De uma folha de papel branco, por exemplo, dizia-se que era desprovida de cor, uma toalha que toda a vida tinha sido branca passou a ser cor de leite, a neve deixou de ser comparada a um manto branco para tornar-se na maior carga alvacenta dos últimos vinte anos, os estudantes acabaram com aquilo de dizer que estavam em branco, simplesmente confessavam que não sabiam nada da matéria ... (Saramago, 2004: 54)

A blank piece of paper, for example, would be described instead as virgin, a blank on a form that had all its life been a blank became the space provided, blank looks all became vacant instead, students stopped saying that their minds had gone blank, and owned up to the fact that they simply knew nothing about the subject ... (Jull Costa, 2006: 43–44)

Here, I had to change two of the examples (compare bold text in original and translation) and a riddle that occurs later in the same paragraph:‘Branco é, galinha o põe’. The original riddle means literally: ‘It’s white and a hen lays it’. Since ‘votos brancos’ in English are ‘blank votes’, the word‘white’ is of no use to me, and it seems impossible to come up with a riddle that will combine the words ‘blank’ and ‘chicken’ or ‘hen’ and then fit in with what ensues. And so I created my own riddle – ‘You can fill me in, draw me and fire me’ – and completely rewrote the rest of the passage:

• mas o caso mais interessante de todos foi o súbito desaparecimento da adivinha com que, durante gerações e gerações, pais, avós, tios e vizinhos supuseram estimular a inteligência e a capacidade dedutiva das criancinhas, Branco é, galinha o põe, e isto aconteceu porque as pessoas, recusando-se a pronunciar a palavra, se aperceberam de que a pergunta era absolutamente disparatada, uma vez que a galinha, qualquer galinha de qualquer raça, nunca conseguirá, por mais que se esforce, pôr outra coisa que não sejam ovos. (Saramago, 2004: 54)

but the most interesting case of all was the sudden disappearance of the riddle with which, for generations and generations, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and neighbours had sought to stimulate the intelligence and deductive powers of children, You can fill me in, draw me and fire me, what am I, and people, reluctant to elicit the word blank

from innocent children, justified this by saying that the riddle was far too difficult for those with limited experience of the world. (Jull Costa, 2006: 44)

So, yes, those puns are, in a sense, untranslatable, but different puns can be created to replace them, as long as they are in keeping with the tone and tenor of the original.

I suppose this and other examples I have given could be construed as‘domestication’. As you are no doubt aware, there are two supposedly opposing camps in translation – the foreignisers and the domesticators – those who feel that some hint of foreignness can and should remain in the translation, and those who believe that a translation should read as if originally written in the target language, in my case, English. I think that most translators probably move between these two camps all the time. Such is the complexity of languages and of cultures, that hard-and-fast rules simply cannot be applied to the art of translation, where one is constantly juggling with linguistic and cultural concepts which may or may not have an equivalent in the target language.

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