A British critic once said that whenever he read American authors, he felt like he was reading a foreign language. When I gave my doctoral dissertation proposal to be corrected by a USA monolingual speaker, he rewrote my material to the point that my advisor -he had read my original, and had suggested an editor- said, “these are not the same ideas we spoke about”. I then found a second editor who knew Spanish and he edited the text without losing the substance of my thesis. I never finished the dissertation for reasons beyond, but including, translations. Gabriel García Márquez novel La Mala Hora’s edition in Barcelona made him so angry that he self-published the novel in México. The editor had rewritten his text to the point that it eliminated all particular Colombian idioms from the novel. The Mambo Kings sounded more Cuban in the USA's edition in English than its Spanish translation. It was as if characters based on the likes of Celia Cruz spoke Spanish like Sara Montiel. “Joder”. When editing a text written in a second language, by a bilingual writer, the editor must know the native language of the author. Translation demands a fierce loyalty to the original text, and when it is from the same language -from English to English, written by a bilingual person in his second language-, the first language has to be present as if talking to him. How readers will respond is a different story.
(from the book edited in .pdf., My Bilingual New York, June 2019)
No comments:
Post a Comment