How Old Neno Speaks: A Note on Voice and Translation
How Old Neno Speaks: A look at the translation choices behind Old Neno's Stories — sound expressions, blessing formulas, and words that could not be translated.
TRANSLATION
Albanika Press
5/25/20264 min read
How Old Neno Speaks: A Note on Voice and Translation
Every translation involves hundreds of small decisions that never appear in the finished text. The reader encounters the result — a sentence, a paragraph, a story — without seeing the choices that shaped it. This post makes some of those choices visible.
Old Neno's Stories presented particular challenges as a translation project, not because the Albanian is technically difficult, but because so much of what makes Kokalari's prose distinctive operates at the level of voice rather than meaning. Translating the content of her stories is relatively straightforward. Translating the way Old Neno speaks is something else entirely.
The Problem of the Sound Expression
Consider a sentence from the story "For Çelo's Mustache," in which two women quarrel in the street. In the original Albanian, the narration includes sound expressions — brief onomatopoeic bursts that mimic the physical gestures accompanying the exchange: fsht, trak, fiu, pllec. These are not words in the conventional sense. They do not have dictionary definitions. They are sounds that carry meaning through their shape and their placement in the sentence — a quick movement, a blow, an object flying through the air, a door slamming shut.
The temptation in translation is to replace these sounds with English descriptions: "she swatted," "he slammed," "it flew across the room." This approach is accurate in terms of content but wrong in terms of voice. It turns performance into narration. It replaces the immediacy of a sound with the distance of a report.
The translation preserves these expressions in their original Albanian form. Trak remains trak. Fiu remains fiu. A reader encountering these sounds in an English text may pause — and that pause is appropriate. The sounds are foreign because the world they inhabit is foreign. Their presence is a small reminder that the reader is a guest in someone else's language.
The Blessing Formula and Its Force
Blessings and curses in Kokalari's stories follow formal structures that carry their own rhythm and authority. They are not casual expressions of feeling — they are invocations, calling on forces larger than the speaker to deliver judgment or protection. "May he live as long as the mountains." "May your days be cut short." "On my father's head." These phrases appear at moments of strong emotion and function almost liturgically within the flow of speech.
An early instinct in translation was to find English equivalents that would feel natural to contemporary readers. That instinct was set aside. "Drop dead" is not the same as "may your days be cut short" — not because the sentiment differs, but because the structure does. The Albanian formula positions the speaker as an intermediary, calling down consequence rather than simply expressing anger. That positioning is part of the meaning. Collapsing it into a modern idiom loses the moral and cultural texture of the original speech.
The translation therefore preserves the formal structure of these formulas even when they sound unusual in English. The strangeness is intentional. Old Neno inhabits a moral universe with its own rules and its own language. The translation does not modernize that universe — it asks the reader to enter it.
One Word That Could Not Be Translated
The word gurbet appears in several of the stories. It refers to migration for work — specifically the kind of long-term, often painful departure that took men away from their families and communities for months or years at a time, to distant cities or foreign countries, in pursuit of economic survival. The word carries within it the longing, the disruption, and the communal weight of that experience. It is not simply "migration" or "working abroad." Those phrases describe a fact. Gurbet describes a feeling shared by an entire community across generations.
There is no English word that does what gurbet does. "Migration" is too neutral. "Exile" is too political. "Working abroad" is too bureaucratic. The translation retains the Albanian word and trusts the reader to absorb its meaning through the context in which it appears — the tearful farewells, the songs of blessing, the long silences after a departure. By the time a reader has encountered gurbet two or three times, they understand it in the way that matters: not as a definition, but as an experience.
The Repetition That Must Not Be Edited
One of the most common instincts when editing translated prose is to reduce repetition. Where a writer has used the same word or phrase twice in close proximity, an editor reaches for a synonym. This instinct, reasonable in most literary contexts, is actively harmful when applied to Kokalari's prose.
Old Neno repeats herself. She circles back to the same grievance, restates the same judgment, returns to the same image from a slightly different angle. This is not a weakness in the writing — it is a feature of the oral storytelling tradition from which the stories emerge. Repetition in spoken narrative builds emotional momentum. It signals importance. It creates the rhythm of a voice that is working through something rather than simply reporting it.
Every instance of repetition in the translation was evaluated carefully. Where repetition appeared to be functional — contributing to cadence, emphasis, or the accumulative structure of the speech — it was preserved. Where it appeared incidental, it was occasionally addressed. But the default was always to trust the repetition rather than smooth it away.
What the Reader Receives
A reader coming to Old Neno's Stories for the first time will encounter a text that occasionally feels unfamiliar. Some expressions will be unusual. Some words will be untranslated. Some sentences will run longer than contemporary English prose convention might suggest. Some sounds will have no English equivalent.
These are not failures of the translation. They are its commitments. The translation was made on the belief that the reader of world literature in English is capable of meeting a text on its own terms — of pausing where a pause is warranted, of inferring meaning from context, of allowing a foreign sound to carry its own weight without requiring explanation.
Old Neno speaks from within her own world. The translation's job was to carry that world into English without flattening it. Whether it has succeeded is for the reader to judge.
Old Neno's Stories is available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats.
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