Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker lived most of his life in the village of Patara, west of Myra, in modern-day southern Turkey. He was born sometime around 270 AD to rich parents, who died in an epidemic. They were Greek Christian, and his uncle a bishop, so Nick spent his life following Christ’s word, generously drying up his generous inheritance. 

His benevolence—despite the shoddiness of historical documentation around his life—garnered the inevitably saintly lore: He paid the dowries of three sisters so their father wouldn’t sell them into prostitution. He encountered a tree, possessed by a demon, and cut it down. He traveled to Palestine and a storm nearly destroyed the ship he was on, but then he prayed the storm into stopping, and it did.

He eventually died, too, and some seven centuries later, the majority of his bones (the important ones, at least) made their way to Bari, in Puglia, by way of Italian merchants-turned-tomb raiders. Soon after, some Venetians went for the remaining bones of lesser import. The clergy of Bari (thieves!) continued to distribute his remains in order to heighten Saint Nicholas’s publicity in “strategic” ways, basically creating the early fan base for beloved Santa Claus. A piece of his crotch is now in Chicago.

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This is called, per the Church, translation. Both this use of the word—referring to the removal and transport of relics (holy remains) to more “accessible” sites of worship—and the more popular linguistic use crop up, roughly, around the late Middle Ages. There are records of the 12th-century Latin translationem, “a carrying across, removal, transporting,” and the more modern Old French translacion, “‘translation’ of text, also of the bones of a saint,” popping up in the 14th century.

I translate, texts, from Spanish into English. In my process I may look to etymology for connections and curiosities. It’s an act of productive procrastination, which may inspire some creative problem solving but mostly results in stretches spent learning about things like Santa’s bones. It’s easy to get side-tracked, in this lifelong search for meaning. 

And sometimes the search comes up short. So translation can mean different things. I like to think the translator is paid for a fundamentally generative act (making something new without erasing something old). The zealots, removal. The Church also uses translation to refer to the transfer of a bishop from one episcopal to another. In geometry translation is the moving of a function’s graph (its form) left or right, up or down, without manipulating the shape.

It’s easy to hurl oneself toward metaphor, where concrete meaning grows hazy. Look to both the etymologies of metaphor and translation and you’ll find the basic concept of transference, a “carrying over” (Greek) or “carrying across” (Latin), respectively. The etymological overlaps are some combination of natural, obvious, and coincidental. Yet every act of translation demands the force of metaphor. One abstract meaning or physical thing becomes two. The empty tomb might be filled, but the ghosts have to go somewhere. Translation as transfer, metaphor as movement. There are only so many words, and so many ways to use them. 

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In translation (literary, and religious, I suppose) there is a familiar sense—also featured prominently in life—that loss and gain are inextricable. The confident translator may reject an inherent loss in their work, but I think they should admit, at least, the inherent bittersweetness of the craft. At least I will: I can be on a roll (winning, the words are fitting) when suddenly a phrase or sentence might appear dejected, homesick in its travels (losing, the text protests). It’s not enough to just say, Make yourself at home. Instead I must masticate, digest, regurgitate, nourish. Soothe the growing pains before pushing the work from its nest. The translator is so mother for that. Language, a baby beast. I’ve heard parenting, too, can be bittersweet. 

Another poignant reality: a horse needs to be broken before it can be ridden. This breaking is a cruel equestrian necessity. At its most daunting, language is quite a steed, better ridden (used, out loud or on the page) when dominated first. Viewing language violently, as something untamed against which some of us wage a daily, gruesome war, helps me process my own delusions that I am a worthy match for it. Or that we’re a worthy team; once broken, language and I can ride, clumsily if we must, at dawn.

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I was working on a text recently and I came across a verb, in Spanish, cantinflear. It’s after the Golden Era film star Mario Fortino Alfonso Moreno Reyes, known more popularly by his stage name, Cantinflas. This verb, inspired by his characters, means to speak in a nonsensical way, with no substance at all. It’s a fabulously evocative verb, carrying the history of an iconic, controversial figure. In my translation I ended up with the word gibber. I got it from Wikipedia. Welcome home, I guess.

Maybe (surely) loss outweighed the gain, here, which feels risky to admit. As a translator, naturally, I should fret over this. The critic could sink their teeth into it (and if there’s an eclipse, like in this case, they’re right to). But I also must move on, focus on the positive, trust that my rendering is worthy of its existence, that it seems to find new things, comfortable in its new skin, in more ways than it has lost, or feels lost. 

Gibber doesn’t sing on the page. It, well, gibbers. But I have to believe I can make up for this elsewhere—a near-perfect turn of phrase in the next paragraph, or an idiom in English that aligns surprisingly sturdily with the original. To seek a perfect translation in context, or references, or prose, or imagery, is Icarian. Or Sisyphean. Or both. It would precipitate monoculture, an annihilation of personality and specificity, the death of nuance. 

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Maybe death is always around the bend. In his essay “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights,” translated by Esther Allen, Borges describes the ranges of success and failure in the Arabic folktale’s various translations into various languages. He finds one translator fearful of the original text’s obscenities and “indelicacies,” like the story of the slave Bujait, which in many works end up censored, or cut entirely. The translation becomes “a mere encyclopedia of evasion,” per Borges. “Mutilation does not exclude death: some tales are rejected in their entirety ‘because they cannot be purified without destruction.’” 

That idea—the purification-destruction axis—is the specter of violence that looms behind the dented hopes of translation, this loss-gain balancing act. Translation and adaptation are vital—especially across large regional, temporal, and cultural schisms—but the passage must be crossed bravely, gently, with just intentions. One central caveat in the translation of relics, like that of Saint Nicholas, is that their new home must usually be of “higher status” within the Church. This often means extraction from, say, the Arab world, and a hero’s welcome to, say, places like Italy or Spain. There is a legacy of literary translation—exacerbated by colonialism and imperialism—that squares nicely, here, in terms of metaphor. The principled, intrepid translator, instead, must reject purification and purity. If cleanliness is next to godliness, deicide it is. The true translator likes it dirty.  

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There are five “love languages.” A Baptist pastor made them up in the early ’90s: gift-giving, words of affirmation, etc. I’ve heard people identify with them with the scientific clarity and self-affirming fervor recognizable from ardent devotees of astrology, the Meyers-Briggs test, or Hogwarts houses.

Very in-love people might describe how their two (different) love languages actually complement one another. Or the very in-love person will describe how, in their couple, they speak the same language. That they’re their truest selves together, needless of translation. Like the other-language, other-culture text sliding, without friction, into its new language in a perfect totality, it seems that love and sex can blind us from the loss-gain inevitability of self-expression itself. The lovers suddenly exist outside of translation, with no need to “filter” the complexities of their interiorities in order to be understood. The loners might fear for, well, the complexities of those interiorities. 

I don’t judge the lovebirds, of course. I am them, or have been them, and when I’m not them, I envy them. English is my boyfriend’s third language, and we have different backgrounds and cultural references. His first is Spanish, which is my second (and last, probably). During rough patches our differences can feel insurmountable. When I feel like I’m being asked to change something about myself to better suit his context, I fear for my own interiority in terms of purity and destruction. I may use this fear as an excuse to avoid correcting my foul mouth or finally learning which way the goddamn knife should face (left). In happy stretches, though, our intimacy and attachment almost trick me into thinking the translation phase has ended, as if it’s passable at all. I may drunkenly think, We’re creating one text. Or worse, even: one language. We finish each other’s... Laughter, love, without all the effort of definition, denotation, connotation. The late essayist Bryan Doyle wrote, “We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.” Having a next-door neighbor is still nice.

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In 2002, a Turkish group, The Santa Claus Foundation, told the AP they were beginning a campaign to demand the repatriation of St. Nicholas’s remains. In 2009, Ertugrul Gunay, Turkey’s culture minister, told a news agency in Anatolia that the government was planning to open a museum near the saint’s hometown, and would likely place a formal request with the Vatican soon after. In 2012, a professor of archaeology in Demre, Turkey, made another round of public claims that Bari should return Saint Nicholas’s remains on the basis that the saint himself had made it clear he wished to be laid to rest in his hometown. The calls seem, mostly, to have gone unanswered. Ancestral claims are, as we know, complicated. 

Every May 9 since 1980, the clergy at the Basilica of San Nicola has extracted a sweet-smelling liquid manna from these bones, which is then diluted in a larger pool, bottled, and sold to believers. These personal take-away relics have allegedly curative properties. About a century ago scientists tested the substance and found it was water, not oil, and likely condensation due to the tomb’s underground location and proximity to a port. Yet still, at the Feast of the Translation, this annual celebration, the bone juice goes crazy.

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As a translator, when I think about the language of the interior, what it means to communicate with anyone, or any thing, my thoughts can’t go far without returning to loss. Speak, even simply, and find that you’ve disappeared a lot: privacy. Loneliness, hopefully. The chance to take something back, a blank, unsullied potential. Truth, even, watered down by the tongue’s saliva the moment it leaves the mouth. These mistranslations of the mind, that clouded, watery, out-loud truth, might be called communication. And the spoils? Community, the edges of comprehension. Potential exorcism. Survival, in the case of Scheherezade, a protagonist who’s gained some serious clout in recent years. 

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The first European translator of “One Thousand and One Nights” was the orientalist Antoine Galland. His version of Les mille et une nuits went on to influence generations of translators thereafter—despite its many, many problems, moral and aesthetic. In terms of  those purification-destruction and loss-gain axes, Galland fucked around and found out: forcing violent fables into rigid forms more easily metabolized by European readers, rewriting along imperialist lines, finding out just how powerful a pen backed by knives and guns can be. Mid-to-late-17th-century France saw a vogue for fairy tales, so he sculpted the thousand and one nights in that image, his ballpoint a bludgeon. Poetry, literally, became prose. He even included two extra “orphan” tales, which weren’t featured in any previous manuscript: “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba.” He learned them from a Syrian, Hanna Diyab, whose important contributions to Galland’s translation were underplayed in Galland’s own diaries. Historians have since highlighted how crucial Diyab was throughout Galland’s entire translation, and luckily, in the three-plus centuries since, more faithful translations and adaptations have turned out. 

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Renata Adler, in her metaphor-obsessed novel Speedboat, translates life as follows: “Every love story, every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing.”

In the custody of translation, and metaphor, I suppose, I could try to do anything. I can only do, in the grand scheme of things to be done, a small fraction of anything. To exist in something but a constant state of translation; to communicate sans metaphor—these are not part of that small fraction.

I could gibber more, I could cantinflear into infinity. It might get a little milyunanochesco (“one-thousand-and-one-nights-esque”). I’m sure to purify, however hard I try not to, but I must promise to not destroy.

THE END