A Translator's Diary — Bir Çevirmenin Günlüğü

Lisbon, 3 March. The contract arrived today, and with it the novel: The House of Small Winds by Inês Carvalho, three hundred and twelve pages of dense, luminous Portuguese. The publisher in Istanbul wants it in Turkish by October. Carvalho is eighty-four, has not given an interview in thirty years and, according to my editor, answers questions from translators only by post. I find this both romantic and deeply inconvenient.

11 March. Forty pages in, and something is bothering me that I cannot quite name. The novel is set in a coastal town that is never identified, and its heroine, a widow named Leonor, spends her days tending a fig tree in a walled courtyard. The Portuguese is flawless, but the rhythm of certain sentences feels oddly familiar, as if I had heard them before in another room. Perhaps I am simply tired.

19 March. Today I translated a passage in which Leonor's mother scolds her for sitting on the doorstep, saying that a girl who sits on a threshold will never marry. My grandmother in Ayvalık used to say exactly the same thing to me. I looked it up: it seems to be a common superstition around the Mediterranean, so it proves nothing. Still, I underlined it twice.

2 April. I sent my first letter to Senhora Carvalho, with eleven questions, most of them about vocabulary. At the end, almost as an afterthought, I asked whether the town in the novel was based on a real place. I wrote it in my best formal Portuguese and then rewrote it three times to sound less like a nervous student.

24 April. Her reply came this morning, written in a firm, upright hand on thick cream paper. She answered all ten vocabulary questions with great precision and ignored the eleventh entirely. At the bottom she had added a single line: "You translate the trees well. Be careful with the wind." I have no idea what this means, and I have been thinking about it all day.

15 May. Chapter nine. Leonor walks down to the harbour at dusk, when the evening wind comes up from the south and makes the shutters knock. Carvalho calls the wind by a strange name, a word I could not find in any Portuguese dictionary. I read it aloud, slowly, the way you sound out a word in a language you are only beginning to learn. And then I sat very still, because the word was not Portuguese at all. It was "meltem", spelled the way a foreigner might spell it from memory.

16 May. I have reread the whole novel with new eyes, and now I see it everywhere. The olive presses, the bitter coffee boiled three times, the sentences that put the verb at the very end, where Turkish keeps it and Portuguese never does. It is as if someone had built a Portuguese house on Turkish foundations and painted over every crack. I wrote to her again tonight, and this time I asked only one question.

9 June. No reply. My editor rang to ask how the work was going, and I heard myself say that it was going beautifully, which was true, and that I had no problems, which was not.

30 June. A parcel today, heavy, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. Inside was a typewritten manuscript, yellow at the edges, and a short letter. "I was born Leyla Karaca, in a town you know," she wrote. "I came to Lisbon at nineteen to marry a sailor, and I wrote this book in Turkish in 1968, when I was still homesick enough to need it." "Nobody wanted it, so twenty years later I translated it myself and gave it a new name. I gave myself one, too." "You are not translating my book, my dear. You are bringing it home. Here is the original, so that you can see how far it travelled."

2 July. I have spent two days comparing her Turkish with mine. In places they are almost identical, which frightens me a little, as if I had been taking dictation from a voice I could not hear. In other places her sentences are stiffer, more old-fashioned, full of words my grandmother used and I have almost forgotten. And in one place, the scene where Leonor finally cuts down the fig tree, I think, and I blush to admit it, that mine is better.

20 July. I wrote and asked her which version the publisher should print. Her answer came by return of post, a single sentence on the cream paper. "Print yours, and put both our names on the cover; after fifty-six years, I would like to come home with company." I read it on the balcony as the evening wind came up from the river and made the shutters knock, and for the first time I did not have to look up what it was called.