For many years when they were still trying to map the world, explorers thought there was an island or even something bigger in the northern Pacific between Russia and North America. This was one of the possibilities anyway, between the land being connected (no Bering strait) or there being nothing large out there at all, which they only figured out for certain during Bering’s second expedition. Some of the maps they carried at the time still had the mysterious non-island known as “Da Gama Land” on it, and one of the two vessels, I recall reading, wasted a good deal of valuable time sailing around in the middle of nowhere to verify that the map was indeed wrong. This was the vessel that eventually lost almost all its crew to starvation and disease, including Bering himself.
I thought of this as I was searching for some actual islands (or so we assumed) in our ongoing translation of Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale. After searching and searching for what he refers to as the Острова Согласия (Ostrova Soglasiia), which we had as “Concord Islands” in earlier drafts, sending us on a great exploratory voyage, I found them!
I felt like I was at sea, without access to an appropriately large dictionary that might contain the term, or a specialized one for geographical names, but I knew from his comments that it was somewhere in the South Pacific. He noted, in a second passage later, that these islands were close to the Cook Islands, and he included some quotes about practices there from James Frazer’s The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, but Frazer didn’t actually name the Ostrova Soglassia in his text, and, it turns out, he was quoting a certain Tyerman and Bennet’s Journal of Voyages and Travels. A bibliographic mystery!
Google Books allowed me to find, first, Frazer’s quote from their book (without a date) but then their text, where they note, still without naming the particular islands, having heard about the practice in question from a local person named Auna with regard to the “Areois,” and these folks finally turn up in a regular old Google search. They are not the Concord Islands but the Society Islands!
A minor bibliographic victory. But also a good example of one of the principles of translation that makes it different from textual explication. In the latter, you can (and in fact, you should) skip the aspects of the text that don’t support your argument. In the former, you have to come to a clear understanding of the entire text, not just those parts you want to focus on. If there is something you don’t understand, you have to go out and discover it, even if it means a brief excursion to Tahiti.
Russell Scott Valentino 