First Sentences

Anyone who has been around kids knows that a good Lego build starts with a good base. In a translation, this is the first sentence. First sentences are a place for translators to make their marks: they are so often the most famous lines from a work. They dictate the voice in which the book unfolds. But has the importance of the first sentence been overly inflated?

In the second episode of my discussions with translators at Lake Como, our conversation begins with Daisy Rockwell, who is also a poet, reading “The Lego Metaphor,” a poem from a series she wrote titled “Mixed Metaphors for Translation.” A few of them, including this one, were published in The Paris Review, but she has many more up her sleeve. These poems capture distinct visions of what a translator does, and several of our conversations open with her reading one of them. 

Daisy Rockwell: This poem is called “The Lego Metaphor”:

I once saw a Lego metaphor for translation. On some online forum somewhere.
I liked it, but it was slightly off, and then I forgot it.
So I had to make up a new one. I’ve thought of a few versions.
I’m still trying to get it right.
Here’s one version:
Imagine (if you will)
that you have purchased the Hogwarts Castle Lego set.
You have given up the dining room table for this project.
You get about three quarters of the way through.
Then a dog or a cat or maybe just
A lurching adult
Bumps into it.
Broken!
You weep. You’ve lost the instructions. Many of the pieces are stuck in the
floorboards.
Some are under the carpet.
So you rebuild, sans instructions.
You don’t have enough pieces so you repurpose
the space station gathering dust in the corner
the Lego Friends camper set and soda shoppe.
You use all these things, and the picture on the box
to create a new and somewhat peculiar Hogwarts Castle
It’s made of the wrong materials and put together
in a different way.
But it’s oddly beguiling!
This is translation.

Merve Emre: What if the Lego set came with no instructions in the box, and you could put it together any which way you liked? That is how I want to link Daisy’s poem to our discussion of sentences. Some of you earlier expressed interest in the fact that I had given you the madeleine sentence to discuss, as opposed to the much more famous and hotly debated first sentence of the first volume of Proust. There’s so much debate in translation about the importance of the first sentence. I’m curious to hear all of you weigh in on the emphasis that’s placed on first and last sentences by people either translating or judging translations.

Maureen Freely: First sentences are really important and really difficult, because you’re establishing voice, context, everything. The first sentence I ever tried to translate, which I attempted forty-six years ago in a book by Sevgi Soysal—and which, after forty-six years, I finally sent to the publishers who bought it just before I came here—I’m still not sure that I’m happy with what I’ve done, but this is what we’re up against. I don’t have the Turkish in front of me, but the gist of it is:

On the 12th of March, when, instead of burning picks and shovels, the burning of people began, at least the extent that people can be burned by being thrown into prison. There were a number of methods.

Okay, well, that’s not a good way of starting anything. There’s a problem about “the 12th of March,” which means March 12, 1971. It was the second of the infamous military coups in Turkey, and people still refer to that time of military takeover as “the 12th of March.” So that’s a context thing. And then you have the proverb, which in Turkish is “Mart kapıdan baktırır, kazma kürek yaktırır.” It is hard to translate since it rhymes. “March peeks through the door, makes picks and shovels burn.” And even in Turkish, it leaves out the most important part. The understood part is that you can burn the handles of the picks and shovels because you’ve run out of fuel. There’s also the greater meaning of the word “burn” in Turkish. You burn somebody by betraying them; you get burned by being caught. There are so many different meanings, and what she’s doing with this sentence is portraying the military as becoming desperate, running out of other things to do, and then burning the things they’ll need to grow the country again. I felt it was really important to figure out a way to bring that conceit through, because it shapes the next few pages.

The most important aspect for me, though, was her playful voice. She’s talking about terrible things, about the crushing of an entire generation. She’s talking about torture. She is determined to not be frightened of the generals, and so I needed to establish that voice. I’m talking about these things, but I’m still laughing at them.

So—any advice?

Tiffany Tsao: This has become like a hotline.

Freely: I need a hotline. The issue with famous first lines is that everybody is invested. It’s like saying that you have the real recipe for Texas chili. Everybody has a view. But as practicing translators, bringing in books from other places and historical periods, there’s a host of other problems. Some of them are to do with grammar, some of them are to do with context. Do you have the solution?

Jeremy Tiang: No, I often have the same problem. Chinese novelists don’t necessarily believe that first lines need to set the tone or grab your attention in the same way. And I often need to do the same kind of reconstructive surgery in conversation with the author, and say, Okay, here are the expectations of English readers; their attention spans are shorter, so you need to get them from the beginning.

But it is different with famous first lines. They stick in the imagination and exert a certain pressure. I have made a habit of collecting Chekhov’s first lines, because there are so many Chekhov versions. With The Seagull, the famous lines—“‘Why do you always wear black?’ ‘I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy’”—are the same in many translations, but you can tell that at a certain point they started exerting pressure on adapters, who then tried to find creative solutions to put their own stamp on the work. Otherwise, why do we need another version of The Seagull? We kind of don’t, but you have John Donnelly going, “Oh, who died?” Anya Reiss, going “Again? What? Again? Black?” That’s called inverting it. And having Marsha start with: “All right, then let’s hear it. What’s so wrong with black?”

Freely: That sounds so English.

Tiang: Yes, well, this is a whole separate discussion about Chekhov and the way he has been domesticated for theatrical production.

Freely: It’s a word I don’t like very much, but it really does apply to The Seagull.

Tiang: Yes, you have to suit the actors, like Vanessa Redgrave. That’s another podcast probably.

Rockwell: I think we analyze a lot of what a translator is doing with the first line and forget that the first line is something editors have to deal with too, because it’s part of the marketing. It’s like the cover design, the title, and then that first sentence. If somebody likes the title and the design or has heard of the author, they pick up the book and open it, and read the first sentence. That first sentence is part of the marketing package as well, which is not true of Scott Moncrieff or somebody who wasn’t working in our hypercapitalist system. But nowadays, it’s very important. And the first line is a thing that armchair translation critics will go after because it’s right there, it’s easy to go for. It’s much harder to go after the big chunk five hundred pages in that really needs a critique.

Freely: If we find a solution, then we’re less likely to have to fight those battles. Coming to translation from writing my own novels, that’s when I know, from my own first lines, whether it’s going to take me into the trance that will write the rest of the book. It’s not something I feel I must do. It’s something that I want to do because I want to enter into the other person’s trance. And generally, I’ll find in my own books, when I go back to them, the seed that may or may not grow is always some unanswered question in that first passage.

Virginia Jewiss: I wanted to mention Caroline Bergvall’s extraordinary meditation on the first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy, one of those lines that everyone can quote. It’s called Via: 48 Dante Variations. What she does is collect forty-seven English variations of the first line and weaves them together, the forty-eighth being, of course, the poem that collects them all. It’s a wonderful reflection on the power of the first line and how translators are, in many ways, impacted by the previous translations, and how we expect that text to sound. We can certainly hear that in the Proust.

But I wanted to touch on something that you just mentioned, Maureen, which is that the seed of the work is in the first line. That’s why the pressure is there. Trying to understand what that first line is doing in your example has that extra complexity. And this is a separate topic, but what do we do when there’s something so significant, like a date that anyone in Turkey would know. How do we gloss that? Do we hope that the reader sees your translator’s note? In other words, how can we introduce the essential information needed for that date, or a particular name or a particular place, to resonate? Those are real challenges for translators when a word holds so much more than just a word—a date or a place name in the original language.

If I can read a sentence from one of Pirandello’s short stories, a sentence I worked on for months, that sets the tone for this very delightful, moving theological story called “Faith,” “La fede.” The first sentence encapsulates the entire room, the movement of the light, the interconnectedness of things. I felt like I had to identify the work of this syntax. Italian sentences can be and often are much longer than we sustain in English. And so one of my jobs as a translator is to understand if and when I can break up those sentences, not because of attention span, but to make them do the same kind of work they would do in English. Here it goes: 

In quell’umile cameretta di prete piena di luce e di pace, coi vecchi mattoni di Valenza che qua e là avevano perduto lo smalto e sui quali si allungava quieto e vaporante in un pulviscolo d’oro il rettangolo di sole della finestra con l’ombra precisa delle tendine trapunte e lì come stampate e perfino quella della gabbiola verde che pendeva dal palchetto col canarino che vi saltellava dentro, un odore di pane tratto ora dal forno giù nel cortiletto era venuto ad alitare caldo e a fondersi con quello umido dell’incenso della chiesetta vicina e quello acuto dei mazzetti di spigo tra la biancheria dell’antico canterano.

I felt, in this case, that the light and peace moving into this room had to encapsulate all of this, so it reads:

Into the priest’s humble little room full of light and peace, with its old Valencia bricks that here and there had lost their glaze and on which a rectangle of sunlight from the window stretched silently and softly through gold-flecked dust motes, bricks stamped with crisp shadows of the embroidered curtains and even the green cage hanging from the shelf with the canary hopping about inside, there wafted the smell of just baked bread from the oven in the little courtyard below, a warm breath that melded with the damp odor of incense from the nearby chapel and the pungent scent of lavender sprigs tucked among the linens in the old highboy.

Here, the smell that rises up and permeates is going to be how this faith, this mysterious faith, in the story permeates every emotion.

Freely: You have these cascading clauses and that sense of something wonderful happening with the cascade. What were you doing during those months when you returned to the sentence? What were the difficulties?

Jewiss: Trying to figure out how I could hold that cascade in a way that made sense grammatically in the English demanded a lot of attention. My first approach was to say, This is impossible to do in English. Let me figure out how I can break this up. I was losing myself in the trance of this story, being transported by the experience. The story itself is about a young priest who is preparing to go to his mentor, an elder priest, to tell him that he is leaving the priesthood. The priest sends him to go speak to a woman—an encounter that changes him and makes him realize what the deep meaning of faith is. It’s a story that moves into the interiority of this man’s soul, provoked by all of these rich external details of the nuts and the chicken and the grain that this woman brings. The more I understood the story, the more I realized that this particular sentence had to stay together. To accomplish that grammatically, it took a lot of work.

Tsao: Back to the opening sentence you’re translating, Maureen—are you going to keep the length of it?

Freely: That particular one? No, I’m breaking every rule in the book in order to get going what I want to get going. I can’t speak to the author, she died just before I read the book. I don’t want to make the decision alone, so I’ve just sent my recent solution to the editor, and I’ve not put a footnote. I want it to flow. And to set up a trance, a footnote is the last thing you want. I mean, obviously, one day I’ll have something before me that I’ll have to use the footnote for, but it’s the last thing I want to do.

Tsao: As a writer, you feel like there is an importance to the first sentence because it sets up the trance. When I’m writing, I’ve gone through so many first sentences, and scrapped so many, and thought to myself that if I don’t get the first sentence right, this whole book is cursed, and it will not go the way I want to. There’s only one way to begin it, and I need to find the way to begin it. And if I don’t begin it in the right way, then whatever will issue forth from the first sentence will not be good enough.

Rockwell: I can’t think of any first sentence like that, but my worst sentence that I had to deal with was with Tomb of Sand, by Geetanjali Shree. This was when I was trying to decide if I could translate it. And it comes up on the third page, where the main character says she won’t get out of bed. She says, “Now I won’t get up.” It rests on this pun of the nonhumorous variety, where the word for “now,” when sort of slurred, sounds like the feminine form of “new,” the adjective “new.” So she goes on saying, “no, no, now I won’t get out of bed,” and then it transforms into “I will.” Instead of, “I will not get out of bed,” it is “I will arise anew.” I felt like that was what the whole book was about. Rather than the first sentence, this sentence was the linchpin. If I could not figure out how to recreate that pun, then I couldn’t translate the book. That was what I decided. So I was sitting at my computer doing all kinds of crazy things and literally stretching the language by putting lots of extra letters, like “nyooo” and “n, y, o, o” and things like that. My daughter was about nine at the time, and she looked over my shoulder and started laughing hysterically. She got her iPad and took a picture of my screen. I felt so defeated.

Freely: It sounds like you’re doing something that I’ve done as well. To find a solution, I’ve had to play around and go really far away from the sentence and then come back to it.

Rockwell: You just throw it up in the air and start batting things around and see what falls down. Eventually you settle on something that—even though it was absurd, what I did—nobody laughed at. Which was important to me, because it was not humorous. It was absurd, but it wasn’t a belly laugh kind of reaction.

It’s also true that, going back to cognates, both “now” and “new” in English are remotely cognate to the Hindi ones and the “nhe” and “nai” are very distant relatives in the proto-Indo-European space. So I was able to actually be a little bit Lydia Davis and go after cognates.

Tiang: With languages that are further from English, there are so many decisions that need to be made from the beginning. With Chinese, I often will do the first page in one tense or another. Like, is this a past-tense book or a present-tense book?

Rockwell: Yeah, I do that too—completely change the tenses.

Tiang: Sometimes you decide later on, and then it’s really annoying because you have to go back and change everything. But I do spend a lot of time at the beginning, not just on the first sentence, but the first chapter, finding the voice. I’ve heard other translators talking about the messy first draft, and I can’t do that. You have to get the voice before you can proceed. For the book I translated that was told from the point of view of the donkey, I spent a lot of time deciding what the donkey’s voice was because you don’t want the donkey to say “hee-haw,” which is how the book opens. I went with the Chinese onomatopoeia, which is “ang ji.” But then are readers hearing it as a Chinese reader would? Or do they just see “ang ji” and go, what is that? But “hee-haw” doesn’t work.

Freely: Can I ask a question about onomatopoeia? That’s one of the great beauties of Turkish. There’s just so much of it, and there will be a word or sound repeated several times. Certain authors I’ve translated make a lot of use of it, and it’s really hard to bring in. So what did you do?

Tiang: I kept the onomatopoeia as close to the Chinese as I could, even where it would be unfamiliar. And I feel like people just have to go with it, and you put in some scaffolding so it’s clear what each sound is. But I do feel it has an effect on the reader to understand that in other places in the world, animals might not be thought to sound the same. It’s an opportunity to bring the reader into another world, an unfamiliar world, the world of the text.

Freely: And the world of sound.

Tsao: I always have trouble with Indonesian figuring out whether to put something in past tense or present tense. The tenses don’t work in the same way. I translated one novel, and the author was like, I’d like it to be all in present tense. And it’s like, Okay… But, you know, it ended up being pretty good.

Speaking of first sentences, I just pulled up the opening of one of the short stories from People from Bloomington by Budi Darma. This one is sort of a dark, sinister story about people who have a very difficult child, which resonated with me because I had a difficult first child. It begins with, “Umur Orez memang belum panjang, masih lima tahun lebih tiga bulan.” It says “Orez,” his name, which is “zero” backward. He’s five years and three months old, but there’s a sinister bent to it. In the course of the story, the narrator tries to kill the child, and there’s a sense of, Oh, we didn’t have him for that long with us. I translated this as, “Orez hadn’t even been with us for that long. He was only five years and three months old.”

Tsao: It’s just interesting to know what you want to emphasize with that first sentence, and how you want to draw people in.

Freely: I sometimes cheer myself up by saying that if you’re translating into English from a non-Western language, the distance is greater. There’s also more room for the imagination not to bridge the gap but to do something new. The most difficult passages I’ve had are the ones that make me love the book and the language most.

Jewiss: Translation is really the deepest form of reading. I find that as I work, the messiness of that first draft isn’t because I’m not seeking or trying that voice, but because I get to know the work so much more as I steep in it. And it’s one of the great pleasures, having that intimate, long, sustained time with another mind, another culture, and to go through that process again and again in various revisions, to bring out and to appreciate what is being accomplished in this language, whether it’s the alliterations or the syntax, the references or the silences of a text. It’s a question of how we honor those.

Freely: If you’re writing in English after translating a lot, for me, some of my sentences have become very long. I managed to vary them with short sentences. But basically, I feel much more free in English because I worked out ways of having a thread that goes through all of those different cascading phrases, as in your excerpt.

Rockwell: It makes my sentences much shorter, because I’m so glad to be rid of those huge sentences so I can just have little tiny, concise sentences.

Freely: So you take really long sentences and turn them into bite-sized ones?

Rockwell: No, I’m saying, after I’ve been translating, I go and write myself, and I say, “Yay, at last, I can just have little, tiny sentences!”

Tiang: I’m with you on the long sentences, Maureen. I’ve imported my penchant for comma splices into my own writing, and it’s liberating. Once you’ve seen how the constraints of English grammar don’t have to apply, how you can achieve certain effects if you just let go of what you were taught at school, it’s freeing.

Emre: We’ve been talking about the first sentences of novels or short stories. For those of you working in other forms and mediums, how does the beginning operate differently? Jeremy, you brought up Chekhov. For those of you who work on poetry or plays or movie scripts and subtitles, how is the conversation we’re having specific to a particular form?

Tsao: Well, I think for poetry, all of the lines matter. It’s not just the first one, it’s just all of them.

Rockwell: Yes, every line is a struggle.

Tiang: And with theater, my final draft is someone else’s first draft. In a way, I don’t have to stress as much about getting the first line right because I know we’re going to go into the rehearsal room, and the director will start getting things on their feet, and we’ll know immediately if it works or not. We’ll mess around with it some more.

Jewiss: I would say in film and TV so much is established by the visual. Whether you have lead-in music, a particular set or kind of lighting, that contributes to the tone of that first sentence. Not to say there’s less pressure on the first utterance of a film or a TV episode, but there are other factors that contribute to the mood of everything that follows in a screenplay. I’m sure this is also true in theater, that there’s both the question of what someone will say and how that line is delivered, so that the final success of a translated script is in how the actor delivers it.

Rockwell: I agree. I haven’t translated screenplays, but with poetry, yes, it’s a very different process.

Freely: And your poems have short, punchy sentences.

DR: Yes, very short. I want to go back to Proust for one last moment.

Emre: Yes, please go back to Proust.

Rockwell: As my daughter would say, I’d like to drop some Scott Moncrieff lore. Well, she doesn’t talk about Scott Moncrieff, but she talks about dropping lore. I’ve always been kind of a stan of Scott Moncrieff. I’ve read his biography. One story I always remind myself of when I’m having trouble with an author or I’m feeling, you know, sort of unappreciated because a lot of authors can’t tell if your translation is good or not—even if their English is perfect, they’re so embedded in their own text that all they see is this pale imitation—so I remind myself of one of Moncrieff’s stories, which was that Proust didn’t have very good English and he would read bits of it and quarrel with him. One of the things he really objected to was the title Swann’s Way because he thought it meant “in the manner of Swann.” He thought it should be, you know, “While Walking Past Swann’s House,” or something really clumsy like that. It was just infuriating to Scott Moncrieff. I try to remind myself that this iconic title, Swann’s Way, the author didn’t care for at all. That’s just something we live with. We’re creating a version that the the author might never appreciate or, if they’re not living, never have appreciated.