Life in translation

I’m starting this in the hopes that it will help me figure out exactly what translation is, and if it really exists. My life is a life in translation as it is: I moved from Romania to the US nine years ago, in 1998, and have more or less carved a life for myself here. I’ve come to inhabit English more comfortably at times than Romanian, and I find that there’s nothing I can do about it. At the same time, I’m constantly learning this language, its small histories that I didn’t grow up with. There are little catch phrases from children’s shows that everybody here knows about that  but that I don’t, and couldn’t have known, given that I came here as an adult and TV in Romania at the time  I grew up was a pathetic excuse for entertainment or education for that matter. There are names and personalities that were famous enough in the US but not at all known where I was (Mr. Rogers? Elmo? Sesame Street? In Living Color? etc.), and so pop-culture references often pass by me.

All this time, though, I try to continuously improve and learn and figure out where things came from–what everything means (a futile attempt, I know, but without which I would have no raison d’etre). My own cultural references, embedded in my native Romanian, are in the meantime getting farther and farther away from me. My mother tongue doesn’t even guest stars in my dreams anymore. I dream almost exclusively in English now.

But I don’t necessarily like that–all this forgetting business. To better reclaim that part of me that is, and forever will be Romanian, I’m starting this translation blog. I started doing literary translations a while ago, as a challenge, almost, to myself. About 3 or 4 years ago I found it impossible to rhyme in English–it seemed so difficult, an advanced topic more suited to native speakers, it seemed. And then I challenged myself to translate a full poem with rhymes and everything. To my surprise, I didn’t completely fail–on the contrary, I found it liberating. I do use a variety of dictionaries (see the sidebar) in my work, and some poems just pour out of me, and some others–I’m stumped in their translation forever. This blog is meant to document both translation successes and failures, and question the possibility of translation, as in a full equivalent of the original in another language. I’ve come to realize that’s just not possible; the most I can do is an interpretation. The same will go for Romanian>English and English>Romanian translations. The latter will be more scarce, but nevertheless–I will attempt it, especially in prose.

In the process, I hope my native language will be kept alive and flourishing inside me, and hopefully I can show some of its beauty to a non-Romanian speaking audience.

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