On a Sentence from “The Touch System”
Lisa Dillman
Que controlara las escrituras de los estudiantes, que no permitiera barbaridades como las del último diario mural, que llevaba crónicas con erratas como «alcohón» en vez de halcón (o de alcohol, vaya una a saber), «murmurllar» en vez de murmurar, «barbosa» en vez de babosa, «dientista» en vez de «dentista» o «baldrar» en vez de quién sabe qué.
Monitor her students’ writing, not allow blunders like those on the last bulletin board display, which had stories with errors like “falkin” for falcon (or maybe for talking, who could be sure), “mermer” for murmur, “snell” for snail, “dennist” for dentist, and “howture” for who knows what.
The Touch System tackles heavy themes—including death, mental illness, migration and immigration—with what is often a very light touch, and the levity frequently revolves around a type of networked lexical play. One example of such a network revolves around typing and manuscripts. There are words misheard, misspelled, and misunderstood. All things typographical reinforce this thematically, but at the sentence level, so does word choice. Sometimes, words in Spanish lose part of their polysemic echo on being translated (e.g. a literal translation of tacto is tact, but the English does not as overtly suggest touch, and tacto is also the word for touch, as in the sense of touch. In my reading, both of these senses are key, since Ania so clearly and endearingly lacks tact.) When those types of resonance recede on being translated, I endeavor to compensate for them elsewhere. For instance, I sought expressions alluding to both touching and typing (Ania thinks she doesn’t “have the touch” for relating to people; her cousin says she’ll call to “keep tabs” on things). And I called the Italian immigrants’ guide a “manual” rather than a handbook, since Agustín’s manual typewriter has many fun chapters dedicated to it.
Avian word networks are also pervasive. Ania talks repeatedly about the bowerbird, finds birds’ nests, thinks the butterflies she rescues resemble small birds. Likewise, migration and taking flight are conceptually central to multiple characters. At the start of the novel, Ania notes, in the Spanish, that she is going to emplumar, replacing her father in Argentina. Emplumar means fledge or take flight (as well as having slang denotations), and morphologically is akin to something like “to en-feather” (in fact it can also mean to feather). Fledge has the meaning and the sonorous qualities I wanted, providing both emphatic tempo and alliteration (“The following day, fledge: cross the mountain, replace her father”), but it doesn’t contain the word feather. To create these types of nuance in the English, I looked for ways to include ornithological echoes. Because Ania describes herself in avian terms, so does Gariglio, calling her “dove” (my ex-husband/best friend Drew, an avid birder, convinced me that “chickadee” lacked verisimilitude). Her uncle Agustín is clearly an odd bird, and Gariglio laments the fact that his friend is such a “birdbrain.” One of the references I cherish most results from Ania’s students’ misspellings. In the Spanish, the confusion results from the spelling of hawk (the student writes alcohón for halcón). In the English, “One of them writes “falkin” for falcon (or maybe for talking, who could be sure).” Toward the end of the book, Ania is airborne, flying back to Chile. Rather than feeling entirely rootless, she gazes down at the land below and knows that she could fashion “a provisional nest… stay and live with the falkins.”
Lisa Dillman translates from Spanish and teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. Some of her recent translations include Such Small Hands, The Right Intention, and A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba, A Silent Fury by Yuri Herrera, and The Bitch by Pilar Quintana, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Decatur, GA.
