Translating Letters While Keeping the Correspondent’s Voice Intact

Ruth Zelig on writing Letters from Brazil, Reflections on Migration and Friendship  

In order to write my epistolary memoir Letters from Brazil, Reflections on  Migration and Friendship, I needed to translate 100 letters I received from a  friend in Brazil, written in Portuguese, and mailed over the course of twenty  years. I saved that correspondence for five decades.  

We became friends as young girls, even though we both immigrated to Brazil a  few years apart, she arriving first, and I arriving in 1959. We went to Brazilian  schools and learned Portuguese, our primary language between us, although we  both spoke other languages already. Our parents had been European survivors  and refugees. Unfortunately, my friend and I were forced to separate in 1964  when my parent migrated again, leaving Brazil and moving to North America. 

My replies to these letters were written in Portuguese for a few years, then  continued in English as I became less fluent in Portuguese. Sad to say, my  letters have not survived. Thus the epistolary memoir is a one-way conversation —think about overhearing a phone conversation. Not the kind you hear on the  street with speakers yelling into their cell phone, but like the routine of a one way conversation perfected by the comedian Bob Newhart. In our case,  however, my friend and I exchanged letters starting as teenagers and continued  until we became adults. Our “conversations” were serious, yet expressed in  mostly lighthearted tones, and occasionally, in misconstrued, apologetic, or  heart-rending dramatic tones. 

So imagine two young women in the 1960s chatting, complaining, revealing, and  yearning for each other while writing in longhand, because there was no 

internet, there were no cell phones, no text messaging, and international calls  were darn expensive. 

Ideally this book ought to be published in 2 languages: the memoir in my  adopted English and the letters in Portuguese. It took me a while to find a  publisher, though; finding one for a bilingual book would have been even harder.  (OK, I’m not Jhumpa Lahiri!) Obviously, I had to translate the letters. 

And now for the conundrum I fell into regarding translation. This extremely  complex topic (translation, literary and otherwise) is written about extensively,  and as a linguist I follow the implications that arise from the social, linguistic,  and literary points of view on this topic.  

J.M. Coetzee and his translator Mariana Dimópulos, discuss this in a current  publication Speaking in Tongues, Liveright, 2025, and reviewed by the linguist  Ross Perlin in the NYT Book Review dated June 15, 2025. 

I had to tackle my cache of Portuguese letters on several levels. – What my friend wrote (content), 

– How she wrote (style), 

– Why she wrote (impetus to maintain a friendship),  

– When (a teenager, then a young woman, in the 1960s and early 1970s), – The underlying Portuguese language (foundation). 

Written language and spoken language have different rules. Rules of  conversation involve give-and-take, interruptions, cross-completions of words,  changing of topics, etc. (See Talk: The Science of Conversation… Alison Wood  Brooks, Crown, 2025.) Conversations involve a lot of talking over one another,  not necessarily in a rude way, but in the human need to abbreviate the slower 

speech form in comparison to faster thoughts, because our thoughts outrun our  speech. It’s the reason many speakers don’t complete their sentences. Thus, we  need a lot of shortcuts: in morphology (meaning), in phonetics (sounds), and in  syntax (structure).  

My friend’s letters made it easy for me: they were written in a spoken style, that  is, as if she was talking to me in a conversation. Although with letters, the  conventions of conversation are not maintained. Instead, think of radio  communications, where you say, “Over” after your sentence, to get the next leg  of the conversation, and then you say, “Over and out” at the end. And naturally,  our letters crossed in the mail a few times, one sent before a reply was received,  in other words, we talked over one another. 

Regardless of style, Portuguese and English are very different languages:  Romance vs. Germanic. Portuguese is gendered, for example. English speakers  are not encumbered with gender. English is a compact language, and syntax is  position-based (for example: the dog bit the boy; the boy bit the dog.)  Portuguese has fewer verb tenses, but verbs have more conjugations that also  include implied personal pronouns which can be dropped. But the structure of  Portuguese and the tempo, texture, and flow of sentences, are unlike the English  counterparts. 

This then, lead to resolving how to translate my friend’s letters, and how they  should “sound” in English. 

I decided against turning the correspondence into “domesticated literary  English.” As Coetzee and Dimópulos describe, I “foreignized” the translation. I  want my reader to read her letters without an apparent intervention, without  turning them conventionally Anglophone. I want the reader to hear my friend 

write to me with a Portuguese accent. Many times, the MS Word “police”  insisted on a change, and, just as many times, I decided to override the  persistent cyber suggestions. 

English is not my native language––it’s not my mother tongue. My writing  contains hints of foreignness; my writing has an “accent.” I tried to make my  friend’s letters speak to the reader with a much heavier accent. 

There is currently an epistolary novel on the best-seller lists, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. It has steadily risen in rank, but it also coincides with the  growing interest to communicate outside of the digital realm that has overtaken  our lives. And who hasn’t heard of the famous correspondence between Abigail  and John Adams. A novelized correspondence is not the same as a historical  correspondence, of course! But the interest in letters is genuine. My friendship  correspondence is historical only in the sense that it takes place among two  adolescents during the social upheaval of the mid to late-twentieth century, but  inevitably, what happens during this period seeps into the letters. This makes  the correspondence a treasure trove of historical evidence that sparkles in the  midst of the emotional weight of friends needing to communicate and share their  lives while separated by a continent.

Letters from Brazil: Reflections on Migration and Friendship―An Epistolary Memoir

For fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, an epistolary memoir about two young women’s friendship across continents and decades—an enduring connection kept alive by the simple act of written correspondence.

When Ruth’s family migrates from Brazil to North America in 1964, she and her best friend, Elana, are forced to separate. They decide to keep in touch via written correspondence—an exchange that ultimately persists for twenty years. From São Paulo, Elana writes candidly with warmth, dedication, and support, easing Ruth’s assimilation to first Canada, then the United States. Lonely and uprooted, Ruth derives solace from the friendship and the correspondence. As both girls mature and embark on a life in different countries and cultures, their bonds transcend their differences. They remain friends for life.

Fifty years after parting, Ruth and Elana re-read aloud the letters that they exchanged as young women. The experience of hearing their words written in letters and sent like a bridge across the continent and half a lifetime is a revelation that stuns the friends: the antecedent voice spoken in the concrete voice of the present.

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: How To and Tips