Elizabeth Thomson (translator)

(5)

MINERVA TRANSLATIONS SERVICES
I am a competent, resourceful and experienced linguist and translator. The time has come for me to make the transition into literary translation.

Since winning a competition judged by a publisher specialised in translated literature, I have looked for a book to translate.

Recent books I have read and would have happily translated include Antonia Arslam’s Skylark Farm, a story of the Armenian genocide, translated by Geoffrey Brock.

I would have loved to work on Train to Budapest, by Dacia Maraini, translated by Silvester Mattarella. The protagonists survive WWII, and witness the Hungarian rising against Russia in the 1950’s. Chance encounters on long train journeys across Europe are reminders of cruel pasts that leave indelible marks on survivors. A thought-provoking book – translating it would have been a welcome challenge.

Umberto Eco’s Numero Zero and Prague cemetery, translated by Richard Dixon, are intriguing. In Numero Uno, Eco’s knack of starting with a seemingly banal event, in this case a dripping tap, which becomes more complicated as more complicated characters join a line-up of journalists, editors, conspiracy theorists and blackmailers involved in inventing and spreading false news, is a tour de force. Eco’s love of English language and British culture seep through the Italian text in both works, and complicated, complicatedly narrated plots are maybe clearer to the translator with time and patience to understand them, than to edgy readers eager to get to the point!

I read An Education in Happiness written by Flavia Arzeni, and beautifully translated by Howard Curtis, at the most difficult time of my life, and I will read it always. The lives of two extraordinary, very different men, Rabindranath Tagore and Hermann Hesse, who find different routes to happiness, are entwined with stories of their writings, travels, domestic lives, houses, gardens, and friendships. For them, happiness is not a privilege for a few, or a passing mood. It is hidden behind a door, which once found, at the end of a journey of self-discovery, everyone can open. A joy to translate!

I read the Ferrante books translated by Ann Goldstein whose theory of translating I share. I am not a writer or poet, and would not assume that what an author writes means something else. Ann does not see recreating and transcreating as part of her remit as a translator of novels. This does not mean she translates literally. She admits her style loyally expresses words she has to translate - through a process of truthfully transposing words and forming sentences, and sentences into paragraphs - to reproduce a novel in English. While she says that had she known how the Ferrante stories would evolve, she may have done things differently, she is also pragmatic about the circumstances in which she worked. She eschews the theory that defends recreating a sentence to reproduce a concept, which I often resort to in an area of work involving texts written first in German and translated literally and maybe badly into Italian, which I translate into English. Finding the core of meaning, and restructuring sentences to a subject-verb-object order, and removing complex syntactic structures by splitting sentences into several, more meaningful ones is essential to unravel seemingly garbled ideas.

I studied History of Art and Renaissance Studies at university, so stories paintings tell are my concern. I love gardening, gardens, the history of gardens, the symbolism of flowers, herbs, and colour. My interests help in my choice of vocabulary – when for example a young girl, killed and hidden in a copse, is found with a stab wound to her “chest”. Asked to comment on the translation, my proposal that “breast” be used, not chest, was vital for the idea that the victim was a martyr to the lust of her assailant. A simple thing to suggest if one brings to one’s work the kind of cultural baggage I bring to mine. 

Native language: English
Translates from: Italian
Translates into: English





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