Damion Searls at Literary Hub:
In my late twenties, when I was interested in maybe becoming a translator but didn’t know how to go about doing such a thing, my mother suggested I try getting in touch with our old neighborhood friend Edie. I had read Dr. Seuss at her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, later babysat her son. She’s stopped teaching and become a translator, my mother said. What language? I asked. My mother didn’t know, maybe Spanish?
Wait a minute, Edie Grossman was Edith Grossman, legendary translator of García Márquez and soon to be of Cervantes?
I got back in touch, and Edie kindly agreed to let me send her my first translation effort, a short descriptive vignette by Peter Handke. She knew no German, had never read Handke, but took a look. Along with being encouraging about my translation and nicer than it deserved, she gave me some advice: Don’t use “-ing” words if you can help it, she said, they’re weak in English. Don’t say there’s a gleaming in the snow, say there’s a gleam; instead of a cocoon hanging in the trees, say it hung in the trees. She circled three of the “-ing” words in my translation and said that those were all right but I should recast the rest. When I looked back at the German, those three—only those three—had the “-d” verb suffix analogous to “-ing.” The verb I had translated “was hanging” could be “hung”; the noun could be a gleam, not a gleaming.
In telling this story over the years, I’ve found that other translators tend to be less impressed by it than nontranslators. But at the time I was one of those nontranslators, and it gave me an eerie sense of being in the presence of greatness: Grossman knew what she was doing, Handke knew what he was doing, and they could commune with each other right through me.
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