Though
her
beloved
sons had been gone for three years without a word from them, Mother
Logan continued baking just as many cakes and pies and cookies as she
did when they were living there in the house.
Sometimes
it was hard to find your way around the kitchen because it was so
filled with baked stuff. Once Mr. Logan put a cup of coffee down in the
kitchen and he couldn't find it among all that baking.
Mr.
Logan had thought about asking his wife not to bake so much but he
never got around to asking her. It was easier for him to live with all
those cakes and pies and cookies than it was for him to say anything to
anybody about anything. If
his wife were a transmission there would be a lot less cookies and pies
and cakes in the house.
He never did find that cup
of coffee.
Courtesy of Ianthe
Brautigan who holds the copyright.
Muffins
galore, but no coffee cup to be found... Photos
cookies and muffin: www.pixelio.de
Notes on
Translating Willard
or "Painting
a
Horse
from the Hooves" ex
ungula equum pingere
I
was asked if
I've read the previous translation. The answer is no. I
rarely read English literature in translation, and
in this case I make a point of not reading it for fear of becoming
influenced. After all, I'm not a copy-cat ;-) I
know several colleagues who keep it that way when working on texts that
have
been translated before. It's almost always best to make a fresh start.
A Brautigan fan asked me, "Is it possible to
maintain the subtleties that blossom out of Richard's outlandish
metaphors?"
That's a very good question. Translating Richard Brautigan is
certainly not
exactly as easy as pie[s] from
Mother Logan's
kitchen, more of a
challenge in fact. I'm trying to work out a similar
rhythm, using words
or synonyms of equal
length with similar sounds that may have the same comic effect on
readers (or listeners, because this might turn into an audio
book) in
the target language. In Willard
Constance discovers she contracted warts.
They
had to be burned off with an electric needle: one
painful treatment
following on the claws of another painful
treatment."Claws" was
obviously chosen because of the
electric needle.
Translating that verbatim would sound very strange in German, but not
at all funny. As it happens, we
have a
German
expression for "painful treatment", "Rosskur", i.e. "horse-cure". But
if I
use that, I might have to eliminate "painful", because "Rosskur"
already implies painful. Right, let's say "One
horse-cure following on the claws (?) of another
horse-cure". Does a horse have claws? Definitely
not. However, "hooves" might work. That leads us to "One horse-cure
following on the hooves of another horse-cure."
Very strange indeed (or outlandishly outlandish) but, given
the context, it sounds
hilarious in German, conveying the humour of the original English
sentence. And why not "claws"? Because readers might think the
translator
got it all wrong. This may serve as an example. I might still change my
mind and replace
this with a different metaphor. In theSpanish
translationthis
sentence was rendered as: Había
que quemarlas con una aguja eléctrica:
un tratamiento
doloroso tras otro.["They had
to be burned off with an electric needle: one
painful treatment after
another."]Sadly,
the
sentence has lost
its
cause or rather its
claws by missing one hoofbeat, i.e. the repetition of "painful
treatment". In an ordinary text the word repetition would
certainly be de trop, but as Brautigan never wrote anything on the
hoof, I'd rather not mess with it.
B Matthew Brady
(That
was Brautigan's spelling, other sources render
the
name as Mathew -
take your
pick.) Photos
left and centre: WikipediaCover:
Wendell Minor Lincoln and Willard - birds
of a feather?
"Unbeknownst
to them the ghost of Matthew Brady slipped supernaturally into the
house and took a photograph
of Willard and
his bowling trophies. Matthew Brady
posed them in
such a way that Willard looked like Abraham Lincoln and the
bowling trophies looked like
his generals during the Civil War."
C
Johnny
Carson "... and
Johnny Carson popped into the room, like a fire-cracker on the TV
screen."
