Geneva, Switzerland, August 20, 2008

​

Translation isn’t just moving between languages. It is creation.

​

We all sat around a computer screen, Joan, his friend Adèle, and I. They were graduate students at the University of Geneva, taking an Advanced MA in Conference Interpretation. Adèle needed to translate a presentation from French to English, due the next day. It detailed the Swiss system of government and police authority for a delegation of the Iraqi police, in Geneva for training. They needed the information in a common language, English. Joan’s first language is Catalan and he speaks Spanish like a native, and Adèle speaks French and nearly native English. I am sure that they had it covered, but it didn’t hurt that I was the closest available native English speaker. At the library, we sat in a study room with floor to ceiling windows. Passersby could see everything, making it feel like we were in an intellectual fish tank.

​

When I went to the water fountain, I looked into other study rooms. You could see people in there, some of them reading, many of them discussing and gesturing, but they were silent to me, only occasional muffled words made it out, the rest trapped behind thick glass.

​

Adèle offered to pay us for our help, but we declined. I was surprised and a little embarrassed at myself that part of me wanted to take a little money just to brag that I’d been paid to translate. We grasped at legal terms and definitions from six in the afternoon until two in the morning. After the library closed, we went back to Joan’s apartment, ate salads with tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese, and continued with the work.

​

Nothing is really the same in different languages. Since meanings can’t quite be imparted directly from one tongue to another you have to improvise. This makes for something new, almost like a group being more than the sum of the individuals. As we worked, the creation brought with it an intrinsic excitement, adding to what was already there from three people setting down to an interesting task.

​

In addition to attending the University, Joan worked as a translator for the United Nations. As a joke he said he liked to drop “I work at the UN” casually into conversations because in Geneva everybody works at the UN. I met him and his former wife, Agnès, in Buenos Aires in 2000 while they were traveling around the world. With some people you just fall right into a friendship. Rather than appearing random, it was like we were already friends and I just had to discover them there in Argentina. One day I was traveling solo, the next day I had friends from Spain. Just like that. Later I met up with them in 2001 in Thailand on Koh Samui Island. Joan and I understood something intrinsic about each other in our need for travel. It is not an option for either of us but a necessity. We were both in our early thirties that year, and I can remember one conversation we had on a dock jutting out into the Gulf of Thailand where we had both realized that it was getting time to make a move. A couple of years later, I went into archaeology and he went into interpretation and translation.

​

Working in the translation with him that night allowed me to get a glimpse into his career, kind of like when friends would come out for a day on the lobster boat when I was a fisherman. I was taking part in a day at the office. As we translated and brainstormed, I could see he was assessing my chops, seeing what I would do to solve the problems of explaining things like the Swiss canton system, or police procedures, in English that didn’t sound stilted or awkward. It was nice to be working together on something. Translating, even when the meanings are handed to you on a plate, is more difficult than it would appear. In a sense it is like acting, they both seem easier when you look at them from the outside.

​

It took hours to get through the presentation, and along the way we made several fits and starts and had to backtrack a few times, scrapping entire slides and starting over. We opened French and English dictionaries, and used the internet and books when we ran into dead ends. In fits of excitement, we came up with answers.

​

*

​

The day before, I visited Joan at his office at the United Nations in Geneva. It felt like a secret mission. As if I were at an airport, my backpack went through a security screening and I had to walk through a metal detector. I waited in line, gave the guard my passport and said that I was there to see Mr. Trujillo. The first guard looked former military, with a crew cut, and a muscular neck. We started talking in French and switched to English right away, thankfully. He typed at the keyboard furiously and confirmed that I was in the computer. I indeed had an appointment to see Mr. Trujillo. They took my picture, printed me a badge with a photo ID, and let me in with diplomatic severity. The guard gave me a map and told me how to get to Building 40. I thought of how strange it was that when I met Joan he was working as a receptionist in a hostel. Once a week he cleaned the toilets. Now his name got me into the United Nations.

​

The UN grounds are near Lake Geneva. Originally it was the old League of Nations, defunct after World War II, so its architecture is a mixture. In the 1920s and 1930s they built in a monumental modern style, graceful even in grandeur, structures designed as the headquarters for a righteous enterprise. The lawn leading up to one of the buildings looked like somewhere Superman would have a press conference on how he saved the world. The building where Joan worked was by contrast from the 1960s or early 1970s, blocky and strictly functional. My mind’s eye could picture Kissinger, Nixon, Khrushchev, or Kennedy walking out of it. It was all right angles, but not in a big hideous communist style, instead an architectural nightmare from the decadent west, a soulless university building. I found Joan at work on his computer, with a stack of papers at his side, and we had an expensive lunch at the UN cafeteria. A beautiful lawn spread before us green as money, the lake and the Alps in the distance. Summer haze hovered over everything, but off toward the city a geyser fountain sent jets of water skyward in giant spurts. After lunch we had coffee in a shop where large windows washed the room in daylight. Delegates from all over the world had coffees and adjusted their neckties.

 

There were things about the UN bureaucracy that Joan didn’t like, some of it was Byzantine and frustrating. He had been translating documents on Africa and central Asia, dealing with human rights violations. Savagery was the word he used. It appalled him. Each of the countries came out with official publications, many of them total bullshit explaining their own supposedly spotless human rights records. He translated their lies into Spanish, but he also translated reports documenting the statements of hundreds of people who’d been mistreated.

​

He may not have liked some of the specific parts of his job, but he loved being a translator. It suited him. In order to excel at it he had to not only be comfortable in other languages, but he had to be a jack of all trades at the same time.

 

*

 

When we finished with the presentation that night, we were too tired to be happy. Adèle thanked us and took herself and her computer home. I thought about the presentation, the first one in French, and now our English version. It was a creation, in meaning not quite the same as the original, but as close an approximation as we could get. I understood why I have heard people say that there is an art to translation because, like art, a translation is a representation of something in a different medium, in this case a different language. I was happy to have been able to really see that. I think if it hadn’t taken us eight hours to complete it, the lesson might not have sunk in, kind of how when I travel to a faraway place, only then do I understand what it really feels like to have my feet on new ground.