No one else can hear the baby speak, but I can. I can hear her say ‘up’ and ‘clap’, I hear ‘stairs’. I hear ‘string’. No one believes my baby says ‘string’, but I know she does, because she loves the bit of string that is tied to the door of the car, and she says ‘shing’. You have to listen hard, I admit that.
For months we have been on call and answer. ‘Ah da da dah,’ says the child. ‘Ah dah dee doo dah,’ I say back. This conversation is surprisingly complex, and gives me a new respect for birds, whales and chimpanzees. With three or four syllables, in all their variations, we can say, the two of us, all that we need, for now, to say.
Still, I dream of the baby turning around, and opening her mouth to say something wonderful and long and syntactically amazing like, ‘Can I go to the shops?’ I know it is in there somewhere — before her first word was ever uttered, there were full sentences playing across her face. The trick is getting them out of there — like pulling down the weather.
There is nothing so exciting as speech. A baby looks at your face as you say a word, and whatever passes between you as you hear the word back, is love and love returned. It is the gaze made manifest. Teaching a child to speak is giving them the world. It is better than feeding them, I realise, as I stand beside the kitchen counter, dropping scraps of words to my daughter’s up-tilted face. And I think that all words are sublimated nurture, or a request for nurture, or its provision. All words happen in the space between you and your dear old Ma.
I develop a theory that all writers have Major Mothers, Serious Mothers, sometimes Demanding Mothers — the kind of women you always know when they are in the room. I test this theory any time I am at a reading or conference, I float it across the dinner table. The last time I did this, one of the writers did not answer. He had started to cry.
Anne Enright, ‘Speech’ in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 171-72.
Nadie más puede oír hablar a la bebé, pero yo sí. Puedo oírla decir “arriba” y “aplauso”, oigo “sillón”. Oigo “cordón”. Nadie cree que mi bebé dice “cordón”, pero yo sé que lo hace, porque adora el cachito de cordón que está atado a la puerta del coche, y dice “ohdón”. Tienes que escuchar con atención, lo admito.
Durante meses hemos estado entre llamadas y respuestas. “Ah da da da”, dice la niña. “Ah da di du da,” yo le contesto. Esta conversación es sorprendentemente compleja, y me da un nuevo sentimiento de respeto por los pájaros, las ballenas y los chimpancés. Con tres o cuatro sílabas, en todas sus variaciones, podemos decir, nosotras dos, todo lo que, por ahora, necesitamos decir.
Aun así, fantaseo con la bebé dando la vuelta y abriendo su boca para decir algo maravilloso y largo y sintácticamente increíble como “¿puedo ir de compras?”. Yo sé que eso ya está ahí, en alguna parte, que antes de que su primera palabra fuera dicha había oraciones enteras reflejadas en su rostro. El truco es sacarlas de ahí, como tratar de hacer que descienda el clima.
No hay nada más emocionante que el habla. Un bebé ve tu cara mientras dices una palabra, y lo que pasa entre ambos mientras escuchas la palabra de regreso es amar y amar de vuelta. Es la mirada manifiesta. Enseñarle a hablar a un niño es entregarle el mundo. Es mejor que alimentarlo, me doy cuenta, mientras permanezco de pie junto a la barra de la cocina y dejo caer sobras de palabras en la cara alzada de mi hija. Y pienso que todas las palabras son cuidado sublimado, o una petición de cuidado, o proveerlo. Todas las palabras ocurren en el espacio entre ti y tu querida y vieja Mamá.
Desarrollo una teoría de que todos los escritores tienen Madres Supremas, Madres Serias y a veces Madres Exigentes, los tipos de mujer cuya presencia siempre sientes en la habitación. Pongo a prueba esta teoría cada que me encuentro en una presentación de libro o congreso, la comparto durante la sobremesa. La última vez que lo hice, uno de los escritores no contestó. Había empezado a llorar.
No one else can hear the baby speak, but I can. I can hear her say ‘up’ and ‘clap’, I hear ‘stairs’. I hear ‘string’. No one believes my baby says ‘string’, but I know she does, because she loves the bit of string that is tied to the door of the car, and she says ‘shing’. You have to listen hard, I admit that.
For months we have been on call and answer. ‘Ah da da dah,’ says the child. ‘Ah dah dee doo dah,’ I say back. This conversation is surprisingly complex, and gives me a new respect for birds, whales and chimpanzees. With three or four syllables, in all their variations, we can say, the two of us, all that we need, for now, to say.
Still, I dream of the baby turning around, and opening her mouth to say something wonderful and long and syntactically amazing like, ‘Can I go to the shops?’ I know it is in there somewhere — before her first word was ever uttered, there were full sentences playing across her face. The trick is getting them out of there — like pulling down the weather.
There is nothing so exciting as speech. A baby looks at your face as you say a word, and whatever passes between you as you hear the word back, is love and love returned. It is the gaze made manifest. Teaching a child to speak is giving them the world. It is better than feeding them, I realise, as I stand beside the kitchen counter, dropping scraps of words to my daughter’s up-tilted face. And I think that all words are sublimated nurture, or a request for nurture, or its provision. All words happen in the space between you and your dear old Ma.
I develop a theory that all writers have Major Mothers, Serious Mothers, sometimes Demanding Mothers — the kind of women you always know when they are in the room. I test this theory any time I am at a reading or conference, I float it across the dinner table. The last time I did this, one of the writers did not answer. He had started to cry.
Anne Enright, ‘Speech’ in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 171-72.
Nadie más puede oír hablar a la bebé, pero yo sí. Puedo oírla decir “arriba” y “aplauso”, oigo “sillón”. Oigo “cordón”. Nadie cree que mi bebé dice “cordón”, pero yo sé que lo hace, porque adora el cachito de cordón que está atado a la puerta del coche, y dice “ohdón”. Tienes que escuchar con atención, lo admito.
Durante meses hemos estado entre llamadas y respuestas. “Ah da da da”, dice la niña. “Ah da di du da,” yo le contesto. Esta conversación es sorprendentemente compleja, y me da un nuevo sentimiento de respeto por los pájaros, las ballenas y los chimpancés. Con tres o cuatro sílabas, en todas sus variaciones, podemos decir, nosotras dos, todo lo que, por ahora, necesitamos decir.
Aun así, fantaseo con la bebé dando la vuelta y abriendo su boca para decir algo maravilloso y largo y sintácticamente increíble como “¿puedo ir de compras?”. Yo sé que eso ya está ahí, en alguna parte, que antes de que su primera palabra fuera dicha había oraciones enteras reflejadas en su rostro. El truco es sacarlas de ahí, como tratar de hacer que descienda el clima.
No hay nada más emocionante que el habla. Un bebé ve tu cara mientras dices una palabra, y lo que pasa entre ambos mientras escuchas la palabra de regreso es amar y amar de vuelta. Es la mirada manifiesta. Enseñarle a hablar a un niño es entregarle el mundo. Es mejor que alimentarlo, me doy cuenta, mientras permanezco de pie junto a la barra de la cocina y dejo caer sobras de palabras en la cara alzada de mi hija. Y pienso que todas las palabras son cuidado sublimado, o una petición de cuidado, o proveerlo. Todas las palabras ocurren en el espacio entre ti y tu querida y vieja Mamá.
Desarrollo una teoría de que todos los escritores tienen Madres Supremas, Madres Serias y a veces Madres Exigentes, los tipos de mujer cuya presencia siempre sientes en la habitación. Pongo a prueba esta teoría cada que me encuentro en una presentación de libro o congreso, la comparto durante la sobremesa. La última vez que lo hice, uno de los escritores no contestó. Había empezado a llorar.
Translation Commentary
Camila Navarrete
The excerpt “Speech”, from Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, delves into the process of learning to speak, and Enright’s prose reflects this very process in key ways through its form, mainly its syntax and diction. In particular, the text incorporates certain poetic devices like rhymes and uses several syntactic licenses to evoke both the mother’s and the baby’s use of language.
In my translation, it was this sense of playfulness as well as the ludic tone within the prose itself that I chose to prioritize over a more literal rendition of the text, hopefully accounting for the cultural differences found in the two languages. From my first cursory glance at the excerpt, I knew the first paragraph would pose the most challenges, mainly because of its sense of musicality. Enright’s word choice reflects the subject being discussed, as she notably favors repeated sentence structures and monosyllabic words, most of them simple and concrete, to evoke the baby’s first attempts at speech. The words that the baby says are chosen not only for their semantic meaning but also because of their length and sound; I struggled with how to best carry this into Spanish, which to begin with, is not prone to monosyllables.
The first pair of words in inverted commas— “clap” and “up” — half rhyme, while the second pair “stairs” and “string” create a clear alliteration, meaning these words are linked more in the way they sound than their meaning. For my translation, I inverted these poetic devices by keeping the direct translations of the first pair—now “aplauso” and “arriba”, both of which have the same number of syllables and the starting sound /a/—, and creating a consonant rhyme for the second pair with the words “sillón” and “cordón”, where I switched “stairs” for “couch”, another object commonly encountered within households. Another seemingly small choice that carried greater implications was how to show the baby’s “incorrect” pronunciation of the last word, where I ultimately elided the harder /k/ and /ɾ/ sounds, and left the vowels /ð/ and /n/ sounds since they are easier sounds for small children to pronounce. The baby’s pronunciation of this word also implies that she cannot yet fully pronounce these words, which is why I felt it was not inappropriate to include “arriba” in my translation, despite the fact the Spanish language’s trilled R is notably hard to enunciate. In this first paragraph, I opted for shorter and simpler words, for instance using the verb “oír” rather than the longer “escuchar”, since I found that the former worked to evoke the sounds of a cooing baby and helped preserve the musicality of the original. I also favored words like “cachito”—a diminutive— and “coche” which, aside from creating an assonance, are more frequently used in most of Mexico and thus help convey the tender, informally familiar tone.
The following paragraphs take a stark turn as Enright begins using more complex language and syntactic structures. I tried to stay as faithful as possible, but some of Enright’s more marked turns of phrase such as in the sentence “With three or four syllables, in all their variations, we can say, the two of us, all that we need, for now, to say” lose some of their impact, since Spanish has a much less rigid approach to syntax and cannot rely on the same economy of syllables that English has. Thus, the parenthetical “for now” does not interrupt the sentence with quite the same urgency in Spanish. As to cultural matters, I had to make a few more choices to best adapt the text. Spanish is well-known for having two forms of the verb “to love”, namely “querer” and “amar”, the latter of which is considered more intense and at times is often used for romantic and familial ties. I opted for the latter due to the themes of the book as well as to avoid the connotation of wanting that the verb “querer” has. I meant to maintain the lightness implied by “float across” by using the word “sobremesa” which typically conveys the light talk people have literally over the table, after a meal has ended. Enright’s metaphor of “pulling down the weather” proved challenging to translate, since the more direct translation of “demoler el clima” — literally “to demolish the weather” — appeared contrived and failed to punctuate the whole paragraph.
Ultimately, I settled for a closer translation, of “making the weather descend” as this afforded a clearer image, emphasizing the impossibility of the task, while remaining linked to the previous metaphor of sentences stuck inside the baby. Similarly, the term “Major Mother” also posed an interpretative conundrum, as it can be taken both as a military rank and the sense of importance through the adjective that Enright is trying to evoke within the list. The most direct translation to Spanish “mayor” can be taken to mean important, but its most common, immediate meaning is “older”, a connotation nowhere in the original text. For that reason, I ultimately chose the adjetive “supreme” (“supremas”) as it intensifies the very concept of mother, in a similar vein to the source text.