Humanitarian Translation

Originated in a journal entry from 1st May

Migrants crossing the English Channel. Photo Credit: The Telegraph

When the fictional writer Pierre Menard (re)penned chapters of Don Quixote and produced a text worthy of praise far exceeding any due to Miguel de Cervantes’ version, he did not do so through a greater understanding of seventeenth-century Castilian or a better-constructed text but through the fact of the context in which he wrote. The world which surrounded Cervantes and the language he used was his own, however for Menard, for the text to be produced required a greater divergence from the context of the world in which he, as a twentieth-century French writer, lived.¹ A translator’s labour is comparable to Menard’s: we are not tasked with reproducing a text from another linguistic milieu but with producing a text within the current target culture. So, when crises occur in, or adjacent to, a receiving culture, it is understandable that translators, like any other writer, would feel the need to respond through their art.

Pietro, the hermit, is initially despised by certain characters in this story. Descriptions of him and the reactions of Nino’s aunt, and to a lesser extent his father, when Pietro is so much as mentioned are reminiscent of how certain media outlets in this British receiving culture respond to the tragically ongoing immigration and asylum crisis. How would the text differ if the Hermit was a refugee, and he settled in his cave, not through choice, but because he had nowhere else to go?

The family discuss the hermit at dinner

I first heard about the hermit at dinner. At the first word from Nino, my sister-in-law had snapped: “He’s a filthy pig. I see why everyone says the things they do; he won’t even integrate with the village.” Nino said that that morning the hermit had appeared at the market to sell rabbit pelts.

“Who is he?” I asked

He seemed to be a young man who, for reasons Nino didn’t initially explain, had settled halfway up the hill by the river. He had dug a cave there, was keeping goats and was wary of people intruding. “But the priest has already warned all the women about what he’s like” interrupted my sister-in-law. Nino, without paying her any attention said that he had a blonde beard, a coat made of furs and sandals. “He’s an immigrant,” spat my sister-in-law. Laughing, I said that he was probably just a scrounger. Nino began passionately defending him, explaining that before coming here he had been a lawyer and had helped people, he had been comfortable and had a home, but he had to give that all up. Everyone knew all of this. Colino, for example.

“Shut it!” He shouted at my sister-in-law, who had started laughing. “What do you know, anyway?”

Nino and his father visit the hermit’s cave

The stench of a barn emanated from the bottom of the cave. The soil was damp and sandy. Turning back towards the entrance all that could be seen were the blue vines in the emptiness.

“We’re going,” I said, sweating. “We shouldn’t be here.”

Nino wanted to light a match to show me the cave, “That’s enough. You don’t know where that water’s been.”

“Oh it’s good,” He said, panting.

Nino’s flame sputtered to life and lit bare, dripping walls. Against one of them was a bundle of ragged clothes and a pair of holey-soled shoes. Next to that, I saw where Nino had found his match. A small, paper book of them, the kind you would pick up in a bar was tattered and mostly empty. Beneath the matches was a heavily thumbed, brown book with an illegible title. From the top edge, I could see part of a photograph which was being used to hold his place. A man with a heavy moustache and glasses looked up sternly. The cave was mostly empty save for those items and the corner of hay reserved for the goat.

I only got Nino to move by leaving half a cigar as a gift in the pocket of a waistcoat hanging on the wall. I’ll come clean. I felt a certain ache for that stranger. He had made himself a home in such a sodden place and chosen to live at such a height above the gaze of the village and the world.

Pietro (The Hermit) carries Nino home from the festival

“Do you have a wife at home, Pietro?”

“No,” said Pietro, “I was living with my parents before I had to leave.” From his coat, he produced the photo I had seen in his book and handed it to me.

“I only ask because of the children. You would be a good father. You’ve seen how they flock to you.”

“If I were a father, they wouldn’t flock. I would make them work. The sooner they learn that contentment and self-sufficiency are all we’ve got, the better. Yours too.

At the foot of the hill, Pietro took him off his shoulder, put him on the ground and made him walk. Nino barely opened his eyes, gave each of us a hand and plodded forward with his head down.

“Did it make you happy, being a hermit?”

“It was the villagers who called me the hermit, who made me the hermit. They called me much worse too on that first day in town. I understood, so retreated up the hill.”

Silence fell between us for several minutes.

“I worry about that boy. Always getting into scrapes.”

“Ah! Even he will grow up.”

In my heart, I know that that night we walked back was the last of Nino’s childhood. The songs, the tiredness, the buzz under the moon made me feel something unreal and sad. I almost love that Pietro; with him, it seems like I’m the child.

For Munday, this exercise would render me an “unreliable translator” due to my deliberate manipulation of the message of these extracts². I chose to play as an ‘unreliable translator’ by distilling a social issue into these translated extracts in a way that warps the original story. When working on this, it brought to mind the liberties Sir John Denham took with his Caroline-sympathising interregnum translation of Virgil’s Aeneid³. There are similarities in approach such as both texts focussing on contemporary issues and making clear the translator’s opinion on the matter which did not exist in the original text. They change and outright omit aspects of the work in order to foreground or “force us to look”⁴ at specific features of the language and narrative. In this case, the work, though it raises ethical questions about the role of a translator, is excusable since I am not presenting this as a “translation proper”⁵, unlike Denham.

It was in the language of Nino’s aunt that this idea began to formulate. An utter disdain emanated from her for this have-less who lived on the hill. In order to approach this issue which so often dominates the political narratives of today, I first found articles on the topic and read reports of what refugees brought with them when they fled their homes⁶. These fed into the description of the hermit’s belongings in his cave, including a photograph of his parents tucked inside what was intended to be a book from his studies in law. Ultimately, the book’s title is unclear to the narrator, but the fact that the narrator cannot read the title gives a certain unknowability to the hermit and pings on the elastic line stretched between the reader and the otherness of the text. Also, certain words from the variant, for example, “scrounger”⁷ and “immigrant”⁸ (used here as a charged term), come from further research and journal articles which investigate the language used in forums and media outlets.⁹

This variant rattles with the potential for a broader retelling of the hermit’s story through this lens, however, in terms of contributing to the final translation of the piece, it falls short. For what I am aiming to achieve with the translation it is tangential at best and does not bear a close enough resemblance to the story. This one stems from two sources, the story, and the context into which it will be translated, but neither of them builds into my understanding of the piece.