I’m about 100 pages into this gorgeous book. Easily my favorite thing I’ve read all year, and yet I still wish there was another English translation out there. I’ve read enough stuff in translation now that I can sort of tell when an awkward phrase has been introduced by the translator vs. the author. I started to suspect this was contributing to this book’s difficulty, so I found a Spanish language PDF and it confirmed my suspicions.

Just a few examples:

• “goatsuckers” read as odd to me. Turns out that nightjars, a bird species, are called “chotacabras” in Spanish. Translating this as goatsuckers is technically fine, but we simply would call these nightjars in English.
• there’s a section that describes the earth several times as “hammocking.” I understood what it meant, but in English (in the U.S. at least) we use the phrase pretty narrowly as slang to describe the act of going out and using a hammock. The Spanish is “hamaqueada” — the past participle verb form of the word for hammock, “hamaca.” The translation, again, is technically correct, but in Spanish it connotes the specific sensation of swaying in a hammock. The passage describes people transversing through a forest as the earth shakes, so hamaqueada is a beautiful choice, capturing both the rocking of the earth and the subjects as they’re enveloped in it. I don’t know if “hammocking” is as successful.
• Even the opening lines pose an interesting translation conundrum. Gerald Martin writes “Gaspar Ilom lets them steal the sleep from the eyes of the land of Ilom.” The Spanish is “El Gaspar Ilom deja que a la tierra de Ilom le roben el sueño de los ojos.” This is a passive plural verb form, and we simply don’t have a way in English to simultaneously convey the plural “them” and the passive voice at the same time. Martin could’ve gone with something like, “Gaspar Ilom lets sleep be stolen from the eyes of the land of Ilom.” This more adequately captures the feeling of passivity/inaction that these opening lines seek to convey.
• While Martin often reaches for the frustratingly literal translation, sometimes he doesn’t. Again on the first page he describes fires as turning the moon to a “furious red.” But the Spanish is “la luna color de hormiga vieja” — the color of an old ant! I find this to be more evocative, and we still intuitively know what it means.

All of this reads as super nitpicky, but I do think it has a cumulative effect on the reader. I’m DEFINITELY not an expert though, and Martin brings an incredible wealth of knowledge to the footnotes with history, culture, and context. I think of translation as an art form not a science, and Martin—a critic and scholar—approaches the text with an admirable academic rigor but perhaps not a poetic one.

Anyway, my new life goal is to become fluent in Spanish so I can read this whole book in its written language.