traduttore tradittore

not sure if i got the spelling right. it's an italian maxim that says "translation is betrayal." and for some reason, after centuries of theorizing, it still seems to hold true. translating from one language/code to another will always entail making choices, deciding what to carry over and what will have to be sacrificed in the name of brevity, readability, &c. there are lots of fancy words for this: information load, cultural content, etc. anyway, the current darling among translational approaches is target-oriented translation, aka fluent translations, in which the text must not appear to be a translation, so that the translator is in effect rendered invisible. sort of like a magic trick.

i would love to be able to do this 100% of the time but with the kinds of texts i'm working on, it just doesn't seem possible. i'm on my third batch now, each batch being a section in a book of poetry characterized by linguistic play and other such experimentation. the first batch of seven poems was difficult because of the various language registers used (dated slang, archaic Tagalog, some dialect) and the fact that several of these featured acrostics. good grief. but i managed to finish those in 2 weeks.

wrestling with the second batch turned out to be much much bloodier. that took me...well, much too long. on the surface, it looked like just four poems that played with repetition and patterns. the first, "balimbing", was easy enough. the second proved more difficult but it was mainly a problem of language register. the third poem was hellish, involving an acrostic, and seemingly endless repetition of the same 8 words in 80+ lines but with different patterns, and therefore different meanings.

the last "poem" in that section was actually a whole series of 20 concrete poems (!!!) that also used a lot of punning, aural and visual. that was like mission impossible for me. most translations scholars will tell you that you just don't/can't translate concrete poetry . at most, you do a prose translation or write a note explaining the content. but no... i actually finished the darned thing, and even managed to replicate some of the sound play via alliteration and assonance. yes, i'm that good, haha. ha.

and now this last batch. fifteen pages of rhyme and meter (the poems follow a traditional tagalog form), some very obscure references and even words that don't apear in my tagalog-english dictionary (the one prepared by father leo james english). argh. been working on this for four months now but very little progress. good grief.

okay, back to work.