Translating The Carriers

When Dave published The Carriers in the middle of 2015, he received his usual plaudits from the leading lights of the literary world (you can read my review here).  But the book was published in translation, having been written in a private language of Dave's invention called Üxtil.  When Calista read the book in its original Üxtil, she identified scores of errors in the hastily-prepared English translation, some of which have serious implications for the way the book has been analyzed and understood.

Calista's discovery drew the attention of practically every major writer and unleashed a flood of academic papers re-appraising the book.  As new translations have appeared, writers have been forced to take sides, and at this point partisans of one translation can scarcely bring themselves to talk to partisans of another, much less collaborate or share a stage at a literary conference.  The resulting chaos makes the perennial Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky argument look like child's play.

The main contenders for "best translation" are Alan's, Nora's, and Calista's, while Pevear and Volokhonsky's is the most commercially successful.  The book was originally translated by Dave's longtime collaborator Akina Uehara, who in fairness was operating under severe time constraints, as well as having to learn Üxtil from scratch based on Dave's fragmentary instructions.  Despite all this, and despite the errors that Calista has identified, Uehara's translation is still the favorite of a small but committed minority of writers, who regard her mistakes as more than compensated by her natural, poetic sensibility.

Notably absent from this list, of course, is Dave's translation, which was published earlier this year.  The dearth of critical support for the author's own translation has sparked a heated discussion of how "authoritative" the author is, particularly in a case like this one, where the author created the language from which the work is being translated.  Alan has made much of this "novel" situation, but it is not my concern at the moment.  Instead I will take a close look at a few passages from The Carriers, and I'll explain how the translators handled the interpretive issues that they present.

The first passage is a playful one.  A sailor teases a woman selling tea cakes by the dock, and she chastely responds.  Here's Uehara's original translation:

"That certainly looks tasty," the sailor called out, leaning nonchalantly against the rail. Katie turned to face him, wrinkling her nose.

"The blue ones are a day old—still good, and half the price!" she replied.

"What about the pink ones?"

"Too expensive for you!" the captain bellowed, clapping the sailor on the back. Katie giggled.

In her original paper, Calista questioned whether this passage should be so sexualized.  One problem is that "tasty" is much more specific than the Üxtil word used in the original, a memoridt, which simply means "pleasing" or "sufficient."  It seems likelier that the sailor is commenting on the entire scene, not the cakes or the woman.  Moreover, "What about the pink ones?" is a bit of a reach—in the original, Dave uses the term nuori pestel'e, which literally means "this dawn's harvest" or "this dawn's catch" and only connotes pink inasmuch as that is the color of the dawn.  Here is how Calista translates it:

"This is a fine scene!" the sailor exclaimed, gesturing from the main deck, his hand on the rail. Katie looked up at him and squinted.

"The blue cakes are from yesterday. Half price!" Katie sang out.

"And what about this morning's batch?"

"You have no money to spare for cakes at any price. Back to work!" the captain shouted, with a hearty back-slap. Katie laughed gaily and turned back to her customers.

But there is another difficulty here, one that Uehara and Calista both avoid.  Where is the captain during the first part of the dialogue?  Has he come up behind the sailor during the exchange, or has he been there the whole time?  In this case, the word for "captain" includes a particle that indicates the writer is gesturing toward someone the reader is already acquainted with.  (The closest English approximation would be something like, "the cat appeared" vs. "a cat appeared."  The former indicates that we the readers have already met the cat.)

Conveying this information in English is difficult.  Here is Nora's effort:

The sailor stood on the deck next to the captain and surveyed the scene before them. "A fine day!" the sailor exclaimed, indicating the bustling docks. Katie squinted at him in the bright sunlight.

"Cakes for sale! The blue ones are a bargain, day-old but still good!"

"What about the ones you baked this morning?"

"Enough banter! We have work to do," the captain grumbled, clapping his hand to the sailor's back. Katie's merry laugh rang out as she turned back to her cart.

Nora preserves a sense that the sailor and Katie are flirting, but resists the over-sexualized reading given by Uehara.  However, she also omits the captain's slightly insulting remark regarding the sailor's finances.

After this relatively low-stakes warm-up, let's turn to a much more difficult passage.  By way of background, Clara Newgate has learned that her husband's lover is displaying symptoms of the disease, but Charles Newgate himself is asymptomatic.  Again we'll start with Uehara:

"When did the symptoms appear?" Clara asked, her voice clipped.

Charles turned from her and examined the books on the wall. "In the middle of January," he said. "You were in the north."

Clara quickly calculated while Charles pretended to read. "Charles, in January!" Clara gasped. "But we—"

Charles grabbed her by the elbow and spun her around. "As if you're so innocent!" he snarled.

This is not one of the passages that Calista flagged in her initial paper, but her translation is markedly different from Uehara's:

"When did you begin to fight?" Clara asked sharply.

Charles examined the books on the shelves. "In the middle of January, when you were visiting the north."

Clara did the math in her head while Charles pretended to read. "January, Charles!" Clara said with surprise. "So you and I—"

Charles took her by the elbow and brought her into an embrace. "You're safe," he said.

In Uehara's version, Clara is asking when Charles's lover started displaying symptoms, and she seems to indicate that she and Charles have had sex since January.  Charles then accuses her of adultery.

In Calista's version, by contrast, Clara is asking when Charles and his lover fought, that is, when they stopped having sex.  January, it appears, was early enough that Charles probably wasn't exposed to the disease.  Clara realizes that they can have sex, and Charles responds that Clara will be safe.

It's a remarkable thing that each of these interpretations is viable!  Dialogue in Üxtil can be extremely elliptical, allowing Clara and Charles to circumnavigate delicate subjects, but leaving us with little idea of what is going on.  Alan's translation mostly sides with Calista's, but at the end he adopts yet another reading of the language:

"When did the... seas get rough between you?" Clara asked probingly.

Charles turned and ran his eyes over the spines of the books lining the wall. "In the middle of January, while you were in the north."

Clara opened a calendar in her mind while Charles pretended to read. "January, Charles! Then when we—"

Charles squeezed her elbow and held her close so that she couldn't see his face. "And yet you're clear," he said as if accusing her.

In Alan's translation, it appears that Clara and Charles have had sex at a time when he might be contagious, and yet Clara is symptom-free.  Perhaps Charles suspects that they are both carriers, and that Clara is the source of his lover's illness.

The passage is obviously a difficult one, susceptible to widely varying translations, and yet everyone was startled by Dave's translation:

"After all, we haven't made love since I don't know when!" Clara spat out with venom.

Charles turned away in shame, occupied with mental book-keeping. "We made love in January," he concluded. Then he added accusingly, "You wanted it up the ass."

Clara seemed to be choosing her words carefully while he pretended to read, but then burst out, "January! Charles! We didn't make love in January!"

Charles whipped her around and squeezed her cheeks with one hand. "You were drunk," he said. "Your lapse in memory is a terribly convenient way to maintain your innocence." Disgusted, he turned her head away with a sudden jerk.

To be honest, it's hard to support this translation at all.  Yes, "the north" can be used in an anatomical sense, as Üxt's northern territories are often called "the country's asshole" or "the ass-end of the country."  But this term is almost never used to refer to actual anatomy, and when it is, the point is to emphasize the back of the country as opposed to the front.  So for instance, a man might sit on a horse's "north," that is, its back—he is not sitting on the horse's ass!  This makes Dave's translation seem like quite a stretch.  In any case there's no express mention of sex in that line of the original text.

But that's just one isolated detail.  Dave's reading of the entire passage requires considerable leaps of logic.  For instance, after Clara asks her question (and by the way, it is very clearly a question in Üxtil, notwithstanding Dave's translation), Charles looks toward the wall of the room they are in, which is a library.  To assume that he is looking at mental books requires adding a concept that isn't in the text while ignoring where the characters are standing!

Moreover, in the original Üxtil, when Clara has done her mental math, she simply says the words for "Charles," "January," and "we."  All of the translations must fill in the gap to some extent, but adding a denial that they made love in January makes no sense.  If this were her meaning, she would have appended a complementary negative particle to "we."  The only way to support Dave's reading is to suppose that she is making an elementary grammatical mistake, unlikely for a woman of her class (or really any class...  this would be a very obvious mistake in Üxtil).

Finally, there is no mention of drunkenness or memory in the last paragraph.  In the original Üxtil Charles simply indicates that Clara is "spotless" or "unblemished," which could either mean that she is innocent or that she has not broken out in the lesions that are symptomatic of the disease.  Of course it could also be ironic, as in Uehara's translation.  But in any case, Dave appears to be making up most of the passage out of whole cloth.

Passages like this one have convinced most critics that Dave's translation is untrustworthy, despite the fact that he invented Üxtil, and despite the fact that Üxtil dialogue is admittedly allusive and indirect.  But I want to stay well clear of that argument, which is vexing and, in my view, ultimately irresolvable.  For one thing, much of our understanding of Üxtil and the culture and customs of Üxt is derived from Dave's magisterial four-volume A History of the Üxtil-Speaking Peoples, which was published in both Üxtil and English.  So to argue that Dave's translation of The Carriers is erroneous is to argue that he was more reliable in his translation of History than he was in his translation of The Carriers, and there is little basis for this conclusion.

Before we move on, I should mention that, in the context of the book, I think Uehara's or Alan's translation of this passage makes the most sense.  We ultimately learn that both Clara and Charles are carriers, but that Clara was most likely not the source of the disease that struck down Charles's lover.  Calista's translation is also defensible on the grounds that Charles might have thought they were both uninfected based on what he knew at the time.

The translators make other choices that involve the traditional translational choices among fidelity to the text, clarity, and elegance.  Where Calista writes that a Member of Parliament is "flying a kite," Uehara has him "floating an idea," and Alan has him "running it up the flagpole to see who salutes."  In another passage, Nora, translating fairly literally, writes that Charles is "fire-breathed," while Calista writes that "his breath was on fire with the vapors of whisky," and Alan writes that "his breath singed her nose with hot tongues of pungent whisky."  (Dave writes:  "Dragon-like, into her chest he poured the flames, igniting almost nothing in that empty space, but nevertheless consuming with a hot vengeance the pine needles shed by her wintering heart."  None of that, apart from the fire-breath, is in the text.)

But perhaps the most interesting passages are those that force us to confront the radical differences between Üxtil and English.  Üxtil contains a vocabulary of emotion that has no counterpart in English.  In one of the most beautiful and haunting passages in the book, Katie (whom we met earlier on the docks) speaks with Henry Tilden, her ex-lover, who has been incarcerated in a carrier colony on a cold, rocky north Atlantic island, where Katie has joined him.  Tilden and Katie can no longer have sex, for she might be vulnerable to the disease.  Tilden indicates all of this with a gesture toward their surroundings, and Katie simply responds, "Bueh."

"Bueh" (or "a'bueh") is an Üxtil word with no precise meaning in English.  It is used to convey emotional reassurance, and its meaning is heavily dependent on context.  Uehara renders the scene in this way:

Katie and Henry huddled in the dwindling light, heads touching, so close that from a distance they might have been mistaken for a single well-insulated seal gazing at the waves. "Katie, I have nothing to offer you anymore, not even... there is no beauty here. And I may die or go insane, leaving you with nothing. You deserve forests and cities and warmth, and here I have nothing but wasteland..."

"I know all this, and I will stay here, not in sorrow, but with gladness in my heart," Katie said. "Your love is like a million worlds to me."

Alan adopts a similar approach but puts more of the words in Katie's mouth:

Katie held Henry close, his head next to hers, their coats forming a single layer of insulation against the brisk wind. Henry looked up at Katie and half hoped that she would go live the life she deserved on the mainland.

"Don't you think I've considered all of this?" Katie said. "You would not tell me which books to like, or what kind of bread to enjoy. And yet you think to decide for me whether I would find more joy on shore or here with you! Purge your mind of this nonsense. I am here because I love you, and your presence makes this island the most beautiful place in the world to me."

Finally, Dave's translation is the most literal, while remaining uncharacteristically restrained:

The wind picked up, but Henry and Katie had overlapped their coats and now peered out at the waves like a polar bear from its cozy den. Henry turned his head, as if to say, "Can this ever be enough for you?"

With a single word Katie set his mind at ease.

One can complain that this translation fails to capture the full richness of the word "bueh," but it's hard to argue with its elegant simplicity.

And so we are, I think, left with no single "best" translation, but instead with a rich diversity of approaches, each with its own merits.  For those readers who don't have the time to learn Üxtil, I don't know which one to recommend, but ultimately I don't think there's a wrong choice.  The beauty of The Carriers comes through in all of them.