Translation and The Riddle

I've been working (in the very literal sense of deep thinking, researching, connecting, writing, conversing, editing and rewriting) on a series of essays describing my experiences learning the French language through its poetry and also on my own particular learning style. I wanted to write a new (to me) kind of 'essay' than the basic research and biography papers I've tried writing in the past.

I want my essays in progress to include my conversations with Mademoiselle  and lessons at the Upper Room and to capture my wonder at language and what I'm learning. I want these essays to be done in a sort of memoir style. Meaning I want them to grow out of my life, like Lydia Davis's essays for The Paris Review. Her essays are vivid and personal and colored with her experiences and opinions. Davis as the writer and narrator moves the essays from Point A to B. I want to be able to capture myself and for the essays to be the format. I'm not sure if I can really call my writing (and how I'm trying to connect the different pieces to tell one story) as essays, but it seems fitting, given the French origins of the word. From Wikipedia:

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing, and his essays grew out of his commonplacing.

So this is my attempt. Here's a piece of what I've written about my thoughts on translating so far. More to come.

Translation:

A translation is an expression, it’s a way of working outside of a language. You become aware of the inaccuracies, the holes, the spaces where words fall loose. As a writer, it’s humbling. It’s like soaring, to become aware of how singular each thought is and how many pathways are opened and gutted from it. How possibilities simmer and shriek. This is your workshop. The translator labors and crawls through mechanisms, technicalities, grammar, culture, history. The translator conducts an orchestra, sets a sound and a time, pieces together a reality. The translator works with the crudest forms of language, language which lies naked and new.

Translation is constructing the pattern and depth between sound and meaning. It’s the perfect riddle.

Translating another writer’s work is the closest way to get to the writing itself. A translation is a rendering of writing across a language. It’s transferring the writer’s design with respect for the writer or a deep love and understanding for the writing and a desire to recreate it. It’s playing with the way words sound and the right momentum of words strung together to relent the intricacies and curiosities of meaning. Translating is choosing the pauses and casualties and stresses and memories that inflict this meaning. Translators redefine creation.