Titles of Literary Works and Cultural Memory. Case study based on the translations of the title of Jesús Moncada’s novel Camí de sirga

According to the way of transmission, the Assmanns classify memory into two categories: communicative and cultural memory.3 Communicative memory includes events, persons, things that are directly remembered by present generations through personal experience or through narrations of parents or grandparents in everyday communication. Grandchildren can learn the stories of their grandparents or their great grandparents, but this kind of oral memory cannot extend beyond 80–100 years. The range of time beyond that falls into the category of cultural memory, which is the domain of indirectly transmitted memories codified in objects, buildings, traditions, institutions, or in written documents or literary works. The essential difference between these two categories is that communicative memory is constantly moving and changing both form and content, while cultural memory is the domain of more or less static, canonized elements.

An important and widely cited term is the concept of collective memory developed by the French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs between the two world wars.4 Halbwachs defines collective memory as a common denominator of group identity, a knowledge shared by group members, evolved through linguistic communication, always bound to time and space. He claims that memory is not simply a repository waiting to be filled up, but a reconstructive force that chooses and shapes its facts and draws a picture of the past according to ever-changing reference frames as time passes. Therefore, generations build up their past with what they want to remember and without things they consider useless or to be deleted. This is true not only in case of conscious, politically motivated memory-politics, or in case of history falsification, but also of natural selection that takes place in the process of tradition. A generation that takes over a cultural heritage adopts not only factual knowledge but also a certain practice, a modus operandi, a vision, an emotional attitude that will be used and reshaped according to the needs and natural, social and technical aptitudes of the heirs. In this process of constant transmission there will always be lost, sifted out or omitted elements.

Language is a special area of cultural memory. On the one hand, cultural memory consists of linguistic products: novels, poems, historical documents, laws, etc., but on the other, this medium enabling our everyday communication is itself a cultural heritage constantly changing in the process of transmission from generation to generation. It is enriched with newly borrowed words to describe the expanding world, and it becomes poorer with the disappearance of words belonging to obsolete professions, objects or lifestyles. It therefore belongs to both diachronic categories of communicative and cultural memory.

We can also consider a linguistic cultural product as a cultural lieu de mémoire, in which the representation of reality is accomplished through a unique combination of linguistic expression, content and style, rendering the work impossible to be composed in another language. This statement is especially true for poetic works, because, as Jacques Roubaud, the French poet-mathematician says, while mathematics (and more or less all other thoughts) can be infinitely paraphrased, it is not the case of poetry, since poetry cannot be said otherwise.5 “What poetry says is not accessible through ways used by thinking or knowledge, nor can it be analysed, debated, described in the same way.”6 In Roubaud’s opinion, poetry is itself the memory of language, because while speaking to us, it evokes things not through reflexive thinking, but through the mobilization of our memory. The specific language choices work as call signs that conjure in us images, memories and emotions. “Poetry is an autonomous language game that cannot be replaced by any other language game without irreplaceable loss.”7 Each language creates works in a poetic configuration specific to it, and even if translation strives to be equivalent and not to cause any loss in the content of the text, it is impossible to convey the same meaning with the same rhythm, prosody, nuances of meaning, etc. The objective reason for that is that languages obey to different laws, but the concept of cultural memory also plays an important role in this respect. Essential memories stored in the brain of native speakers can be triggered by linguistic signs, because certain concepts, feelings or sensations are intrinsically linked to words. It is possible that according to dictionaries words have the same referential meaning in different languages, but this meaning can have many different connotations that have to do with social, historical and cultural experiences of a given community, which don’t figure in dictionaries. Language is a special case of our cultural memory, a constantly changing, working memory. It activates individual memories through the use of linguistic signs that are part of an associational network shared by the community of language users. The preservation, transmission or forgetting of these signs is a permanently ongoing process.

Thus, a language of a community is connected to its deep-rooted past, and it evokes the community’s knowledge of the world through anamnesis activated by linguistic signs. In the post-Babel world, the need for language-to-language mediation has created one of the oldest professions, interpretation and later, with the appearance of writing, translation.8 Among all types of texts, it is the translation of literature that requires from translators the highest level of familiarity with the cultural memory of both source and target language communities. Only a deep knowledge of the respective memories enables translators to become players in the language game themselves. Only as being part of these memory networks, they are able to assemble the pieces of a traditional language set in a new way in order to describe new realities. And when it comes to translation, it turns out that not only words have their own history but individual translators too, and this fact inevitably plays an important role in the translation process.

This case study is an analysis of the connotative meanings of an expression in different European languages. Camí de sirga is the title of a contemporary Catalan novel written by Jesús Moncada9 and translated to 18 languages.10 I consider the title as a prominent symbolic communication capable of expressing in a single short sign the memory content of the novel as a whole. To that effect, the title is the most “poetic” word of a novel in Roubaud’s sense, and that is why the translation of the title is always the last in the creative process. I chose Camí de sirga, because the Hungarian translation of this great novel is my work, so I have intimate experience with its content and thanks to the invitation of The Association of Catalan Language Writers,11 I also had the opportunity to meet some of the translators in the author’s hometown in 2008. For this paper, I tried to contact the literary translators of the European languages to find out what motivated their decisions translating the title that in many cases is not a denotative but a connotative translation. When the original title has a literal translation, I wanted to know what images and concepts are associated to it in the target language in order to see whether it is capable of transmitting the same message. When the translator opted for a different solution, I wanted to find out the same: what connotations have the literal translation that makes it unfitting in the opinion of the translator. In this latter case, I also wanted to know what justifies their innovative solutions. In cases, when it was impossible to interview the translator in person, I intended to find native speakers to discuss the memory content of the title or used written sources commenting on the translations. These sources were found in the digitalized family archive of Jesús Moncada with the permission of the author’s sister, Rosa Maria Moncada. I refer to these articles with the abbreviation of MFA (Moncada Family Archive).

Catalans who have not read the first novel by contemporary Catalan writer Jesús Moncada, Camí de sirga, do not know what the title means. When I interviewed Carles-Jordi Guardiola, the director of Magrana Publishers12 about the title, he said he had been dumbfounded seeing it on the cover of the manuscript at his desk, since he had never met this word proper to the terminology of fluvial navigation before. His words are corroborated by a quiz question What does a “sirga” mean? in a newspaper article13 found in the writer’s family archive and dating from 2005. The unknown term couldn’t possibly transmit hidden contents attracting the public’s attention, therefore it was a risky marketing decision for the publisher to agree on. However, the novel became very popular, and as a result of its successive twenty-four editions, the expression camí de sirga and the universe of its memorial realm ended up as an important place on the cultural memory map of Catalan readers. Camí de sirga means ‘towpath’. It was a sacred and invulnerable route parallel to the river, a path to be respected by all, because in case of adverse winds sailing boats could pass up-stream only if towed by human or animal effort. In Mequinensa, the writer’s hometown in Aragon at the confluence of the Ebro and the Segre, centre of a mineral basin and heavy river traffic towing was a common sight since the lignite of local mines was transported by sailing boats on the Ebro up until the 1970s. For Jesús Moncada (1941–2005) and his generation towing belonged to the everyday reality, just like the sirga, a very strong and heavy rope this hard work was carried out with. The verb deriving from the name of this rope is sirgar, which means in Catalan: to do a tiring, hard work. The hard work of towing up-stream is also a metaphor for the process of memory work or memory therapy by which the writer saved his hometown from oblivion. While the fictional Mequinensa is an important place on the literary map of Catalonia, the waters of a dam once for all covered the real, original town in 1971 due to the forced-pace industrialisation of the Franco dictatorship.

The Spanish translation, made by Joaquín Jordà (1937–2006), a natural first step towards greater fame or broader acknowledgment for a novel written in Catalan is from 1989.

I discussed the title with Professor Manuel José de Lara Ródenas, a historian at the University of Huelva, who wrote in a private letter that “when I saw the expression camino de sirga, I had no idea it could have anything to do with rivers.” He tried to take the novel out of the library and was surprised to see that a Huelva poet wrote a book of poetry of three hundred pages with the same title: José Luis Vázquez de Zafra: Camino de Sirga (Madrid, 1952, second edition Huelva, 1964). For the professor Lara Ródenas who has been dedicating long years to study the local and cultural history of Huelva, his hometown, it was an unexpected discovery to come across this expression. The preface of the poetry book by Vázquez Zafra was written by a literary critic, Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles who openly stated his profound dislike for the title on two occasions. In the case of Moncada’s novel the Spanish translator, Joaquín Jorda decided to give a literal translation to the novel despite the fact that camino de sirga sounds strange and unfamiliar for educated Spanish people. The Portuguese translator, Artur Guerra chose the same solution: Caminho de sirga (Dom Quixote, Lisboa 1992). The novel was translated into two minority languages of the Iberian Peninsula: to Galician, Camiño de sirga (Xerais, Vigo 1997; translated by Xabier Rodríguez Baixeras); and to Aragonese, Camín de sirga (Gara d’Edizions, Zaragoza 2003; translated by Chusé Aragüés).

I managed to contact Chusé Aragües, the Aragonese translator whose answers to my questions concerning the title were the following: “I did not previously know the term, which is slightly the same in Catalan, Spanish and Aragonese. I could have chosen the phonetically more different version: Camín de Xirga, or a synonym: Camín de tiradera, but the latter, though also an act of traction, is more related to the work on the upper reaches of the river, the hauling of logs. I chose the version most similar to the original because formal similarities make it easier to identify the Aragonese translation with the original Catalan title. Also, this way it is easier for the readers to grasp the meaning and search in Aragonese dictionaries. When translating to Aragonese, I always try to make the title recognizable, even if it involves sacrificing some of the authentic Aragonese vocabulary. The vocabulary of river traffic and transport is not part of the commonly known vocabulary. Towing barges or log driving on rivers disappeared with the development of railroad and road networks, but even when practiced, these professions were unknown in the areas further from rivers. In my opinion, Jesús Moncada gave this title to his novel, because he wanted to bring this extinct old craft formerly so vital in his hometown back to the collective consciousness, and save it from oblivion as he did with the city itself.”

The official language of Aragon is Spanish, whereas Aragonese language has about 10,000 speakers and is classified as “definitely endangered” on the UNESCO map of languages. However, this tiny linguistic community consisting mainly of mountain villagers of the Pyrenees, is capable of maintaining an editorial, Gara d’Edizions. This publishing house has a wide range of world classics translated into Aragonese, and the publishers deemed it important to translate a contemporary classic of Catalan, the other minority language without having official status in Aragon. This editorial policy proves the thesis that “all languages are equal” since definitely endangered or minority languages are just as capable of expressing complicated concepts or linguistic subtleties as world languages, since literary expressivity has nothing to do with the official status of a language. It is a conscious effort for language revival that works on the basis of reinforcing local identities through asserting the prestige of the community’s language.

The lack of knowledge of the term camí de sirga among the Iberian nations could be explained by the fact that the flow of the rivers in the Iberian Peninsula fluctuate seasonally, they are not navigable throughout the year. Thus, river transport hasn’t been a general option, and the use of its vocabulary is limited to those riverside areas where it was in use, as highlighted by the Aragonese translator. Despite of the fact, that the title was an unknown hence meaningless expression for the majority of readers, the translators of the Iberian languages made a literal translation of camí de sirga. Because of the linguistic affinities between these languages, the translated titles conserve a strong formal equivalence with the original title that might have influenced the translators.

There are other languages that have a literal translation of the title though these versions don’t have any visual resemblance to the original. They are the following: The Towpath (Harvill/HarperCollins, London 1994; translated by Judith Willis); Træksti (Munksgaard/Rosinante, København 1993; translated by Marianne Lautrop); Dragarstig (Norstedts Förlag, Stockholm 1996; translated by Sonia Johansson és Kjell A. Johansson); Het jaagpag (Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1992; translated by Adri Boon).14

The English translator, Judith Willis gave two reasons why she decided to make a literary translation of the title. “First, the concept of a towpath exists in English, it has the same meaning like camí de sirga, and it is a well-known term in English. Second, to the best of my knowledge no writer has ever given such a title to an English novel.” So, she considered that the title could be attractive by its rarity. She referred to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition15 to prove the equivalence of the Catalan and the English concepts. I quote here the first entry that gives a proper definition of the word: “A path beside the river or canal, originally used as a pathway for horses towing barges.” Judith noted, however, that most of the examples given in the dictionary associate the term with walking and paths by canals. “Most educated people know they used to be used for pulling barges but a lot of people, especially younger ones, may not be aware of this. The fact that the word, although a compound (tow + path), is written as a single word probably means people don’t think of the original use. However, there is a lot of tourism centred on canals so the image of horses towing barges isn’t totally unfamiliar.” Judith reckoned that a longer title with some local reference might have sounded like a travel guide. In the Post-Industrial Revolution England, boats on the national canal network were equipped with engines and the successfully developed nation-wide rail system substituted traction by horses all along the country. Judith explained that the word towpath does not at all include the connotation of the tedious, laborious work of hauling up-stream, as in England these – nowadays recreational – routes are mainly by canals, not by rivers.

Adri Boon, the Dutch translator, chose the literal translation of the title that is Hat jaagpad, and he answered my questions the following way: “The word ‘jaagpad’ consists of two elements: ‘jaag’ and ‘pad’. ‘pad’ means path, camí. ‘jaag’ derives from the verb ‘jagen’. The first meaning of ‘jagen’ is to hunt, caçar. A, nowadays, more obsolete and obscure meaning is to move (something) forwards. (In the expression ‘gejaagd door de wind’ – blown by the wind – it is still present.) The word ‘jaagpad’ is also present in names of roads. My parents lived nearby ‘de jaagweg’ – ‘weg’ is synonym to ‘pad’ (in this case). The practice of ‘jagen’ (moving forward a ship by towing, a ship that was ‘gejaagd’) as a common way of transport of goods (or persons) did exist till the ‘50’s of the last century. Later, motorized vessels obliterated the towing by men (and women!) or animals. So, for a youngster, nowadays, the words ‘jagen’ and ‘jaagpad’ will not directly lead to the concept in which they are used in the novel of Jesús Moncada. Although the word ‘jaagpad’ itself would not sound unfamiliar to an average teenager, the deeper meaning, where it comes from, could raise, when asked, a problem.” So, in Holland, in the country of waters, canals, rivers and lakes, average people walking or riding by ‘jaagpads’, might not percieve the same concept like the Catalans who reappropriated the concept of camí de sirga through Moncada’s novel.

The novel was published twice in French (1992, 2010), translated by Bernard Lesfargues, who gave two different titles to his translations: Les Bateliers de l’Èbre (The barge haulers of the Ebro; Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1992) and Le testament de l’Èbre (Testament of the Ebro; Autrement, Paris 2010). Bernard Lesfargues (1925–2018) was an Occitan poet, literary translator, literary organizer and publisher. By his age and being from the county of Dordogne-Périgord, he was certainly familiar with the profession of the haulers, since the Dordogne River valley has been an important waterway since the 17th century, along which there is a network of towpaths. These paths are one of the major tourist attractions in the area today. Unfortunately, I have not been able to interview the translator who passed away two years ago, so I tried to find out the reasons he might have had for changing the title. My French native-speaker interviewees were Ingrid Ficheux, a Parisian classical guitarist and Mathieu Houdayer, French foreign language assistant professor at the Bilingual Grammar School in Veszprém. They both unanimously stated that the term chemin de halage (camí de sirga) is familiar to the French, and as a metaphor it can be associated to the path/course of life, or to a road leading to a distant, unknown future. However, the images they associated to the term were different. The older interviewee (60+) evoked a picture of horse-drawn boats of past centuries, while the younger one was clearly thinking of the beautiful contemporary walking trails along rivers and canals without thinking in the meaning etymologically coded in the word.

The French noun halage derives from the verb haler, which is to pull a rope and, above all, to tow a boat along a river, and the other verb, etymologically close to it: haleter means to wheeze or heave with the effort, which could perhaps connect the picture of the road with the concept of efforts and difficulties. Bernard Lesfargues decided to insert an exact geographical designation ‘Ebro’ in both of the titles, and instead of using the ancient term chemin du halage, he named the people of the profession: les bateliers (the barge haulers) that he considered less obsolete. For the younger interviewee, nevertheless, the name of this profession, batelier was completely unfamiliar. The literary translation chemin de halage could have been a proper choice, since France, just like England or Holland, has a wide range of towpaths now converted to touristic or walking paths along its rivers and canals,16 so the concept itself wasn’t missing from the French cultural memory as it was more the case of les bateliers. Probably, the title didn’t work very well, that is why the second edition came out with an entirely different one: Le testament de l’Èbre (The testament of the Ebro).

A very similar solution was chosen by the Italian translator Simone Bertelegni, who gave her translation the title Il testamento dei fiume (The Testament of the River; Gran Via Edizioni, Narni 2014). These varieties no longer focus on the work of traction but rather on the death of the river and of the old, traditional way of life.

The Serbian translator of the novel, Igor Marojević, gave a very concise answer to my questions (why he chose the title and what kind of images the title evokes in Serbian readers). “After World War II, Yugoslav Socialists forgot about Spain and the Civil War (1936–39), though they did participate in it. They didn’t remember the Battle of Ebro either, and since the name of the river does not say anything to Serbian readers anyway, I decided to replace it with a well-known Serbian river name, which often figures in our folk songs: Ibar. I left all other place names in Catalan, only changed the Ebro. Towpath in Serbian17 doesn’t mean much, I would not go deep in the infrastructural background of this question, it is a mere technical term that does not have more meaning than the literal. I gave the novel the title Srušeni grad (The ruined city; Laguna, Beograd 2007) and by this choice I wanted to express my astonishment that politicians might decide to destroy a city for ideological reasons.”

Igor Marojević (1968, Vrbas, Serbia) is a successful contemporary writer and translator who has two of his novels published in Spanish (El engaño de Dios, Platea). His short story collection, entitled Beograđanke (Belgrade Women) has six editions, and it is considered a cult book of his generation. I think the cover of the Serbian edition18 (a photo of a house in a precarious state in Central-Eastern Europe) of Camí de sirga together with the words cited above show that personal experiences (young adult during the Yugoslav Wars) of a translator may have a strong influence on what he highlights from the content of a novel to make it a metaphor for the whole book.

The title of the German translation Die versinkende Stadt (The Sinking City; S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1995) similarily to the Serbian, evokes the tragic fate of the city. The translator of the novel, Willi Zurbrüggen (born 1949) wanted to make only a few remarks on the title. “Although there are literal German equivalents of the term camí de sirga – Der Leinpfad or Der Treidelpfad, these are far less dramatic than the image evoked by The sinking city, which is what the novel itself is about, it is the story of a sinking city. Jesús Moncada agreed on this title. Leinpfad or Treidelpfad are old expressions that immediately evoke the image of a boat drawn by horses along a river, but in Germany, publishers don’t have to seek the consent of the authors on the title.”

At the end of our correspondence, Willi Zurbrüggen mentioned that as far as he could remember, the title was chosen by the publisher. The dramatic effect triggered by this title was supposed to attract the attention of the public in the opinion of the German editors, so the main argument wasn’t inherently linguistic, nor left to the translator.

The Romanian translation is the work of Mianda Cioba, professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Bucarest, who gave the novel the title Rîuri care duc în cer (Rivers that lead into the sky; Editura Univers, Bucureşti 1997). Mianda explained the reasons behind her choice the following way: “Towing of watercraft is an obsolete term in Romanian today, just like in Spanish or Catalan. Although we have the term (trage la edec) and its semantical field, but it is too outmoded. It is more of a technical term with Turkish origin, belongs to the vocabulary of navigation that is perfectly unknown to everyone apart from the families that worked in and lived out of shipping or waterway transport. I needed a symbolic title that could show the resistance of this community, how they had been resisting for 13 years to protect their hometown and gain the right to remember, which finally ensured though not materially their survival despite the city being destroyed and sunk. So, I turned the picture upside down, the rivers head for the sky instead of going to the sea. The analogy is simple, in the Romanian liturgical language there is a diction drumuri care duc în cer (paths that lead to heaven), which is a well-known expression that refers to the paths of asceticism and sacrifice. When someone decides to do something good, even at the cost of personal sacrifices, we say, this is a path that leads to heaven. The title is thus a metaphor of those who sacrificed a lot from their lives so that the community of the old town could survive and remember together. The main topic of the novel is the right to remember, and by giving this title I wanted to express what I think Moncada intended by writing the novel.”

Another very good example for metaphorical interpretation and translation is the Slovenian title. The translator, Simona Škrabec a writer, essayist and university professor living in Catalonia built her translation on the symbolic meaning of the term camí de sirga, and explained her choice Proti toku (Against the current) in a literary journal article.19 I give here a brief summary of this article. “A cruel flood can take away everything that previously constituted our lives, this can happen to anyone, so we can imagine the enormous effort it took from the writer to write this chronicle. Jesús Moncada is that boatman who sails away and returns, towing the boat of his life up-stream with the help of a heavy, thick rope, whose cargo, memory, is none of a light merchandise. However, the writer stubbornly proceeds to finally arrive to a city that is no longer on the map, but in the land of memory.”

Simona, just like Mianda, emphasized the metaphor in the title, the fight against oblivion, and in her answers to my questions she gave interesting geographic and etymologic arguments that supported her decision. “The term camí de sirga cannot be translated into Slovenian because towage did not exist in our country. The Alpine rivers are too fast flowing wild waters, there were only log drivers who bound together the logs into timber rafts, rafted down-stream, sold the timber in saw-mills or town markets, and then bought their train ticket to get back home. I could have created the term camí de sirga out of the verb to pull – “vleci” and the noun path/road – “pot”, it would have sounded “Vlecna pot” o “Vlacilna pot”, but this term points to a completely different meaning. In Slovenian, “vlacuga” is the name for a prostitute – a woman who is invitingly pulling/swaying, herself on the streets, so expressions that contain these two elements like “Vlecna pot” or “Vlacilna pot”, may give the impression to the Slovenian reader that it is a road, where prostitutes walk around20 offering their charms, and I obviously wanted to avoid that.” Simona had the opportunity to consult the writer who gave his full consent to her translation.

Finally, I would like to explain what were the reasons behind the title in Hungarian: A folyók városa (The city of rivers), which was published twice with the same title (Íbisz Kiadó, Budapest 2007; L’Harmattan, Budapest 2013). The definition of the Hungarian equivalent “vontatóút” for camí de sirga found in the Czuczor–Fogarasi thesaurus dictionary21 reads: “A path 4-5 yards wide at the riverbank left open for towing horses.” Though there is a denotative equivalent of the word in Hungarian, it is a word with restricted technical meaning that belongs exclusively to the terminology of fluvial navigation. “Vontatóút” is a compound word made of the verb to tow (vontatni), and the noun path (út). The verb has rather negative connotations. Its past participle vontatott as an adjective means: slower than usual, sluggish, cumbersome, elongated, impassive, not vivid.22

There was another personal reason why I didn’t consider the term – though a perfect lexical equivalent to the original – a suitable translation of the title. As a student specialized in Russian, I spent eight hours/week in classrooms of Russian during my most sensitive years of childhood and adolescence contemplating the picture of the great Russian realist painter Ilya Repin Barge haulers on the Volga (Бурлаки на Волге). The painting depicts a bunch of haulers towing a ship, miserable, wretched, vulnerable wrecks working as slaves. There is no doubt about the iconographic role of this picture in our indoctrination. These unfortunate men and many more millions of their comrades were exploited by the inhumane tsarist system, so they rightly triggered the Great October Socialist Revolution. With this picture built in the visual memory of many generations, we could feel the legitimacy of the Great Revolution right in our bones. Repin’s representation of the exploited barge haulers took the place of the concept of towing in my imaginary forever, which made it virtually impossible for me to use this word as a title for the translation of the vibrant and lyrical novel seasoned with grotesque humour. Instead of weeping and mourning, Moncada’s novel resurrects the writer’s hometown doomed to death by the dictatorship. Although the anxiety and fear of the inhabitants are portrayed very plausibly, the tragedy is far surpassed by the vivid representation of the old city illuminated by bright Mediterranean lights and transformed into literary pages. For Moncada, the rivers, the lifeblood of the old city were ancient gods. As he puts it in his novel: “Memory was a human affair; the river, the Ebro, was a force insensitive to the troubles of the folk who fished in it, cut through it with the keels of their boats or met their death in its cold, muddy depths.”23 In an interview the writer said: “The old Mequinensa was an almost magical world of rivers and sailing. Our Ebro in Saragossa was a different river, incomprehensible for me, no boats sailed on it.”24 The Hungarian title intended to evoke the image of this old city living in harmony with the rivers and respecting their strength since its foundation in the age of the Roman Empire up to its death in the Franco-era.

Summarizing the traductography of this title Camí de sirga I can conclude that the translators I managed to interview were in the position to decide about the title of the novel except in Germany where it was picked by the publisher on extra-lingual basis. The translators considered the symbolic interpretation of the title in case the target language equivalent of camí de sirga was not part of the common vocabulary and thus the imaginary of the language community. Even in this case (Iberian languages) the almost identical formal appearance of the title resulted in literal translations. Apart from linguistic or aesthetic reasons, the translators had various other motives that determined their choices. The Serbian translator’s decision was probably influenced by his own historical experience, the Aragonese translator was motivated by his minority language speaker position that made the title more understandable by keeping the original and visually almost identical form. The Slovenian title is a very poetic and expressive title that was an obligatory transformation motivated by geographical reasons: Slovenian simply didn’t have the lexical equivalent of the title. The Romanian title uses a religious metaphor taken from the liturgical language to express the effort of this literary anamnesis, that probably wouldn’t have occurred to a translator, if she is not an expert of religious philosophy and Christian theology like professor Mianda Cioba, while the Hungarian translator discarded the possibility of the lexical equivalent on a generational ideological basis. Each of these decisions are connected to images and associations invisibly encoded in our respective languages through which we experienced and learnt the world. Let’s say that words have their own history and when it comes to translation, the case is further complicated with the translator’s determined by age, sex, profession, social status, religion, etc. These factors all play their part in the language game.