The Order of Things: Jennifer Croft on Translating Olga Tokarczuk, What It Took to Render The Books of Jacob Into English

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

A beautiful bit about language:

The Order of Things: Jennifer Croft on Translating Olga Tokarczuk, What It Took to Render The Books of Jacob Into English

Olga Tokarczuk’s twelfth book, the novel The Books of Jacob, first published in Poland in 2014 to great acclaim and considerable controversy, kicks off in 1752 in Rohatyn, in what is now western Ukraine, and winds up in a cave near Korolówka, now eastern Poland, where a family of local Jews has hidden from the Holocaust. Between mid-18th-century Rohatyn and mid-20th-century Korolówka, Olga traverses the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in search of the manifold secrets of Jacob Frank, a highly charismatic real historical figure, beloved and despised by his contemporaries, the leader of a wildly heretical Jewish sect that converted in different moments to both Catholicism and Islam.

The novel is divided into seven books: The Book of Fog, The Book of Sand, The Book of the Road, The Book of the Comet, The Book of Metal and Sulfur, The Book of the Distant Country and The Book of Names.

It is the second book that most concerns us now. It opens as follows:

Bywa, że Bóg męczy się swoją światłością i ciszą, mdli go od nieskończoności. Wtedy, jak ogromna, wszechwrażliwa ostryga, której ciało, tak nagie i delikatne, czuje najmniejsze drganie cząsteczek światła, kurczy się w sobie i zostaje po nim trochę miejsca, gdzie od razu z zupełnie niczego pojawia się świat. Najpierw świat przypomina pleśń, jest delikatny i biały, ale rośnie szybko, pojedyncze nitki łączą się ze sobą, tworząc mocne poszycie. W końcu twardnieje i odtąd zaczyna nabierać kolorów. Towarzyszy temu niski, ledwie słyszalny dźwięk, ponura wibracja, która wprawia atomy w niespokojne drżenie. Z tego właśnie ruchu powstają cząsteczki, a potem ziarnka piasku i krople wody, które dzielą świat na pół.

Teraz jesteśmy po stronie piasku.

This section of the book—the novel doesn’t have chapters in a traditional sense—is titled “O tym, jak ze zmęczenia Boga powstaje świat,” which, taking a certain poetic license—a license it is imperative I take, lest I fall prey to Robert Frost’s 1959 definition of translation as “that which is lost out of both prose and verse”—means something along the lines of “Of how it was the world was born of God’s exhaustion.” A somewhat scandalous suggestion on the part of Olga’s narrator that only gets bolder as we continue to read.

“Bywa, że Bóg męczy się swoją światłością i ciszą, mdli go od nieskończoności,” that first paragraph starts. “It happens, that God tires of his brightness and quiet, he sickens of infinity.” That is as close to a literal, word-for-word translation as I can muster without breaking all the rules of English grammar. For now, I have left the original Polish punctuation, even though the Polish conventions surrounding punctuation differ significantly from the ones we have in English. The Google version of this opening is: “It happens that God is tired of his light and silence, fainting him from infinity.” My own first sentence: “Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick.”

The words of the text are the embodiment of its past. Its sentences, on the other hand, lead the way into its future.

“Every” echoes the Polish “bywa,” meaning “it happens,” or “it so happens,” implying “sometimes”: the third-person singular present tense of the frequentative imperfective form of “to be.” In Polish, this first word lends a somewhat folksy feel to a first sentence that soon vaults into the metaphysical. God tires or is tiring—Polish does not have a present continuous tense like English or Spanish, so the translator must choose based on context clues—of his (own) light or brightness and quiet or silence. The word for quiet or silence is the usual word: “cisza.” The word for light or brightness, meanwhile, is the usual word for light—światło—plus an -ść ending that raises the register a bit. This word, literally “lightness,” often comes up in the context of religion, and more particularly, the Catholic faith that predominates in Poland. It is used, for instance, in the so-called Prayer for the Eternal Rest:

Eternal rest grant unto them,
O Lord, and let perpetual light
shine upon them. May the souls
of all the faithful departed, through
the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Where it says “perpetual light” in English (“lux perpetua” in Latin), in Polish it says “światłość.” Yet this “perpetual” is part of the word’s unfathomable background, and I also can’t use it in my translation because it is too close to what comes next: “mdli go od nieskończoności,” literally “sickens him from infinity.”

The words “światło”—“light”—and “światłość”—lightness or perpetual light—both contain the word “świat,” which is “world.” This will become very important in a moment.

“Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick.” The trochaic meter of the opening clause is in keeping with the structure of Polish—in which the stress is always on the penultimate syllable of the word—and the particular rolling rhythm of Olga’s writing. The words “wearies” and “luminous” are relatively formal, elevated—as is shifting from noun to adjective, a not uncontroversial choice—while “starts to make him a little bit sick” is informal, in keeping with the deckle edge of Olga’s sentence, which is both humorous and profound.

One drawback to my version is that it weighs in at a whopping twenty-one words, versus the original’s modest thirteen. Because English does not have grammatical case, we need prepositions like “with”; because English can’t abide a run-on sentence, we need to add an “and”; to mark an infinitive, we require a “to.” Translations of Slavic languages into English are generally about thirty percent longer than their originals. But it’s mostly my decision to start with “every now and then” that tips the scales, and I will have to see if I can compensate for that with something pithier over the course of the next few lines.

So now we know from the section title—“Of how it was the world was born of God’s exhaustion”—and the first sentence of the main body of the text that our narrator has determined to rebel against any story of creation with which we might have been familiar, in order to suggest instead that God has weaknesses and failings—that God might even suffer from as humiliating a complaint as ordinary boredom. And as if that weren’t enough, she will now go on to suggest that the world, a world, presumably our world, is a product of that sad malady—that humanity is nothing more than a diversion, the result of some irritation and an almost animal reaction to the same.

This is where the connection between the Polish words pertaining to “light” (“światło” and/or “światłość”) and “world” (“świat”) makes itself felt. While there is not a way to reproduce this resonance identically, I got lucky with English, which connects “world” with “word.” I have tried to take advantage of this stroke of luck throughout this vast and treasure-laden tome.

For the connection between light and this particular version of the creation of the world is in no way arbitrary. Olga’s provocative rendering is drawn from a much older provocation, first arising in Isaac Luria’s version of Kabbalah, the most influential and resistant strain of Jewish mysticism. Unlike earlier kabbalists, Luria treated creation not as a positive event, but as a negative one. Before creation, divine light filled every available space, meaning that in order to create the world, God had to endure the process of tzimtzum, a Hebrew word that attained special power in Lurianic Kabbalah, where it became a term for God’s self-diminishing, or shrinking, to make room.

“Without contraction, there is no creation, as everything is Godhead,” writes Gershom Scholem, the German-born scholar who revolutionized the study of Kabbalah. “Therefore, already in its earliest origins, the creation is a kind of exile, in that it involves God removing Himself from the center of His essence to His secret places.” Scholem (a close friend of Walter Benjamin, whom we will come to in a moment) will be a guiding light for Olga throughout The Books of Jacob, which is after all a chronicle of exile and the quest to undo that original absence and every removal that came after.

But let’s get back to the sentence in question for now. “Wtedy, jak ogromna, wszechwrażliwa ostryga, której ciało, tak nagie i delikatne, czuje najmniejsze drganie cząsteczek światła, kurczy się w sobie i zostaje po nim trochę miejsca, gdzie od razu z zupełnie niczego pojawia się świat.” “Then, like an enormous, all-sensing oyster, whose body, so naked and delicate, feels the smallest vibration of particles of light, contracts inside itself and there remains after it a little space, where right away out of absolutely nothing there appears a world.” The Google version: “Then, like a huge, all-sensitive oyster, whose body, so naked and delicate, feels the slightest twitching of light particles, it shrinks in itself and leaves a little space after it, where the world immediately appears from nothing.”

Slavic languages do not have articles, definite or indefinite. English requires them; ending this sentence with “there appears world” is not an option unless intelligibility is not something we care about. The translator must intuit, then, the definiteness or indefiniteness of a noun from its context; in this case, although we may already suspect that the world in question is our world—and thus a definite, specific world—what the preceding sentence tells us is that this happens “every now and then.” In which case, each time it happens, “a” new world is created, freshly nacred and luminous and bored.

Let us not forget the oyster. The Polish word for “oyster” is feminine, so every adjective that applies to it in the original describes a feminine being—no doubt not a coincidence in the work of a proudly feminist writer like Olga Tokarczuk. The oyster is first of all “ogromna,” which I always like to translate as “enormous,” due to the confluence of sounds between the two words. It is “wszechwrażliwa,” which is a highly unusual compound word made up of “wrażliwa,” sensitive, and the prefix “wszech,” which appears in slightly more common adjectives like “wszechmocna,” omnipotent, or “wszechwiedząca,” omniscient, suggesting “omni” as the appropriate divine prefix in the English translation: “omnisensitive.”

Source