The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

"I’ll tell you why I did that. A few years ago, I discovered two authors whom I confess I had known nothing about before, and I discovered them in translation. One was WG Sebald and the other was José Saramago . It was the shock of my life. I was stunned by The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis . I read it in Giovanni Pontiero’s translation and I was so overwhelmed by the book – both by Saramago’s vision of the world and by the beauty and skill of the translation – that I started to devour Saramago novels, one after the other. Giovanni Pontiero was Saramago’s translator until his death, and then Margaret Jull Costa took over. She continued the tradition of great translations of Saramago’s novels right up to the last, Cain . Between Saramago and Sebald a world was opened to me that I had known nothing about. And I have been grateful to Pontiero for bringing Saramago into my life. So yes it was a bit of a cheat, but all of his novels, one after the other, touched me and moved me in the most profound way. And it was through all of the translations that I had that experience. I think he does it very well. There are things that you can do in a romance language, syntactically, that you simply cannot do in English. You would just wind up with gobbledygook. You have to impose certain syntactical rules for it to be a sentence in English, so it doesn’t match up with the original. In other words, you can leave every subject pronoun out of the sentence and move things around in Spanish or Portuguese in a way that you simply cannot do in English. But Pontiero translates it beautifully. I once translated a story of perhaps three or four pages that consisted of one single sentence. So it’s possible, though I wouldn’t want to do it every day of my life. The point I’m trying to make about that syntactical difference is that word order is crucial in the meaning of an English sentence. If you say “John loves Mary”, it’s different to “Mary loves John”. The words are exactly the same, but the position changes their meaning. Position almost doesn’t matter in the romance languages. You can place parts of speech all over a sentence and the very structure of the words indicates what that sentence means. In English, we don’t always have endings on verbs to indicate the subject – I love, you love, we love, they love – so without a subject pronoun that doesn’t indicate who’s doing the loving. If you take away the subject pronoun, you have no verb. You simply have a noun, love . It’s very difficult sometimes, because you want to maintain the style. If the original is craggy and difficult, your job isn’t to smooth it out, your job is to create craggy and difficult English. But sometimes you’re constrained by the nature of the language you translate into. If you translate from English to Spanish, Spanish has certain requirements which you cannot break, otherwise the sentence makes no sense. Languages are, obviously, very different."