the Portuguese when something sounded funny. "Howabout X as a solution, instead? Or do you think it's moving too far away?" "Y isn't quitehow I understood this phrase—what do you think?" And on one occasion: "I'm prettysure that's not what this phrase means, [you idiot. What a stupid, careless, thoughtlessmistake!], I think it's more likely to mean Z." She is too nice to have actually said the bitin square brackets, though she probably should have. Because in the middle of all myworrying about odd commas and syllables, I had set aside all common sense and usedthe phrase "she didn't even telephone" instead of "she didn't even notice," which is alegitimate translation of the same verb but in the context made no sense at all. It'sannoying being fallible.

(A distinguished author on stage with one of his translators years ago commented that itwas unsurprising that a translation will always be a compromised thing, because"translators are human." His implication, I suspect, was that originals do not suffer thisessential, inevitable failure because novelists are omnipotent and infallible.)

Nowhere People is, I think, an exceptional book. It's a clever, thoughtful, beautifullywritten, perceptive telling of a story that hasn't been told before. (I hope you'll read itwhen it's out and I hope you'll agree.) Well, actually it was told once before, when it wascalled Habitante irreal, and written by Paulo Scott, and for different readers. Now it's ajoint endeavour, still by Paulo but also by me and Stefan and Ana and Sophie—a bookwith all different words, but the same in every other way that matters. So if Paulo canget away without resorting to a comma in that first sentence, so can I. Indeed, so must I,because that's the translator's job. And that challenge, well, that's the fun of it, too.