Anthony struck right notes in translation

THESE Saturday people we have been meeting for the past four months have been showing a certain consistency in how to make a success of life. It often comes down to the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time, but it also entails knowing how to make the best of one's natural talents. And if, like writer Anthony Bonner, you are highly flexible, then success is more easily achieved. Anthony's adaptability is so well honed that he not only knows his limitations, he also takes the view that nothing is impossible. Anthony is one of those rare foreigners who have made their home in Majorca: he is so integrated that he's more at ease in Catalán (talking it, reading it, writing it and thinking in it) than he is in Spanish. And sometimes, one suspects, there are times when he is so immersed in medieval Catalán texts and Catalán dictionaries that Catalán comes even more naturally than English. Yet when Anthony arrived on the island for the first time in 1954 with his wife Eve, he was like most of us in that he had no Spanish and no Catalán. Mind you, he had plenty of other things going for him. For a start he was bilingual in French and he had just graduated from Harvard where he had majored in music.
After he graduated from Harvard, Anthony spent a year in Paris studying with the great Nadia Boulanger who had taught such composers as America's Aaron Copland and England's Lennox Berkeley. While studying in Paris, where he met and married Eve, three neighbours told them about Majorca. “We had never heard of Majorca,” says Anthony, “and one of the neighbours told us it was unbelievably cheap, another told us that it was like Tahiti and the third told us you could ski all year in the Serra de Tramuntana. “So we came down here and were a bit disappointed because it doesn't really look like what I imagined Tahiti looked like and the ski–ing was out. But this was 1954 and it was unbelievably cheap and we got to love it.” Anthony wrote some music and began to have second thoughts about his career as a composer. He was recognising his limitations. “It was a bit of a waste of music paper,” he admits, before adding immediately, “Well, it wasn't bad, but if you're going to ask somebody to listen to a piece of music it had better be exceptional. “I always think of The Beatles, who apparently every year wrote like 100 songs of which they actually performed 15. Schubert wrote 600 songs and we now listen to maybe 30 of them. You've got to have this fluidity.” Anthony reckoned he didn't have this essential faculty. “In Bach's time,” he explains, “there was very little division between composing and improvising. An organist like Bach was expected to be able to improvise a fugue. If composing, he just did it with greater care and the structure was a bit better.” When a composer sits down to write a piece of music, he's not starting with a fresh sheet of paper, says Anthony. “He's heard music for years, he's been playing music for years, so in a way it's the excitement of recombining in a new way. “Mozart had a terrific musical memory and they say he composed the overture to the Marriage of Figaro the morning of the dress rehearsal. He got up a couple of hours early and he wrote it. But he had it all in his mind already and what he was doing was copying it.” So when Anthony realised that the life of a composer wasn't for him, he showed his complete flexibility and his ability to make the most of his talents. “I had always been interested in languages,” says Anthony, “so then I inverted my profession and my afición, and went into translating and had music as a hobby.” Although Anthony was born in New York City and was brought up in New Hampshire, his mother was Swiss and until the age of six the family lived mainly in France, so he learned French as a child and was bilingual. “The man who founded the Berlitz Schools,” says Anthony, “said that the most difficult languages are the first 12. So if you start with two, it's a lot easier.” A translator friend in New York offered to introduce Anthony to his publisher. Anthony went back to New York, met the publisher and was commissioned to translate some works by the 15th century French poet François Villon. Other translation jobs followed, including a Balzac novel. Anthony realised that he was making enough money to live in Majorca, so in 1959 he returned to the island to be a full–time translator. Anthony was always interested in the Middle Ages, and did a translation of an anthology of Provençal troubadour poetry, Provençal being rather similar to Catalán. He also did some translating from Spanish including a couple of stories by Jorge Borges, the Argentinian writer.
One of his literary coups was the first complete English translation of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, which he did in the early 70s. “When I started to do translations I looked to see what was around and there were no complete versions of Twenty Thousand Leagues in English. Until then they had done only abridged versions for the children's market.” Verne's novel was one of the most difficult books Anthony has ever translated. “He's got one chapter when they're 48 hours under the Mediterranean and he describes all the fish, and all in their 19th century classifications. “Luckily I had the 1911 edition of the Britannica and I could look them up there. Nobody really cares if I get that fish right, but I felt obliged to get it right.” Anthony and Eve went to live in Puigpunyent in 1963 and remained there for 31 years before moving about eight years ago to a large sprawling seventh floor flat in the Santa Catalina area of Palma. It was in Puigpunyent that Anthony was able to get down to learning Catalán, because it was the language everyone in the village used. He got plenty of practice in everyday contact with the villagers and also bought himself a grammar book which Majorcan philologist and lexicographer Francesc Moll had written for Majorcan writers. Those were the days when the Franco government banned the teaching of regional languages in schools, so this Catalán grammar book was a clandestine publication. “I remember going to buy it,” says Anthony, “and the guy in the shop looking around before reaching under the counter as if it were a book of dirty pictures or something.” A good example of Anthony's philosophy that nothing is impossible, and also of his ability to make things happen, is his book on Balearic plants. “For years I did excursions every week or two and I got fascinated by the landscape and the mountains here. Most mountains are pretty bare, but here you get these cliffs going up that bloom in June. It's spectacular. “I wanted to identify these plants and I realised that there was no general guide available. To try to do it you had to read specialist literature. So I thought what's needed here is a book for hikers so they can identify plants.” At that point Anthony knew “nothing at all” about plants, so how did he manage to write a book about them? “Well, I like to do research and there were some good botanists here who guided me,” explains Anthony. So over several years he brought back specimens from his walks in the mountains and eventually built up enough information to write a book called the Plants of the Balearic Islands. “The flora that really interested me was that in the mountains. A lot of it is endemic and their only names are in Majorcan, and to write this book in Spanish would have been something else, so I decided to write it in Catalán. Then it got translated into English by a friend, which looks very pretentious.” The reason Anthony didn't do the English version was that he was involved in another translation and couldn't take any time off for the plants book. “It looks very funny,” he thinks, ”like I couldn't do the translation into English or something.” New up–dated English and Catalán editions of this book are due out next month with many revisions and changes in some of the nomenclature.
Since writing the plants book, his first in Catalán, he has done many others in that language, as well as giving lectures in Catalán at Barcelona University. “At the first lecture I gave in Barcelona years ago,” Anthony remembers, “a dialectologist invited several of his students so that they could hear the Balearic dialect.” So Anthony not only speaks, reads, writes and thinks in Catalán, he does it in the Majorcan way. You can't be more integrated than that.