Diamela Eltit, ‘Never Did the Fire’ (trans. by Daniel Hahn) and Daniel Hahn, ‘Catching Fire’.
Never Did the Fire is a peculiar novel, full of ambiguity, strangeness and repetitions.
Eltit’s experimental style has, throughout her career, gone hand in hand with her political commitment: elements of it, for example its ambiguity and strangeness, seem to have even been instrumental, at times, to bypass the censorship. How to translate this language, so embedded in its time and circumstances?
Daniel Hahn provides us with some answers in Catching Fire, his diary of translating Elitit’s novel: "This constant instability in the original, this constant play of ambiguities, requires a particular effort not to inadvertently clarify: if it's not clear in the original which of two possible characters is being referred to, say, I must be careful not to have the translation specify." On the other hand, an additional challenge arises when it comes to translating nouns and articles that are gendered in Spanish but wouldn't be in English - here, Hahn says, it is a matter of finding ways of keeping the specificity of Spanish where there wouldn't normally be any in English.
The discussion on style as an instrument for political writing reminds us of another book in our Translation Table series: A Book, Untitled (Shushan Avagyan, translated by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz). Here, the author pleads to the translator: do not make this text understandable. Both these text shine a light on the meaningful political role of ambiguity, and on how hard it can be to accept that we might not be able to understand everything that we read: translation in these cases can be an instrument for keeping a deliberate distance between the reader and the text, rather than turning it into something wholly familiar and understandable.
On a different note, it is interesting to compare Hahn's approach ("Though I have read other things by Diamela, both in Spanish and in English translations, I know very little about this book" p.20) with Ada's Realm's translator Jon Cho-Polizzi, who spent a long time researching Sharon Dodua Otoo and her writing, as well as the books that influenced her, before even beginning the translation, or with Deanna Cachoian-Schanz's translation process, which took 10 years, while Hahn's 'only' took 3 months. As Kate Briggs also discusses in This Little Art, the circumstances in which a translation happens influence the way the translator works, and how much time they can afford to spend on one single text. Practical matters such as payment and contracts need to be taken into account when considering who can translate, how and what. Copyright issues and royalties are more often than not denied to translators, commonly paid by word. But that is a topic for another time.
