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8 The Linguist Vol/55 No/6 2016 www.ciol.org.uk FEATURES I had read it any number of times and, for about 30 years, had quietly hoped someone would ask me to translate it. Do you feel a greater sense of responsibility with such classics? Very much so. I felt that I had to be very careful to capture the idiom. The Evenings was particularly difficult because it's 1947, it's a lot of internal monologue, and Frits is a very sarcastic, very verbal young man. His language is very prolix and the jokes are often arcane. It's the life of a hyper intelligent, bored teenager in the post-war years. I had to be careful to get the language right, not updating it too much but keeping it readable, making sure that English readers would enjoy it as much as I did the first time I read it, back in the 1980s. How do you deal with internal monologues in books like The Evenings? As a translator you have to get under the character's skin and start 'doing' them in the way that mimics do the voices of famous people. There's a strange kind of play-acting involved. I'm convinced that a good translator is also a kind of actor. It may be an introverted actor, but you're interpreting roles, and I think we have an awful lot in common with our thespian brothers and sisters. The humour in The Evenings is quite dark. How do you deal with humour? I use myself as a test audience: if I have read the book a few times in Dutch, translated it and, when I read my English passage afterwards, I laugh, then I figure I'm on the right path. You have to be honest though: you can't laugh just because otherwise you'll have to do it over! I understand exactly why people say that humour is hard to translate, but I really enjoy doing it; I get paid to make myself laugh – there's a privilege to that. The anticipation of, "Boy, when they read this they're gonna laugh", is a great kick. Can you think of a specific example? In Turkish Delight, there's a passage at a carnival in a southern town and the hero (if you can call him that) is talking about how this ordinarily staid town descends into drunken debauchery. Wolkers made up his own carnival song – the sort of 'oom-pa-pa' songs that are common in Holland and often off-colour. I had to get that right. It had to be funny, it had to be scabrous, it had to scan and it had to hit more or less the same notes that Wolkers was hitting. How do you deal with elements that may not be familiar to the target audience? It depends on the context. You may, in a Dutch novel, have a character who comes from a certain part of the Netherlands that implicitly adds something to their character . If you mentioned Spakenburg, for example, that creates associations: older women wearing traditional dress, shops being closed on Sunday, everyone filing, single file, down to church. You can't achieve that same ease of expression in English by mentioning Spakenburg, so you have to add something cleverly – by which I mean unobtrusively. At the same time, you have to be careful not to make the mistake of anglicising the experience of the character. You don't want to overplay your hand; you don't want to suddenly become visible in this narrative. So how do you remain 'invisible' while also maintaining a sense of this being a foreign work? That can be hard but I don't underestimate the readers' intelligence.They have chosen to read this book; there is a willingness to read something different. By maintaining some elements that could be called 'foreign', or at least not polishing them away, you are rewarding them for that curiosity. Between Dutch and English it's often to do with realia – something that comes from a television show or an expression that a politician once used. Sometimes you do go for an equivalent, but you're getting on very shaky ground then I think. I don't want to chew the readers' meal for them. I feel a responsibility that when people are reading a Dutch novel, they're still reading it as a Dutch novel when they're reading it in English. Have you come across something that you just couldn't translate? Untranslatability is something that is often touted but I think it's a very rare butterfly, if it does exist. It is often just a lack of time, and occasionally a lack of creativity, on the part of the translator. But sometimes you do lose things. In a book by Frank Westerman, Brother Mendel's Perfect Horse, we decided to leave out one paragraph. The words you use to describe the parts of a horse's body in Dutch are the same terms that you use when describing a human being, whereas for other animals there are other words for its legs, its head. And the fact that in Dutch there's that difference says something about the way that human beings view horses. I think that different perspective applies both in Dutch and in English, but the basis in language doesn't exist in both cultures. When Westerman makes a point about this, I couldn't do anything with it. Explaining it would destroy the narrative with a massive footnote; I don't do that and Frank Westerman didn't want to do that. Languages evolve differently. You're using the language to describe things that aren't always objectively outside in the world, but have more to do with the way you and your next-door neighbour, and all those who share that culture, have come to see the world and to talk about it. How much licence do you give yourself to translate creatively? When I talk to colleagues it often seems that we differ greatly in our view on this, but I think the end results often resemble each other much more than they differ. My own take is that, to the extent that I can give the reader the same experience in English that I have when reading the book in Dutch without changing a thing, then I will do that. I don't