TRANSLATION WORK

Translations, from the Spanish, of excerpts of Los niños tontos by Ana María Matute

As a translator, I am currently working on methods of incorporating sound into translation. Too often, the vocalic, musical elements of Spanish are lost in translation to the English. Over the past two years, I have been working with short stories by Spanish author Ana María Matute to experiment with and better emulate the breathtaking sound of spoken Spanish in an English translation.

“The ninny fair”

The girl, she had a dark face and eyes like small plums. She wore her hair parted in two plaits, braided on each side of the face. Every day she went to school, with her notebook full of letters and a brilliant, shining apple for her light afternoon snack. But the girls at the school named her “Ugly girl”; and they would not hold her hand, they did not want to go by her side, neither in the circle, nor with the jump rope: “You, go away, ugly girl.” The ugly girl ate her apple, watching them from afar, from the acacias, sitting with the wild rose bushes, the bees of gold, the red ants malignant, and the hot earth of the sun. There, no one told her “Go away.” One day, the earth told her: “You have my color”. And on the girl they put flowers of thorn on the head, flowers of cloth and of waving paper in the mouth. Ribbons, blue and purple, on the wrists. It was quite late, and everyone said: “What beauty she has.” But she left to her hot color, to the hidden aroma, to the sweet hiding place where she played with the long shadows of the trees, flowers awaiting birth, and small sunflower seeds.

“The boy who was friend of the devil”

Everyone, in the school, in the house, on the street, told him cruel and ugly things about the devil, and he watched them in the inferno of his book of doctrine, full of fire, with horns and smoldering tail, with the sad and lonely face, seated in the cauldron.  “Poor devil—he thought—, it is like the Jewish peoples, who everyone evicts from their land.” And, since then, every night he said: “Handsome, beautiful, friend of mine” to the devil. His mother, who heard him, crossed herself and turned on the light: “Ah, stupid boy, do you not know who the devil is?”. “Yes—he said—yes: the devil tempts the bad ones, the cruel ones. But I, as I am his friend, will always be good, and he will leave me to go tranquilly up to Heaven.”

“The boy who did not know how to play”

There was once a boy who did not know how to play. From the window, his mother watched him from the window go and come back by the little earthen paths, with his hands at rest as if fallen to the two sides of his body. The toys in garish colors, the ball, so round, and the trucks, with their miniature rollers, did not please the boy. He observed them, he touched them, and later he went to the garden, to the earth without ceiling, with his little hands, pale and not very clean, hanging next to the body like two small, strange, mute hand bells. His mother restlessly observed the boy, who went and came back with a shadow in his eyes. “If the boy does not like to play, I will not grow cold watching him go and come back.” But the father said, with much happiness: “He does not know how to play, he is no common boy. He is a boy who thinks.”

One day the mother wrapped herself up and followed the boy, beneath the cloud of rain, hiding herself within the trees. When the boy arrived at the border of the pool, he squatted down, he looked for little crickets, worms, frog babies and earthworms. He went, putting them in a box. Later, he sat on the ground, and one by one he took them. With his little dirty fingernails, almost black, making a little, light noise, crac!, and off with their heads.