A great translator is worth more than 2kg of pig meat
Justin Lifflander
One way to learn another language, beyond the cliched advice of sleeping with a translator (and I don’t knock this suggestion!), is to write a story that is important to you and then have a team of professional translators – with deep idiomatic knowledge of your mother tongue – interpret it into their language in a dual column document, so you can go through the text, line by line, word by word, and begin to feel and see your thoughts and emotions in their words.
I had the good fortune to work with a team from The Russian Translation Company (RPK), when preparing my memoir, How Not to Become a Spy, for publication in Russia. Ten years later, we all remember the fun and learning we had together. Below is a blog from my friends at RPK.
By Anna Dik
Anna Dik, Ekaterina Khomyakova and Ksenia Kostrova, RPK (They deserve an award for surviving six months of “cooperation” with Justin)
Several years ago, we were given the wonderful opportunity to translate Justin Lifflander’s story How Not to Become a Spy into Russian. The book is autobiographical, funny, and instructive, telling the story of a young American living in the Soviet Union. What makes it particularly compelling is that it was quite literally written from the personal experience of the author. As such, it presents a view of the dying days of the Soviet Union from the inside… and a little from the outside, too. And it comes close to our ideals – that it is better to be friends than to quarrel. We had a great time translating the book. Justin turned out to be a sweet guy: he eagerly offered explanations, praised our creative translations, introduced us to the prototypes of his characters, and invited us to his place. And at times he was even inspired by us to rewrite parts of the original.
One of the episodes in Justin’s book recounts the story of how he met his future father-in-law. Worried about “losing face” in front of a foreigner – and one who may very well become his son-in-law – the bride’s father decided to slaughter the family piglet Borka and give the young couple a kilogram of lard and the same amount of meat as a gift. The image of his girlfriend’s dad, a hulk of a man, standing in the doorway carrying a bag with Borka’s bloody head peering out was more than a little intimidating. Justin’s girlfriend (who had a six-year-old son from her first marriage; yes, she had some life experience behind her) would later confide to him that the slaughtered creature had been her childhood playmate.
Aleksandr Genadevich Zotov, Justin’s Father-In-Law
Ksenia and I are city girls, so we didn’t spot where Justin had messed up; we diligently translated and edited what we had read. But Katerina, who spent every summer in the countryside, keeled over with laughter.
“A middle-aged pig! They’re butchered before they finish their first year, well, maybe third. But certainly not thirtieth! And what does ‘A kilogram of lard and the same amount of meat’ mean? The absurdity of it! Pigs weigh, like, dozens of kilograms! Yeah right, dad was trying to impress his daughter’s suitor…
Borka had a privileged childhood, until….
We tried to explain to the Justin, as delicately as we could, why our colleague Katerina was in bent over in laughter. He offered the following justification:
“I mean, he came alone. It must have been heavy for him!”
These words only caused another bout of hysterical laughter:
“The poor broad-shouldered bugger! Dragged two whole kilograms of meat! Its head must’ve weighed at least five! And why would he take a bloody head with him anyway? To test the suitor’s mettle?”
Giving one’s life for a good cause… (source Freepik)
Justin was forced to admit that his memory of the event was rather fuzzy, as they’d been drinking quite heavily that evening to mark their first meeting. And his wife (you know, Borka’s friend) confirmed that the translators were, in fact, right – she didn’t have the heart to upset her partner, as he’d retold the story so beautifully. So, under the watchful eye of our resident expert on country life, the text was put into a more plausible form: the piglet was posthumously made much younger, and the weight of the lard and meat were obscured. Perhaps in doing so we robbed someone of the chance to have a good, hearty laugh at the implausibility of it all. But at least the author’s integrity was saved. And that’s worth a great deal!