This week I was working on a translation test (often a way companies will check that you actually know what you’re doing, and I will not go too far into my thoughts on this practice here. Best to think of it more like a very specific interview than unpaid labor, which is only how the bad agencies use it). Anyway, the sample text came from this article in Spain’s El País newspaper. I think it’s a testament to the fact that I am a good translator that I found the article at all, as I was simply asked to translate the first paragraph, but half of being a good translator is being a good researcher. Research, however, is not the point of this post. The point was an odd coincidence that occurred involving this translation test and the book I happen to be reading right now, which I’ll come to later. The article is a sample from Rafael Azcona’s book Los muertos no se tocan, nene, which was later turned into a film in 2011. Azcona was, in fact, largely a screenwriter and wrote the screenplay for another film La lengua de las mariposas, that I just happened to create my own subtitles for just to practice subtitling back when I was picking up the skill. It’s a beautiful, sad movie about the start of the Spanish civil war based on a collection of short stories by Manuel Rivas, but I digress about a different coincidence.
The article includes the following line:
“Don Fabián Bígaro Perlé estaba convencido de que morirse en primavera era un despropósito: el mundo ofrecía épocas más adecuadas para abandonarlo y sólo a un bohemio o a un anarquista se les podía ocurrir fallecer cuando todo en la tierra empezaba a renacer.”
Which I translated to this:
“Fabián Bígaro Perlé was convinced that it was frivolous to die in the spring: the world provided other, more opportune times to leave it. Only a bohemian or an anarchist would think to die when everything else on earth was just starting to be reborn.”
It’s clearly satirical, and almost reminds me of the ironic tone of a novel of the 19th century. A Dickens or Twain. Maybe even a Chekhov or Tolstoy (whom I’ve only ever read in translation). I thought little of it, took the test, and moved on with my day.
But then, as I sat reading last night before bed, the line was thrown into stark relief. The book is My Heart by Semezdin Mehmedinović in a (so far) lovely translation by Celia Hawkesworth (it was originally written in Bosnian). The line that really made me stop was this one: “It was somehow indecent to die in the autumn. It was kitsch to die in the autumn, along with everything else. With the leaves.” So now we’ve got the frivolity of dying in spring and the indecency of dying in autumn. Compound this with the fact that, later in the El País sample, Azcona goes on to write, “El ideal sería apagarse en otoño, y a ser posible el primero de noviembre,” or “The best thing would be to die in autumn, specifically the first of November if at all possible.”
Now obviously this is ultimately a coincidence, but it made me think of a phenomenon called Baader-Meinhof, also called frequency illusion (the latter name comes from 2006 thanks to Arnold Zwicky, a linguist out of Stanford). This article by Alan Bellows from Damn Interesting is a short, useful read if you’d like to learn more about it. I have two things I’d like to highlight about the article. One is this paragraph, stating that frequency illusion:
“bears some similarity to synchronicity, which is the experience of having a highly meaningful coincidence… Both phenomena invoke a feeling of mild surprise, and cause one to ponder the odds of such an intersection. Both smack of destiny, as though the events were supposed to occur in just that arrangement… as though we’re witnessing yet another domino tip over in a chain of dominoes beyond our reckoning” (Bellows, 2006).
Each assertion about when it was best to die, however facetious, became more significant in contrast. As I say, I didn’t think much of the veracity of the first statement until it was challenged by the second. The other point Bellows makes is that “Baader-Meinhof is amplified by the recency effect, a cognitive bias that inflates the importance of recent stimuli or observations. This increases the chances of being more aware of the subject when we encounter it again in the near future” (Ibid). So I’d say the recency effect played a strong role in amplifying a coincidence that occurred later the same day.
All in all, I know that this is pure coincidence and that as someone who reads a lot and spends my days interacting with various media for translation that’s placed in front of me by a client, the chances of odd intersections like this are not actually that low, but I’d like, for a moment, to think about the dominoes of destiny that had to line up for this coincidence to occur. These assertions come from two different texts. One is for work and the other is for pleasure. One is in Spanish, and the other, originally, in Bosnian. One is from 2005 and the other is from this year, 2021. And they are such perfect antonyms of the same concept. The alluded to event in My Heart is even taking place in November, the first of which is the ideal time to die according to Azcona and a kitsch time to die according to Mehmedinović and Hawkesworth. And I encountered both of these texts, and both of these lines, on the same exact day. I have another book on my kindle right now, but I chose to read this one first. I didn’t have to go find and read the entire article sampling Azcona’s work for a translation test that was only a paragraph long, but I did. There are so many ways in which this recency and frequency could have been more like history and rarity. Anyway, all I know is that the world of literature is wide and yet so small, and that I’m still not certain what season is the preferred time to die.