On Translation

Not long ago, I received an email with a curious request: could I translate a passage quoted in Life is Hard from syntactically skewed into unskewed English so that a translator could translate it and then reskew it?

The passage was from Joshua Prager’s sublime, prosaic book about the “shot heard round the world”: Bobby Thomson's National-League-pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants, on the final playoff pitch of 1951. Prager writes against the tendency to see our lives as linear narratives, driving onward to predestined ends:

He contests it in the structure of his book—doubling back on his protagonists’ lives in detours that suspend the sequence of events—and in the structure of his sentences, which explode or invert expected syntaxes, as if to step outside of time.

After saying which, I quote three sentences from Prager’s book:

Thus did a bloody digit and enflamed appendix now convene Durocher [the Giants’ manager] and Horace Stoneham [their owner] in New York’s center-field …