Translating Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

Cătălina: Deciding we should work together came almost naturally. I knew I didn’t want to translate it on my own (the thought that the entire novel would depend on my interpretation only felt unfair) and I knew Alexa loved the book and would probably enjoy joining forces. As for who did what, for a better continuity of the narrative, we initially agreed that I would do the translation part and Alexa the revising and correction part. But since the deadline was so tight, I barely had enough time to finish the first two parts in time, so in the end Alexa had to translate the third part and we both revised each other’s work.

Alexa: This was not the first time that Cătălina and I worked together and I already knew we made a good team, so when she proposed to work together, I immediately got on board. Time was tight, so doing it alone would have been a huge struggle. Translating fast would mean a higher risk of maybe misinterpreting or loosing bits and pieces of this extremely dense novel. I knew that working together would assure a good end result.

Cătălina: Since we both had to revise each other’s work, in a way, the translating probably did go slower at times. But in the end, I think it was actually a major win situation. There’s less chance that things will get lost in translation or be overlooked so you’re much less likely to be unsure of yourself. And, very important, the pressure of not doing justice to the text considerably diminishes since it doesn’t all rest on one pair of shoulders. I found revising Alexa’s translated bits to be much more difficult than translating myself. Maybe because revising involves getting out of one’s own flow, entering someone else’s mind space to a certain extent, meaning that you can’t go by your gut feeling anymore. Anything you disagree on has to undergo a thorough process of rethinking and has to be justified to the other. „Would Jas say this? Would her dad swear like this or is it too harsh?” Although it was the most difficult part, I also found it to be my favourite. The quick back and forth, often through emoji’s in the comments when one of us came up with a good idea or a silly one, the encouraging “mooi” (nice!) or just “superb” / “ador”. It was a very intimate way of getting to know each other, as if I suddenly had access to a thinking process of Alexa’s which couldn’t be accessed in any other way. 

Alexa: De avond is ongemak is fragmented on my computer in more than 40 files, that’s how many times we sent the chapters back and forth to each other. The translation definitely took longer, but the end version was also better as a result of that. Cătălina and me have a different feeling of the Romanian language and talking about the ways in which we read a word or a sentence, made it all worthwhile and made us communicate clearer. Moreover, I felt that I could relax while translating, because there is a second opinion coming. That does not mean to become sloppy, but working with somebody else lifts a weight of your shoulders, because you share the responsibility. I think we came up with better solutions: for the multitude of realia, the weird mixture of childish language and the harsh parts and mostly also the natural flow of the book. Reading it back and forth so many times made the book sound every time more natural in Romanian. 

Cătălina: Before sending the book off, we worked very closely with a third reader, the Romanian to Dutch translator Jan Willem Bos. The text was so dense that even after reading it countless times, there were still things we wouldn’t have picked up on without his keen eye. For instance, the reference to a big bad wolf (you can tell Dutch isn’t the language either me or Alexa had read Little Red Riding Hood). We had made sure that every single word in the book was in the exact right place, what Jas said was definitely what Jas would say, the whole thing was checked and double-checked not only by the two of us, but also by Jan Willem. So for me, the new suggestions from the publisher felt almost intrusive at times and I noticed they were often met with a bit of resistance. It was especially hard to let go of the changes in the topic. „That’s not Jas’ tone!”. But this is only because you get so attached to the text that it becomes difficult to accept a different interpretation, not necessarily because the suggestions were bad. You create this character, it’s almost like being a puppeteer, you bring the character to life, draw its eyes, its mouth, find the perfect voice for it, you know exactly which link words it uses, when, in which part of the sentence, and most importantly, you know exactly what they would never say. I came to know Jas so well that when I started reading Mijn lieve gunsteling, Rijneveld’s second novel, I was still reading it with Jas’s voice resonating in my head. The relationship is so intimate.

Alexa: Jan Willem Bos was the mentor of my first translation of K. Schippers and also Cătălina’s mentor when she was part of the first edition of CELA, so working with Jan Willem feels very familiar. He is very meticulous and we knew that our text would be in good hands. Luckily, he agreed to check our text. His encouraging comments meant a lot. I was also very glad that Maria Ghiurțu and Alin Croitoru from Pandora M read our translation with such care and interest, as this does not always happen. Alin made us go through the book three times again and again and explain our choices. We were especially keen on keeping the childish tone of Jas, even though it sometimes interferes with a more distant literary language, that the Romanian reader is used to. We succeeded in maintaining what felt to be the right voice of the Romanian Jas and made compromises in other places.

Cătălina & Alexa: We decided not to consult any of the translations in other languages while we were still working on the text as we felt it would be too distracting, and that it could potentially influence our own translation. But the first thing that comes to mind is that, at the end of the whole process, I would have liked to have been able to check the translations in other languages, maybe to have had enough time to write and wait for a possible response from the writer, ask a few questions about things we weren’t as sure of. Although translating without being in touch with the writer is a good exercise too, it gives more freedom to be daring in the interpretation and decision making. 

Cătălina: We decided not to add any footnotes in the book, as we thought it would distract from the reading flow and we didn’t think it would suit Jas’ stream of consciousness. So maybe one of the biggest losses in the translation is the fact that the Romanian reader will not know that Jas also stands for jacket, it’s not just a simple name. Another thing that comes to mind is the blue envelope. At a certain point, Jas complains about the fact that she never receives mail whereas her dad always gets beautiful blue envelopes. What we couldn’t keep in our text is the implied reference that the colour carries with it. The blue envelopes that she admires are in fact anything but beautiful, since the colour is actually an indicator of the belastingdienst (the tax office). But we weren’t able to keep the reference in Romanian. We wouldn’t have been able to explain it without drawing more attention to it than needed.

Alexa: I was strongly against footnotes because a text written in stream of consciousness cannot have footnotes. It would interrupt the flow too much. So I’m quite pleased about that, but indeed less pleased that we didn’t translate the name of the main character, especially because in Romanian, “J” would be read as a the “J” (from Jacques). Luckily, the name does not appear too often. The title is something that was transformed in translation. The “ongemak” is so typical for Germanic languages that we could not find a perfect equivalent. Other that the English “discomfort”, the Romanian “neliniște” means disquiet, uneasiness. The construction “De avond is ongemak” sounds very powerful in Dutch, while the Romanian version with a gerund is rather more poetical. Yet, losing some bits and pieces in translation is something that we had to get used to.  

Cătălina: The book is steeped in Dutch culture, the farm life and the heavily Protestant environment in which Jas grows up. This was all already a huge challenge to find the right equivalents in Romanian, but aside from that, the text is also very very dense, with a really specific rhythm to it, almost like a long poem. I think this was actually the biggest challenge, keeping the rhythm and the tone in line with the original text. The tenses weren’t any easier either.

Alexa: All the terms that the narrator uses for the farm life, the cows, the objects used for the cows, for all the cookies and the food were a challenge. Maybe more so were the words for pee and poop. The Romanian literary language is quite prude and does not necessarily invite this vocabulary. But we made it work. I struggled with it but, at the same time, enjoyed finding the right tone and register, somewhere between sweet and mild, yet at times aggressive.