On a Sentence from “Migratory Birds”
Julia Sanches
Desde la primera vez que las escuchó, Bill cree que quien las nombró grullas trompeteras nunca voló con ellas; en las alturas sus gritos son de júbilo, no el acompañamiento disonante de una marcha militar.
Ever since he first heard them, Bill has had the feeling that whoever decided to call those birds whooping cranes had never flown beside them; way up high, their cries are of jubilation, not the dissonant celebration of a death by hunting.
In Spanish, a whooping crane (Grus americana) is called a “grulla trompetera.” A literal translation, were we to model the spelling after the trumpetfish, might be “trumpetcrane.” In “Migratory Birds,” which is centered on the life of the Canadian aviator Bill Lishman of Fly-Away-Home fame, Mariana Oliver draws a contrast between what a trumpetcrane’s cries might evoke in her subject—jubilation—and what its name could otherwise call up—el acompañamiento disonante de una marcha military, or the dissonant accompaniment of a military procession. However, in English, the whooping crane does not trumpet, just as, in other languages, roosters do not all cock-a-doodle-doo. And although it might be dissonant for a formation of marching soldiers to be accompanied by whooping, it struck me, while translating, as the wrong kind of dissonance.
What is a ‘whoop,’ anyway?
According to the first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, it is: “a. An act of whooping; a cry of ‘whoop!’, or a shout or call resembling this; spec. as used in hunting, esp. at the death of the game, or by North American Indians, etc. as a signal or war-cry (see also war-whoop n.); occasionally the hoot of an owl.” It can also, according to Merriam-Webster, be used to express eagerness or excitement or denote an infinitesimal amount of something, i.e. to not give a whoop. Finally, it is the “crowing intake of breath following a paroxysm in whooping cough” (pronounced, astonishingly, “hooping cough”).
“Migratory Birds” was the first piece I chose to translate in Mariana Oliver’s collection of the same name, after hearing her read it on a Letras libres podcast. I had been drawn, in her writing, to what she is able to convey in the space between each word, sentence and even paragraph. Mariana doesn’t overexplain, even though I asked her to, on occasion, for my sake; her writing is spare and evocative; it is guided and clean.
To convey in “Migratory Birds” what Mariana’s sentence had done in “Aves migratorias,” I would have to see if one of the meanings contained in the word “whoop” was enough of a contrast to jubilation, for a man like Bill Lish, or at least the Bill Lish Mariana had introduced me to in her essay. Eventually, I landed on the dissonance inherent in celebrating the death of an animal. “Way up high,” my translation reads, “their cries are of jubilation, not the dissonant celebration of a death by hunting.”
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Claudia Hernández, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various magazines and periodicals, including Words Without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica. A founding member of Cedilla & Co., Julia sits on the Council of the Authors Guild. She is the translator of Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver.
