Ecirp Nelle Hada and translating literature

I was born with half of my brain dried up like a prune, deprived of blood by an unfortunate fetal mishap. Doctors called it first Wernicke’s and Broca’s aphasia but later concluded that my condition is hemiplegia. As a result, I do not speak as well as I think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

When I finish reading a book from front to back, I read it back to front. It is a different book, back to front, and you can learn new things from it. It from things new learn can you and front to back book different a is it? You can agree or not, as you like. This is another way to read it, although I am told a normal brain will not grasp it: Ti morf sgniht wen nrael nac ouy dna tnorf ot kcab koob tnereffid a si ti. The normal, I understand, can see words my way only if they are adequately poetic: Poor Dan is in a droop.

My own name, as I am accustomed to think of it, is Erirp Nelle Hada. Sometimes I write it this way without thinking and people turn up startled. To them I am only Adah or, to my sisters sometimes the drear monosyllabic Ade, lemonade, Band-Aid, frayed blockade renegade, call a spade a spade.

The above excerpts are from Barbara Kingsolver’s book The Poisonwood Bible which was published by Harper Perennial in 1999. I offer them to illustrate some of the difficulties in attempting to translate literature. For example, the rhyming of words, such as Ade with lemonade, may be lost in translation. Some words need not be translated in that they are names, but brand names, such as Band-Aid, are only known in some countries. Likewise, idioms create problems. To call a spade a spade is a phrase that originated in 1500’s and is rarely used in modern English. There may not be an equivalent expression in the target language that captures not only the meaning but also the time period of its use. Even more problematic is Kingsolver's use of the palindrome "Poor Dan is in a droop." It is extremely unlikely a palindrome, a word or phrase which reads the same in both directions, can be translated and remain a palindrome. Here is another well-known palindrome in English: " A man, a plan, a canal: Panama." Examples of single word palindromes in English are “radar”, “level” and “racecar.” The word “redivider” is supposedly the longest single word palindrome in English. In Finnish two long examples are “saippuakauppias” and "solutomaattimittaamotulos." The former is translated as a “soap seller.” The latter means the result from a measurement laboratory for tomatoes, although technically it is a compound of four words. As you can see from the last two examples, while translation is possible, the word play is lost.

With such obstacles it is no wonder that in real life many good translators of literature are well-known writers themselves. I have recently read several books by the Finnish author Tapio Koivukari. He is a master in describing the lives of the seafaring people and fishmongers in his native coastal town of Rauma in Finland. The words and phrases, especially those related to the sea, in his writings are chosen from the time period of the events and are intimately known and used only by the people rooted in the peculiarities of the locally spoken dialect, many of whose words originated from Swedish. No wonder then that Mr. Koivukari himself has translated no fewer than eighteen books from Swedish and Icelandic to Finnish.