By Anindita Saha
The text presented below is an excerpt from the novel 'And The Mountains Echoed' written by Afghan-American novelist and physician Khaled Hosseini in 2013. After his two previous novels titled The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns came out in 2003 and 2007 respectively, in this third one he deviated from his style through his choice of avoiding the focus on any one character.
The story is set in 1952 in the fictional village of Shadbagh, Afghanistan, and sees many flashbacks and time leaps throughout its course. It primarily makes the reader witness the relationship between ten-year-old Abdullah and his three-year-old sister Pari.
The excerpt that I have chosen is a part of the story that their father Saboor, an impoverished farmer is narrating to them one night before he is to sell Pari to a wealthy childless couple in Kabul.
Text in English:
Though he loved all of his children, Baba Ayub privately had a unique fondness for one among them, his youngest, Qais, who was three years old. Qais was a little boy with dark blue eyes. He charmed anyone who met him with his devilish laughter. He was also one of those boys so bursting with energy that he drained others of theirs. When he learned to walk, he took such delight in it that he did it all day while he was awake, and then, troublingly, even at night in his sleep. He would sleepwalk out of the family’s mud house and wander off into the moonlit darkness.
Translated text in French:
Même s'il aimait tous ses enfants, Baba Ayub secrètement avait un penchant unique pour un parmi eux, son plus petit, Quais, qui avait trois ans. Quais était un jeune garçon avec les yeux bleus foncés. Il charmait ceux qui l'a rencontré avec son rire diabolique. Il était aussi un de ces garçons si débordant d’énergie qu’il a vidé d’autres de celle des leurs. Quand il a appris de marcher, il y prenait si plaisir qu'il l'a fait toute la journée pendant qu'il était éveillé, et puis, étrangement, même à la nuit dans son sommeil. Il faisait du somnambulisme et il sortait de la maison de boue de la famille et errait dans l'enseigne de la lune.
Problems faced
As mentioned above, this excerpt sees a father narrating a story to help his two kids fall asleep at night before their trip to Kabul the next morning. While translating, I had to make sure that I'm able to conserve the same emotions and sentiments of the actual story in the translated piece. The emotion of the kids eagerly listening to their father with sparkling eyes and a hearts full of suspense, the sentiment of the father who is narrating the story of another father, Baba Ayub, who faces a similar situation about his kids in the latter part of the story, his heart heavy with sadness thinking this might be the last story he is narrating to his dear kids.
Speaking in technical terms, I made use of the word-to-word translation for this text. The part that I chose was that of a children's story which therefore did not have many difficult words and deep meanings at its face value. So word to word translation worked easily in this case.
Moreover, the only thing that I kept in mind during the process was that if there is a French family whose father decides to narrate this story's translated version by me to his son or daughter, they should be able to enjoy the story and understand the moral without getting lost.
Pros and Cons of the strategy used
PROS:
1) It was comparatively less time-consuming since almost every word was to be translated literally without going into its deeper meaning.
2) For someone who is not very well aware of the translated language, or for a language learner, this literal translation is a useful method to learn new words and locate their equivalents in the text written in his native language.
For example, in English, I say "My name is Anindita". Its literal translation in French would be 'Mon prénom est Anindita'. So now I know the following:
My=Mon
Name= Prénom
Is=Est
On the contrary, had I used sense-to-sense translation, it would have been 'Je m'appelle Anindita' which would have been difficult for me to decipher as a newbie.
CONS:
1) The most common disadvantage that we associate with literal translation is that often the meaning is lost. Though true, this shortcoming was controlled in this particular text since it is a children's story with no deep meanings on the surface. Hence, the actual meaning and sentiment were preserved.
