Translating Monsters

  by Sarah Ardizzone

A golem is a monster that risks getting the better of you. And there were times, in the eighteen months, it took me to coax my virtual monsters across the Channel when I felt like I was up against it. My roller-coaster research ride, from the Algerian quarter of Marseille to the heart of youth culture in Brixton, was exhilarating enough. But I hadn’t bargained for the way the challenge would keep on morphing.

Following GOLEM’s success in France (and in particular its appeal to reluctant boy readers), my job was to translate this pot-boiler adventure series, set in the contemporary urban ghetto, and make it work for a streetwise British readership. Which meant rolling up my shirtsleeves and tackling that ongoing tension between a faithful (dull?) translation and a promiscuous (gripping?) one. Let me give you a film analogy: unlike screen buffs, as a reader, you don’t get to choose whether you’re perusing the original version with subtitles or the dubbed one. I have to make that decision for you. I’d like to think the British GOLEM works best where aspects of adaptation, original version and transparency all hang together.

Dealing with the non-nametag of myths can be liberating and bewildering for the translator. You may feel freer to forge a fresh voice in your mother tongue, but in the absence of a strong sense of how that voice was born, or what parameters shaped it, your translation risks becoming a slippery veneer of paraphrases. Here the three co-authors, aka the Murail siblings, took an oral tradition and transformed it into a fast-paced current serial, updating the tradition of the roman feuilleton with comic-strip humour. In this process of writing à six mains, they didn’t just forget which specific bits ‘belonged’ to them, but expressly extended this spirit of team-work (the French word ‘collaboration’ has too much of a negative connotation) to their British translator. They were happy to entertain the idea that, in addition to ferrying linguistic meaning, translation can also be about cultural fine-tuning or the re-stacking of humour necessary to make stories work afresh.

One of the most legendary re-workings of the Golem myth was set in 16th Century Prague where Rabbi Loeb created a monster designed to help out the oppressed ghetto-dwellers, but which ended up destroying them instead. Fast forward some four hundred years, factor a few edgy themes into the equation – like voracious multinationals, mass consumerism, cyberspace and virtual babes – and you get the Murails’ up-to-the-minute version, set against the backdrop of graffiti tags, hip-hop and North African immigration. The action takes place on a run-down housing project (the Paris suburbs are mentioned, but it could be any high-density living area in any multicultural city of a developed country). The happy twist in the tale is one of urban regeneration.

Talking of which, here’s an example of the kind of topographical headache I faced. The outskirts of French cities like Marseille are often scarred by housing projects that sprawl horizontally for 200m. These concrete ‘barres’ are now reckoned such an architectural and social disaster, the French government has begun dividing them up as well as demolishing them. So how do I convey all that in the term ‘tower block’? Ghetto humour proved easier to translate. Like the way the more ‘mashed up’ (as in problematic) an estate is, the more absurdly up-beat its name: Hummingbird Tower, Flamingo Block, Paradise Estate.

It was the backslang I really had to get my teeth into. The French love turning their words back to front and inside out. So in verlan (the back-tofront way of saying l’envers which, you guessed it, means ‘back to front’) a femme becomes a meuf, a mec (guy) becomes a keum, a prof(esseur) is a feupro and les flics (police) are keufs. Take that last example: an old skool English translation would be ‘pigs’, but given the US influence on UK slang, you might want to refer to them as Feds or Five O’s (as in Hawaii). There’s a free-style factor going down here too. You don’t just splice the words down the middle and flip’em back to front – there’s got to be a feeling, often a musical one, for what’s best to add or subtract to make the word flow or jam. Just to keep everybody on their toes, verlan is now being re-reversed or double-flipped so that beur which is backslang for ‘arabe’ has been re-mixed to form ‘rebeu’. Where all this starts getting complicated is in absorbing the Maghreb influences from the French (the hard K sounds in verlan often give the words an Arabic feel), while looking to shades of, say, Jamaican patois in the English. I wanted the authenticity of dialogue from a Bali Rai novel, for example, rather than have my characters speaking the typecast ghetto fabulous of Ali G hybrids.

This kind of banter and wordplay is also much more encoded, systematic even, in French. Which makes interacting with mainstream culture much easier – once you’ve grasped the principle, you don’t just understand what’s been done to words but you’ve got the power to forge slang yourself. Such coded language in British culture tends to represent specificinterest groups, as with the gay language Polari. Like the English language itself, our mainstream slang tends to be a rich melting pot of what’s filtered on through.

Young people on the Tulse Hill estate in Brixton, where I lived, came to the rescue as my dialogue consultants. The over-smart ‘slangstas’ at Lambeth’s Live Magazine ("by young peeps, for young peeps") helped out too. These 12-21-year-olds advised me on what’s current, while warning me about slang’s in-built obsolescence factor. Once I’d got a feel for the rhythms and resonances of slang in South London, its colour, mood and humour, my task was to engineer an equivalent: but preferably with a longer shelf-life. As the Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, remarked when delivering the 2004 NESTA Max Sebald Lecture at London’s South Bank Centre: "Translators can’t convey the slang of our times accurately, because slang is language in constant transformation. So we have to give slang an ‘onomatopoeic resonance’ by  transforming language into comical expression."

Consulting with these young people about the stories they wanted to read from other countries, creating the kind of dialogue they felt was an accurate portrayal of how their contemporaries might talk if they were dubbed into English, are what most inspired my extended sense of the translator as go-between, observer and writer. From the Algerian rappers who wowed me with their (at first) incoherent verlan in Marseille, to the UK street slangstas who talked a whole new language, I relished forging encounters between words and people, as well as witnessing so-called non-linguists offering up fiery translations of their own. Now that really is a case of monsters growing arms and legs. From my perspective, it ain’t what you lose but how you gain it in translation.

© Outside In: Children’s Books in Translation, Milet Publishing (2005)

Sarah Ardizzone (née Adams) is an award-winning translator from French.  She was born in 1970 in Brussels, Belgium and has worked as an arts critic and travel journalist and critic reporting on cultural melting pots from Harlem to Marseille, and her writing has appeared regularly in national newspapers and on bbc.co.uk/arts.

Sarah curated the Translation Nation programme for the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust and Eastside Educational Trust, rolled out in primary schools during 2011-2012 and she is also one of the first 'mentors' appointed in a new pilot scheme by The British Centre for Literary Translation and the Translators Association.

Sarah has translated many works of children’s literature including works by Daniel Pennac - Dog, Kamo's Escape, Eye of the Wolf which won the 2005 Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation and The Rights of the Reader; Faiza Guêne’s, Just Like Tomorrow, Dreams from the Endz and Bar Balto; Timothée de Fombelle's Toby Alone and Toby and the Secrets of the Tree; Joann Sfar’s graphic novel version of The Little Prince; Little Red Hood by Marjolaine Leray and Mr Leon’s Paris (Phoenix Yard); The Boy Who Ate Stars by Kochka; 'Golem' series by Marie-Aude, Lorris and Elvire Murail; ‘Who Am I?’ picture book series and Super H for Milet; Watching by Suzy Chic and My House by Delphine Durand (WingedChariot)  Publishing. Sarah’s recent translation is a new novel by Timothée de Fombelle – Vango: Between Earth and Sky (Walker Books).

There are 41 Books translated by Sarah with reviews on the Outside In World website.