Over the winter break, I completed a translation of a novel—the first novel I’ve ever translated. I’ve translated excerpts from novels before, as well as short story collections, but a complete novel was a new (and somewhat intimidating) experience for me.
Ultimately, my process for translating the novel was no different from any other translation I’ve done, involving a rough translation and then many, many revisions, including one where I read the whole book aloud to myself. When creating the actual translation, I was lost in the language—working out the author’s style and parsing the ambiguities within individual sentences—but when it came to the revisions, I found myself moving further and further away from the original words in the text and thinking more and more about the novel as a concept. By the time I submitted it, my eyes were practically spinning around in my head and I was muttering to myself, “I see how he did it. I see how he did it.” Through the revisions, I got closer and closer to the bones of the novel, to the way it was working on a structural level—Why did the scenes come in the order they did? Why did it center around three friends?—I saw it all.
What all this introspection made me want to do was write a translator’s note—an impulse I have never before understood. Translator’s notes have always struck me as a little too meta. I want a translation to stand on its own, without any notes telling a reader what to think. I want readers to come in with their own knowledge and use that to make something of the story. After all, that’s quite literally how I approached this translation: the book was assigned to me and I read a couple of sentences about it in Indonesian before I began. But after spending so much time with such a long work, I wanted to get meta. I wanted to talk about everything I’d seen while translating and everything I had learned (and am still learning) about the author.
Some translations do include translator’s notes, but that’s not going to be the case for this particular publication. Instead, I’ve decided to channel all my reflective impulses into a zine, because that seems like an easy communication method for me lately (more on that to come in another post).
What this has raised for me, on a higher level, is the concept of reflective writing in general. For big projects like a book, it makes sense to get a little reflective, but I wonder what would happen if I put more reflective writing into practice on a more regular basis. I obviously do some reflecting for this blog, but I’m wondering how writing reflections after I teach a class or after I attend a talk might impact my overall work.
It’s my plan in the new year to try some of this. I’d like to pause from time to time and do some writing on things I’ve accomplished—what I’ve learned, how I’ve worked through things, and what I’d like to do differently or try next. I don’t want to be too prescriptive about it, but I do want to see what structuring more writing time into my work might do. At the very least, I’m hoping it will help me retain new things I’ve learned, but I think it will also help me identify patterns and come up with new ideas or things I want to try.
What about you? Do you have any goals or resolutions for the new year? Do you regularly incorporate writing into your work? How has that gone for you?