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This morning we all visited the American Embassy in Lisbon, which for most of us meant that we were technically in our home country for a few hours. The embassy grounds, however, naturally bears little actual resemblance to America. Perched on a hill in the outskirts of town, the older buildings date back to a 17th century monastery and lush Portuguese vegetation surrounds them - definitely a far cry from my hometown in Western New York. The embassy shop that sold US goods for dollars was probably the part of the tour that made everybody feel most at home. The ship's company bought all of their favorite snacks, toiletries and magazines, and we even picked up a few pieces of American sports equipment for the upcoming Amistad Feats of Strength.
Leafing through Eve's recent edition of Newsweek, an exciting acquisition for somebody who lives at sea and abroad, I stumbled across an article that made me feel at home in a different way. For some background: in my other life I'm a literature and classics student, but life aboard doesn't normally give me the chance to actively pursue those interests; I try to do a lot of pleasure reading, but I often pass out asleep in my bunk after just a few pages, completely worn out from standing watch or a full day of ship's work.
The article was about two new translations of Tolstoy's War and Peace, and as an avid fan of Russian literature I was excited to see that my favorite translators of Dostoevsky's work had undertaken this epic, gloriously ambitious novel. In this brief article, in response to an inquiry as to the necessity of more translations of such a well-known and oft-translated book, Richard Pevear, one of the authors of a recent translation, responds,
"You could tell people what is portrayed in Rembrandt's 'Return of the Prodigal Son' and move them deeply. But the telling would have little to do with the experience of looking at the unique disposition of color, light, space, scale, line, texture, brush work in Rembrandt's painting, which also happens to depict the return of the prodigal son. It is the same with a work in words. Words have color, shade, tone, texture, rhythm, pacing, disposition, structure; they can quote, echo, parody other words; they can be unexpected, infinitely suggestive, mercurial; they can also beat and repeat like a drum. That is the nature of Tolstoy's artistic medium; his 'story' comes clothed in all these elements of style as he alone used them, and which alone create the impression he wanted to make. Of course he used them 'instinctively,' and not for the sake of effect (though he was a far more conscious and even experimental stylist than is sometimes thought). The translator, on the other hand, has to do consciously what the author did instinctively. And yet it must seem instinctive - that's the final test."
("Lost in Translations," Newsweek, October 15th)
Reading this made me wish I were capable of giving such a lovely, succinct and eloquent response to everybody who expresses puzzlement or disinterest when I tell them about my passion for language. I always find it difficult to explain to people why plot is often the last thing I'm concerned with when reading a novel, but I feel that Pevear expresses it quite nicely here. Sitting in the Main Salon reading this made me feel much more at home, in a figurative sense, than touring around native soil in a foreign country ever could. I'm at home in words, and having somebody articulate exactly what I think about them, a thought that's been lost in the clutter in the back of my mind recently, made me feel like I was sitting in the armchair next to the woodstove in my family's house, watching my parents cook dinner.
I do also have a certain obsession with translation, with the human attempt to communicate across linguistic barriers. Though it may seem like me sitting alone in a tiny room at a desk piled high with big books poring over ancient Greek verb charts has little in common with Alexandra and Renato shouting a Portuguese translation of a crew member's Amistad story at a compartment filled with a teeming mass of boy scouts until their voices are hoarse, we're all motivated by the same desire: to understand and communicate some kind of truth to our fellow human beings. And, as Pevear said, the challenge and the goal isn't to give people a list of facts or plot points, but to use language, the most powerful tool that we, the human race, have at our disposal, to see to it that people can to some degree partake in an experience that they're vastly separated from by every other factor in the universe besides our words. So we strive to use just the right ones.
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