ELLAH P. WAKATAMA: I want to start off by asking you all for an origin story. Anton and Daisy – can you tell me when you started exploring in a language that wasn’t your first, and when you understood that learning another language opened up a different world for you?

ANTON HUR: I think I’m the only heritage speaker here – my family speaks Korean. But my dad’s job took us all over the world, so I attended international schools where we were taught in English. I very naturally became a translator: it was a skill I’d had since I was a child, when I’d translate for my parents, and so I thought, if I already have this skill, why should I learn another? I’m very lazy, and I love literature, so I became a translator.

DAISY ROCKWELL: I’m not bilingual, and I started learning languages, like many people, in school. I first translated in Latin class – in the US, Latin teaching is completely translation-based, but very boring; they didn’t want you to elaborate or embellish. But I would always play with it anyway. And when I went to college I wanted something that was completely unfamiliar to the way the American system works, where I could just experiment with things. Hindi fit in my schedule, and that’s how I came to it

EPW: This is great: one of you became a translator through sheer laziness, and one of you because of scheduling issues!

DR: There’s a Hindi word for that, that you all know: Kismet.

EPW: Damion – what about you?

DAMION SEARLS: Could I just follow on from what Daisy saying? Because Latin class and translation is something that I bring up in a different context. I often find myself telling people that they shouldn’t be scared of translation. Even reviewers – people who judge books by other people every day – will say, ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly judge a translation.’ And my theory is that it’s because they think of translation in the context of a Latin teacher testing your knowledge of vocabulary and syntax. But when those reviewers heard or read Cinderella and Poseidon stories as a kid, they had no problem with translations. It’s just that didn’t get categorised as the thing that happens in Latin class, where there’s a teacher marking you down for a mistake. So when you were enjoying those stories as a kid, you were doing something your Latin teacher didn’t want you to do.

EPW: An act of rebellion. And so what’s your origin story?

DS: Mine isn’t that interesting. I just took classes in college and liked it. But maybe I can tell you my Norwegian origin story, because I’m mostly a translator from German. I learned Norwegian because of this writer, Jon Fosse. A publisher asked me to do a reader report of another of his books, which had been translated into German. I said, ‘This book is total genius. You absolutely should do it.’ And they said, ‘Thank you very much. Here’s your 100 bucks. And no, we’re not going to do it.’ That’s normal – publishers make their decisions. But I asked if I could take the project somewhere else, and they said yes, so I got in touch with someone who works between Norwegian, German and English, and we co-translated it. And from there I learned Norwegian to the extent that I know it – I don’t speak it, I couldn’t order a meal in Norway, but I could read a menu, and I could write it. I think that relates to a common misconception: people think that to translate you have to be perfect in the language you’re going from, but it’s really about being able to read in a very deep way, and being able to triangulate and find the right English. Because ultimately I’m writing a book in English, and you’re reading it in English.

EPW: When I’m working as an editor on translations, I feel that process of triangulation. You don’t necessarily know what the right word is, but you can tell when there’s a wrong word.

DS: Yes – I bet everyone here would agree that you can tell a good translation, even if it’s from a language you don’t know. You can sort of see how the English is deformed, in a good way, in a way in which you haven’t encountered before, that feels as though it has a mind behind it, that feels right.

EPW: Frances – could I ask you to go right back? What was your first encounter with different languages?

FRANCES RIDDLE: I’m from Houston, Texas. My mother was a librarian, and she didn’t have very much maternity leave. And when she went back to work, she’d leave me in the home of a Cuban woman with her grandchildren and loads of other kids, all of whom only spoke Spanish. So I learned to speak Spanish as I was learning to speak English, and I would go home and speak to my parents, and they’d have no idea what I was saying. Then I started day-care and forgot all my Spanish.

But it must have stayed there subconsciously. I had to choose a language to learn at school when I was 12 or so, and it had to be French or Spanish – and French doesn’t serve you very well in Texas. The Spanish came so easily back to me. My friends would copy off me in tests, and encourage me to keep learning the language beyond what I needed, so that they could keep copying me and keep doing better. I became obsessed – although Damion says it isn’t necessary – with perfecting my Spanish. I wanted to become bilingual. So I travelled to Mexico, to Spain, majored in Spanish at college, and then moved to Buenos Aires in 2010. Someone who knew I spoke English and Spanish asked if I’d translate something for their company, and I just loved the puzzle of it. It’s a very literary city, and I love reading, and I realised I wanted to translate books, but it took a long time to find the path to that. The Spanish version of Elena Knows was actually the first book I read in Argentina, so it’s pretty cool that a decade later I’m its translator.

EPW: That’s a wonderful story – thank you. Sam and David – you translated Mieko Kawakama’s Heaven together, but could I hear your individual origin stories?

SAM BETT: My origin story is that I failed French class. I couldn’t do French, and I had to do something, so I took Japanese.

AH: You failed French, but you passed Japanese?

SB: Yeah – I couldn’t pronounce the ‘r’s. My French teacher said, ‘Look, you’re never going to be able to speak French.’ So I had to switch, and the only open language was Japanese.

DR: See – it’s all about scheduling.

DAVID BOYD: I pretty much dropped out of high school. I failed every class. I started going to the library and read whatever caught my eye. Before long, I realised that all the covers I’d been drawn to belonged to books translated from Japanese. Then I really got into Japanese literature, started idolising particular translators, and thought, ‘I want to do what they’re doing.’

EPW: Anton – could you tell us a little about Bora Chung?

AH: Despite some of her work being very dark, she’s actually a hilarious person. She was until very recently an academic of Slavic literature, and then quit to become a full-time writer once it became clear that her international career was taking off. Her English is perfect, and she could translate if she wanted to, so I’m very glad that she doesn’t translate herself. And she’s also known for her political activism. When she was shortlisted for the International Booker, the newspapers called her and asked, ‘How do you feel?’ and she said, ‘Well, I’m at a protest at the Russian embassy, because of the war in Ukraine, and because I’m at a protest I’m cold and hungry.’ That’s the kind of person she is.

EPW: Damion – I’d love to hear about your relationship with Jon Fosse. Have you met?

DS: I’m actually going to be meeting him in person for the first time on Thursday at the International Booker Prize ceremony. But we’ve emailed a lot over the years, and I really cherish the friendship we have in that medium. He’s very kind. He’s very supportive. He also translates, and so he understands.

EPW: David and Sam – I’d like to talk to you about working together. How did that come about?

DB: I translated some of Mieko Kawakami’s short stories a while back. I met her here in the UK, at a workshop for literary translators. She was the invited writer. Then Sam and I met later on, around 2016, when I was working on some of Mieko’s other stories, and we got talking about her work. Our collaboration grew out of that.

SB: I hadn’t published any literary work at that time. I was translating patents– it’s not as bad as it sounds – and I wrote David a kind of fan letter. Anton has written very beautifully of the idea of the translator “valley of death”, this space before you start getting paid for literary work, which is disorientating and isolating, and that’s where I was at the time.

EPW: I’m interested in that switch from technical to literary translation. Could you talk about that a little?

SB: Well, patents are technical, but they’re also not. A lot of manipulation and art goes into patents; the best description I’ve heard is that you’re trying to protect an idea with language. And something similar is going on with a novel: the engine of any novel, I’d say, is an idea that you try to unfold in stages with extreme calculation.

EPW: And how does working together work? Where do you start?

SB: People have been co-translating for a long time – the Bible, for example, is a co-translation. And there are so many different models for it, so you approach things differently depending on the book. We decided to divide this book along what we called ‘pre-existing lines’: in our first draft, we split the dialogue/letters and the rest of the prose, so that any differences in voice would be endemic to differences in form. I recently learned that people who make furniture from driftwood mix wood glue with wasp nests, because wasp nests are basically macerated wood. If you were gluing acorns together, you’d need to glue it with something else – oatmeal, maybe – and that’s what we were doing.

EPW: Daisy – are you the same person when you’re inhabiting the language you’re translating from? Or do you take on a different persona? Does the language have its own personality within you?

DR:There have been lots of studies on how multilingual people have different personae in different languages – Anton’s nodding, so it must be true. And Hindi is certainly a different space for me. You also have to inhabit a different mentality when you’re inside a text to the degree that we translators are – not just what’s inside the author’s head, but also what’s outside it. I keep being asked, ‘How do you create the voice? How do you reproduce the voice?’ And I don’t know how I do that. It’s like a channelling, you know – it comes into your head; you have to be able to feel it.

EPW:And do you surround yourself with cultural cues when you’re translating?

DR: I don’t, actually – and this book was so hard to translate, was such an overwhelming experience, that I actually did the opposite. There are so many voices in Tomb of Sand. Geetanjali Shree uses language nobody uses: she makes up words, she makes up ways to describe things, she makes things into characters. The perspective constantly changes. It’s very overwhelming. And I needed a vacation – I needed to be in other worlds when I wasn’t working on the book. So I’d read a French novel, or eat Mexican food.

DS: Also, you’re writing a book in English. If you were writing a book in Japanese, maybe you’d eat Japanese food. But if you’re too much in the world you’re translating from, you risk forgetting that the readers of your books are not necessarily sharing in those things.

AH: When I was translating Love in the Big City, which was longlisted for the prize, I asked the author Sang Young Park which writers he liked reading in translation from English into Korean. He said Chuck Palahniuk and David Sedaris, and I thought, ‘Yeah, actually, you do sound like them, but in Korean.’ So I leaned on their voices quite a lot.

EPW: So you’re looking for a voice of a literary equivalent – fascinating. Frances – your route to translation was interesting because there was a learning of language, forgetting of it, and then a picking up again. Could you talk about who you are in Spanish?

FR: Argentine Spanish is a very difficult dialect. When I moved to Buenos Aires, I felt like I had to relearn the language. It employs a lot of exaggeration, a lot of slang. I actually think it’s immensely helpful to be in the country whose language I’m translating from. My desk is in my kitchen, and I live with lots of people who are always coming in and out – which can be really annoying, but can also be very helpful. I’ll ask them, ‘What does this word mean to you? What is this?’ and I find that extremely useful.

EPW: Daisy – how much creating do you do as a translator?

DR: This particular book required extra creative process because of its wordplay and imaginativeness. And Geetanjali very strongly wanted me to play with the language as much as she played with it. She didn’t want me to translate exactly what the words meant; she wanted their combination to feel the way her combination of words felt. It wasn’t just about lexical meaning, it was about feeling and sensation. And the more I did it, the more Geetanjali liked it.

I think it’s also important to think about your audience. Until now, my audience has almost entirely been Indians in India who read in English, or South Asians in the diaspora. And they want to feel it. Geetanjali’s English is perfect. She could have written the book in English, or translated it from Hindi to English. But she didn’t. She’s a terrible translator, she’d say. And she writes in Hindi. That’s how she wants it to be. But I have to be mindful of her voice in the English. As Damion said, I am writing it in English – in my English – but I still have to reflect her radiance.

EPW: How do others feel about that?

AH: Jon Fosse said something really profound at the Southbank event on Sunday: that when he writes, he doesn’t feel like his language comes from within him, but that it is coming from outside him. He’s just writing it down. And that’s exactly what I do is a translator. People always ask me ‘How do you translate?’ And the answer is that I just get very, very quiet, and I listen very, very carefully, and my subconscious pushes it up into the conscious.

FR: I feel like get into a flow. I jump into the text and let it guide me.

DS: Yeah – I feel that it’s like reading. When you’re reading, you’re in the book, you’re getting it, you’re there. As a translator, it’s that experience you get when reading a book of the author speaking it out in your head, but you’re just externalising that speaking. So the question ‘What do you do when you’re translating?’ is a bit like asking ‘How do you come up with the thoughts when you’re reading Jane Austen?’

DB: I don’t like the word ‘creative’. What we’re doing is definitely creative, but the word carries so much weight. It pushes things in a particular direction. I think translation is creative, but maybe in a different sense. Every book has different requirements, and with every text you have to relearn how to translate. That’s a big part of our creativity.

SB:I don’t have any problem with the word creative. But I think there’s a deeper question that’s not being asked when this is discussed, which is, could someone else do the same job as you? And the answer to that is: no. Everyone would translate the book differently; individually, David and I would have translated it differently. A paradigm I find helpful when explaining translation is that, when you’re brewing beer, you’re mostly a janitor – you’re not actually drinking beer with your friends, you’re mainly just cleaning things. I think a writer is mostly making decisions, so if you don’t like making decisions, and you’re a writer, you’re probably going to be getting a lot of headaches. And if you don’t like making decisions then don’t be a translator, because a translator has to make decisions about someone else’s decisions. So I think of translation as regenerative rather than generative.

AH: To add to what Damion mentioned about transcribing your reading: Gregory Rabassa, who translated Gabriel García Márquez, said that translators are the only readers in the world whose reading is preserved.

EPW: That’s beautiful.

AH: Yeah. Everyone else, when they read a book, their reading happens and then flies away. But for translators, it remains in the book they have translated. And I think it’s really important to see translators as readers, as excellent readers. I mean, of course translation is creative. But I’m prouder of myself as a reader, really. Jeremy Tiang, who is one of the judges of this year’s International Booker, said that, when we watch and hear piano players playing Mozart or Chopin, we don’t think of them as less. They’re artists. They’re interpreting the sheet music that someone else wrote, and that’s what we translators do.

SB: To use another metaphor: there’s a gait-change that happens when you go from walking to running. You can’t just walk incredibly fast. And something similar happens when you’re translating: you downshift into a lower and lower gear ratio of reading, so slow that you couldn’t possibly read that slowly unless you were translating.

EPW: Frances – what happens when you arrive at something – a joke, a relationship, a feeling – that you just cannot translate?

FR: There’s a bit in Elena Knows: a little rhyme that the character makes up. And rhymes are very hard to translate. When we got to that part, I asked to the editor, Fionn Petch, ‘Can we just say “She made up a little rhyming chant,” instead of recreating the rhyme?’ He said, ‘Let me have a crack,’ and he actually wrote the version that appears in the book. It’s completely different to the original, but it works, and its purpose as a rhyme works.

EPW: Could I please ask you all what you think brings a person to translated literature, and what you want your work to do towards that?

FR: I’ve read everybody’s books – to size up the competition! I loved them all, and getting almost to travel because of the books. I think that that’s what attracts me as a reader: wanting to see the culture through the literature.

AH:I think readers are extremely open-minded – much more so than a lot of publishers give them credit for. If Frances hadn’t translated Elena Knows, and if Charco hadn’t published it, I would have never imagined that a story like this would be possible. I’m a pretty good reader, but I’m not able to imagine that such worlds are possible until I see them in translation. Whereas, because I’ve read so many English books, I pick them up and look at the cover, or get part way through them, and know exactly what’s going to happen. And that’s never the case with translation. I also think there’s a certain extra level of vetting that comes with translation – it has to be excellent to get published.

DR: I like to think of translation as writing that wasn’t written for you. You are not the intended audience for any of these books, right? And in my casual reading life, I never read American literature because I don’t want to read books that were written for me. Translated literature is like eavesdropping; you get to listen in and discover totally different assumptions about how a story should be put together. In Anglo-American literature, there’s so much streamlining, in terms of what character development is and how a story should progress. And I don’t want that. I want to be able to enter into a story and a world that isn’t meant for me.

SB: I think a lot of American readers are sick of being told sleek stories about domestic life – largely about straight, white domestic life. And translated literature is about different perspectives, if not entirely different value systems. Also, not to reduce things purely to a business level, but although it’s a financial risk for publishers to publish translation, it’s also a lot cheaper than paying a novelist a $150,000 advance.

FR: And translated authors are great authors; it’s not easy to get published in English, and those who are published in translation are all amazing, famous authors in their own countries and languages.

EPW: It comes back to the idea of ‘vetting’ that Anton mentioned. Damion – what about you?

DS: I just liked the good stuff. Somewhat analogous is the fact that the canon is pre-vetted; most books published 150 years ago in English are bad, but the handful of them that we’ve still heard of, like, you know, Jane Eyre, are good. Something similar happens with translation publishing – not all the great books happen to have been written in English. I think that, because the languages I translate from are not particularly embattled, there’s something less activist about what I’m doing. I’m not trying to make people eat their spinach. I just want to help people be able to read the good stuff.

EPW: Laziness, scheduling issues, and the good stuff.

AUDIENCE: What happens when you come across a word and you translate it as one thing, and then finish the draft and realise that you’ve translated that word differently in different places? Do you go back and change things?

EPW: And can I add to that a question about the drafting and self-editing process? How do you go about that? Do you go back and forth between the draft and the original?

FR: I spit out a first draft and it’s horrible. And then I go back and compare the two. When I’m in a good place with the translation, I then don’t really look at the Spanish. The readers are only going to be reading the English, and I’ve already been contaminated enough by the Spanish.

DS: I’m pretty much the same, but I do a slower first draft. Then I don’t really look at the original unless there’s an issue I’m trying to work out. Also, it’s worth saying that translators don’t translate words. People think the hard words are the hard ones to translate, but the hard words are easy. If you’re translating the name of some chemical – benzene, say – you look it up and it is what it is. You don’t have to modify it – unless it’s in a rhyming couplet, for example. But if the original phrase is ‘Hey, what’s up?’ you have a hundred choices. Frances said she often finds herself asking the Argentinians in her kitchen what something means, whereas I find myself going up to strangers in a café and asking what, to them, the English is for something – like, ‘Hey, what do you call this [makes gesture]?’

AH: I agree – Jeremy Tiang (I idolise Jeremy, so I’ll quote him again), says that translators don’t translate words, we translate vibes.

A: If you’re translating a book from, say, the 1960s, how do you go about transposing a particular vernacular, or the way language evolves, in your translation?

DB: Sam and I made a playlist of era-appropriate music – stuff from the late 80s, mainly – and we listened to the same songs as we were working on the book. That can keep you in the vibe, to echo Anton’s point.

AH: I translated an author who was a communist woman from North Korea in the 1920s, and I borrowed a lot from Pearl Buck – they were both energetic, enthusiastic, college-educated women, both publishing at the same time. And I think that really worked.

SB: For me, a big question is ‘Am I giving the reader what they need?’ In the early 90s in Japan, there was a fad for having these little balls that had an aroma and keeping them in your pencil case. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t a word for them in English – we’d call them scent balls – what matters is what the readers needs or doesn’t need to understand it, and how we go about enabling that. The translator Susan Bernofsky calls this stealth glossing: in her translation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, there’s a fretsaw that’s being used to cut bone, and while the reader doesn’t necessarily need to know exactly what a fretsaw is, they need to get that it’s strange for it to be used in this way. So she adds a gloss along the lines of ‘ordinarily used by luthiers, if that wasn’t clear’.

A: Anton – as the only heritage speaker, has your relationship to Korean changed since you’ve been translating?

AB: It’s a very fraught topic. Publishing is very white, and translation is very, very white. A part of the reason I’m so extroverted is because I have to be, because Asian translators are otherwise completely invisible. So I have to be loud to get my books into the hands of readers. You would think that it makes sense for heritage speakers to translate, but the reality is that it’s quite rare. I think we have to acknowledge that there are racial and gender elements in how translators are picked, who gets attention, who we give credibility to. However many awards and grants I won, people just wouldn’t give me a book to translate. So I had to take matters into my own hands, sell the book, create my own job. And that’s how Cursed Bunny came about.

Ellah P. Wakatama OBE is Editor-at-Large at Canongate and was the founding Publishing Director of The Indigo Press. She is also the Creative Manchester Senior Research Fellow at the School of New Writing, University of Manchester and serves as the Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was a judge for the 2017 Dublin International Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. She is former deputy editor of Granta magazine and senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House. She is the editor of Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction. Her journalism has appeared in the Telegraph, Guardian and Observer newspapers and in Spectator and The Griffith Review. She is featured in the 2019 New Daughters of Africa anthology. She is a trustee of The Royal Literary Fund and sits on the Advisory board for Art for Amnesty and the Editorial Advisory Panel of the Johannesburg Review of Books. In 2016 she was Visiting Professor and Global and Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana and Guest Master at the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia.

Sam Bett is a writer and translator of Japanese who, with David Boyd, is co-translating the novels of Mieko Kawakami for Europa Editions. Awarded Grand Prize in the 2016 JLPP International Translation Competition, Bett won the 2019/2020 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for his translation of Star by Yukio Mishima (New Directions, 2019). He has translated fiction by Yoko Ogawa, NISIOISIN and Keigo Higashino as well as essays by Banana Yoshimoto, Haruomi Hosono and Toshiyuki Horie. A founder and host of Us&Them, a quarterly Brooklyn-based reading series showcasing the work of writers who translate, Bett lives in Portland, Maine, USA.

David Boyd is assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in the USA. He has translated fiction by Izumi Suzuki, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017) won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. His translation of Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole won the same prize in 2021. With Sam Bett, he is co-translating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.

Anton Hur was born in Sweden in 1981 and raised in Hong Kong, Ethiopia and Thailand – but mostly in Korea, where he has lived for 30 years. Hur has translated Man Asia Literary Prize-winner Kyung-Sook Shin’s The Court Dancer and Violets, Booker International Prize-longlisted Hwang Sok-yong’s The Prisoner, and many others. He won a PEN/Heim grant for his translation of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny. He currently lives in Seoul.

Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors, including Isabel Allende, Claudia Piñeiro, Leila Guerriero, María Fernanda Ampuero, and Sara Gallardo. Her work has appeared in journals such as Granta, Electric Literature, and The White Review, among others. She holds a Bachelor’s in Spanish Literature and a Master’s in Translation Studies. Originally from Houston, Texas, she lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer and translator living in Vermont, US. Rockwell was born in 1969 in Massachusetts. She has translated a number of classic works of Hindi and Urdu literature, including Upendranath Ashk’s Falling Walls, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her 2019 translation of Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize.

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch – and a writer in English. He has translated four books and a libretto by Jon Fosse – Melancholy (co-translated with Grethe Kvernes), Aliss at the Fire, Morning and Evening (novel and libretto), and Scenes from a Childhood – as well as books by many other writers.​

The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a single book, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.

The International Booker Prize is awarded every year for a single book that is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. It aims to encourage more publishing and reading of quality fiction from all over the world and to promote the work of translators. Both novels and short-story collections are eligible. The contribution of author and translator is given equal recognition, with the £50,000 prize split between them. In addition, for the first time in 2022, the shortlisted authors and translators each received £2,500, increased from £1,000 in previous years – bringing the total value of the prize to £80,000.

This year the judges considered 135 books, with a record number of submissions received.

Together, the two Booker Prizes reward the best fiction from around the globe that is published in English in the UK and Ireland.

The 2022 International Booker Prize winner will be announced on 26 May 2022 at a ceremony at One Marylebone in London. The Booker Prizes online – the website and our channels on Twitter,  Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and You Tube – is the home for the Booker Prizes past and present. As well as a full history of our previous winners, nominated authors and judges, it is also a hub for year-round editorial content around our 500 or so books and authors, designed to engage readers with both prizes and to foster a lifelong love of reading.

The post The Words We Choose III: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlisted Translators in Conversation appeared first on English PEN.

MAUREEN FREELY: I’d like to start by asking how, as translators, you came to these books. Martin, could I go to you first?

MARTIN AITKEN: Well, Olga Ravn’s The Employees is a book that consists of a lot of short testimonies. I was approached by an English-language magazine in Copenhagen, who asked me if I’d like to translate some of these testimonies. I did about fifteen or so, and they were duly published. Shortly after, Denise Hansen at Lolli editions – who had only published maybe two books at that point – asked me if I’d like to translate the whole thing. And, of course, I jumped at the opportunity.

MF: And Megan, how did you come to these Mariana Enríquez short stories?

MEGAN McDOWELL: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is actually the second book of Mariana’s that I’ve translated. Here in Chile, she’s published by Diego Zúñiga, who is a friend and whose work I’ve also translated. He told me, You have to check out this writer. I did, but I also knew there were others translating Mariana so never really thought of her work as a possible project for me. But then I was offered the translation of Things We Lost in the Fire for Granta, and of course said yes. In Spanish, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was published before Things We Lost in the Fire, back in 2009. It had a lot of success, and everybody wanted more Marianna, so whilst she was writing a giant novel we went back and worked on the short stories.

MF: So you have another big book waiting for you as well?

MM: Yes, that’s what I’ve been working on for the past year.

MF: Great. And Mark, how did you come to this book?

MARK POLIZZOTTI: The War of the Poor is the second book I’ve worked on with Éric Vuillard – the first being The Order of the Day. It was proposed to me by a publisher with wonderful taste, Other Press, and I was immediately captivated by its understated, straightforward quality, which nonetheless conveys passion and rage. That’s a very difficult balance to strike in any language. The fact that Eric was able to strike it in French made it all the more challenging for me to strike it in English. We cut our baby teeth working together on that first book – there was a lot of back and forth.

When the second book was proposed, I jumped at it. I’d liked the way we’d worked together on The Order of the Day, and the second book was again a delight. It’s very short – the manuscript was less than 100 pages – but I feel like I put more of myself into it than some 500-page translations I’ve done.

MF: The voice is really extraordinary, and The Order of the Day is such a powerful book. It doesn’t go away. I think of it every time I look at certain brands. Nate – your turn.

ADRIAN NATHAN WEST: It was a bit roundabout. I translate from German as well as Spanish, and have translated a number of Suhrkamp authors. Nora Mercurial, who handles foreign rights there, contacted me and said ‘I’ve got this Chilean writer I’m going to work with, Benjamín Labatut’. That’s unusual for them – often, they represent the rights for Eastern European writers as well as German authors, but this was Nora’s first South American writer. When We Cease to Understand the World was still a manuscript at that point, and I think they hoped they could sell it to several publishers at once, for which you often need an English translation. And so I was given the first chapter – which is fairly long, around 40 pages – and translated it. Then there was a lot of back and forth, mainly because of a sub-agent arrangement, but it eventually sold, first in Italian and in Spanish, and then, when the English publisher purchased it, they decided to have me translate it.

MF: That’s really interesting, and chimes with a lot of what I’ve experienced. I think we’re going to have to talk about indies very soon. But first, Anna, how did you come to David Diop’s All Night All Blood Is Black?

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS: I was approached by Jeremy Davies, an editor whom I’ve known for a long time, who I associate with indie presses because of his long history with them and his present position in one, but who was at a larger press, FSG, at the time. He contacted me and said he’d thought of me immediately for this book. When he told me what it was about, I didn’t know why he’d thought of me. But when I started to read it, I did – something in the language, and the philosophical quality. I fell in love with it. I did a sample translation, which had been requested by both the press and the author, who thankfully both liked it.

MF: Thanks. And Sasha.

SASHA DUGDALE: I’ve known Maria Stepanova for a long time, and I’ve been one of her poetry translators for, I suppose, the last decade. She asked me if I would translate In Memory of Memory and I have to say, at first, I was filled with trepidation. I’m not a prose translator – I translate poetry and plays. I thought, I can’t say ‘no’ to her because she’s my friend and I love her. But everything in me was shouting No!

I started in the spirit of friendship, but also because I thought it would be something of a spiritual adventure. And I was indeed quite different by the end of the book.

MF: Can you say how?

SD: I think that there’s something about living with her very humane, rather beautiful, unsentimental, unjudgmental, but also uplifting voice that does change a person. And I hope readers find that too. As a translator, I felt it deeply. I felt enriched by Maria’s words.

MF: You’re not the only poet in our group today. And by the way, Sasha, you’re also prose translator now, whether you like it or not.

Anna – would you say that there’s something about the language in David’s work that speaks to your poetry practice?

AM: I’ve been a poet for a long time, though I’m now a prose writer too. I’ve mostly translated prose – partly because that allows it to be part of my income, and partly because, I guess, I’m a little frightened of translating poetry. But my poetry is quite prose-y and my prose it quite poetic, and I think what made Jeremy think of me was the repetition and recursion employed in the book, which I work with a lot as a poet. And also a consciously reduced vocabulary.

MF: When talking about how you all came to these books, I’ve been struck by you all loving the work and feeling close to the authors. I’m one of these very lucky translators who hasn’t had to translate a book I don’t really, really love. There’s a book that I got really angry at – the love affair went sour. But I’ve always been fortunate. Would you all always want to translate books that you love? Is it different when you translate a book you love?

MA: I’ve translated books I didn’t love, or that I wasn’t really bothered about. But when something like The Employees comes along you feel very enriched – to use Sasha’s words – and very fortunate. This book has such a profound sense of longing that I found translating it a very emotional experience. It’s a book that touched me very deeply, and I think it speaks to us even more profoundly in our present predicament – sitting at home, isolated with our work.

MF: The format is so of the workplace – you don’t have names, all the reports are in blocks. But there’s this urge to reach beyond those. It’s formally very, very interesting.

Megan – you’re in Chile, and immersed in Chilean letters and South American literature. How do you understand your role there? In other words, is the first joy searching for what you long for as a reader, rather than what you want to translate?

MM: I’ve never had to translate anything that I didn’t like. Even where it wasn’t something that I’d necessarily chosen, as a translator you live in the space of the book and develop a kind of relationship with it. Some of the relationships are a bit troubled, in that they require you to step outside your comfort zone; for me, that has a lot to do with geography. I live in Chile, I learned Spanish in Chile, and I feel more comfortable with Chilean Spanish. But Mariana is Argentine, and at this point I translate just as many Argentine writers as I do other Spanish-language authors.

What draws me specifically to Mariana is a certain horror – this Gothic element of her fiction, which was something in the very first things I ever read as a kid. I still love to watch horror movies. And when I read Mariana, there’s this coalescence of horror and genre, taken into a literary space, that brings in social issues – the horror of the past, of military dictatorships, of violence against women. It talks about the ghosts that we live within. It has a very specific Argentine context, working within this tradition of the supernatural, the fantastical. But Mariana is modernising it. And I should mention the female characters, who are not always the easiest people to love, but they’re very easy to get interested in. I love that complexity.

MF: And it’s funny – she’s making jokes you’re not supposed to laugh at.

Mark – Éric is an extraordinary author, and you are an author of many, many guises. What’s the ‘conversation’ between Éric’s books and your other work?

MP: That’s a great question. I’d like first to just jump back a little. In terms of what I like translating, it’s not really about love or hate; it’s about interest and boredom. It’s about being able to enter into the skin of the book. The ones that I really want to do are those I find myself translating in my head as I read them in French.

I’ve always recommended to translators who are starting out to translate anything they can. Back in the day, I used to do business translations, technical translations, which are great vocabulary builders. It so happened that I was working on a literary novel at that time, which used very precise technical terminology, and I realised that what I was doing with the non-literary translation was excellent training for this much more glamorous work. Similarly, writing or editing someone else’s writing gives me a perspective on the text that has helped me in my translation work. It all feeds in.

MF: And, Nate, what was your relationship like with this extraordinary author?

ANW: Well, it’s good, which is always helpful. Benjamín and I were in touch pretty early on, and we were able to email each other back and forth as things continued. I’m not the sort of person who wants to pepper a person with emails, so in general I think there was also a respectful distance.

MF: One of the things one can’t help but think when looking at this shortlist is that there isn’t a book that conforms to standard Anglophone ideas of what a novel should be. They all push at the boundaries, but of course they’re all originally from contexts in which those boundaries might not be so strict. I’d like to talk about that, starting with history and memoir. Sasha – in what “category” would In Memory of Memory be put if we didn’t have a sophisticated indie working on it?

SD: I don’t really know, and it wasn’t something I asked myself when working on the translation. Maria and I have spoken a lot in the proverbial Moscow Kitchen about the issues the book explores, and so when I came to the work I could immediately hear her voice; the chapters sounded like conversations we’d had, and it was this idea of voice by which I was guided. So the question of genre – and I’ve been asked about it a couple of times – simply never really occurred to me. Perhaps that’s because I’ve come in via poetry.

MF: Poetry is a much better place to for these things. I think because I’m first and foremost a novelist, I’m always being told Oh, that’s not the way you’re supposed to write. And it’s my romantic hope that by bringing more of the most interesting fiction from elsewhere into English we can disrupt the ideas that people seem to have in the commercial marketplace. Anna, you’re nodding.

AM: I agree with Sasha – I don’t have an interest, really, in settling on a genre. I’m coming via poetry too, and maybe I figured anything can happen in poetry – so anything should be able to happen in fiction too. But yes, I’m also always startled when “innovative writing” in English is treated in the mainstream press as if it’s something brand-new. I sometimes want to say, ‘Have you read anything written in a different language?’.

MF: I find ideas about what ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ are almost anthropological. ‘Nonfiction’ is the most extraordinary term. Not not real?

Martin, so many of my students are writing speculative fiction, weird fiction, science fiction – whatever you want to call it. And so many of them are locked into very conventional modes, until I get to work on them. If Olga had gone to a publisher as an English-language writer – unless she’d gone to one of our special indies that had already been educated by all the books in translation they’d published – they’d say Who are the characters? Where is this spaceship? All those conventional questions. So, where does Olga place herself, as a writer of many forms?

MA: She does move around between forms and genres. But this book she’s quite proud to call a science fiction novel.

MF: Good for her.

MA: You’re thrown into the story, and you don’t know what’s going on. There are no characters as such, as you say. I’m sure that more traditionally inclined publishers would think twice about the book, and that’s where indie publishers are fantastic news for people like us, who love this kind of stuff. They’re willing to take a risk. And It’s so incredibly important to sing their praises.

MF: So talking about independent presses and how work comes to the market, Mark – you have now a very large network of publishers and people who come to you. How did that start?

MP: In my case, it was accidental. I blundered into translation when I was 17. I was in Paris and happened to find myself across a café table from a novelist whose book I had read. I had nothing better to use as an icebreaker, so I offered to translate his work, and for some reason he took me up on it. That’s how I started. A few years later, when I was in my first publishing job, I tried to get the house to publish a novel I loved, but they weren’t interested. When I then learned that another publisher had taken it on, I wrote to him and said, ‘You don’t know me, and I don’t have much of a track record, but I love this book and I’d love to translate it’, and he gave me a chance. It happens.

MF: Yes, it happens slowly but surely. Megan, did you want to come in?

MM: I don’t necessarily want to talk about my experience, because I want to talk about things that are more universal, but I do think there’s a sense of community and of activism in translation. If you want to get into translation you have to translate, obviously – but you can do other things: write reader reports, write reviews, develop networks. Nate and I both worked at Asymptote. And I think translation tends to be welcoming in that way, and embraces people doing all these things and getting a panorama of the world. I encourage my students to do that – to be good literary citizens.

MF: I think it’s important to say that to students – not just that it’s possible, but that it’s actually quite fun. I have so much more fun now that I translate as well as writing novels.

So Nate, you worked with Asymptote. Do you think of yourself as an activist?

ANW: That’s a hard question. Maybe, maybe not. I’m going to pass on that one. But I do want to say something about small presses. There’s often a sense of persistence with translation. I worked on a book with Jeremy Davies – who has already been mentioned and who is a saint of translated literature – that was just fantastic. I gave it a rave report, but it was shot down. Jeremy then went somewhere else, and now it’s coming out, and that’s wonderful. These things can take a while, but if you have the right editor they’ll eventually happen.

MF: Those personal relationships are important. I want to pass over to Sasha now, because you were talking about being very close to your author, Sasha.

SD: Yes – I’ve been working on Maria’s poetry for quite a long time, and I was quite consciously preparing the ground to get her poetic work out – getting her poems into magazine, trying to get people to consider her for festivals. It was incremental work over the years. It’s true that these things bubble along under the surface. In Memory of Memory is a remarkable book and a completely different thing, but certainly for her poetry it helped to build a certain presence.

MF: To turn to a rather precise question, what words in these books did you find hardest to translate? Were there any that were almost impossible to carry over? Mark?

MP: There’s a great momentum to Éric’s work – his book is very short, very spare, but it carries a lot of history. It has one foot in personal speculation, one foot in solid history, and, if I can put it this way, a third foot in polemic. Éric has pared his narrative down to the essentials, yet bubbling under the surface is an incredible passion. Even though the story of Thomas Müntzer happened centuries ago, what’s striking is how contemporary it all is. The German Peasants’ War happened 500 years ago, yet many of these pages could have been written about the events of today. So how to convey that superimposition between past and present, historical fact and personal passion? That was the challenge.

MF: Anna, yours is a book that’s all voice, in a way. Was that inviting, difficult, impossible?

AM: If this novel had not been a sort of stream-of-consciousness, voice-driven, poem of a novel I think I probably would have found it impossible to accept as a project – I might have struggled too much in terms of my distance. The intimacy of the voice seemed to carry the historical material, and that’s actually what made translating it possible, despite my insecurities about not knowing enough.

MF: It is an intimate voice – you could say it’s embodied, but it also takes flight, and in that sense it’s like Éric’s voice and Olga’s voice. These all feel like books that wouldn’t achieve anything near what they do if they weren’t written and translated in the (often unconventional) ways they are.

Nate, could you talk to me about the extraordinary author’s note at the end of this extraordinary book?

ANW: I suppose the idea is to throw the reader a little bit off balance, right. Like you, Maureen, the terms ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ really interest me. How we distinguish fact and fiction is obviously rather relevant in our era of fake news. Something discussed in the psychology of narratology is that when we ‘suspend disbelief’, we process text as factual. Only when we actively intervene, and say no, do we process it as untrue. In Benjamín’s book truth and falsehood are very closely interlaced, and in a way the whole form sets out to throw things at the reader and say, you know, don’t make particular assumptions about what’s true and what’s not true, here.

MF: Thank you. And now I want to move to the audience.

AUDIENCE: Mark, how do your experiences differ when translating authors who are dead? Apologies for the morbidity.

MP: The flippant answer is: you can’t ask them questions, but they can’t interfere either. In this instance, Éric’s English allowed us to discuss certain nuances in very specific terms. The conversations we had in the margins of the text were almost as interesting as the translation work itself. When you work on a text by a dead author, you can’t ask about those subtleties. You can do the research and read the scholarship, but the kinds of questions that keep people like us awake at three o’clock in the morning can’t be answered by a biographical tome or Wikipedia page.

A: Martin, what do you find most difficult when translating from Danish into English?

MA: Well Danish is quite a lexically thin language. If you compare an English dictionary and a Danish dictionary – and of course dictionaries don’t just fall from heaven; they’re written by people – the English dictionary will be a lot fatter. That’s a constraint, I suppose. If you’re translating the Danish literally, whatever that is, it would come out pretty flat in the English. You have to work around that, and employ the resources English gives you – more lexis.

MF: My problem at the moment is verbal nouns. Very beautiful in Turkish, not so good in English. There’s a poetry question from the audience.

A: Sasha and Anna – what does your collaboration with poets look like when translating them?

AM: My experience translating poetry has come through friendship and play. There have been two cases with friends where we thought I was going to translate their work in a more-or-less straightforward way, but it turned into another kind of collaboration that doesn’t look so much like translation. You might think that translating a living poet would be a line-by-line process, and then a fixing together of those translated lines. But in my experience it’s been more like endless conversations, spinning and spiraling, swimming, and then something coming out of it.

SD: When I was translating Maria’s poetry, that was probably the closest I got to collaboration. The War of the Beasts and the Animals is a long poem about war, imperial reach, nostalgia, militarism, all in the context of the war in Donbas. I found translating that really hard until the Brexit referendum, because the language in Britain changed, the way of speaking about nation and empire changed – all in a way that resembled the Russian poem. It suddenly became not just possible but necessary to translate, because there was so much that the poem had for us as British, English-language readers. The poem borrows a lot from Russian culture, and in some cases I substituted in Anglophone references so that there was an underground, subconscious sense that this wasn’t about a “foreign place”, but about something closer to home. Collaboration was inherent to that process.

A: How much conflict is there in the literary translation world?

MM: I haven’t seen much conflict in the translation world. I think it tends to be more of a community, and a pretty supportive one. What does come to mind are the recent conversations about translating Amanda Gorman. I think those have laid bare some differences and issues among translators.

They have made me really think about my role as a translator. To say that your identity has to do with what you can translate gets at something very fundamental for us as translators, because what we have to do is place ourselves empathetically in a role defined by difference.

MF: Translation is, in my view, all about difference. There is always going to be an argument that, for instance, my practice is one of cultural imperialism, because I take non-Western literature into a Western language. I think a powerful tool readers who disagree with a process have is not to buy the book, and a powerful tool translators have is to translate it again. Translation is an act of generosity, and it’s ephemeral.

AM: It’s hard to talk briefly about any of this. But I think there are distinctions between controversy, conflict, difference, and community work. The question about identity and translation is a big and complex one, but there’s also a question about access to the role of translator. If you look at this group of us, it’s very white-presenting. There are broader problems about access and diversity that manifest in the translation world, and there are also specific problems – in terms of hidden curricula, the fact that literary translation doesn’t pay very well, etc. I do think the community at large is focusing more concertedly on both questions, or at least portions of it are. And I’m grateful, in a way, for the controversies around translating Amanda Gorman because they have forced a lot of articulations and thinking from both committed and aspiring members of the translation community.

MF: I think this is an opportunity perhaps to discuss the word ‘activism’ again – to be more visibly activist and bring in new translators who wouldn’t usually have access to the practice, and also to work together on bringing underrepresented or ignored literatures into new languages.

A: Do you have any advice for emerging or aspiring translators?

MP: If there’s one piece of advice I’d give to beginning translators – and this sounds self-evident, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard horror stories – it’s to check with the foreign publisher first. Make sure it a) hasn’t already been translated, and b), more importantly, that it’s not being translated. Otherwise, you can start on a wonderful project you’re really passionate about, and then discover that another translator has already been contracted for the project, even if it hasn’t been announced yet.

Also, jumping quickly back to something Megan said: foreign rights agents are good people to contact when starting out as a translator, because they often need sample translations for their submissions to American or British publishers. It’s a good way to get your feet wet and your name known.

ANW: I think there are people who don’t realise the level of persistence that is necessary, too. Realistically, most books don’t make money. Realistically, most publishers are receiving thousands of submissions per month – everyone’s email is online. You have to work at it.

MF: Sasha – how about with poetry? As editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, you were making a lot of poetry translation happen.

SD: I think poetry translation is very different to prose translation. It’s much lighter on its feet; you can publish a poem in a magazine in a way that you can’t a novel. There’s also no money, so you can forget that. But you can get to the practice of translating poetry much more quickly – you can meet poets and talk to them, and they’re often really happy to collaborate. Poetry translation is more mobile, somehow. You don’t need a publishing house with a publicity department and all the wheels set in motion. It goes in a magazine, people read it, and talk about it, and it changes them.

A: How do you approach reading literature in your source and target languages? Do you put more focus on one or the other?

MF: The first thing I would suggest is to stop thinking of them as sources and targets.

MM: That’s what I was going to say. One of the most important things I did when getting into translation was come to Chile. If there’s any possibility of travel, do it. I went to bookstores, talked to editors and readers and people in the literary space. I knew I was interested in contemporary literature from younger writers, so I went around and asked people about who they were. That’s how I came to Alejandro Zambra, most of whose books I’ve now translated.

So, yes, immerse yourself in the language and space you’re translating from, but keep reading in English. Something I’ve also done is ask writers whom I’m translating – if they’re alive – if they have a writer in English they feel an affinity with. If it’s Cormac McCarthy, you can spend fifteen minutes reading Cormac McCarthy before you start to translate.

ANW: I agree. People talk a lot about reading in the source language, but I feel that the diversity and breadth of your reading in your own language is very important as well. Much of our thought about language is governed by cliché. For instance, a cliché about German is that it has very long sentences and English has very long sentences. And I think – have you read Hazlitt?

MF: Thank you all. It’s been wonderful having this chat with you. When I think back on this year, I’ll think Well the pandemic wasn’t all bad, because we were able to have this kind of conversation.

Maureen Freely is an author, journalist, translator and academic, who has written seven novels, as well as non-fiction. She is professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and the director of its writing programme. Her novel Sailing through Byzantium was named as one of the best novels of 2014 in both the TLS and the Sunday Times, and she has translated five books by the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. She is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the U.S. National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.

Sasha Dugdale is a poet, writer and translator. She has published five collections of poems with Carcanet Press, most recently Deformations in 2020. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and in 2017 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize for Poetry. She is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and is poet-in-residence at St John’s College, Cambridge (2018–2021).

Megan McDowell’s translations include books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, and Carlos Fonseca. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, among others. Her translations have won the English PEN Award for Writing in Translation and the Valle-Inclán prize from the Society of Authors, and have been short- or long-listed for the International Booker Prize three times. She won a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Anna Moschovakis is a poet, author and translator, whose works include the James Laughlin Award–winning poetry collection You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and a novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love. Her translations from the French include Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, and Bresson on Bresson.

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Raymond Roussel. His translation of Éric Vuillard’s The Order of the Day was a finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Award. A Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of a 2016 American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Best Nonfiction; Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados; Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited; and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. He directs the publications programme at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and the forthcoming Philosophy of a Visit and translator of more than twenty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German. His essays have appeared in The Baffler, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals in print and online.

The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a single book, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.

The symmetrical relationship between The Booker Prize for Fiction and The International Booker Prize ensures that The Booker Prizes honour fiction and writing on a global basis. 

The vital work of translators is celebrated, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and translator. Each shortlisted author and translator will also receive £1,000. Both novels and collections of short stories are eligible.

The 2020 winner was The Discomfort of Evening, written by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translated by Michele Hutchison. The 2021 judging panel is chaired by cultural historian and novelist, Lucy Hughes-Hallett and consists of: journalist and writer, Aida Edemariam; Man Booker shortlisted novelist, Neel Mukherjee; Professor of the History of Slavery, Olivette Otele; and poet, translator and biographer, George Szirtes.

The 2021 International Booker Prize winner will be announced from 6pm BST 2 June 2021, in an online ceremony from Coventry Cathedral. 

For the current The Booker Prize longlist and The International Booker Prize shortlist, as well as a full history of the prize including previous winners, shortlisted authors and judges visit the website: www.thebookerprizes.com

The post The Words We Choose II: A Roundtable with the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Translators appeared first on English PEN.

GEORGINA GODWIN: I’d like to start by discussing collaboration – not just between author and translator, but between translator and translator. Fiona and Iona, you co-translated Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron. How did you find that experience?

IONA MacINTYRE:I certainly have no complaints. We didn’t really take advice; we found a way ourselves. We shared out chunks to translate, and from those created a big, ugly first draft. It was intentionally rubbish, so that we didn’t feel too attached to our own work. And then we worked in very close collaboration, sitting next to each other all the time.

FIONA MacKINTOSH: It’s a very intense process, but it’s also really reassuring. Normally, as a translator, you’re a bit on your own. If you come up against a problem, you wrestle with it and bounce your ideas with online dictionaries. But if you’ve got someone next to you, you can instead bounce things with them, and they often have the word that you spent so long searching for right at their fingertips. So the back and forth is actually very freeing.

Sharing the experience of reading a book so intensely with somebody else is also very special – to share in microscopic detail is a real privilege.

GG: Stephen, Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police was originally published in the 90s. Was it translated at that time? Or did you recently complete the English version?

STEPHEN SNYDER: It’s only just been translated. It’s a little complicated having a writer who, in Japanese, has a backlist of 25 titles, most of which haven’t yet been translated into English. My translations started later than Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle’s excellent translations into French, and, for various reasons, I’ve been working at a slower pace.

I meet with Yōko once a year or so. We have dinner in Tokyo and discuss those books of hers that I’ve read but not yet translated. In consultation with her agent and editor, we decide what will be next. The Memory Police is one I’ve wanted to translate for a long time. It’s one of Yōko’s favourite books that she’s written, and so, after working on some of the titles that the publisher was intent on having translated, we settled on this one.

GG: And you’re in constant collaboration throughout the process?

SS: Not at all. I work completely independently, and Yōko is generous in allowing me freedom with the translation. The collaboration is all in that process of deciding which book will come next.

GG: Ross, how does it work with Daniel Kehlmann? You translated Tyll, for which you are both shortlisted.

ROSS BENJAMIN: Daniel and I spoke throughout the process of translating Tyll – mostly initiated by me. I’d send him questions, ideas, versions of things. He’s, of course, a rich source of insight when it comes to authorial intention. Right now, I’m also translating Kafka’s diaries, for which I have no access to the author. And with diaries, which are intended as private, things can be very cryptic, very opaque. The transparency of the communication with Daniel is so, so refreshing – and I actually gain freedom from it because there’s so much that has to be reinvented anew. That’s especially the case in a book like this: there’s a passage where Shakespeare is talking, and Shakespeare has to sound a certain way to English ears that he doesn’t necessary sounds to German ears. Having an author who endorses latitude takes a burden off – a burden of fear that you’re doing something totally wrong.

The main thing with Tyll is that it has to be funny. I don’t care if it’s funny in a different way in the English to how it is in the German; if it’s not funny in the English, you have to do something else funny. Daniel agrees, and having the author’s endorsement to take that sort of liberty is very helpful.

GG: To the anonymous translator of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, how did collaboration work with you and Shokoofeh Azar?

ANONYMOUS: The closeness of collaboration varied throughout the translation process. Shokoofeh and I corresponded via email, and occasionally through voice notes on WhatsApp. These exchanges mostly came about when I needed clarifications on intention and tone. Like Ross, I had a lot of latitude, for which I was grateful. But there is always the debate of how close to the original text the translation should remain – not just in meaning, but in style as well.

Take sentence length – which in Persian tends to be long anyway, but which in Shokoofeh’s work was taken almost to an extreme – and word repetition. The effect of the latter is different in each language. The whole process was an exercise in building trust, and I think in that regard it was successful.

GG: Sophie, this is the second time you’ve been shortlisted for the Prize – last year, it was for Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder, and this year it’s for Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season. How different were the ways of working with those two authors?

SOPHIE HUGHES: I was smiling ear-to-ear listening to Ross, because it’s so similar to how I worked with both Fernanda and Alia. With Alia, as she’s based in London, we were able to meet up and do readings aloud – which was wonderful because, as she often said to me, What matters is how this flows. It’s the music. It’s the music. Whereas, Fernanda and I have never met, and so our albeit very extensive correspondence has been via email.

Being in close communication with Fernanda was particularly helpful because Hurricane Season is filled with Veracruz dialect, which is very specific to one region of Mexico – so specific that other Mexicans may well not understand it. And so specific that, when it was published in Spanish in Peninsular Spain, many readers there said they could barely understand any of it. Being able to discuss linguistic points with Fernanda was helpful in capturing the dialect. As Ross has said, knowing an author’s intention actually sets you free.

I always ask an author if they want to correspond and, if they do, I love it. I’ve only worked with one dead author – it was much harder.

GG: Michele, I know that you’ve worked as an editor as well as a translator, and – as Stephen noted – collaboration involves editors, too. Having been on both sides, could you explore the complexities of that collaboration?

MICHELE HUTCHISON: With The Discomfort of Evening, I worked closely with the author, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, and also with both the English and Dutch editors. As an editor, you want to bring out everything you can in a translation whilst making sure you point out if something doesn’t quite work. The editors involved with this book were able to highlight both, and that was wonderful.

Marieke Lucas didn’t want to read a draft of the translation, but we had lengthy email conversations about my initial questions, and then spoke over the phone to work through the edits from Faber.

GG: I want to turn to the Black Lives Matter movement, and current conversations around race and racism in literature. Could we talk a little about the different language contexts you all work in, and how those conversations differ in different spaces? What do you do as translators when you are confronted by a problematic portrayal of race? And how representative and diverse is the literary translation community itself?

RB: Issues of race in German literature have been examined and re-examined extensively by scholars – particularly in reckoning with the Holocaust and portrayals of Jewish characters. More recently, complexities around race and belonging in German literature have focused on migrant contexts and the Middle Eastern diaspora. And there have been conversations – as in many other language contexts – about the prevalence of racial slurs against black people (and there is an N-word in German) in beloved children’s literature from the 50s and 60s.

I’m in America at the moment, and so I can’t really speak about Germany’s engagement with BLM: I haven’t been reading the German press of late, because there is so much in the American press at the forefront of my consciousness.

IM: Co-translating The Adventures of China Iron, I sometimes felt as though I was an accessory to racism. I had to remind myself what my role was – had to remind myself that the narrative voice of China Iron is taking stock of her national context, and all its racist, disgusting baggage.

Ross mentioned the German-language N-word; the English-language N-word was present in the original Spanish version of China Iron as part of a multilingual device Gabriella uses, and we ultimately decided to transpose it into our English translation. We discussed this so much: it threw up so many questions about the ethics of translation, which were luckily made easier as we were working with a deeply ethical author. The language is part of the storyline – it’s part of China Iron’s journey of reckoning with colonialism, and the violence, exploitation and extraction inherent to the British Empire. It’s done amazingly – and bluntly – in the original, and it was a complex privilege to translate that.

SH: Reading China Iron brought home to me something I’ve always felt: that whilst we talk about reading as a bridge that allows us insight into other cultures, this book, like so many translated works, gives us insight into how we – the Anglophone population at-large – are seen by others. I’d like more literature to do that; to resist being an exoticising, outward-looking anthropological process and to give us new eyes to interrogate ourselves.

SS: Georgina, I wanted to speak to your question about diversity in the translation community. On this side of the Atlantic, PEN America recently hosted an event focused on revising and reissuing their manifesto for translators. The main discussion was a recognition that the translation community has been a deeply privileged one, and that we can’t diversify meaningfully if we aren’t diversifying who gets to translate texts, as well as who gets to be translated. That comes down to training, and programmes that develop literary translators must place this firmly front-and-centre.

GG: Thanks Stephen. Michele, do the Spanish and German contexts speak to the Dutch?

MH: Well, we have the exact same word in Dutch as the German N-word. And it’s even still used in some contemporary novels. So that’s something I have to contend with as part of my practice. When it comes to the diversity of the community, I think a significant issue is that it simply doesn’t pay well. Until the terms get better, you have to be in some way privileged in order to survive as a translator.

Sophie, could I ask you a question? One of the things I struggled with in The Discomfort of Evening was translating passages of terrible violence. How did you find that with Hurricane Season?

SH: I feel like lots of us have had to contend with that. Whenever I go to talk about this, someone in my head says Well, imagine writing it. Whatever I felt translating it, it’s not my exercise in imaginative empathy – I just had momentarily to babysit it. But babysitting involves a lot of care. It’s a lot of re-reading very upsetting content. The pernickety nature of translation helps, though, in a way, in putting down a little barrier to the upset.

That said, when we talk about the difficulty of choosing the words we deploy when we translate, choosing the words to deploy for some of the worst things you could possibly imagine is deeply upsetting. It still upsets me.

MH: It’s visceral, isn’t it – I’m typing, and these words are coming out of my fingers, my body. I feel so connected to the text, and it can be hard to get distance from the upset.

GG: I’d like to talk about untranslatability. What do you do when it comes to untranslatability? What do you leave untranslated?

MH: In Dutch, we have short words that are basically meaningless – they function only to affirm or question what someone is saying. I think German is the same – Ross?

RB: Yeah. Kafka uses them constantly – they’re something akin to Greek participles. They inflect and emphasise. But it simply doesn’t work when you maintain approximate versions in the English, and so inflection and emphasis have to be realised in a different way. It’s a challenge with someone like Kafka, whose tone is so slippery to begin with, which would be unmanageably so when you add in ‘moreover’, ‘besides’, ‘indeed’, ‘isn’t it’ every few words.

MH: Everything Ross has said about the German is true for the Dutch – which is fascinating. I think I’ll have to learn German, now.

RB: Yes – I’ve done translation workshops with Dutch translators from the German, and it seems terribly unfair because everyone else has to reckon with deeply difficult things, whilst the Dutch translators say Oh, yes, we have that too.

GG: Stephen, what about Japanese?

SS: With the development, worldwide, of an understanding of Japanese culture, untranslatability becomes less of an issue; people can simply Google concepts. So we have more Japanese remaining in translations than ever before. When I first started translating – and that’s a long time ago – you couldn’t use the word ‘tofu’, because it was neither something with which people were familiar nor something of which they could readily find the meaning. Both those things have changed.

Of course, sometimes, you simply have to leave things out. The writers I have worked with have all understood that this is in the interest of creating a readable translation – that sometimes you have to leave out the kinds of interjections Michele and Ross have mentioned.

A: Untranslatability comes up quite often when translating from Farsi to English. But because Shokoofeh wrote the book to be published in English first, rather than Farsi, she had already anticipated that complexity with some helpful footnotes. Like in all translation, I imagine, the complexity with Farsi often lies in the deeply cultural, religious, and historical nature of particular ideas and words.

I found the poetry included in the text particularly problematic – of course because of the well-known issues of rhythm and rhyme, but also because of the feelings the verse evoked. And, with this, I really don’t know how successful I was. Shokoofeh has a very musical, playful way of writing that really pushes some semantic boundaries. I tried to focus on tone – as Sophie has discussed – and create something roughly equivalent.

GG: And Sophie, Iona and Fiona – how is that inflected by different dialects in the Spanish? Sophie, you mentioned Veracruz earlier.

FM: There are huge differences not just between Spain and Latin America, but between Latin American countries – and indeed within them. In our particular case, that involved translating forms of speech distinct to Argentina and other Southern Cone countries, and also Guaraní.

With Guaraní, I luckily had a friend in Paraguay who didn’t mind my incessant WhatsApp messages when we were translating the final part of the book – where Guaraní words are introduced. But we also had to contend with the fact that, for the vast majority of Spanish-language readers, these words were new. A metropolitan Buenos Aires reader will not have encountered this vocabulary. So, ultimately, we left these words untranslated in the English, too.

IM: These issues also occur at the sentence-structure level. We faced two main troubles with the translation: sex and syntax. If it wasn’t the former, it was the latter that gave us headaches. I had probably not sufficiently challenged, before working on this book, some rules of thumb about translating Spanish – mainly that sentences that are long in the Spanish can always legitimately be cropped. I had to unwork that for this translation, and contend with that constant battle in terms of ‘how far we go’ when we translate.

SH: Could I ask how you came to the decision to re-translate the Martín Fierro? Have you had any pushback on that?

IM: We knew quite a bit about Walter Owen – the original translator of the Fierro – from a research context. The translation is great. But we felt that, in this context of a reimagining of a literary scenario, it was right that we retranslated it.

I did notice in a review of China Iron that a reader had looked for a quotation of ours in the Walter Owen translation, and subsequently felt aggrieved because they felt ours wasn’t ‘real’ or ‘true’. So I guess we’ve accidentally sent some people on a merry dance.

FM: I’d add that, as Walter Owen was an early 20^th Century Glaswegian, his translation is certainly heavily inflected as Scottish. It was reviewed as sounding like a racy border ballad in translation. And it did feel a little dated.

As Iona has said, because Gabriela had been free with the original Fierro poem, and pulled it apart and queered it, we felt we could pull apart and queer the translation too. So, in our version, we rhyme ‘construct’, ‘obstruct’ and ‘get fucked’.

SH: I’d love you guys to translate the whole poem.

FM: We actually did. I sent a WhatsApp voice note of us reading it to Gabriela – she couldn’t understand all the English, but she wanted to hear how it sounded. She liked the sound, the musicality, and so we knew it was right.

GG: Ross, could we go back to your point about humour, and how it relates to the idea of translatability? Tyll is a very funny book. How do you preserve that?

RB: There are different types of humour. There’s the diegetic humour in the book – things Tyll’s doing that are almost outdated; things that might have been humorous to Germans in the original medieval chapbook aren’t that funny to Germans anymore – the incredibly malevolent pranks that he plays, for instance. But there’s also the humour of Daniel’s writing – his wit – which is in part about timing, and beat, and rhythm, and wordplay. I find transporting Daniel’s sensibility and sense of humour into English quite seamless, but there’s of course a challenge when it comes to wordplay and rhyme.

GG: To the translator of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, could I ask if there’s anything you’d like to discuss about your decision to remain anonymous?

A: Well, unfortunately, I believe the decision was necessary. That this is the case is tragic for many people who are much, much more affected by the state of Iran than I. And, on a personal level, it hurts my ego just a bit that I can’t enjoy the recognition of being shortlisted a bit more publicly.

GG: On that, and although that recognition can’t be public, what does being shortlisted for the Prize mean to you?

A: It’s amazing – naturally, it’s a huge honour. Literary translation is not my profession, though, for years, on-and-off interpretation has been. And so I feel humbled to be among all of these very accomplished translators.

GG: I’d like to ask the same question to everyone else: how important is being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize?

SS: It’s enormously valuable – particularly as it elevates the translator as an equal to the writer, which many prizes don’t. The Memory Police was also a finalist for the National Book Award in the US, and together these successes have made me feel personally very seen. The international and translated category for the NBAs was only added two years ago, and it has really changed the landscape for translators over here. These prizes are enormously important to a community of people who have, for so long, felt on some level invisible.

SH: I’d add that the point of raising our status and making us more visible is not the end – it’s a means to a greater end: gaining trust from readers. If publishers keep insisting that there’s still a hesitation and reticence for readers when it comes to translation, the only way we gain trust is by being seen – by people seeing how deeply careful we are, how skilled we are, how brilliantly we’re trained and nurtured.

RB: I feel publishers are embracing platforming the translator more and more. There’s a greater appreciation of the act of translation, and the pivotal role it plays in our world right now. The cross-cultural essence of literature – the international essence of literature – is re-emerging in people’s consciousnesses in a way that it wasn’t, say, ten years ago. And that’s so vital.

The Bible wasn’t written in English. The consciousness of the cross-cultural nature of literature is a consciousness of what literature has always been about, and always been interested in: continuing to foster the richness and the evolution of the world.

A: This conversation has been wonderful. I relate to so many of the issues that have been discussed. And I wish we were sitting at a real round table, sharing experiences and solutions.

Georgina Godwin, broadcast journalist, is Books Editor for Monocle 24,  a regular host of current affairs programmes and analyst of Southern African politics for various media outlets.  She chairs literary events worldwide. She was a founder member of Zimbabwe’s first independent radio station, is on the board of English PEN and the charity Developing Artists. She tweets @georginagodwin

Ross Benjamin is a prizewinning translator and writes literary criticism for The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. He was a Fulbright Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow and graduated from Vassar college. He lives in New York.​

Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish to English, known for her translations of writers such as Laia Jufresa, Rodrigo Hasbún, and José Revueltas. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder. She has also been longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award (2017; 2018), the ALTA National Translation Award in Prose (2018) and the PEN Translation Prize (2018). In 2017 she received a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and in  2018 she was named one of the Arts Foundation “25” for her contribution to the field of literary translation. Sophie is the co-editor of the anthology Europa28: Visions for the Future in association with Womarts and Hay Festival and published by Comma Press, and she is currently working with the Stephen Spender Trust taking creative translation to UK classrooms to promote language learning in schools.

Michele Hutchison was born in the UK and has lived in Amsterdam since 2004. After a stint as an editor, she became a literary translator from Dutch. Her translations include the bestselling An American Princess by Annejet van der Zijl, Mona in Three Acts by Griet op de Beeck and Seaweed by Miek Zwamborn – and most recently, The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Riijneveld. She is also co-author of The Happiest Kids in the World.

Iona Macintyre is a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Iona’s teaching and research has focused on nineteenth-century Spanish American history and culture. Within this area she works primarily on Argentina, history of the book, translation studies, gender studies and transatlantic relations. She has also published on the contemporary fiction of Jorge Accame.

Fiona Mackintosh is a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Literature at the University of Edinburgh with research interests in gender studies, comparative literature and literary translation. Fiona specialises in Argentinian fiction and poetry and has published extensively on Alejandra Pizarnik and Silvina Ocampo in particular, as well as on contemporary authors. She has translated Luisa Valenzuela’s ‘The Other Book’ for Bomb magazine and selected poems by Esteban Peicovich for In Other Words. She is currently writing a book on the novels of Claudia Piñeiro.

Stephen Snyder is a Japanese translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. He has translated works by Yoko Ogawa, Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, and his translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.​

The translator of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree wishes to remain Anonymous.

The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for the best single work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK. It was known as the Man Booker International Prize when sponsored by Man Group. The £50,000 prize is divided equally between the author and the translator. Each shortlisted author and translator receives £1,000. The 2019 winner was Celestial Bodies written by Jokha Alharthi and translated by Marilyn Booth. The 2020 judging panel is chaired by Ted Hodgkinson, Head of Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre, and consists of: comparative literature and translation specialist Lucie Campos; Man Booker International winning translator and writer Jennifer Croft; writer Valeria Luiselli; and Man Booker shortlisted writer and musician Jeet Thayil. The 2020 winner will be announced on 26 August. 

For the current The Booker Prize longlist and The International Booker Prize shortlist, as well as a full history of the prize including previous winners, shortlisted authors and judges visit the website: www.thebookerprizes.com

The post The Words We Choose: A Roundtable with the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Translators appeared first on English PEN.