Speech at Cunda Workshop 2012:

Translating Latife Tekin´s Dear Shameless Death

Life is full of surprises, and being at a workshop in Turkey was certainly one of the twists and turns of life. I would like to thank the Steering Committee of the 6^th Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature for inviting me. I´m very grateful, and hope I have managed to contribute with some points of view, although not a professional translator.

Personal background/CV

My academic background is from the University of Oslo and the University of Cambridge. My thesis was The Thematic Function of the Social Structure in Shakespeare´s Plays, submitted in 1973.
After leaving University, my work experience is connected to primary and secondary education, first as a teacher. For a spell in the 80´s I was involved in union work at county and national level. The last 20 years I have been the principal of a middle sized secondary school, project leader and finally adviser for the Director of Secondary Education in The County of Nordland. Being heavily involved in school development from the 80s, I have written heaps of papers on various aspects of education. The last 8 years of my professional career, I wrote documents to be presented at the political assembly of the County of Nordland.

My road to Cunda

I met Saliha Paker way back in 1970 when both of us were studying in Cambridge. Finally, I visited Saliha in Cunda last summer, and luckily Saliha introduced me to Dear Shameless Death and Latife Tekin´s universe. Reading the novel while being in Turkey, talking with the translator of the novel, and meeting the author, made a stong impact on me.
To my surprise I couldn´t get the novel out of my head. It made me uneasy until I realized the novel had to be translated into Norwegian. I tried to figure out whom to contact, and how to get someone interested in translating Dear Shamless Death. But living far away from Oslo where the publishing houses are located, doesn´t make it easy.
Just for the fun of it, I tried to translate the first few paragraphs into bokmål. I immediately got stuck, and thought the language of Latife Tekin too difficult to transfer to Norwegian. However, the text was nagging me until I suddenly realized it demanded to be translated into nynorsk (New Norwegian). Before I knew it I had translated the first "chapter".
Here I need to make two important digressions:

Digression 1

Norway has two official written languages, the dominant one is called bokmål (Book Language), and the minor is called nynorsk (New Norwegian). The bokmål is strongly influenced by Danish, which was the adminstrative language of Norway for 400 years while being under Danish rule, and a Danish King. Denmark happened to support Napoleon and had to relinquish supremacy over Norway. In the rather caotic aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Norway managed to establish a national assembly and writing our own constitution in 1814. But we didn´t achieve independence, and were transferred to Sweden. Sweden had supported the winning side and had to be compensated for the loss of Finland to Russia.
The ninteenth century saw the rise of the National State and the national movements in Europe. Norway was certainly a part of this development, and the last 25 years of the century was a political struggle against Sweden, and we finally became independent in 1905.
Part of the struggle for independence, was the construction of nynorsk, a written language based on dialects spoken in the rural areas, mainly on the West Coast of Norway. Ivar Aasen was the scholar who accomplished this amazing project. He was an erudite Old Norse linguist and knew what he was doing, collecting words from the base area, but other areas as well, and travelled as far as my region. He concluded that in Vefsn, (my area), «they spoke tremendously archaic and strange». Nynorsk got status as an equal national language 1885. I was taught nynorsk as my first written language in primary school.
Nynorsk was then by many considered to be the legitimate heir to Old Norse, and the correct language to use for a new nation with a 'proud' history. Since then, nynorsk has developed and has today a more updated and modern vocabulary. The same is true about bokmål which is less stiff and bureaucratic. But nynorsk is for me a more poetic language, and luckily we have many authors writing in nynorsk.
Interesting in this context, is the family connection between English and Norwegian. First, there is the Germanic connection between Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, secondly there is the direct Old Norse influence on English through the Vikings. I´ll deal with this point a little later.

Digression 2

I was born during the German occupation, in a remote rural village in the Northern part of Norway, 80 kilometres away from the nearest small town. When reading Dear Shameless Death the first time, my own childhood became a sounding board. The social fabric of Tekin´s village has its counterpart, in my village. The communication with djins and animals was equally recognisable. In Norwegian folklore we don´t have djins, but we have nisser, tusser and trolls. The nisser and tusser are living very close to people. Some nisser and tusser are good, but some are evil. Anyway, you have to keep them in good mood, and every Christmas we put porridge for the nisse in the wood shed. The trolls live deep in the woods and mountains. There are lots and lots of fairy tales about all of them.
A large bulk of fairy tales were collected in the nineteenth century by Asbjørnsen and Moe and these constitute the Norwegian Canon of fairy tales. Many of these are variants of tales found in other countries in Europe and around the world. When I was a child, my father used to read fairy tales as bedtime stories for me and my sisters. When I became too old, I listened in on his reading for my younger sisters.
The second background similarity is the migration of my family from the valley to a town, not far from Oslo, the capital. Adult at that time, I observed how my mother felt this as a social degradation. The third similarity is connected to being female and the first girl from my village achieving secondary education and a university degree.
As a summing-up of the second digression, I think one can say that the similarities in background and up-bringing, made me particularly receptive to Latife´s universe, which is universal and complex. It´s above all a description of change and how people deal with change. And not to forget... Tekin´s ironic grasp makes her story a treat to read.

A translator of fiction?

First of all I must thank Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne for having made an excellent translation of the novel. Due to them I was able to read the story and enjoy it. What´s more, it woke up a slumbering longing for finding words in my own language that feelingly could convey the totality of Tekin´s language and universe.
Being a bridge translator is not ideal, but somehow I overcame all my inhibitions and got started. In the process I had to make lots of choices/decisions, sometimes they worked, sometimes they had to be reconsidered.

Sentence structure, rythm and words.

I have diligently tried to stick to the same sentence structure as the English version. When I had to deviate in order to get across the meaning, I tried to keep as close as possible to the rhythm in the original sentence. Furthermore I relied a lot on the chromatic but still concrete language. When stuck, I just closed my eyes and tried to visualize what was actually described. Then the words usually decended upon me. The last resort was to hunt for synonyms, often helping to clarify the meaning.
Selecting words was rather easy, I think, for many reasons. First, the setting or location was familiar, many of the tasks were the same as in my childhood, the feeding of cattle, the toil in the fields, the freezing cold, the struggle to make ends meet, etc, etc. Quite interestingly, I first chose old-fashioned words connected to farming and country life, but discarded most of these later.
Another possible explanation why words came easily, might be the Old Norse connection. As I have mentioned earlier, nynorsk is closer to Old Norse than Bokmål, and one theory is that it is easier to translate texts from English to nynorsk than from English to bokmål.
A third explanation might be the fact that I finally came around to using my 'native' language, after having been dallying with bokmål for decades.

Tekin´s visionary universe.

Tekins´s language has a very visual, not to say a visionary texture. The first item that takes on a more than real dimension, is the bus. From the beginning its presence is more or less supernatural, and although a mechanical contraption, it has a soul, and reacts on the obvious maintenance neglect by falling physically apart. The same goes for the radio, the water pump, and later in town, the lamps produced by Dirmits brother, Mahmut. Although dealing with ordinary items, in everyday use, the language recreates and regenerates dead objects to a short and blissful moment of eternity. The words and sentences needed to represent such transformations, are not easily produced. It goes without saying that the illusionary effect of the language is challenging to translate. Hopefully my text has managed to catch some of the magic conveyed in the English tranlation.

Finding my voice

Looking back, it took me years 'to master' the art of writing. As a kid I didn´t like to write essays at all, and every written topic to be handed in, was considered a punishment. I managed to improve my skills at the university, but I was not a happy writer until I felt I had something important to say. As a trade union leader, as a headmistress, as a project leader, and finally as an adviser, the written language became a tool, an important means of communication, which had to be constantly refined in order to get the exact meaning across. To achieve a simple style, I chose words closest to my dialect whenever possible. This practise improved my fluency and made it easier to check the texts for possible misunderstandings.
As I have mentioned above, life is full of twists and turns, and finding myself translating Dear Shameless Death into nynorsk, was an awesome experience.  First, because the translation just poured out, secondly because I took back a language which I hadn´t used since I was a kid, and finally, because Latife´s universe became virtually authentic in nynorsk.