It Takes Two

I’m a translator. Some would call me a word engineer or a language architect. I’m not being flippant; it’s other people who use those terms. I just say I’m a translator, but not literally. Most people don’t get the point; it’s an in joke.

Well, I had to do something after retiring early so I could see the world! Which I did, in a way.

Speaking in a more professional tone, which is the one I should by rights be using here, I will tell you that I spend most of my working hours translating. From Galician to English, to be specific. It’s not all that odd, because there are lots of translators working with languages like Georgian, Icelandic, Urdu, and Nahuatl. Never judge a language by the number of speakers it had or has.

And all of this personal information I provided is relevant, I believe, because when you spend all that time going back and forth between languages, trying to fiddle with ways to match them up, to make everything fit perfectly… You go from one side to the other, one sound to another, one tense or case or concordance to another, knowing…

that only the obsessed ever choose this type of work. You see, in going repeatedly from one side to the other, from here to there, you - I - begin to lose track of who I am or maybe where I am, even when you and I are. Nobody needs to flip the switch for you to get started; it’s stuck in the on position.

Obsessed, yes. With a few advantages coming from that condition (obsession), but a few more disadvantages as well. Not the least of these disadvantages is running into one’s own doppelganger. Not one’s ghost, because you can’t have or rather, be, a ghost until you’re dead. In comparison, the doppelganger is real, is just like you. And is always there. You do not need to be dead to have one, but you might be rather unfortunate. There are mixed reports on what the role of a double is, and the majority of them are frightening.

We are often tempted to dispose somehow of what a few call the ‘evil twin’, but I know from the case of Poe’s poor William Wilson, that it’s not just a matter of killing the “Other’” (as some intellectuals call the phenomenon), because in doing so we only kill ourselves. We can’t keep waging war on our doubles, who are just people like us… we cant’t… I can’t…

But I’m getting distracted and am just hoping my story might provide some comfort to readers who share the same inability to distinguish which side of the bridge they’re on, if not consistently, then occasionally. Readers who might face the same problem of knowing what page they’re on, the one - problem, not page - I find myself dealing with all the time. The problem that creates double minds in the same body while it also places people on paths that lead them to people they knew two centuries ago. Who might have been either good or evil or both, and who also know then. They all know each other so well, it’s as if they can read one another’s …

I always pack my words in a case when I’m entering a book. It’s not necessary , what with technology today, but I do try to shift linguistic gears and having a few extra on hand is helpful. This is for the most part a mental image I’m describing. Maybe it’s something that helps psych me up before I take another plunge into the sea of a new translation. This sense of opening a door is part of not knowing where I am. Am I in the Sar with Rosalía or Rianxo with Manoel-Antonio? My rain is Galician rain, it definitely is.

I shift my position, getting increasingly closer to the text I’m translating, and then where I am shifts, too. I do wonder where I am, to be honest. I seem to be the outsider walking through fields of ryegrass or tall, curly cabbages where outsiders have never walked. It is urgent that I learn the words for things. Like the different words for the stages in growth of couve, the cabbage on a stalk that pigs eat and people might. Like all the brands of potatoes and the names for the shellfish that vary according to the ría they came from. 

The lexicon they say is dying and to my translator’s heart it is such a universe. I would learn it all if I could, let them turn me into a word repository, like the universal livrary idea of a few centuries back. I need no other life.

For those of you who need to know, Walter Benjamin wrote about the task of the translator, but the word for task - die Aufgabe - also means frustration. I am sorely frustrated, it is true, at that lack of love of the speakers for something I would give my first born to have: the ability to speak the language, to know all its dialects and writers, have grown up with it. That will never happen, so while one of me keeps on working with words, the other or Other (one never knows) watches and smirks, or so it seems to me. 

No, I am not a foreigner, I tell the woman walking through tall grass and stopping to snip off a licorice-scented frond of fiúncho. I am from here, I was once born in a Galician here. I hope the woman walking knows my language or if she doesn’t she won’t get a word out of me because I don’t know any other language but the one I do know I can handle pretty well. We don’t know whose thoughts these are now.

Narrator’s Note:

You see, after you read something over and over, it becomes part of you, like a song or a commercial. On some level, you know it by heart. But your heart? Dangerous topic, especially for a person who is passionate about words. Try not to think about that. 

Conclusion of sorts, Epilogue, Final Comments, Author’s Observations:

All of this is intended to show how I meet myself coming and going, how it makes me feel to meet people who never could or would speak to me in English, since the truth is when they speak to me only in another language, one I did not know until much later, they are speaking to my double. And only I know that I am my own doppelganger, a mask-wearer who knows just enough to seem like I know who, what, where I am. 

This story has a second part, told from another point of view. A better one, perhaps. Or saner.

Translator’s Note:

Years ago, Lambert et al, sociolinguists, studied anomie in speakers of two languages. What they didn’t say is that this condition also affects a good 75% to 80% of all translators. So we really don’t know who we are after a while.