More on the Frisian translation of HH

My Frisian translator very kindly gave me permission to repost his letter on how The Hallowed Hunt came to be in the version you can see in the post just prior to this one. I think it has a lot of interesting sidelights on the challenges of translating generally, and into minority languages particularly.

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Mr. Janzen writes:

The “saga” of this translation really started back yn 2004, when I was browsing through the English-language fantasy and science fiction section in a bookstore in Ljouwert (Leeuwarden) that has since gone bankrupt, completely unaware of what was about to happen. I won’t say that day changed my life, but it certainly had a mild impact on these last couple of years when I picked up a book titled The Curse of Chalion, by an author named Lois McMaster Bujold, who was at that time completely unknown to me. It was a paperback edition with a gold-tinted depiction of a castle on the front cover and a Robert Jordan quote yelling “Superb!” on the spine (I still have it here, in my book-case). I scanned the text on the back cover, leafed through it for a bit, and decided to give it a go. Other bookstore shoppers will probably agree with me when I say that when you buy books in such a way, sometimes you strike out, and it turns out to be a badly written little rag that doesn’t even deserve to be called a novel, and goes straight on the take-to-the-second-hand-bookstore-so-I-will-at-least-get-some-of-my-money-back pile. On the other hand, sometimes you strike gold.

As soon as I had read the first few pages (when I finally got around to reading it), I realized that here was a writer who really knew how to use language to tell a story. After that I ordered Paladin of Souls (the one with the Nazgûl on the cover), which I also liked very much, but it was The Hallowed Hunt that really got to me; in my opinion it is still the best Bujold novel by far, and, in fact, the best book I’ve ever read. It also has one of the best openings I’ve ever read (For those of you who don’t know it: “The prince was dead. Since the king was not, no unseemly rejoicing dared show in the faces of the men atop the castle gate. Merely, Ingrey thought, a furtive relief.”). The only other opening in fantasy literature that is comparible, to my mind, is that of Jo Walton’s novel The King’s Name: “The first I knew about the civil war was when my sister Aurien poisoned me.”

I must have re-read The Hallowed Hunt at least half a dozen times in its entirety, over the years. Since I’m fascinated with the phenomenon of language in general, and with my native tongue of Frisian in particular (and, being unemployed, had lots of free time on my hands), the idea started to take root in my mind that I should translate this great novel into my native language. It would not have been my first foray onto the field of translating; even as early as when I was still in highschool, I made an abortive attempt at translating the Zane Grey classic western Desert Gold into Frisian – from Dutch, though, not English. So I’ve always had this urge to want to see prose that I enjoyed in my own language. At this point I should probably make some things clear about Frisian first, since even in the Netherlands most people know next to nothing about it. After that, I will explain some things about the process of translating a novel into a minority language and then getting it published. I’ll try to stay succinct and to the point, and I’ll even refer to that criminally untapped reservoir of talent Jim Belushi once, so be sure to keep reading!

Originally (we’re talking the early Middle Ages here), Frisian was the language closest related to English, but after more than a millennium of being heavily infuenced by Dutch and German, this is no longer the case. Over the centuries, Dutch, German and the Low Saxon dialects of the eastern Netherlands and northern Germany have made such inroads into the original Frisian language area (once stretching all along the North Sea coast from wat is now Belgium to Denmark), that it has crumbled into several small – or smallish – enclaves, which are still shrinking or at least remain under constant pressure. In the outside world, the term “Frisian” is generally used as if it were a monolithic language, but in fact there are three different Frisian languages, which are mutually quite incomprehensible and have been so for a long time.

• North Frisian is spoken in northern Germany, in an area along the North Sea coast and on the nearby islands directly south of the Danish border, by about 10,000 people.
• East Frisian was once spoken in the German coastal area adjacent to the Dutch border, but has gone extinct there, except for one small inland area, Saterland, which was originally surrounded by almost impassable peat bogs. Saterlandic, or Saterland Frisian, is still spoken today, by some 2,200 people.
• In the Dutch province of Friesland, Frisian is still spoken as a first language by about 350,000 people (out of a total provincial population of c.630,000). It has official status equal to Dutch, here, and some 110,000 inhabitants of the province speak it as a second language. There are a lot of Frisians who for the sake of (better) employment have moved away from Friesland, bringing the total number of native Frisian speakers in the Netherlands to c.450,000. From this point, I will refer to this language, my native tongue, as “Frisian”, which is the name we have for it (Frysk), but FYI, in English it is often called “West Frisian” (a somewhat confusing name, since in the Netherlands, that is what we call a Dutch dialect spoken in northern tip of the province of North Holland).

Today, Frisian is a minority language used by about 3% of the total Dutch population, and although a lot of things have changed for the better since the beginning of the 20th century, when the Frisian language movement first emerged, we still have to fight for our rights more often than not. To give you an impression of the situation we have to deal with, a 1994 survey showed that of the total number of inhabitants of Friesland (now c.630,000), 94% can understand Frisian, 74% can speak it, 65% can read it, and 17% can write it. (These are still the most recent numbers available; I’ve read that they’re in the process of doing a follow-up survey, but apparently the results aren’t in yet.)

On the subject of literary translations, it should be understood that this is a relatively new phenomenon for the Frisian language. The Bible was not published in Frisian until 1943, and Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre appeared in our language in eight big omnibus editions between 1955 and 1976 (although some plays, like Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, had already been published separately in the twenties and thirties). Klaas Bruinsma, whom I very much admire, has been working since the 1970s to translate the Ancient Greek plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes into Frisian, as well as Mediaeval romances, Latin hagiographies and the Spanish-language poetry of Pablo Neruda and others; in 2004 his translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey was published, followed in 2010 by his rendition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Other recent translations into Frisian have included The Canterbury Tales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Thomas More’s Utopia, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I understand that Frisian translations of David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, and Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum will be published later this year. Popular fiction has not seen nearly as many Frisian translations; as far as I know there have only been Dean Koontz’ The Vision, and quite recently Dan Brown’s Inferno. As far as fantasy is concerned, Lois McMaster Bujold has the distinction of being the third author who has had his/her work translated into Frisian, after J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 2007), and Tolkien (whose The Hobbit was published in 2009, followed by The Fellowship of the Ring in 2011).

Before I continue on the subject of my own translation of The Hallowed Hunt, I want to make clear that I enjoyed the assistence of the Rev. Liuwe H. Westra, who graciously cleared time in his congested schedule to be my test reader. (He’s currently working to get his own translation of Tolkien’s The Two Towers published.) Another person I have to mention here, is my publisher Jitske Kingma, who made it possible to get my translation published at all, and who showed great enthusiasm for the project from beginning to end. Eare wa’t eare takomt, as we say in Frisian (“Honor to those who are entitled to it”).

I’ve read a quote from someone somewhere saying that as a translator you can only hope to produce the best failure. Well, I have to say that I hope for a little more than that, but it is true that in translating, the making of compromises can never by entirely avoided. When translating a book from one language to another there are two main considerations to take into account, or so I have learned. One is to stay faithful (or as faithful as possible) to the original text, and the other is to remain intelligible to your target audience. In the case of Frisian this last consideration weighs perhaps somewhat heavier than in languages such as Dutch or English, since we Frisian readers simply have less experience in reading our own language (“have not covered enough meters of literary Frisian”, is how Liuwe Westra once put it), because a lot of literature and other reading-matter, all of the newspapers and advertising material and even most leaflets and flyers are written in Dutch over here. In fact, one could almost go so far as to say that a Frisian-speaking person has to make a concious decision to want to read Frisian, as he or she could get by fine with Dutch alone (and a lot of people do). What this comes down to, practically speaking, is that word associations that are simple in English and Dutch, and can be bundled together in one word or concept, are made not nearly as easily in Frisian, and often need a couple of more words or even some different phrase altogether to be recognizable or understandable.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Not long ago I was watching the sitcom According to Jim. So Cheryl, Jim Belushi’s wife, was asking her sister Dana if she could think of something to give Jim for Valentine’s Day, and Dana answered, “What about opposable thumbs?” Alright, that is funny because everybody knows opposable thumbs are a sign of higher evolution, which is linked to intelligence, which in turn is linked to civilization, and by implying that Jim didn’t have them, Dana was saying he wasn’t evolved, intelligent or civilized. In Frisian this joke would never work in this form, because the translation, opponearbere tommen, is a completely unknown term/concept, and therefore does not have those instantanious associations that make it funny in English. It would have to be explained or thought through and wouldn’t be funny anymore by the time the reader/viewer would come to understand it. So in such a case a translator would have to think of something else which would have to be similar but could not be exactly the same.

Happily, The Hallowed Hunt didn’t have too many of such stumbling-blocks, and all in all I think I managed to stay pretty close to the original text. By the way, I liked what the author did with the rhyme in chapter 23 (“Young men, old men, angry men, sad; shaven, bearded, scarred. Mad.”), which I preserved in translation (Jongemannen, âlde mannen, lulke mannen, goedhinnich; skeard, beburde, fergroeven. Sljochtsinnich.), though the meaning of “sad” was lost, I’m afraid, as goedhinnich, meaning “a little simple”, was the best word I could come up with to rhyme with sljochtsinnich (“mad”). (A good example of the making of compromises, which I mentioned before.) As for the nomenclature in the novel, I translated the geographical names – I could hardly leave them as they were, in English – but I left the proper names alone, except for Nij, a very marginal figure, one of the groom-acolytes. The word nij (pronounced /nɛi/, “ne” in “neck”, followed by the “y” of “ready”) is Frisian for “new”, and for that reason, because it’s at the beginning of a sentence (where you can’t see it is supposed to be a name by the capital letter), and because it only appears once in the entire book, I deemed it unnecessarily confusing to Frisian readers and changed it to Nich (which I thought was the nearest thing to it, presuming that the intended pronunciation would have been “Ni” + the “j” of “jet”).

One aspect of The Hallowed Hunt where I did take a bit of freedom in translating, was that of titles and honorifics. The author seems to think that there’s nothing wrong with adressing a prince as “Prince” and an archdivine as “Archdivine”. I don’t know whether that is her republican American heritage shining through and that I disagree with her on that score because I am the product of a country that still has a royal family with all its accompanying pomp and circumstance, or whether it’s just caused by the language gap, but whatever the reason, I could not translate it that way without it sounding very disrespectful to my ears. So in these cases I used forms of address such as “Your Highness” (Jins Heechheid), “Your Grace” (Jins Genede) and “monseigneur” (monsênjeur).

As I have pointed out earlier, Frisian is primarily a spoken language, and only to a far lesser extent a written one. That has resulted in a situation of diglossia, where spoken Frisian has absorbed and continues to absorb a large number of loanwords, mainly from Dutch, but in certain areas (computer-related terminology, for one) also from English. In written Frisian, words occur that are not commonly used in the spoken language anymore. These are not necessarily very complex words; for instance, when talking almost all Frisians would use the word welk for the interrogative “which”, although that is actually a Dutch word – the proper Frisian word is hokker, but that is a typical written language word. Another example is the Frisian word for “key”, kaai. When I was little I was the only child in my school to say kaai (a word my parents still used but most of their generation did not), because all the other children used the Dutch word sleutel. It is slightly stigmatizing, by the way, especially for a child, to use proper (in this case Frisian) words in speech that most people have stopped using, which is how language decay feeds on its own success. Now, don’t get me wrong, here: I’m no language purist; if you don’t have a (functioning) word for a concept, I see nothing wrong with loaning one from another language. However, if you do have such a word, loaning another one just because it’s trendier seems superfluous to me.

Abe de Vries, who translated Dan Brown’s Inferno into Frisian, tried to use for his translation “the sort of Frisian that doesn’t repell people”, as he put it in a newspaper interview, meaning he wanted to stay as close as possible to the spoken language while not actually going so far as to use any Dutch words. So for “which”, to continue with the earlier example, he consistently used a different word altogether, watfoar (literally: “what for”), which means the same thing. You can imagine that proceeding in such a way severely limits the size of a translator’s vocabulary, and that it is like treading a tightrope in that way. Frankly, it doesn’t really appeal to me. One of the things I take away from translating is being able to use the full width of my native tongue (though I did make sure to use really archaic words only where their meaning is evident from the context). And no disrespect to Dan Brown intended, but in my opinion The Hallowed Hunt is a rather “deeper” book than Inferno. So in translating, I used a large vocabulary, just like the style the original English-language novel was written in.

As for the title, well, even before I started translating, I had that figured out. It would have to be De Hjeljacht (pronounced /də jɛljɑxt/, approx. “duh yelyakht”), with jacht meaning “hunt” and the prefix hjel- being an archaic form for “holy”, as in hjeldei, “holiday”. Out of these two parts I created the (completely new) word hjeljacht, a literal translation of “hallowed hunt”. Having congratulated myself on my own cleverness, it started to dawn on me about halfway through the book that perhaps a new and even to experienced Frisian readers initially incomprehensible word wasn’t the best title to give to a novel if you want it to appeal to people. I could of course have used the modern Frisian word for “holy”, hillich, but I thought the title De Hillige Jacht (which would translate as The Holy Hunt) sounded like a dime a dozen. So I looked around on the internet, and discovered that the German translation of The Hallowed Hunt is called Im Schatten des Wolfes, “In the Shadow of the Wolf”, which I thought had a very nice ring to it. My publisher thought so, too, so we didn’t have to discuss it for long. And that’s how the Frisian translation of The Hallowed Hunt became Yn it Skaad fan de Wolf (pronounced /in ət ska:t fɔn də ʋolf/, approx. “een uht skaht fon duh volf”).

No doubt it will be clear from all I have mentioned earlier that our language area is very small. The number of people who read Frisian-language literature is even smaller, and decreasing steadily because the older generations, who are more likely to read Frisian-language books, are slowly dying off, and also because of the simple fact that people in general are reading less and less these days. That means that it is currently not easy to get a Frisian-language book published in the normal way, and it is getting more difficult all the time. As for translations, they are even harder to get published, because a lot of publishers believe such books will be more difficult to sell than original Frisian-language literature. I think they are wrong about that, but that’s another matter entirely. For Yn it Skaad fan de Wolf one has to take into account the extra complication that not every Frisian reader is or will be a fantasy fan. So I turned to Elikser, which is a publishing company where writers and translators can pay to get their works published. So I invested a fair amount of money in the publication of Yn it Skaad fan de Wolf. I may get some of it back in the form of royalties, but probably not all. I certainly won’t earn a cent of profit from the whole deal. But then, I knew when I started with the translation that it was going to be a work of charity (leafdewurk, we say in Frisian, “a work of love”, which is a better description, I think). I don’t mention this to elicit either pity or praise, but simply to explain how things work in a minority language area like ours. In fact, I regard the sum I lost on this project as some of the best-used money I ever spent. As for the number of copies printed, if the reader pool is small, it follows that the printing cannot be large either. The first edition of Yn it Skaad fan de Wolf consists of 250 copies only. We’ll see how it goes, and Jitske Kingma, my publisher, tells me she can have more copies printed very quickly.

So, if anyone is interested in owning a limited first edition copy of the first book by Lois McMaster Bujold ever translated into the Frisian language, here’s its page on the website of the Elikser Publishing Company: http://webshop.elikser.nl/yn-it-skaad..., where it’s for sale for €24.50. There’s also an e-book version available for €12.50. The website is pretty much all in Dutch and Frisian, though, so if you only speak English, and you want to own the book as a collector’s item, or, I don’t know, a doorstop or something, you can contact the publisher directly at jitskekingma@elikser.nl.


Willem Sjoerds Janzen
June 18th, 2014