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 Dr Adrian Oţoiu is a novelist, academic, literary critic and
translator. In 2004, Dr Oţoiu received the first Residential Translation
Bursary awarded by Ireland Literature Exchange, and chose to
visit Dublin in order to finalise his translation of Flann O'Brien's
At-Swim-Two-Birds.
I might not be your typical translator, as I come from fiction
writing. I am – as some blurbs have it – "an award-winning Romanian
novelist" who happens to work as a professor of English in a Transylvanian
university. I have published six books: three volumes of fiction
and three critical essays, which are apparently good enough to
secure me a top position in this decade's literary tops (last year,
in what is probably Romania's most credible top, that keeps track
of the opinions of at least two dozens critics, I have reached
position 2 and stayed there for a good number of months). Impressive
as this might sound, one cannot live on one's writing in a country
with a declining interest in reading, such as Romania unfortunately
tends to be.
Hence my translation interests, which are rather heterogeneous.
I translated a best-selling guide to cultural tourism in Maramureş
(one of Romania's greatest tourist assets in terms of natural beauty
and folk traditions), a manual for foreign entrepreneurs willing
to invest in Romania, plus the usual load of technical stuff. Despite
it being terribly underpaid, literary translation has always been
a strong temptation for me, and I tend to go for those authors
who seem to represent a daunting challenge. I have translated contemporary
American short-story writers, a couple of Angela Carter's postmodern
tales and Elias Canetti's minimalist "characters".
Since every book I wrote had been perceived by critics as a major
departure from my previous work, it seems that I placed myself
in a pretty awkward position. After a massive Joycean novel and
two collections of hyperlinked minimalist IT-related stories, now
I have to "reinvent" myself, like Madonna! I am currently working
on two very dissimilar projects: a third-person autobiography of
my years as an "airport child" (my parents both worked on various
airports) with the working title The Windsleeve, and an exploration
into the "dead branches" of the tree of possibility that our lives
meander through, those branches that a storyteller will prune,
as they are never fit to become a full-fledged story (this project
goes under the title of Serendipity Ltd.).
My often neglected hobbies
are video-making (my video on my month in Dublin still awaits editing),
caricature (I have tonnes of caricatures of literati that some day
might be reunited into a book) and travelling.
Back in the nineties Flann O'Brien's importance in the shaping
of European modernism was the well-kept mystery of a few university
English Departments. Most Romanian literati outside the academia
– who would immediately name Joyce and Beckett among the greatest
innovators of twentieth century fiction – knew next to nothing
about this third great Irishman, whose revolution in modernist
fiction is by no means less important than that of his compatriots.
My
encounter with Flann has something of a serendipitous story. In March
1999 I was in McKey's, a used-books store in Knoxville, Tennessee,
when my good friend, professor Shawn O'Hare – an American specialist
in Irish studies and editor of Nua, a journal of contemporary Irish
writing – placed a book with a weird title in my shopping basket.
I had never heard of At Swim-Two-Birds, and the book was a bit on
the expensive side, so I wanted to discretely place it back on its
shelf. Shawn noticed my move and firmly put the book back: "This
is a crucial Irish book, I'm sure you'll love it".
And I did. More
than that, I found that O'Brien's stylistic proteism, (ab)use of
logic-proof metalepsis and intertextual games were familiar territory
for me, as my own fiction delves on similar grounds. Besides, I was
happy to discover somebody who became a great modernist without losing
his sense of humour in the process! Which, by the way, would be my
main grudge against modernist writing: much of it is too serious,
too keen on finding absolutes, too intolerant on "low" art. Flann
seems to run against this current, he is almost postmodern in his
joyous relativism, in his absurdist humour and his nostalgic-ironic
recycling of literary tradition. And yes, Keith Hopper is right:
Flann O'Brien might well be the missing evolutionary link between
modernism and postmodernism. His other masterpiece, The Third Policeman,
proves to what extent the often misunderstood O'Brien was a postmodern
innovator avant la lettre.
It's kind of hard to tell. Over the last three academic years I
ran a translation workshop with my fourth year students and we
worked mainly on Flann O'Brien. I found that Flann's puns would
be too easily missed, his tongue-in-cheek humour would pass unnoticed.
It takes a bit of training to train one's palate to such delicacies.
Flann is, as one would say, an acquired taste.
O'Brien is obviously
what you'd call a "niche product", something my editor was not aware
of when they established the circulation figure of my translation
of At Swim-Two-Birds. Now it seems that I'll have to find another
editor for my planned translation of The Third Policeman.
First of all, I have to say that I couldn't praise the dedication,
professionalism and friendliness of the staff of Ireland Literature
Exchange highly enough!
Before landing in Dublin, judging merely from
the breadth of their operations showcased on their website, ILE had
appeared to me as some vast institution housed in impersonal government
buildings and employing dozens of people. What a surprise then to
discover that instead of a floodlit, air-conditioned, American-style
office, it was located in a sunny friendly room that resonated with
some of the bohemian atmosphere from its next-door neighbour, the
Dublin Writers' Museum! And inside – instead of dozens of government
automata working in anonymous cubicles – I was even more surprised
to discover it had a skeleton staff of just two people.
For someone
like me coming from a country where the public servant is the epitome
of the incompetent truant (and, often, tyrant), Sinéad MacAodha and
Máire Ni Dhonnchadha – the two-stroke engine of the ILE operations
– were simply unbelievably efficient! They obviously love their job
and do it with passion and gusto. Every time I visited their office,
no matter how busy they might have actually been, they acted as if
they had all the time in the world to deal with my queries.
Sinéad
Mac Aodha masterminded all the details of my stay in Dublin, from
clues about the best places to eat out, to miraculously-procured
tickets to theatrical shows at the Gate or Abbey; from securing access
to the special funds of the National Library to ensnaring O'Brien
experts into having dinner with me. Máire Ni Dhonnchadha, an Irish
language-speaker, disentangled for me many of the lexical intricacies
of the legendary layers in At Swim-Two-Birds.
Was this visit useful
for my translation of Flann's novel? Yes, without any doubt. It was
essential for enabling me to go beyond the mere semantic decryption
of unfamiliar words (after all a good dictionary will facilitate
that), and to help me to capture the spiritus loci, the spirit of
Dublin and Ireland, the musicality of the language, the sulphurous
atmosphere of Irish pub (well, this was before the smoking ban!),
the luminous haze of the soft Irish rain, the lush green hues of
St. Stephen's Green. Throughout my one-month stay in Dublin, I tried
to absorb as much Irish culture as I could, for translation is not
just a matter of matching words, but also of matching cultures.
And,
of course, there were the long hours spent in the National Library
– which, after reading Joyce's Scylla and Charybdis, seemed an almost
sacred place – a place that invited gentlemanly manners and sported
quaint rituals (like the ringing of the bell at closing time), that
nearly "beamed" me back to Flann's time. In the oval room under the
rotunda of the National Library, as well as in the concrete caves
of the library of Trinity College, I perused (the verb is definitely
a Flann brand!) exegeses on O'Brien, microfilmed doctoral theses,
specialized lexicons, treatises on Gaelic mythology, atlases of Hibernian
birds and collections of old newspapers.
But there were details that
no book revealed. Such as the fact that, unlike in Eastern Europe,
the "head" of a pint a beer is regarded here as a bonus and not as
a waiter's deceit. You have to go to an Irish pub, with the right
person, in order to learn that! I owe that one to Gerry Smyth, of
The Irish Times, who was my Virgil to Flann's haunt, The Globe.
What's
more, there were details that no ordinary Irishman could reveal.
One such example was the elusive meaning of Flann's "three-star cast-iron
plunger", a lexical riddle that nobody I met had been able to crack.
No one, that is, until I met Anthony Cronin, Flann's crony (pun intended)
and biographer. At the end of a long lunch at La Mère Zou, where
he had been dragged in Sinéad's fine snare, I asked Mr. Cronin in
what might have sounded like a hopeless voice, whether he had any
idea what a three-star cast-iron plunger is. "Oh, yes," he replied
vividly, "three-star refers to the best quality, first rate; cast-iron
is something very solid and plunger is something you must plunge
on. So, it's a very solid, first-rate, opportunity".
It was the night
before my return home. And I instantly realized it. My month-long
stay in Dublin on an ILE Translation Bursary had been just that:
"A
three-star cast-iron plunger."
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