Martin Boyd

“Giants” (Gary Willis, 1992)

In 1992, a friend gave me a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was the first work of Hispanic literature I ever read, and it opened me up to a world that appeared more vital and powerful than anything I had ever encountered before. At the time, I was sharing a house in London with an artist who was working on a series of paintings featuring Don Quixote, and thus the tragicomic exploits of Spain’s mythical knight errant were combined in my imagination with the singular history of Macondo, both narratives inviting me into the vast, labyrinthine dominions of the Spanish-speaking world.

From that time, I developed a fascination for Hispanic literature, which inevitably led to a desire to learn Spanish well enough to be able to read the works I loved in their original language. I had the vague notion in those days that translation was a kind of filter that it would be preferable to dispense with, a veil over a culture or cultures that I wanted to see clearly. I studied Spanish while completing a degree in linguistics and literary studies at Deakin University in Australia. I made some close friends with members of Melbourne’s Latin American community, who introduced me both to the warmth and richness of their cultures and to the political turmoil that has characterized their national histories. I had been writing short works of fiction since I was a child, and at this time my writing began increasingly to explore Latin American themes, particularly of Latin Americans in exile. Perhaps as a person who had travelled widely from a young age and who had never felt particularly at home in his own homeland, I felt naturally drawn to themes of migration, translation and exile.

It was also around this time that I began rereading some of the works of Hispanic literature that I’d previously read in English, this time in their original Spanish versions. I was struck by the stark difference between the translations and the originals, and I began to ponder the complex and often problematic nature of transporting meaning from one linguistic and cultural context to another. The very same authors I was reading illuminated my ruminations, as Octavio Paz pointed out to me that “all reading is a translation”, and Jorge Luis Borges presented me with the allegory of Pierre Menard, the fictional 20^th century French writer who reproduces Don Quixote word for word, and in doing so creates a completely different text by virtue of the new cultural context in which it is written.

When I completed my degree, I moved to Mexico City, where I worked for several years teaching English literature. I fell in love with Mexico, with its people… and with one in particular: Mexican violinist and composer Paulina Derbez, who would become my wife, my best friend and my most dedicated Spanish teacher. Mexico has become my home in a way no other place I have lived has done. Although we now live in Toronto, Mexico continues to be the place to which we turn and return.

It was while living in Mexico that I received my first paid work as a translator, for a bilingual monthly magazine published by the government of the State of Mexico. I discovered that I really enjoyed translating, and soon took on more work translating articles, graduate theses, film scripts and legal documents. In 2006, my wife and I moved to Toronto, where I established my own translation agency. One of my regular clients has been York University’s Glendon College, where I also completed an M.A. in Translation Studies, which gave me the opportunity to explore in more depth the questions of meaning transfer between cultural contexts that has been an interest of mine for many years.

As a writer, I find the work of translation particularly rewarding, as it shares with writing the same objective of finding the right word, the right phrasing, the best means of expressing a particular idea. Such work requires a facility with the written word that is all too often overlooked. There is a popular misconception that simply being bilingual is sufficient to qualify a person to be a translator, but in fact, all translators need to be excellent writers, with a gift for written expression in their target language that is comparable to the gift of the author whose work they are translating. This is a daunting thought, especially for translators who take on the task of translating legendary writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz or Rosario Castellanos. This is why when Gregory Rabassa, when he was hired to translate One Hundred Years of Solitude into English, was asked whether he felt his Spanish was good enough, he astutely replied: “What I wonder is whether my English is good enough.”

This article was originally published as a guest post at the Intralingo Blog, and is republished here with permission.