On a hot summer day, at around teatime, Iona arrives at a cafe near Bloomsbury. As she waits for her professor to turn up, she takes out her notebook and laptop, as well as her dictionary and documents, and continues her translation.
As she works away, she hears a familiar laughing voice.
“I can see you’re working on serious stuff! Look at all the paraphernalia you need!” Charles Handfield glances at Iona’s papers, his left eyebrow rising with a familiar nervous spasm.
After buying himself a cup of tea, Charles sits down, picks up the photocopied page Iona is working from. “What handwriting! It may seem a cliché, but in my experience, it’s the rebellious Chinese who often write with these sort of wild strokes. It tends to be true, you know.” He pours his tea from a small white pot. “So, tell me about him.”
“Right, so this is Kublai Jian. And what I’m struggling with is his colloquial style. It’s fascinating, and I can manage some of it, but it’s the precision I’m lacking—or maybe it’s the spirit I find hard. At any rate there are a lot of expressions I’m not familiar with. Hopefully you can help.”
“Ha!” Charles chuckles. “You know what, Iona? There is one thing from all your classes with me that you never wanted to learn: untranslatability.”
“Untranslatability?”
“Yes, it’s something I think it’s important to teach students. It always got pushed to the end of the term and I never managed to fit it in alongside the scheduled syllabus.”
Iona looks bemused.
“Untranslatability? Surely it’s just to do with facing the lack of one-to-one equivalence between the word or phrase in the source language and in the target language. Nothing very mysterious about that.”
“Yes, my dear, but what do you do with that problem?” Charles doesn’t look at her, and is instead scanning the menu while gesticulating to a young waiter. As the waiter comes to him, he orders a scone with jam and butter to go with his tea. “Do you want another cup, Iona?”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks.” Iona continues, undeflected. “I suppose there are the technical devices, the tricks of language—metaphors, paraphrase, adaptation, as you used to demonstrate to us. But I still have a problem.”
“Yes, like Tintin’s little canine friend ‘Milou’ becomes ‘Snowy’ in English. So now, tell me, what are your Milous, and what are the Snowys you are proposing on this page?”
Iona is silent as Charles butters his warm scone. He surveys her pale face and heavy brow.
“I see you don’t want to follow up the matter with Milous and Snowys in your text.”
“No. Perhaps not.” She seems to confess with a sigh, “I think it’s more to do with making people intelligible. You know, Charles, translations only work because we get inside a person’s inner culture. And how does one do that? How does one get inside someone?”
Charles has his beaming, kindly eye upon her. “You have to imagine. Allow yourself to be opened up. The great translator, now and then, has to go beyond what they know. You have to go beyond translation and its techniques and tricks, and be absolutely human.”
But Iona is still not at ease. Maybe it is something about this knowing but kindly man’s gaze, like a better, kinder father looking at her. “Yes. I get all that. But it’s just not working. There’s something I’m completely missing.”
“So what is it then, Iona? It’s not translation, not intelligibility?”
“I seem to be failing here. I spend my days grappling with the real people, trying to get them to come out. But I feel like I’m not making contact with them. It’s like, despite all my efforts to make them speak, they remain silent. Or won’t speak to me. What can I do? What am I doing? What’s the point without that connection?”
Charles draws towards Iona and rests his hand on hers. “I think, my dear, you’re talking about something else here. I don’t think it’s about translation at all. I think it’s more about you.”