In early February, I took a cross-country drive from my home in Coventry to UEA campus on the edge of Norwich. It is a journey of just over 150 miles, much of it along the A14, a dull stretch of road consisting mainly of an ugly dual carriageway that winds its way through various counties including Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, before eventually you veer off it onto the A11 towards Norfolk. I was on my way to spend the first official day as one of two translators-in-residence at the BCLT, and the drive was something of an experiment. The alternative is a train down to London, a tube trip across the capital, then another train up to Norwich, which felt circuitous, and so I thought I would see whether the drive felt more direct, despite not being the most confident of drivers.
The writer Rachel Cusk has an essay called ‘Driving as Metaphor’ in her collection Coventry (which disappointingly features nothing at all about the actual city of Coventry). In it, she writes that ‘there are people who appear to have known from the beginning that driving wasn’t for them: often they are individuals society might label as sensitive or impractical or otherworldly; sometimes they are artists of one kind of another.’ I suppose I may once have fallen into this category, but I did eventually learn to drive a few years ago at the age of 41, after having felt slightly isolated during Covid. Unlike Cusk, I do not get into my little car that often, and on new routes, or ones that involve large amounts of complicated road systems, I can get nervous and stressed. The train, meanwhile, can afford one the possibility of reading, writing or working as one travels. Driving and taking the train: two different ways of getting to the same destination, and so perhaps two ways of thinking about the various ways in which we reach a solution as translators (I am a sucker for a translation metaphor).
I planned my route, filled up my car, and asked for recommendations for podcasts to listen to along the way. It took me just under four hours (with a stop), and certainly did feel more direct, although after driving back home the following day and then spending several hours sitting in the same position at my desk, my back seized up at the weekend, and I remembered why I am so grateful not to have to commute to work in my car. Completing the route did feel like an achievement, as a relatively new driver who doesn’t drive that much. But perhaps next time I would get the train, I thought – it would be a chance to do some thinking about translation and therapy, the focus of my residency project. I scribbled down a note about ‘driving as a translation metaphor’ and booked myself a train for the next visit.
That same week I had been talking about translation metaphors with the students I teach on a translation MA. While the ‘carrying something across’ metaphor for translation is not exactly new, it felt like specifically considering different forms of transport in terms of how they make the journey feel, qualitatively – how fast or slow they are, or how direct, how boring, how unpredictable, stressful or exciting – could be a useful lens, particularly in terms of the links I am trying to make between translation and attachment theory. What if we consider driving, or perhaps just travelling through space, as a translation metaphor? What can it do for us? A need for a more direct route in a car as a need for control, but one that perhaps offers only dreary views; and opting for a slower route via train, where by definition you are not in the driving seat, as being a way to let go of control, to be open to whatever happens along the way.
An idea I am exploring in my writing is that if we cling too closely to a text because we are worried about making a mistake, just as an anxious baby might cling to its mother if the parenting is unpredictable, then we can risk blocking a certain amount of creative play, play which would allow us to recreate the text’s effects more effectively. Was my need for control on the journey stopping me from having fun (and thus discovering interesting creative solutions) along the way? The next time I went to BCLT I experimented with the train. Although it took marginally longer and involved more stages, I was able to read an essay by Sheila Heti, to listen to a podcast about therapy my sister had recommended, and to do some really good looking-out-of-the-window-and-thinking, something which has a rather different quality when you are focussing on driving.
The best metaphors allow us to see a thing through a new lens, and although they are always partial, if they work well then they can shed new light on something we thought we knew. As I translated myself across the country on the train, letting go of the need for control, I thought about how the train journey felt similar to a more experimental approach to translation: far more random encounters along the route, far more sensory experiences, and of course you are using your body more, or in a greater range of ways: sitting, walking, sometimes running when you worried about missing a connection. By contrast, in the car, you move far less and can end up feeling a strange combination of hyper alert and almost stultified; you get there faster – just as a more straightforward translation approach might get you to a solution faster – but do you enjoy the journey? Perhaps more seasoned drivers would, but I’m not quite there yet.
Perhaps driving can still serve as a way to think about the unpredictability of translation. On the drive back home after that first visit to BCLT, I set off later than I’d meant to and about two hours in, darkness fell, and the rain got up. Usually I don’t like night driving – I am startled by all the LED lights and the lack of visibility makes me tense up. But even as I sped through the dark towards home, it occurred to me that this also felt a little bit like translation: knowing (trusting, believing) that the road is there, even though it is only visible in the short stretches illuminated by your headlamps up ahead, you just keep going forward, making decisions, making tracks. In this metaphor, driving in the dark is like translation because in both activities, we move forward without fully conscious of what lies ahead, without being able to really see or sense what lies ahead, and yet all the while trusting, because we have to, that there will be something there, that we will be able to make our way through and beyond the darkness to safety. (I think I’ll still get the train the next time, though.)
