Assignment 6 ( Marilynne Robinson, Home)

Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. She was born in 1943 and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho.  She has emerged as one of the America’s greatest contemporary novelists, with a career characterized by surprise and singularity. So far, she has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008).

Home is an unusual exercise: a companion to Gilead, not sequel but sibling, narrating the same, rather uneventful, events as that novel, but in a context of a different family history and from different perspectives.

Home retells Jack Boughton's story from the point of view of his younger sister, Glory, who has reluctantly returned to Gilead at the age of 38 to care for her dying father, a Presbyterian minister and John Ames's best friend. Jack, the family's black sheep, an alcoholic with a dishonourable past, returns for reasons that he will only intimate (they are more fully disclosed in Gilead). Glory has secrets of her own: she was humiliated by a man to whom she thought she was engaged, but who turned out to be married. Home is a novel of secrets: the three Boughtons withhold most of what they are thinking and feeling from each other, as they reside uneasily under the same roof.

Before starting my translation, I read the text twice. It wasn’t hard to conclude what the text is about. We are given a description of the house in which the Boughton family used to live. Children of the Reverend Robert Boughton returned to the house and we see them reviving their memories all over again.  But it is not just a simple description of the house- the house is personified, and from the description we come to conclusion that it is treated as a human being, an important member of the family Boughton, rather than an object.

During the translation I used Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (8^th ed.), Merriam-Webster Online, Google Translate, Wikipedia.com and Guardian.co.uk

Even though the text is not hard to understand, one must be very careful when translating it as the main point is to make the house a living object- reader must get an impression that it is alive in order to realize what that house represents for its inhabitants. Problems that may appear during the translation:

“ Well, it’s a good house” – this is the 1^st sentence in the text. I myself would translate it as “Pa, dobra je to kuća”. What might be confusing is the word Well, which most of us would replace with Serbian equivalent Pa. After the discussion we had in class I think that the more suitable translation would be Dobra je to kuća, znaš.

“ …with a flat face and a flattened roof and peaked brows over the windows”   This is a description of the house which I found little confusing. After the discussion we had in class, it was obvious that the house is, as I already mentioned, personified. It was essential to find Serbian equivalents which won’t spoil the image that the author was trying to create. I translated it as: “…neukrašena, spljoštenog krova i šiljatih lukova iznad prozora nalik na obrve”

“Italianate” The father was probably referring to the style of the house, the way it was built. If that is the case than a proper translation would be “Prava italijanska” or “Italijanski stil gradnje”.

“Such times you had!” Obviously, this sentence can’t be translated literally. I had several solutions: “Eh, kakva su to vremena bila” “Ala ste se lepo provodili” “Bila su to dobra vremena”

Before posting my translation I read it several times to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes and to make sure everything had sense. I didn’t change anything. The notes from the class sure did help me a lot- if it weren’t for them, I might have misunderstood something and translated it differently. As I already mentioned the text is not hard to translate, we did some more complicated texts, so I will grade it with 4.