Living not at home

When translating, there are always textures in the source language which cannot be directly replicated in the target language. Moving from Portuguese to English, gender is one such texture. Every noun in Portuguese is either feminine or masculine (which is the case in many other languages too) while English only has gendered nouns in special cases. I have been translating João Luís Barreto Guimarães’s collection Aberto todos os dias from Portuguese into English. I noticed a pattern at the start of the poem ‘Aquela garça ali’ (or  ‘That heron there’) . The first six nouns are alternately feminine and masculine. The nouns are:  a garça, o bote, a curva, o rio, a cidade, o fim. (In English this would be: the heron, the boat, the curve, the river, the city, the end).  Since every noun in Portuguese – whether animate, inanimate, concrete, abstract – is gendered, gender can seem arbitrary, not carrying significant meaning. To me the gender of a noun stands out ‘as though each ...

I have been completing first drafts of the last few poems in Aberto todos os dias   by João Luís Barreto Guimarães. In my experience, translating poetry involves a negotiation between sense and sound. The words I choose need to communicate a meaning close to the Portuguese original, and also a similar rhythm and sound patterning. There’s some adjusting to be done: swapping a word for a synonym with one extra syllable, or with one less. Swapping a word for a synonym whose vowel sounds complement an existing pattern in the line. It reminds me of being a dressmaker making small tucks or opening seams in a garment to get the best fit. The acrostic is a literary form where such subtle alternations are inadmissible. Guimarães’s poem 'Introdução à poesia' ('Introduction to poetry') describes a group of fruit trees planted so that the first letter of each spells out the word CALMA (in English, CALM): Cerejeira, Ameixoeira, Limoeiro, Macieira, Ameixoeira. Translating this list ...

False friends are an established idea in language learning. They link two languages in a deceptive way. They are pairs of words, one in each language. They are friends because they’re similar in sound or spelling. They’re false because their meaning is significantly different. They look like effective translations but they're not.  Two classic examples are embaraçada – embarazada and préservatif – preservative .     embaraçada (Portuguese) means embarrassed     embarazada (Spanish) means pregnant     préservatif (French) means a contraceptive     preservative (English) means a food additive I’m proposing a related idea: unreliable friends . These are pairs of words which link two languages and translate each other, but do so with some slippage. I like unreliable friends because they foreground the way languages borrow words and repurpose them. The idea of correct English or correct Portuguese is a fundamental misunders...

How many translation mistakes can you spot on this disposable paper place mat? I found three — one howler, one blip and one neologism. They're hard to ignore once you've noticed them but do they matter? Do they get in the way of communication?  The blip is ‘I’ve already had a date at Praça D. João I.’ The source sentence used já . Já is a hardworking word. It can mean both right now or already . And it’s used in Portuguese more liberally than already is in English. The translation into English sounds a little unbalanced but it roughly communicates the meaning. The howler is ‘I’ve mistakenly went to Rivoli…’. It should be ‘I’ve mistakenly been to Rivoli …’. Here the translation loses some clarity – by mixing two forms of the past tense the reader is left unclear if it means that the trip took place at a particular moment ( ‘ I mistakenly went to... ’ ) or that it was sometime before the present but the precise moment is not important ( ‘ I've mistakenly been to... ’ ). ...

  Question: what Portuguese term is harder to translate than saudade ?  Answer: calçada portuguesa . Calçada portuguesa has a clear and unambiguous meaning : ​​it is a paving surface made from small pieces of hard dense limestone with one flat face. The limestone comes in both black and ivory forms. The contrast between the two colours is used to form decorative patterns and mosaics. As well as having a specific definition, the practice of making these paved decorative surfaces has a global spread; as well as in former Portuguese colonies it occurs in Spain, Gibraltar, the US, Canada. Despite this, there’s no standard translation of calçada portuguesa into English.  How do I know? Because I’ve been translating poems by João Luis Barreto Guimarães. The last poem of the collection Aberto todo os dias (Quetzal Editores, 2023) has an image of a child using the binary black/ivory division of a mosaic pavement to play a game. My first translation of the poem included these l...

Can you pat your head and rub your belly at the same time? Can you do the weekly shop whilst helping with maths homework over the phone?  Can you read one language whilst hearing a second language behind it? I recently managed the third of these multi-tasking challenges and the glow of achievement is still with me. I work in a school in Portugal. I joined last year when it added an international wing; international in the sense that lessons are delivered in English, qualifications are certified by an organisation registered in the UK, and most pupils come from beyond Portugal.  The school has been in existence for nearly ninety years so its supporting infrastructure was already well-established before it started offering a curriculum taught in English: policies, term planners,  clothing guidelines,   categories for recording pupil absence and all the other written procedures necessary for effective operation. And, naturally, all of this was in Portuguese. A handful o...

Na sexta-feira, 14 de Abril, fui a um evento multilingue incomum. Multilingue porque falaravam três línguas para manter todos na conversa. Incomum porque nenhuma destas línguas era o inglês.  Tratava-se do lançamento de dois livros de Peter Svetina na Livraria Velhotes  em Vila Nova de Gaia. Peter é um autor infantil consagrado, mas estas são as suas primeiras publicações em Portugal.  Peter esteve à conversa com dois dos seus editores: o seu editor português, João Manuel Ribeira , e a sua editora eslovena, Barbara Pregelj. A maior parte das perguntas vieram de Barbara. Ela dirigiu-as a Peter em espanhol e ele respondeu em esloveno. Depois, Barbara traduziu as respostas para espanhol, para benefício do público.  Tenho quase a certeza de que, à excepção das três pessoas na fila da frente que se riram ou acenaram com a cabeça enquanto o Peter falava em esloveno, todos os outros tinham o português como primeira língua. O editor João Manuel Ribeira fez algumas perguntas...