Journale Lucy Fricke’s Töchter: A Translation Road Trip

THIS IS NOT A DONKEY

By Isabelle Liber, translated by Odile Kennel


I once gave my younger brother a book I had translated. After he’d finished it, he told me, “It felt like reading a letter from you.” Oh no! Where had he detected my “hand”? Isn’t my role to disappear behind the author’s style, to let them speak for themselves?

Of course, the notion of the “invisible” translator – the idea that a successful translation is one in which the translator is absent – is illusory. Just get a few people to translate a couple of sentences and you’ll instantly notice how varied the results are, how they all contain traces of the people who translated them.en und offenbar Spuren der Person enthalten, die sie übersetzt hat.

A sign on Santorini’s “Donkey Trail”.

When we translators approach a text, we do so not as translation machines, but as thinking, feeling, speaking beings who pay attention to different things, whose knowledge and experience are unique.

"We stared at each other. His eyes were coal-black and surrounded by a white coat. His muzzle was white too, as were his teeth, which practically glowed in the dark. I heard a scream that seemed to come from the sea but I realised was my own. Unperturbed, the donkey regarded me for some time before eventually trotting on. Trembling, I followed from a safe distance. When he stopped, I stopped. When he moved, I moved. It was a game, but it was a long time since I’d played anything and I didn’t understand what the aim was. Only when I kept walking and he remained motionless did I realise that the donkey was waiting for me, that this was the goal: to get me to catch up with him and accept his invitation. If he won my trust, he won the game."

(Daughters, p. 196)

In this passage towards the end of Lucy Fricke’s novel, the narrator, Betty, who is trying to escape her past before it destroys her, suddenly encounters a donkey. I find this scene moving, not just because of the role it plays in the story 1, but also because of the personal associations it evokes, associations that have little to do with the novel itself. The novelist’s donkey isn’t my donkey; how could it be? Superimposed on the donkey depicted in the novel is a donkey comprising all the things I associate with the animal.

First, my donkey is a composite of all the donkeys I encountered as a child. My mother adored these animals, and whenever we went for a drive in the countryside, we would stop to stroke the donkeys grazing at the side of the road and take photos. At home, our bookcase was full of books about donkeys, and I remember one birthday that involved us going on a donkey trek.

A few items from the family collection of donkey iconography (postcards and a book:  G. Rossini, Mémoires des ânes et des mulets, Équinoxe, 2003)

But my donkey is also a philosophical fox, as Betty’s encounter with the animal inevitably reminds me of the scene with the Little Prince and the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book. This is a book that, in spite of the excessive merchandising, has lost none of its wonder for me.

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The encounter between the fox and the Little Prince in the 2015 film Le Petit Prince.

In addition, my donkey trots “between worlds” along the Georgian paths painted by Niko Pirosmani, an artist whose work has been part of my life for several years now. A good friend first introduced me to him; some time later, I sat in a dark cinema utterly entranced by Gueorgui Chenguelaia‘s film about the artist.2Later again, I edited a catalogue to accompany an excellent exhibition of Pirosmani’s work in the Albertina (in Vienna) and the Fondation Van Gogh (in Arles) in 2018/19.

Without contradicting the source text or imposing anything on it, each word I use to describe the donkey in this passage contains tiny traces of all the donkeys that have crossed my path. As Jean-René Ladmiral puts it, “translation is impossible without the mediating subjectivity of the translator".3 And subjectivity is one of the things that makes translation so fascinating.

 

Drive on.

 

Fußnoten
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