Megan McDowell: The Contemporary Translator

Megan McDowell: The Contemporary Translator

Dina Famin

 

Reading Megan McDowell’s translations of Mariana Enriquez, I was curious about her approach to slang terms, cultural markers, and regional linguistic signifiers. In Maria’s presentation, I learned that McDowell sticks pretty closely to her texts but has a domesticating approach to make the context clearer to anglophone readers by glossing right into the text and smoothing out certain idioms. Part of this, McDowell said in her lecture, was because of her close relationship with her authors. Unlike dead authors who are “more impenetrable,” living authors are not—at least in this specific writer-translator relationship—subject to the translator’s whims and are in fact a key part of the discussions and solutions to translation problems.

During her lecture, McDowell addressed the problem of “the untranslatable,” or what “is lost in translation,” or the “liberties” that the translator takes. Borrowing a phrase from Alejandro Zambra, she says that we can only “use the words we have” when we translate literary fiction, whether by making the implicit explicit, translating sense for sense, or collaborating with the author to create an English equivalent. “I want [my translation] to be read independent of the Spanish to the extent possible,” she says, but not because she seeks to replace the Spanish; there is just as much gained in translation as is lost, seen in the new forms and readings that arise from the new work.

McDowell is an experienced professional translator, and is confident about her role, speaking against the belief that being a translator is “just” being a translator as opposed to an author. “As a translator, I never have to face the empty page,” she says, differentiating between the two artforms. I enjoyed the way she differentiated between writers’ and translators’ styles: “Mariana Enriquez is the only one who can write a Mariana Enriquez story, but I’m not the only translator who can translate it; Only I can do a Megan McDowell translation.” Like Glaser, McDowell describes translation as “active reading” and “creative reading.” The translation arising from this ‘philosophy’ is a reading of the text, a reflection of her interaction with it and the writer, and is very intimate.

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