Arguments and Evidence

Passage I — Literary Narrative: “The Seam” (original story written for this practice set)

Mara had assumed that tuning a piano would be loud. She had imagined her grandfather hammering at keys while she waited in the car with her headphones on, and for the first week of July that was more or less how the job went. Abel’s doctor had taken away his driver’s license after a small stroke in May, and because Mara was sixteen, unemployed, and—in her mother’s phrase—“available,” she had become his driver.

The clients were mostly old, like the pianos. There was a church in Fenwick with an upright whose middle C had stuck since Easter and a widow on Larch Street who played nothing but hymns. Abel answered each of them with the same three words, “Let’s see it,” and then he disappeared into the piano and did not come out for two hours.

On the eighth day it rained, and Mara came inside.

She had expected noise, but what she heard instead was a kind of patient argument. Abel would strike a single key, listen, and fit his tuning hammer onto a pin no thicker than a pencil. Then he would turn it—so slightly that Mara could not see his wrist move—and strike the key again. Between strikes he held his head tilted, the way a bird does when it hears something under the grass.

“What are you listening for?” she asked finally.

He did not answer right away. He played two keys together, an F and the C above it, and the sound that came out had a faint wobble in it, a pulse like a slow heartbeat. “That,” he said. “The beats. When two notes are almost right, they fight a little. You hear the fighting.” He nudged the pin and played them again. The pulse slowed. “Now they’ve nearly agreed.”

“Nearly?”

“A piano is never in tune,” he said. “It’s only in tune with itself, for a while.”

Mara thought this was the kind of thing old people said to sound wise, and she told him so. Abel laughed—a short, surprised bark she had not heard since before the hospital—and handed her the hammer.

It was heavier than it looked. He put her hand on the pin, closed his own hand around hers, and told her to play the F and the C with her other hand. She heard the wobble at once, now that she knew what it was, and she was startled by how obvious it seemed, as if it had been there all along in every piano she had ever heard. Together they turned the pin. The pulse slowed, and slowed, and then for a moment it was gone, and the two notes sat side by side as smoothly as water.

“There,” Abel said, and let go.

After that she came inside every day. She learned the names of the parts—the hammers that strike the strings, the dampers that silence them, the felt that wears thin over years of practice—and she learned that her grandfather kept no notes, that every piano in the county seemed to live in his memory with its particular faults. “The Larch Street one goes flat in August,” he told her. “Humidity. She keeps a window open.” Mara began to notice that he talked to the pianos more than he talked to their owners, and that he talked to her more than he had in years.

She noticed other things, too. He tired by early afternoon now. Twice he struck a key and then sat with his hand on the lid, not listening so much as resting, and she pretended to be reading the music on the stand until he began again. On the drive home he often fell asleep, his head against the window, and she turned the radio down so low that it was barely a sound at all.

In the last week of August they went to the high school, where the auditorium piano had to be ready for the first assembly. Abel tuned the bass and the middle of the keyboard himself. Then, when he reached the high treble, where the strings are short and the beats are fast and hard to hear, he sat down in the front row and said, “Your turn.”

She was not ready, and she told him so. He folded his arms.

It took her forty minutes to tune eleven notes. When she finished, she played a scale from the top of the keyboard down to the place where his work began, and she could not hear the seam. She turned around to ask whether he could. He had his eyes closed and his head tilted, the way he always held it to listen, and he did not open them for a long time.

Passage III — Humanities: “Carrying the Joke” (original essay written for this practice set)

The hardest sentence I have ever translated was four words long, and it was a joke.

It came near the end of a Brazilian novel I was putting into English, in a scene where an elderly fisherman, asked by a tourist whether the sea is dangerous, replies with a pun on two Portuguese words that sound nearly alike, one meaning “tide” and the other meaning “bad.” In the original, the line is both funny and sad, because the fisherman’s son drowned years earlier, and readers who know this hear the grief beneath the wordplay. The tourist, who knows nothing of the son, hears only a clever old man. In English, the two words share nothing: not a sound, not a letter. A literal translation would leave the tourist—and the reader—puzzled by an old man who seemed to be answering a question nobody had asked.

People who have never translated often imagine that the job is a matter of finding equivalents, as if every language contained the same furniture arranged in different rooms. For most sentences, this picture is good enough. A cup is a cup; rain is rain. But a joke is not furniture. It is a small machine built out of the particular parts of one language, and the parts do not travel. When I translate a pun, I am not moving the machine from one room to another. I am trying to build a new machine, from English parts, that does the same work.

That phrase—“does the same work”—hides most of the difficulty. What work does a joke do? This one makes the tourist laugh, uncertainly. It shows the fisherman’s habit of deflecting questions with humor. And it lets the reader, who knows about the son, feel a sudden weight that the tourist cannot. A translation that kept the laugh but lost the weight would be a failure, and so would one that kept the weight but turned the fisherman into a man who speaks in riddles.

This is why I distrust the familiar advice to translate “the meaning, not the words.” A joke’s meaning cannot be lifted away from its words; the words are what make it a joke. What can sometimes be kept is its effect on the listener, and even that has to be reconstructed rather than carried across.

I tried nineteen versions. Some were clever and some were faithful, and none were both. In the end, I used a technique that translators call compensation: I let the pun go in that sentence and placed a smaller piece of wordplay two pages earlier, in a line where the fisherman talks about his boat, so that English readers would already know him as a man who plays with words. When the tourist’s question comes, my fisherman answers with a plain sentence about the tide and then pauses, and the narrator notes that he “seemed to be listening to something farther out.” The grief is carried by the pause rather than by the pun.

I am not sure the solution is right. The author, to whom I wrote about it, was gracious; she said that the English fisherman was “quieter than mine, but the same man.” I have reread the passage many times since, and some days I hear the original beneath it and some days I hear only my own choices. That doubt, I have come to think, is not a sign that something went wrong. It is the ordinary condition of the work.

It is also, I suspect, why translators argue so fiercely among themselves. Give the same paragraph to ten experienced translators and you will receive ten different versions, each defensible, each a little foreign to the others. The differences are not mistakes. They are evidence that a sentence offers more than one road into another language, and that every road passes through a particular person.

Readers sometimes ask whether they are really reading the author when they read a translation. The honest answer is that they are reading two people at once—the one who imagined the book and the one who rebuilt it—and that a good translation tries to make the second person disappear. But disappearing is itself an act. Every choice I make in favor of the author’s voice is still a choice, made by someone with my ear, my vocabulary, and my sense of when an English sentence breathes. The most faithful translation is not the one with the fewest changes. It is the one whose changes the author would recognize as her own.

Passage IV — Humanities: “The Invisible Craft” (original essay written for this practice set)

When people learn that I design typefaces for a living, they usually ask one of two questions. The first is whether there are not already enough fonts in the world. The second, asked more politely, is what exactly there is left to design. Both questions rest on the same assumption: that a letter is a fixed thing, like a chemical element, and that a typeface merely dresses it up. I held that assumption myself until my second year of art school, when a teacher handed me a lowercase a that she had drawn by hand and asked me to find what was wrong with it.

I stared at it for twenty minutes. The letter looked fine—better than fine, in fact; it looked like every a I had ever read. Finally she laid a ruler across it. The bowl of the letter, the round part at the bottom, dipped very slightly below the baseline, the invisible line on which letters sit. “It’s supposed to,” she said. “If it didn’t, it would look like it was floating.” Round letters, she explained, must overshoot the lines that flat letters rest on, because the eye judges a curve by its middle, not its edges. An o drawn exactly as tall as an x looks smaller than the x. Type designers have known this for centuries, and they correct for it so quietly that readers never notice the correction—only its absence.

That lesson changed how I looked at every page. Text that seemed effortless was, I began to see, the product of thousands of small decisions, most of them designed to disappear. The horizontal stroke of a capital H is often drawn slightly above the true center, because a bar placed at the exact middle looks low. The strokes of a letter are adjusted so that an n and an m look equally dark, even though the m contains more ink. The spaces between particular pairs of letters—an A beside a V, say—are tuned one pair at a time, because the gap that looks right between two straight letters looks enormous between two diagonal ones. None of these choices can be settled with a ruler alone. They are judged by eye, tested in paragraphs, and judged again.

It took me years to trust my own eye for these adjustments. At my first job, I spent most of a month on the spacing of a single typeface, printing the same test paragraphs again and again and pinning them to a wall across the room, where I could see the texture of the text rather than the individual letters. A well-spaced paragraph, seen from a distance, looks like an even gray. A flaw shows up as a dark knot or a pale gap, and the eye goes straight to it.

This is why I find it difficult to answer the question about whether the world has enough fonts. A typeface is not only a style; it is a tool made for particular conditions. A face drawn for the narrow columns of a newspaper must stay legible when printed quickly on cheap, absorbent paper, where ink spreads and fine details fill in. A face drawn for the signs above a highway must be read in a second or two, at a distance, through rain. A face drawn for a phone screen must survive being displayed by a grid of glowing squares at many different sizes. Each condition rewards different choices, and a design that excels in one may fail in another. When the conditions change, as they did when reading moved from paper to screens, the old tools no longer fit quite so well, and new ones must be made.

There is a second reason, which I admit is harder to defend. Typefaces carry a tone of voice. A wedding invitation set in the same letters as a parking ticket would feel wrong to almost anyone, even to someone who could not name either typeface. Readers respond to these differences long before they could explain them. I once watched a group of friends compare two nearly identical restaurant menus, one set in a crisp modern face and one in a softer face with gently rounded strokes. Every one of them described the second restaurant as “friendlier,” and not one of them mentioned the type.

I sometimes envy painters and architects, whose work is meant to be looked at. The best compliment a typeface can receive is that no one remarks on it—that a reader finishes a novel without once thinking about the shapes of its letters. Yet I have come to prefer the invisibility. When it works, the craft gives readers something no one can see: the feeling that the words arrived directly, with nothing standing in the way.