KOHALA COAST — For linguist Keao NeSmith, translating literature isn’t just about going line-by-line through a book and translating the words.
“It’s the thought in the (author’s) head that needs to be translated,” he said. “It’s not a matter of translating the words; it’s an issue of translating the culture.”
NeSmith presented a panel Saturday at the HawaiiCon Science Fiction Convention about his efforts to translate popular literature into Hawaiian as well as a recent effort to translate Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic French novella “Le Petit Prince” (The Little Prince) into Hawaiian Pidgin.
His first translation effort came in 2013, when an Irish publisher reached out to him about translating Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
The publisher, he said, specializes in distributing classic literature, particularly “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” that are translated into the world’s lesser known languages.
The effort was “a labor of love,” he said.
“In the Hawaiian immersion schools, especially for the teenaged demographic, there’s practically no materials for them to read just to enjoy,” NeSmith told the crowd.
He worked on the translation during pau hana time.
“You go home, kick up your feet, crack open a beer and you just hammer it for about an hour or until you’ve gone completely bonkers for that day because Lewis Carroll is that kind of a writer,” he said.
Translating Carroll, he said, required not just an ability to find the right words, but also making the right cultural connections.
“In order to wrap my brain around this guy’s brain, I needed to really understand his culture,” he said. “It’s very England centric.”
Carroll’s manic style also presented its own challenge, such as the “Mad Tea Party,” which NeSmith described as “the craziest piece of literature any translator could attempt to translate.”
More challenging still was NeSmith’s translation of Carroll’s sequel, “Through the Looking Glass.”
That book introduced the famous poem, “The Jabberwocky,” which included numerous nonsense words—nonsense NeSmith nevertheless translated.
The Jabberwocky’s titular character, for instance, became “Waha ‘Apu’upu’u.” Some of Carroll’s other nonsense words, however, were easier to translate.
In the poem, Carroll refers to “brillig,” an invented term to describe a time in the later part of the day “when you begin broiling things for dinner,” according to the book.
“We have a word for that in Hawaiian,” he said. “It’s ‘auinala!”
NeSmith has also translated into Hawaiian Antoine de Exupery’s “The Little Prince” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.”
For The Hobbit, NeSmith translated Tolkien’s fantasy elements by looking for terms that Hawaiian speakers could understand in context.
The books orcs, for instance, became ‘oaka, a term that refers to the open-and-shut movement of a mouth like a barking dog.
For his ongoing translation of the Harry Potter series, NeSmith took the term “muggle,” a reference to non-magic users in that universe, and turned it into “makala,” which not only is phonetically similar, but can also be taken to refer to something “not being in a state of magic.”
A couple years ago, he said, the publisher who requested the translation of “The Little Prince” came back with another request.
“He said, ‘Keao, there needs to be a Pidgin translation of The Little Prince,’” NeSmith told the crowd.
“I said ‘Are you kidding? Nobody writes this way. How am I supposed to write it? We just talk it, we don’t write it.’”
Two years later and after one more request from the publisher, NeSmith gave in and decided to give the translation a chance.
“Within that first one hour, I was laughing so hard I was literally crying,” he said.
With that, he presented the cover of his latest book “The Small Pitot Prince.”
Given that it’s the version illustrated by the author, he gave it a subtitle: “Wit da pikchas da ones da autor had draw.”
NeSmith read an excerpt of the translation to the crowd, demonstrating where he used common Pidgin idioms to convey the story.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator shows off an illustration he drew of a boa constrictor eating a snake.
“Try look,” the narrator says in Pidgin.
The book also features a lamplighter, tasked with lighting and extinguishing a lamp post on a tiny planet.
The lamplighter bemoans his situation. In the original French, it approximates to “I have a terrible profession.”
In NeSmith’s translation,the lamplighter simply states “Junk my job.”
“So you see, it’s the voice,” NeSmith said.
NeSmith explained that he translated directly from the original French, saying he didn’t want to “translate a translation.”
He said he split his screen into two columns: the French on one side while he writes the Pidgin on the other.
“That was to me the funny part. Even in French, a lot of this stuff is not that funny. It’s kinda cool but it’s not that funny.”
“But on this side,” he said, pointing to the Pidgin column, “my fingers are giggling.”
NeSmith said though he had to be careful to keep the story’s tone faithful, which was difficult in places where the book takes a very serious tone.
To accomplish that, he said, he couched some of the humor in a deadpan style, using phrases like “make-die-dead” to maintain the tone within the translation.
“It’s funny to say it, but the message is being serious,” he said.
NeSmith said he hopes the Pidgin translation, which was published just a couple months ago, will encourage Pidgin speakers to connect with the literature and “draw in an audience that might not have been there before.”
Furthermore, he said, it provides a sense of self-validation.
“I want to be validated within myself,” he said.
Rather than concerning himself with how other communities might view Pidgin, NeSmith said he’s “more interested in how I and other like-minded Pidgin speakers think of ourselves.”