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rereading Harry Potter: part 1
Sep. 28th, 2016 11:36 pmvia http://ift.tt/2dANRhr:
So I’m rereading Harry Potter, and in order to freshen up the experience and to make sure I don’t forget my Spanish, I’m reading it in translation.
I like the way that Hagrid sounds in Spanish. Everything is much cozier-sounding. And I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think my impressions of the characters are probably closer to the way that JK intended them to be. As an American, I don’t have any frame of reference for the accent that Hagrid has, what the cultural stereotypes of people with that accent are, and I definitely didn’t have that reference when I was eight and first reading the books.
On the other hand, I absolutely have mental images of people who talk the way that Hagrid does in the Argentinean translation. Hagrid, Madame Malkin, and Mrs. Weasley*, I can picture them much more clearly; I feel like their characters have come into focus for me in a way I didn’t expect to happen. I expect it’s probably me knowing many more types of people now than I did when I was eight, and where I know people who are warm and friendly and uneducated like Hagrid. There was one line that Hagrid says when he first meet Harry, and I laughed with recognition because oh, he sounds like this older man I worked with in rural Peru. I’ve never met anyone who talks like Hagrid in English, but because I’ve met people who talk like him in Spanish, suddenly I have a frame of reference for his character that I didn’t before.
*(Mrs. Weasley sounds exactly like my friend’s mom in my head, which is delightful. She is tall, dark, and lacks freckles, but is otherwise basically the same person)
Harry’s dialogue, on the other hand, doesn’t really change the way I feel about him, but my increased reading comprehension skills since I last read the books has. I can figure him out a little better: he’s clever and resourceful and fucked up from a lifetime of abuse that he’s normalized to a frightening degree, and it hasn’t broken him the way it would’ve broken me. In a strange way, he seems to expect to be treated like a shameful secret, someone impossible to love, but he has no idea why – or, anyway, it doesn’t seem to have affected his … pluckiness, for lack of a better word. Sort of attitude of, “well, this is the way it’s always been, it’s not so bad once you learn how to manage it, and anyway there’s nothing I could change that would please them because I’m Not A Dursley”, without any understanding that the way it’s been is profoundly wrong. And I didn’t really understand how to analyze characters for myself until college, and as an adult reading about this eleven-year-old child locked in a closet for days or weeks at a time, who’s never been allowed to eat as much as he wants, I’m fucking horrified because I can empathize a lot better now than I could as a small child myself.
And of course he feels weird and disappointing when everyone in the Leaky Cauldron thinks he’s great! No one has ever expected him to be anything but underfoot (and it never mattered what he actually did, he’d always be perceived as a failure). Having expectations to rise to when he knows, knows, knows that he’s always going to be a disappointment and no matter what he does, someone will be angry at him. It doesn’t seem to be something that he’s consciously aware of feeling, but it bubbles to the surface whenever there’s a lull in the conversation between him and Hagrid, or him and Malfoy, or him and Ron.
I understand Sirius’s massive reaction in Stealing Harry much better upon rereading the books, is what I’m saying.
So I’m rereading Harry Potter, and in order to freshen up the experience and to make sure I don’t forget my Spanish, I’m reading it in translation.
I like the way that Hagrid sounds in Spanish. Everything is much cozier-sounding. And I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think my impressions of the characters are probably closer to the way that JK intended them to be. As an American, I don’t have any frame of reference for the accent that Hagrid has, what the cultural stereotypes of people with that accent are, and I definitely didn’t have that reference when I was eight and first reading the books.
On the other hand, I absolutely have mental images of people who talk the way that Hagrid does in the Argentinean translation. Hagrid, Madame Malkin, and Mrs. Weasley*, I can picture them much more clearly; I feel like their characters have come into focus for me in a way I didn’t expect to happen. I expect it’s probably me knowing many more types of people now than I did when I was eight, and where I know people who are warm and friendly and uneducated like Hagrid. There was one line that Hagrid says when he first meet Harry, and I laughed with recognition because oh, he sounds like this older man I worked with in rural Peru. I’ve never met anyone who talks like Hagrid in English, but because I’ve met people who talk like him in Spanish, suddenly I have a frame of reference for his character that I didn’t before.
*(Mrs. Weasley sounds exactly like my friend’s mom in my head, which is delightful. She is tall, dark, and lacks freckles, but is otherwise basically the same person)
Harry’s dialogue, on the other hand, doesn’t really change the way I feel about him, but my increased reading comprehension skills since I last read the books has. I can figure him out a little better: he’s clever and resourceful and fucked up from a lifetime of abuse that he’s normalized to a frightening degree, and it hasn’t broken him the way it would’ve broken me. In a strange way, he seems to expect to be treated like a shameful secret, someone impossible to love, but he has no idea why – or, anyway, it doesn’t seem to have affected his … pluckiness, for lack of a better word. Sort of attitude of, “well, this is the way it’s always been, it’s not so bad once you learn how to manage it, and anyway there’s nothing I could change that would please them because I’m Not A Dursley”, without any understanding that the way it’s been is profoundly wrong. And I didn’t really understand how to analyze characters for myself until college, and as an adult reading about this eleven-year-old child locked in a closet for days or weeks at a time, who’s never been allowed to eat as much as he wants, I’m fucking horrified because I can empathize a lot better now than I could as a small child myself.
And of course he feels weird and disappointing when everyone in the Leaky Cauldron thinks he’s great! No one has ever expected him to be anything but underfoot (and it never mattered what he actually did, he’d always be perceived as a failure). Having expectations to rise to when he knows, knows, knows that he’s always going to be a disappointment and no matter what he does, someone will be angry at him. It doesn’t seem to be something that he’s consciously aware of feeling, but it bubbles to the surface whenever there’s a lull in the conversation between him and Hagrid, or him and Malfoy, or him and Ron.
I understand Sirius’s massive reaction in Stealing Harry much better upon rereading the books, is what I’m saying.
