‘Translation is thinking with the reader’s head’

During a lecture about his book Underlandtranslated in 2019 as Downworld, Robert Macfarlane put a piece of bone on the table: a fossil ossicle of a whale, twenty million years old. “This is listening to deep time,” he said. According to the British nature writer, it is now our task to think ahead from the Anthropocene into ‘deep time’: about „the history of things to come”. We want to be good parents and grandparents, but the real question is: “Are we good ancestors?”

For Nico Groen the answer can only be ‘no’. He has been Macfarlane’s regular translator into Dutch for twenty years and has translated dozens of other books from English in which amazement at the richness of nature goes hand in hand with the idea that nature is coming to an end. And that we have to do something like the bugger.

No fewer than four of his translations were published last year. Rachel Carson’s Classics The Sea Around Us (The sea) and Silent Spring (Silenced spring), which launched the American environmental movement sixty years ago. He translated Birds and Us by ornithologist Tim Birkhead (Birds and us; 12,000 years of shared history) and The Sea is not Made of Water from Adam Nicolson (The sea is not made of water), about the fragile life on the edge of sea and land. And then there were recently revised editions of Mafarlanes The old roads (2012), about walking, nature and imagination, and his debut, Altitude feverabout the sometimes fatal charm of mountaineering.

“All the authors I translate come to the same conclusion: things are just not going well. But it was a good year for my translations,” says Groen (1965) in his workspace in Haarlem. “Nicolson’s book is one of the best I’ve translated and being asked to translate Rachel Carson – I didn’t have to think twice about that. And now suddenly all sorts of things come out of it, such as lectures and the lessons I teach at the Vertalersvakschool.”

Is “nature books” a category? A book about the landscape is different from one about insects. And The H is for hawkby Helen Macdonald, that you translated is actually about grief.

“That’s true. But her second book, Twilight flights, is again a real nature book. I see those books as Venn diagrams, which partly overlap.”

How do you make a book your own?

“Many translators read a book completely before they start. I don’t, if only because that keeps it exciting. Whether I want to translate a book or not, I quickly see. If the subject interests me, all I have to do is read a few pages through the whole book. And stylistically it has to be challenging, otherwise it becomes a fill-in-the-blank exercise.

How do you like the author’s voice?

“I don’t wonder. You just have to make do with what you have, the source text. As long as you’re precise enough, you’ll get that voice at some point. Although it is almost inevitable that your own voice will also sound somewhat in it. In all the years that I’ve been translating, I’ve come to use certain tropes and word patterns: making a passive sentence active or something abstract more concrete. That’s my fingerprint.

“Altitude fever was my first real nature book. I had translated mountain sports books and you immediately saw that this was groundbreaking: not an adventure book, but a cultural history about our changed view of mountains. When it came out again last year, I thought the translation was outdated and revised it.”

IF YOU ARE PRECISE YOU GET THE VOICE OF THE AUTHOR ITSELF

Does something ever go wrong?

“Sometimes I will miss something, I think. And very stupid: Intertwined lifeMerlin Sheldrake’s book on fungi, begins with a sentence that I tried very hard to get, and yet I missed a word.”

Do you consult with authors?

“Yes. About something I don’t understand. And once or twice because I caught an author making a mistake. Then I consult, usually by e-mail, sometimes live. Authors usually like it when there is resistance, even if I suggest adjusting the text a bit, for example to highlight a passage for clarity.”

Then you are editing.

“Yes. I started as an editor and also teach it. Translating is also a lot of editing. I translate a piece, check it the next day. Later I work through the whole book a few more times. And if I stumble over a sentence, I change the word order, for example.”

Does a translation appeal to you?

‘Take a text in which the words ‘hazel‘ and ‘hawthorn‘ appearance. Then I choose ‘hawthorn‘ for the lesser-known ‘hawthorn’, rather than ‘hawthorn’, because the original is so clearly intended for alliteration. Suppose I don’t propose an alliterative solution’hazel‘ and ‘ hawthorn‘, I might be able to make it up somewhere else for something that doesn’t alliterate in English but does in Dutch.”

Where is the line between mechanical and inspired translation?

“It is, if it is good, always inspired. But it’s also just hard work; get some words every day. You shouldn’t make it more beautiful than the original, but get everything out of it. There is an element of creativity in that. Take Ness by Macfarlane, a hermetic booklet, fiction, about a spit of land in the sea where old bunkers stand like pagodas and where tests with radar and atomic bombs used to be done. He is writing: ‘Ness speaks gull, speaks pagoda, transmission, reception‘ and so on. I asked him if he meant languages ​​by those words and he did. So I thought: where do language names end? I took those endings out of the closet: ‘Ness speaks Meeuws, Pagodi, Transmissian, Receptian’.

“Another example. In his novel Just Like You [Op het eerste gezicht, 2020] let Nick Hornby say someone: ‘There’s method in her madness.’ That comes from Hamlet of course, but you should know that. The context is a white woman who takes a black boy to a pub quiz because he knows all about sports. Someone then makes that comment. I finally came up with: “So she’s not as crazy as she looks.” You have to translate idiom with idiom. You develop that kind of flexibility. And you also have to dare.”

Translate it as a muscle you need to train?

“Yes really. I remember well that Marijke Versluys, once my mentor, said: ‘You still have miles to go, flying hours. And get counteracted.’ I have also received some harsh criticism. That was discouraging but I took advantage of it. When I submit a translation now, I’m almost disappointed if it doesn’t get much resistance.”

Do you develop a sense for what constitutes a good translation?

“Some combinations with an inconspicuous adjective are suspicious. Little owl – is that an ‘owl’? Fourteen of the seventeen participants in a translation workshop I gave thought so, but it’s a little owl. By the way, just a matter of looking up, doing your homework. Recognizing something in the source language, you develop a third ear for that. I have not studied English, so that is a bit more difficult for me. I get annoyed sometimes. Not only when I read that ‘conifer‘ is translated ‘conifer’ instead of ‘conifer’, or something like that. Often it is too close to English. You might be better off leaving this translation to Google Translate.”

Do you ever use it?

“No.”

Translation is ‘as literal as possible, as free as necessary’, I learned at school.

“You have to translate what is written. If a sentence has, say, five ingredients, you have to take it across. But whether they are in the same order there is up to the Dutch ear. To translate is to think with the reader’s head. That is why it is good to put a translation aside for a while, to let it ferment. When you read it back, you notice all kinds of things, because then you are a reader. Then I start scraping again until it reads well.”

IT IS GOOD TO PUT AWAY A TEXT TO LET FEMINATE

Should someone be aware that they are reading your translation?

“As Macfarlane writes, in The old roads, that it seems like a poem or a ritual if you read all the names for roads one after the other, then I do my best to make such an enumeration sound like a poem in Dutch as well. Then I don’t translate those words one-on-one, also because you sometimes get the same translation twice, but I choose words that sound good in Dutch.”

He reads: “Pilgrimage road, cattle path, corpse road, lane, leyline, dyke, country lane, shortcut, alley, sunken road, berceau, impasse, shire, drift, cripple street, landslag, ford, slate, passage, roadway. These are words that you will not find anywhere else, that have their own power in Dutch.”

To find such words, does it make life worth living?

“Well, it’s my job. But there is a similarity with what I also love to do: walking, for thirty years, often with a few good friends. In Iceland, Morocco, along the Elbe in Germany, France, Scotland, Nepal. With a backpack and a tent of one kilo, wild camping if possible. We call that disappearing. I was fascinated by that long before I translated nature books.”

Disappear into the landscape?

Actually yes. Preferably out of telephone range, although that is more difficult. Helen Macdonald writes somewhere that nature occasionally gives you something, a small miracle. I recognise that. Then at night you stand with your tent under trees in which two owls call to each other. I would like to lie awake at night. Or wake up in the Ardennes with, completely unexpectedly, a layer of snow on your tent. Or ice hair. I see things from my own experience in those books and vice versa, through those books I learn to look at nature in a richer way.”

Does that make you a better translator?

“Someone who doesn’t like walking in nature but is a good translator can probably do it just as well. I can do a lot with language, but in a next life I would rather do it with music. If I go to a jazz concert and I listen to pianist Brad Mehldau, I would like to know how he does it. Being able to do that: what I hear in my head, being able to play and direct that.”

I LOOK AT THE LANDSCAPE LIKE A PALIMPSEST, TEXT ON TEXT, LAYERED, GEOLOGY, NATURE, HISTORY

Do you think in language when you walk?

“You become a little disconnected from the world. In the beginning your head just keeps on rattling, but you lose that after two or three days. Then you stop thinking. That’s hard to believe and yet it is. I name it meditation in motion. And as you approach the end point you start to think about normal life again. Fascinating and healthy.”

Do you also want to write yourself?

“Rather yes. A book about fallacies, my graduation subject, but then a book on that subject came out, so I had to let that go. And I wanted to write a book about my way of walking. About why it’s beneficial, while still exhausting yourself. Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner was always said to be such a good faster. I think I have too. If I have to, I think I can go three days – not without water – but without food. Chocolate or a piece of cheese will do. Isolation is very good for body and mind. Anyway, I notice.

“I am not a biologist. I can distinguish a rose from a tulip, but it doesn’t go much further. I especially like the wideness, that’s good for your eyes, otherwise accommodate. From Macfarlane I learned to look at a landscape as if it were a palimpsest, a text superimposed on an older text, layered, think of geology, nature, history.”

Have you become more activist?

“I immediately said yes to a request to translate something for an Extinction Rebellion collection. I’m too old and too shitty to glue myself to something or let the police drag me away, but I do agree with that mindset. Activist? It mainly boils inside. Those books contribute a little bit to that.”