PT Data wrangler

Tag: translation

  • The Words We Choose II: A Roundtable with the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Translators

    The Words We Choose II: A Roundtable with the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Translators

    The shortlisted translators of the 2021 International Booker Prize in conversation with Maureen Freely.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    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: http://www.thebookerprizes.com

  • Translating Emergencies

    Translating Emergencies

    Sophie Lewis on translating Noémi Lefebvre.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Poetics of Work is a mock treatise –or perhaps a work trying to become a treatise whose protagonist is too effectively distracted to carry these efforts through to serious conclusions.

    As far as it gets, the treatise is about the pushmepullyou, the carthorse-pulling horse-cart we all become when faced with the question of work. Should we, must we do it? Does it make us or destroy us? Or in destroying remake us in the image of something else? What about vocation – what if the work we seem best made for isn’t remunerated or no one wants it or no one knows they need it? Should we do it anyway, or should we occupy ourselves with something else? And that barbed word ‘occupation’ – is this all we are seeking in life: something to busy us until it’s over?

    Other questions flow from these: what about influence and antecedence? What do our parents give us and what do they make of us, with what degree of force? How can we mark out our own choices from theirs? Where do we draw lines between ourselves and all the authorities, parental, municipal and national? When is a national emergency like a writing desk, and can that be ok?

    One set of questions is never asked, or perhaps one frame is never imposed on the questions that spiral out of this verbal firework: that of gender. We don’t know; we don’t ask. It’s hardly there at all. To be precise, Noémi Lefebvre does sketch in two parents, distinguished by their genders as well as by their being alive or dead, their presence or absence, their disparate benevolence with textual resources. But our protagonist has neither name nor gender, and speaks without the encumbrance of either. And my dark confession as the book’s translator is that I didn’t even notice. I didn’t notice when I first read Poétique de l’emploi and I still didn’t clock this when I translated it, despite doing several drafts from start to finish. It took an incidental conversation between another of the French book’s readers and Noémi, relayed back a few months later, for me to do a sickening double-take and at last see the absence I had been blithely missing.  

    Two emergencies then needed tackling on the spot. One was practical: what, in my ignorance, had I translated wrongly that would need retranslating? I pushed other work aside and went back through ‘my’ Poetics with a fine-toothed comb. The other was moral and contextual: had I betrayed the trust put in me as translator of this book? Could it be ok that I had done this, if I were to fix every little glitch caused by my foundational error? Was I a bad reader, the wrong reader – the wrong translator for this job? How could I reconcile myself with this serious oversight?

    The two emergencies turned out to share a solution. On rereading my translation, I discovered no misplaced gender markers, not one, nothing. I checked and rechecked (and on the way rechecked my solutions for other translational tangles of which I had been fully aware) and was surprised but overjoyed to report no required gender changes or related fixes. It turns out that all the work to effect this rare accomplishment of neutrality had been Noémi’s: she had done all the stripping, not of personal pronouns – that is not at issue in French – but principally of titles and of whole types and realms of discourse, where a person’s gender would normally be signalled through all kinds of parts of speech. She had mostly avoided your average third-person descriptive narration, instead using interior monologues and dialogues.

    Discovering the nature of this incredibly subtle achievement cleared me of having accidentally mistranslated Noémi’s book, and partially cleared me of having culpably misread it. Noémi’s occultation of the protagonist’s gender was deliberate and meticulous, but she had not intended to make gender or its lack a talking point – rather, she wanted to take it right out of the equation. Her questions were political and philosophical and urgent – she wanted no distraction, no extraneous writerly decisions or readerly debates. Noémi did the heavy work, the speculative testing of her own language, to see what it could bear within such a powerful constraint, and what more it might then express in the thinner air of her gender-free space. It turns out my work, on this score at least, was the lighter task. In belatedly discovering my misreading, I also discovered that, for once, our two languages could mesh without further corseting in the translation process.

    Noémi has achieved her aims: we have a book about a poet in the world, a poet facing politics and the language of emergency politics, as only a poet could. And she has done more: her subtle removal of the gender context through which we see so much of life casts an even sharper light on the ways in which language works upon us even while remaining our creature and, apparently, in our control.

    Sophie Lewis is an editor and a translator working from French and Portuguese into English. In 2016 she co-founded Shadow Heroes, a workshops series for students on critical thinking through translation. Her co-translation of Emmanuelle Pagano’s Faces on the Tip of My Tongue was longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. In 2018 her translation of Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait was shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes. Lefebvre and Lewis also collaborated at the Lancaster LitFest in 2019. Poetics of Work is Lewis’s second book-length translation of Lefebvre’s work.

    Photo credit: Carla MacKinnon.

  • On the Pacific Coast: The English PEN Membership Interview Pilar Quintana and Lisa Dillman

    On the Pacific Coast: The English PEN Membership Interview Pilar Quintana and Lisa Dillman

    Pilar Quintana and Lisa Dillman, author and translator of PEN Translates award-winning The Bitch, are interviewed by the English PEN Membership from their homes in Colombia and the USA.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    This interview took place during an English PEN Members’ Call with Pilar Quintana and Lisa Dillman, part of our programme of events for the PEN membership

    ~

    WILL FORRESTER: Pilar and Lisa – we’ve just heard you both read, in the Spanish and the English, from The Bitch. Pilar – could I ask you about dogs? What draws you so much to them?

    PILAR QUINTANA: That’s a very good question. When I was growing up, in Colombia, people didn’t have close relationships with animals. Dogs were used on farms, or to bark and keep houses safe. Cats were for hunting mice. But that has changed over time: now, dogs and cats are family. People have birthday parties for them, and when they die it’s a family death.

    When I lived in Colombia’s Pacific Coast – in the jungle – I had pets. It was difficult. In the jungle, animals are less tame than in the city, where I had lived easily with cats. My relationships with animals on the Pacific Coast were complex: pets would get lost, walk out into the wild, get sick. I suffered when they died.

    I wanted to explore that as a literary theme, particularly the relationship between a woman and an animal – a woman who couldn’t have children, who adopted a puppy instead. This is something that has happened to a lot with people around me – family, neighbours, and in particular one of my closest friends. This is something that hasn’t been explored before, at least in Colombian literature.

    WF: Thank you, Pilar. And I think we’ll come onto some more questions around motherhood and animals. I’d like to ask you about some other books – books about dogs, but written by men [holds up J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace]. But first, Lisa, I wanted to ask you about translating these person-dog relationships. How did context and language intersect in translating The Bitch?

    LISA DILLMAN: That’s a really interesting question. I’d say, in terms of language, it was fairly like-for-like translation. But in terms of the ideas of dog ownership that Pilar just discussed, things were more complex. In The Bitch, we have a character who really wants to love a dog, but exists in an environment in which that’s not the way dogs are treated. It’s a question of sentimentalisation. Where I live, people take their dogs to Doggy Day Care; yesterday, I spoke to a student whose mother had taken their cat to a psychic. So there’s a clash of mentalities to translate – but Pilar’s prose is so spare, that clash somehow became more surmountable.

    WF: You mention ideas of sentimentality, and there’s a question from Jill Nicholls in relation to this that I’d like to go to.

    JILL NICHOLLS: Thank you. I love the unsentimental descriptions of nature in the book – of the sea where the child is killed, of the jungle, of the ants that make Damaris stand on a plastic chair as they ‘clean’ the house. I wondered if you have personal experience of an environment like that, Pilar?

    PQ: Yes, I lived on Colombia’s Pacific Coast for nine years. I lived on a bluff – where my ex-husband and I built our house with our own hands. I think The Bitch is the result of my time there.

    Even for many Colombians, the Pacific Coast is an unknown place. When Colombians think of the sea, they think of the Caribbean Sea. Even if they live in Cali, three hours from the Pacific Coast, the sea is still the Caribbean Sea. So I had to be descriptive and sensitive to the place, even for local readers. Sometimes Colombians do know the area, but, if they do, they know it with a lot of prejudice. It’s a poor area, with a large black community. And I wanted to show something other than a preconception of the region.

    JN: You certainly did.

    WF: Thank you, both. Could I please go to Rebekah Zammit for a related question on nature?

    REBEKAH ZAMMIT: Thanks. Pilar, with a growing awareness of the natural world and its needs – as well as the needs of women and those who experience violence – what can a reader draw out of The Bitch and apply to their own reality?

    PQ: Well, Damaris is born in an isolated area. In my country, if you are from the city, you have certain privileges. People on the Pacific Coast lack opportunity. And not only is Damaris born in isolation, but she’s also born poor and black. She has systemic racism, misogyny and classism against her, and she suffers the violences that come with that.

    What’s sad for me, as a Colombian, is that she’s not a fictional character. She represents the everyday life of many women on the Pacific Coast. When I decided I was going to write about a Pacific Coast woman who couldn’t have kids – but wanted to – I had to be careful in showing how complex systemic violence is for people in the region.

    RZ: And what can we as readers do for people like Damaris?

    PQ: Be aware of them. In Colombia, our racial issues are different than in the UK or the US. So many of us are mixed. From as early as I can remember, I was told that I had Spanish – white – blood, indigenous blood, and black blood. And this is true. In Colombia, I have what in the United States or in England would be white privilege. But when I’m out of Colombia, I’m told I’m black, or brown.

    It’s not just readers in the UK or US; I’ve had many readers in Colombia say the book has made them aware of how racism works in the Pacific Coast, and for that I’m glad.

    WF: Lisa, I want to ask you about translating that complex racial context into the Anglophone, particularly from a US context. You’re based in Georgia – you’re speaking to us from Georgia – and that’s a very urgent context at the moment as well. What was it like translating this nuanced, localised conception of race?

    LD: It was fascinating and difficult. It was something of which I was very conscious, and about which I spoke to Pilar on several occasions. Because the book is very spare, it’s a very minimalist but very direct address to race. There were certain elements that a Colombian audience would understand that an Anglophone audience wouldn’t – like simply being from a certain place signifying a character as black.

    Something else I was acutely aware of was the words used or not used around race. Early on, Rogelio, Damaris’s husband, is described in Spanish as, literally, ‘a black man, big and muscly, who always looks pissed off’ – and, at this this point, Anglophone readers might not yet have surmised that Damaris herself is black. In translation – linguistically and contextually – this could be taken in a vein that was not originally intended, and as signifying something that the original did not signify. And so there were small but conscious and concrete lexical moves I made to temper that – for example, changing the order of a list of adjectives.

    PQ: I didn’t realise that people didn’t know Damaris was black. A Colombian gets it from the first line – she’s from the Pacific Coast, from a fisherman’s village, so she’s obviously black. Lisa told me that this wouldn’t be obvious to people who weren’t Colombian or Latin American, and that she’d like to handle this in a nuanced way.

    LD: To add to that briefly: I didn’t want to add textual markers beyond those in the original that made it overly clear to Anglophone readers that Damaris was black. I think it’s important to question our perspectives – to interrogate any default presumption of whiteness. Why should we automatically presume someone is white? I didn’t want to make overt moves to clarify Damaris as black, because it’s important to complicate those presumptions.

    WF: This speaks to a question from Samantha Schnee – Samantha, could I pass over to you please.

    SAMANTHA SCHNEE: I’d like to ask Lisa a little bit more about the challenges you faced during translation, and, as Pilar is fluent in English, how closely you worked together.

    LD: Race, as discussed, was definitely a challenge. Another was the specificity of the jungle. I’d find myself using Google Images to try to picture it, but, even then, I didn’t have the necessary lexicon to describe it adequately. Pilar was very generous in sending me photos and describing the context; for instance, there are different types of palm that would be used by craftspeople in the tourist town in the book – one for baskets, one for satchels – and Pilar’s generosity was very helpful in conveying this in the English.

    It was important for me not to generalise. The reality of this book is intensely located in Colombia’s Pacific Coast, and it was critical to convey that specificity. I left as much Spanish in as I could, and I was very fortunate to have a wonderful editor in Lydia Unsworth who allowed that, and who obliged my refusal to italicise Spanish words.

    WF: Pilar – how did you find working with Lisa in this way? This is the first of your works that has been translated into English. How was that experience?

    PQ: I loved it. It made me realise quite how many of the words I use are Colombian Spanish, and don’t work outside Colombia. It also made me realise how differently class and race interrelate (and sometimes don’t) in Colombia, compared to other contexts.

    As a writer, when a book is finished, published, it is very difficult to judge my own work. It’s not mine anymore. I don’t want to read it anymore. But the wonderful thing about being translated by Lisa was that I came to it again as a reader. And I liked it. Lisa made me like me work, and for that I am very grateful. She did something magical: she made me be able to read my work with new eyes, and like what I saw.

    MAUREEN FREELY: That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard a writer say about their translator.

    WF: It’s lovely to have you both here, talking to us together. Could I pass to Yvonne Battle-Felton, please, for your two questions.

    YVONNE BATTLE-FELTON: Thank you. Firstly, how did Colombian and Pacific Coast readers respond to the book?

    PQ: I was afraid of how they would react, because it portrays the area in all its complexities. There was a woman from the community, who now lives in Argentina, whose mother gave her the book. She wrote to me and said Thank you. I am living in this cold place, and you brought me back to my town. I walked my beach again. And I saw my father again. I loved that.

    YB-F: That’s wonderful. I was thinking, when you mentioned your friends who longed for motherhood and transferred that love onto a dog, whether any of those friends have read the book? Did they recognise themselves in it?

    PQ: The close friend whom I mentioned always knows about my writing. But I didn’t tell her this time – it was too difficult. When The Bitch was published, she asked what it was about, and I said: ‘Well, I have a confession to make. It’s about a woman who can’t have kids and adopts a puppy’. She wanted to read it, and I told her she didn’t. Then I was in Frankfurt, and I met up with her, and she said she really was ready to read it. She did, and she told me it made her cry a great deal but that she loved it. She’s a very generous person.

    WF: I’d like to finish with an anonymous question.

    ANONYMOUS: How much have the tumultuous politics globally, and on a local level, affected your writing and translating? Do they feed in unconsciously?

    PQ: Well, I’m going to say something terrible. I’ve decided to bury my head in the sand. Because every day, for so long, there has been anguish. So I decided I couldn’t watch the news anymore; I could only do what I could do around me.

    There are many immigrants from Venezuela where I live, and they are suffering greatly. There are pregnant mothers with babies going hungry on the street. And, though I know that giving food isn’t going to solve this, it is what I can do from where I live. So I do a shopping trip for myself, and then I do a second shopping trip for those suffering around me. This is what I am able to do.

    LD: It’s a really good question. I’m not sure that I know the answer. It has certainly affected my psyche every day for the past four years, and that has ratcheted up recently. With the murder by police of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other unarmed black people; and with being in Atlanta; and with the voice of white supremacy coming out of the White House, it has been stifling and anxiety-inducing.

    I don’t know precisely how it has affected my translating, but it has affected everything. When my home state, Georgia, turned blue last week, it felt like a weight had been lifted. I know it won’t be plain sailing, but I’m hoping to begin easing out of the tension and constraint.

    Pilar Quintana is a Colombian author. She debuted with Cosquillas en la lengua in 2003, and published Coleccionistas de polvos raros in 2007, the same year the Hay Festival selected her as one of the most promising young authors of Latin America. Her latest novel, The Bitch, won the prestigious Colombian Biblioteca de Narrativa Prize, and was selected for several Best Books of 2017 lists, as well as being chosen as one of the most valuable objects to preserve for future generations in a marble time capsule in Bogotá. The Bitch is the first of her works to be translated into English.

    Lisa Dillman (USA) lives in Decatur, Georgia, where she translates Spanish, Catalan and Latin American writers and teaches at Emory University. Some of her recent translations include Such Small Hands (winner of the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award) by Andrés Barba; Signs Preceding the End of the World (winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award), Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies (shortlisted for the 2018 Dublin Literary Award) by Yuri Herrera, and Breathing Through the Wound and A Million Drops, by Víctor del Árbol.

    Chaired by Will Forrester, Editor.

    Pilar Quintana photo credit: Danilo Costa

  • Translating Every Day: The Importance and Impossibility of Decolonising Translation

    Translating Every Day: The Importance and Impossibility of Decolonising Translation

    Kavita Bhanot writes on mother-tongue shame, translating across generations, and decolonising translation.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Last year, I participated in a two-day conference, organised by ‘postcolonial intellectuals’, called ‘Intellectuals without Borders’. I presented on the ‘Whiteness of Postcolonial and Multicultural Literary Criticism’, intending to disrupt the very idea of the ‘borderless intellectual’.

    I sensed a discomfort amongst many of the attendees – established academics or ‘intellectuals’ – about recent political conversations, self-assertion through university campaigns and social media platforms. ‘It’s as if anyone can be an intellectual now’, said one of the ‘postcolonial intellectuals’ during the event. Critique of the need for safe spaces, which create boundaries for the apparently free and neutral ‘intellectual’ of the title, was a recurring conversation. There seemed to me nothing post colonial about the frustrated expectation of elite white (or simply elite) academics that they should be able to enter and have access to every conversation and space – in particular non-white spaces that might be source-material for academic careers based on studying the ‘other.’  There was little understanding, in the room, of the importance of lived experience; of the vulnerability that people of colour might feel in exclusionary spaces; of their need to educate, empower and strengthen themselves before crossing ‘borders’ into spaces of power, in order not to be crushed or assimilated.

    The idea of borders is often depoliticised – especially in relation to art, music and literature, which are supposed to bring people together. From a position of power, hierarchies are flattened into superficial borders that should be easy to cross.

    In this way, reading the literature of the ‘other’ is often seen to allow the normative white reader to cross borders; to enter, access, understand hidden, secret spaces – all the more so in the case of translated literature. When English language literature is seen in terms of its global advantage, as facing and privileging white readers, as the forte of upper classes and castes in non-western countries, translated literature can be seen as a more ‘authentic’ alternative that goes further and deeper – giving access to ‘other’ worlds and voices. It isn’t originally written for a global western audience, but is rather invested in regional and national specificities of non-western societies and takes these for granted. In this formulation, the desire to excavate, to read this literature, can be part of the same colonial desire and curiosity to understand, to encapsulate, to dominate the world. As translator and poet Heriberto Yépez said:

    Why do we translate? I think psychohistorically it has to do with trying to dominate the other, trying to absorb the other. […] If writing is, as we know, imperialistic in nature, translation is more clearly imperialistic…Why do dominant cultures translate so much? It is the same as gathering oil.

    These words were spoken at an event called ‘Moving Across Languages, Borders, and Cultures’ – again suggesting travel ‘across’ a flat terrain.

    But translation across languages, countries, races and classes that have an unequal power relationship to each other – between English and non-western languages, for instance – is not simply a lifted barrier, an innocent bridge, a clear path that allows us to cross artificial lines that separate the human race. From a place of power, the interaction is inevitably colonial – a form of domination. Is the act of translating from Punjabi or Hindi into English, I have often wondered, exploitative and extractive – does it make me a native informant? In other words, is the idea of decolonising translation a contradiction?

    ~

    However, there is another border or boundary across which translations can be important, also derived from colonialism: generations.

    This is not a straightforward power relationship, especially in the case of migrants brought to Britain via a colonial history. All parents, including migrant parents, are assumed to have power over their children; that is how the generation gap is usually presented in films and books. But those who came to Britain without English, or without native proficiency of the language, have often looked to their children, once they’re old enough, for support in navigating the new country – for daily translations.

    Not only has this dependency complicated the parent-child relationship, it has also created a generation of those to whom translation has always been a part of life. Although few of us see ourselves as professional, experienced, skilled translators (literary translation still tends to be seen as a white profession) translation has been part of our everyday reality.

    While, without English, our parents and grandparents were more vulnerable in their new context, we were led to believe that, despite what we were told at home, only English was important. The wider contexts we grew up in – schools, media, television – taught us that there was no value in our families’ languages and literatures.

    My own research on British Asian literature often reveals this shame around the mother tongue. Sathnam Sanghera writes in his memoir The Boy with the Topknot of his journey from speaking only Punjabi as a small child, to becoming, through a kind of wilful forgetting, incoherent in the language, unable to express his basic thoughts or communicate with his family. ‘You’re in England now, make some kind of effort to learn the language of your country’ is his attitude towards his family and other Punjabis. The narrator of Nirpal Dhaliwal’s Tourism tells us: ‘The temple provided (Punjabi lessons) for free; like other immigrants, Sikhs were desperate to retain their customs in a foreign land. I attended the lessons for years. I had no enthusiasm for my mother tongue and the lessons bored me to death’.

    British Asian literature from the 1990s onwards has often been a form of translation of childhood experiences, of parents and communities, into English. However, directed towards the white reader, explaining, simplifying, often mocking, through the voice of a native informant, this translation has been intertwined with the colonial project. These writers, carrying perhaps their own unprocessed trauma in the face of racism, gave publishers what they wanted; they were paid to gather oil.

    ~

    In recent years, something has changed. Younger people, in Britain and across the world, have been questioning structures that have instilled inferiority and shame in them. Understanding the ways in which the colonial project continues in the diaspora – leading them to dismiss and erase their cultures, languages and literatures – many have been turning to, recovering, reconnecting with these, seeking – with a sense of solace, relief and emotional connect – to learn, understand and value what they were told is worthless.

    (Re)turning to the mother tongue has been seen as an act of reclamation, a radical act – which in some ways it is. Translation can be seen in the same way; as a bridge, a connection, a space of communication between generations. This form of translation, whether it is of lived life and histories of families and communities, or of music and literature, oral and written from the mother tongue faces a different direction. It can be read by anyone, but it is intended for fellow diasporics who have lost their language – offering an anchor, a foundation, a history, which colonialism has taken away. Translation into English still privileges the language of power and carries the limitations of the language, but it is all some of us have.

    No literature is a mirror, to the present or the past – it is always ideological, always carries a perspective. And translation is the same. Facing away from whiteness means that our engagement with mother-tongue literature doesn’t have be performative, nostalgic, romantic. We don’t have to pretend, in the face of the shame that white supremacy had filled us with, that there is no patriarchy, no misogyny, no homophobia, no casteism, no colourism in our cultures, languages and literatures, our pasts and our presents.  It is true that our mother-tongue literature doesn’t centre the white reader: it takes for granted realities and histories in which whiteness can be irrelevant or marginal, reminding us of the myth of western universalism and neutrality, reminding us that there are other, different ways of being and thinking. But the literature can represent other layers of dominance – regional or national. Hindi literature, for instance, can’t easily be extracted from Hindu Brahminical supremacy. There are writers who challenge this from within, but languages carry biases and structures of thinking. Punjabi literature can carry its own male, upper caste perspective; it can sideline other languages, such as Pahari and Saraiki. In the diaspora, in the name of resisting white supremacy, forgetting or bypassing this can be convenient. Translating makes it harder to do this. Through reading mother-tongue literature, in the process of translating or of reading translations, we can look at what we have inherited in the eye, the good and the bad. We can acknowledge that there’s no utopia, no safe space. We can find ways to engage with, read, discuss and translate this literature critically; so instead of castles in the air, we can build, on this more solid foundation, houses to live in.

    Kavita Bhanot is ECR Leverhulme Fellow at Leicester University. She is editor of The Book of Birmingham and Too Asian, Not Asian Enough and co-editor of the Bare Lit Anthology. Her fiction, non-fiction and academic work has been published, performed and broadcast widely, including the landmark essay ‘Decolonise not Diversify’. She initiated and recently co-organised the Literature Must Fall Festival in Birmingham 2019.  She has been a reader and mentor with The Literary Consultancy for ten years. Her first novel won third prize in the 2018 SI Leeds Literary Prize. She was awarded the 2018 Tilted Axis Emerging Translator Mentorship by the National Centre of Writing. 

  • Translating Fascisms

    Translating Fascisms

    Alex Valente on translating fascism between Italy, the UK and the US.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    In the summer of 2019, I translated a short satirical book by Italian author Michela Murgia. The original title – Istruzioni per diventare fascisti, literally ‘Instructions to become fascist’ – is a little different in the English version. The didascalic application is the same, though: Follow these steps, reader, and you too can contribute to the creation of a totalitarian reactionary country.

    The book was published in Italy in 2018, at the peak of Matteo Salvini’s power as Minister of the Interior and the height of the far right’s hold on the country’s wants – rampant xenophobia, anti-immigration policies, increased and targeted policing. These all built on years of bipartisan populist appeal to the lowest possible common denominator among the electorate: personal success, external threats, no accountability. On publication, many voices on the supposed left vocally denounced the trick played by Murgia: how dare she suggest that, if you share any of the statements in the Fascistometer (a quiz-style list of statements for measuring your own level of commitment to the cause), you might be complicit? How can she absolve herself (she does not, and explicitly so) while initiating a witch-hunt for anyone who doesn’t think like her, who she brands as a fascist? The point was both effectively made and entirely missed.

    The UK version of the book was published in January 2020. Two years after the original publication, we were facing a supposed shift in power and policies in the Italian government, the actual arrival of the Brexit process in the UK, the beginning of the supposed final year of the US Trump administration, and the Western spread of COVID-19.

    I was asked, as part of the translation process, to localise the references and historical contexts that were specifically about Italy – about its precedents with historical, capital-F Fascism, with tyrannical rule, with mass propaganda and media manipulation. Some could easily be swapped with a similar equivalent; some, such as the side of the war the country had been on, and most of the book’s last section, had to undergo a complete overhaul.

    To talk to ‘them’, whilst remembering there was no ‘them’, I had to locate an appropriate ‘them’ for the translation of context. Who are the populist ‘they’ in the anglophone world?

    What the task really meant, I realised, was that I had to inhabit the language of similar individuals, groups and ideologies as those Murgia was targeting in Italy. Years of being Very Online, editing political publications, and working within activist circles was finally coming to fruition: I had a chance to ‘bridge the gap’ – to talk to ‘them’, to talk like ‘them’, to get ‘them’ to listen. All the while, I had to keep in mind the crux of the book: there is no ‘us’ or ‘them’, there is no bridge; there are only slippery slopes and normalisation of language and method-through-baby-steps.

    To talk to ‘them’, whilst remembering there was no ‘them’, I had to locate an appropriate ‘them’ for the translation of context. Who are the populist ‘they’ in the anglophone world? Anti-trans movements, religious extremists, anti-intellectual thinkers, political icons, 4chan, incels, debate-me social-media users, YouTube professors, speakers of the free marketplace of ideas – the fertile grounds of radicalisation and the perpetration of harmful ideologies. After all, the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free. Some slogans and words have almost direct correspondents: ‘stay human’ for restiamo umani, ‘reverse racism’, ‘telling it like it is’, ‘will no one think of the children’. But what would ‘they’ call idiosyncratic concepts such as the ideologia del gender, radical chic, prima gli italiani, buonismo? The buzzwords of these platforms are not hard to find. I might choose, then, something like ‘gay agenda’, ‘armchair activism’ or ‘liberal elite’, ‘Britain/America first’, probably some ‘virtue signalling’, ‘sea-lioning’, and, at different moments in time, maybe even refer to a ‘feminazi’, ‘cuck’, ‘soy-boy’ or ‘simp’.

    It was a little harder to de-Italianify the specifics of fascist nostalgia, though, trying to avoid making it sound like the butt of a joke about Italians and their trains running on time. I looked to the other side of the pond, where there has been talk of ‘fine people on both sides’, and lines like ‘the Republicans were the ones to end slavery’; where ‘they started out as national socialists’ and ‘so much for the tolerant left’ are dark, memefied jokes based on actual statements by real people with political and media power.

    The US version of the book was released in August 2020, to coincide with the GOP primaries and party convention. (That was the plan all along, I was told, with a wink and nudge. I haven’t had the heart, yet, to point out that the Democratic Party is doing pretty well on the Fascistometer too, and has done so for decades.)

    Prior to its release, I asked the editors to let me take a look at any changes they had needed to make to adapt the book for a US readership. Surprisingly (though perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise), there were very few.

    My fear, specifically, was that historical references to the British Empire – to Churchill, to UK-localised allusions and semi-citations – would not land in the US. My work in finding the closest kind of statement and target between Southern European and British might not carry any weight at all, unlike the translators into European Spanish and German, whose countries both share similar histories with Italy. The conversation that I had with one of the US editors, however, highlighted two things: first, that their target readers would be at least ‘familiar’ with American imperialism – a different incarnation, on paper, to the literal empire of the British Crown, but a vicious, culturally pervading one nonetheless. And, second, that the kind of US politics targeted by the book’s satire ‘loves to reference Western Civilization, empires, and Great Men of History like Churchill’. Though the references may not have the same impact as with a UK reader, they do in fact still work. In light of recent global developments, the Churchill references perhaps carry even more weight than I initially intended. I should’ve snuck in something about Columbus when I was asked to remove Matteotti and Gramsci, and slid in a ‘strong and stable’, and mentioned all the best words.

    If anything, the US edition drives Murgia’s point even further: the ‘us’ and ‘them’ construct of the past can no longer be applied, if the us is now using the language used by them, while claiming – at the same time – that this is not us and when they go low, we go high. The distinction is made through language and in language: they are deplorable, their words are horrifying, they scare us, we must say and do better, because we are better than them. What we are prone to forget is that their language is our language too, because it is still language.

    Fascist language is othering, monstering, ostracising, oppressing. But all language – all the ones we share across communities of practice, across countries, across histories – has the potential also to do so.

    One early review pointed out that ‘satire requires worthy targets. While some […] deserve [Murgia’s] barbs, others (people who think that “gender studies is ruining families”) lack a comparable moral weight and take throwaway jabs.’ Yet again, the same reaction: only some forms of language and thought are ‘worthy targets’; only the more explicit, more deplorable statements are truly a sign of fascism. Yet again, the point is being missed. Supposed liberals and progressives are regularly aghast at being made aware of the danger and damage of their own words, their statements, their platforms and their followings. Letters are drafted, appeals are forwarded, the news cycle – slowly reporting on the global rise of totalitarian politics – is eclipsed for another week, everything is cancelled, and new book deals are signed.

    As Murgia says in her closing disclaimer, ‘the problem is being able to pinpoint anyone who isn’t even marginally complicit in the legitimisation of fascism as a method’ and its amazing property of ‘contaminating absolutely anything and everything’ by means of gradual or sudden normalisation. Fascist language is othering, monstering, ostracising, oppressing. But all language – all the ones we share across communities of practice, across countries, across histories – has the potential also to do so. The translatorial process just highlighted, for me at least, in screaming red ink, what the book was already eagerly pointing towards.

    I am the product (genetically and educationally) of two very specific cultural backgrounds, one of which historically fought the other to stop the spread of European fascism, and both of which are now happily rising together in populism and authoritarianism as they look to, borrow from, and mimic each other’s linguistic practices and slogans.

    Inhabiting this specific type of language is not something I’d recommend. Learning, however, the language that aids and abets oppression can teach us how to counteract it, how to defuse it, how to avoid falling into its traps all the way to the normalisation of fascism. It becomes a constant exercise in deconstruction, a form of active translation that subverts the usual labels of commentary. Not thought policing, but awareness. Not cancelling, but checking and helping each other learn. Not simplification, but critical engagement. Not defensiveness, but learning opportunities.

    I am the product (genetically and educationally) of two very specific cultural backgrounds, one of which historically fought the other to stop the spread of European fascism, and both of which are now happily rising together in populism and authoritarianism as they look to, borrow from, and mimic each other’s linguistic practices and slogans. If that made my job easier in making this manual accessible to two sides of an anglophone pond, it is not a good thing. At the same time, if it makes even a few readers rethink how they use language, how internalised some totalitarian seeds have become, it might have been worth it.

    Alex Valente (he/him) is a half-Tuscan, half-Yorkshire white European currently living on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sel̓íl̓witulh land. He is an award-winning literary translator from Italian into English, though he also dabbles with French, and regularly struggles with Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch. His translation of Michela Murgia’s book is available through Pushkin Press (UK) or Penguin Random House (US),and his work can be found in The Short Story Project, The Massachusetts Review, NYT Magazine.

  • The Words We Choose: A Roundtable with the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Translators

    The Words We Choose: A Roundtable with the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Translators

    The shortlisted translators of the 2020 International Booker Prize in conversation with Georgina Godwin.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    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 20th 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

  • Silence, Our Noisy Silence: A Conversation with Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury

    Silence, Our Noisy Silence: A Conversation with Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury

    Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury discuss shame, representation and the Turkish language.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Sema, how did Every Fire You Tend come to be?

    SEMA KAYGUSUZ: I have been writing this book since my childhood. I grew up in a secular community, in an incredibly open, loving family. We were close, and we shared things – we had no dramas, violence, or deprivation, but we spoke openly about personal difficulties and emotions. No word was unspeakable. And yet I always felt that something was secret, silent. That all the talking was to cover something up.

    In my childhood, every year, for ten days, I visited my grandparents. There is one particular moment that I always remember. My grandmother said to me, with empty eyes: ‘They butchered us’. This one phrase. I began to ask who they and us were, and this is when I realised that we never spoke about the past.

    This is when I began to conceptualise the silence – our noisy silence. And, then, years later, I discovered our history. At university, I found the history of Dersim. I found witnesses to it. I found out that my grandmother had seen the bodies of all her brothers and sisters floating in the river-waters. She was the only one to survive.

    And then I began to conceptualise shame; to consider the psychology of genocide, and how it related to the silence. There is an important Jewish proverb: the children always want to forget what their parents lived, but the grandchildren always want to remembers what their grandparents lived. I felt I had to remember. This book is my way of doing so.

    You mention two words I wanted to ask about: ‘survival’ and ‘shame’. In a way, this is a narrative of survival – of how one can survive when one’s community, language and culture have been violently removed. But it is also one of shame – of how one remembers, or chooses not to; voices, or chooses not to, because one is ashamed of, is told one must be. I wonder what the relationship between survival and shame are? Is shame a way of surviving?

    SK: Definitely. I know that my grandmother kept asking herself: Why do I get to survive? To be seen – to say something about survival – is not easy. We all live with the taboo that Turkey has not yet confronted. A national secret.

    After the holocaust, Adorno said no one can write poetry, now. But then Paul Celan did. And maybe the silence and shame of my grandmother – what she had to live, as a burden and a legacy in her body – maybe it is a language that I need to decipher. It took me years to understand the shame, the secret, the silence.

    I have chosen a way of trying to decipher it. Zeus has two sons, Chronos and Cosmos. Chronos always talks about time in a linear way. He writes his story by linear arrangement, and always about himself. His story is always written through dominance and power. He uses classification, symbolisation, polarisation, organisation, dehumanisation, extermination, and denial. This is what linear time does. I did not want to write this way.

    I’d say that linear organisation is also tied up with masculine and colonial narrative – and that they do all they can to homogenise and claim totality. In Every Fire You Tend, there’s a plurality of narrative – these are women’s voices, and they’re many. Is this a response to the male, colonial, official narrative?

    SK: Yes – it is. It is Cosmos. I turn my back on Chronos and recognise that time can be elliptical. Cosmos appreciates shame and silence and everything else that comes from history – recognises the small and the large. Cosmos sees things as helical, with pathos and mythos and sensual experiment.

    I agree with Walter Benjamin: tragedy is a pile of debris growing skywards before me. My life is okay; but before me is tragedy. I climb up the debris and I see survival. My life – my survival – is a coincidence. And I ask myself how I convey tragedy not for the past, and not linearly, but for the future, and with plurality.

    Could you speak a bit more about representing plurality?

    SK: I don’t write communities; I write individuals. When you say the Armenians, you make Armenian individuals a material.

    You homogenise.

    SK: Yes, you homogenise and instrumentalise. I didn’t want to do that to the Zaza community. I don’t want to instrumentalise any community as a cultural product. Everyone has their own special moments, and as a writer I need to touch one spirit that can open the others. My grandmother’s individual experience can speak to the global, but it should not speak for the global.

    Nick, when we talk about representation and plurality, we’re talking about something to do with narrative structure. When you came to this book, how did you perceive that?

    NICHOLAS GLASTONBURY: The form is significant when we talk about modes of representation: the novel form, at large, is bound up in the same violences of the nation-state, coloniality and modernity that are at the heart of the novel’s critique. By writing something elliptical, you confront some of the assumptions of how narrative is supposed to function.

    And though this point is about form, it relates deeply to language – something with which Every Fire You Tend is highly concerned. Could you both talk a little about the book’s language – which is, in the English and the Turkish, extraordinary?

    SK: When I go to France, they ask about women in Islam. That’s the role I’m asked to play. But I am not a ‘Muslim writer’ or a ‘Turkish writer’. I call myself a ‘Turkish-language writer’. And this is not a homogenised language: it includes Arabic, Greek, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Kurdish. If you speak with a Turkish nationalist, you realise that they don’t speak real Turkish. They don’t know Turkish – just a very narrow version of it. Nationalists get their irons out and flatten everything. The Turkish of Every Fire You Tend refuses this.

    NG: Before I even read the book, I spoke to friends in Istanbul about it. They told me that they stopped ten pages into the Turkish version because they couldn’t ‘understand it’. That emboldened me to translate it.

    As a translator, the difficulty comes in translating the historical development of Turkish that the book explores. Certain words that were used 100 years ago in the Turkish feel as antiquated as words from 400 years ago in the English.

    I suppose that’s another way of capitulating Chronos.

    NG: Yes – and being able to move between language histories was the most difficult, but most rewarding, thing the book asked of me. Each section varies tonally, and striking that polyphonic register took me several years.

    SK: I never choose a word coincidentally; I always choose consciously. Nick got that.

    Did you work together closely on the translation?

    NG: We did, and there’s a long WhatsApp thread – the archive of the process – that testifies to that. I also spent several days staying with Sema, in her home, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and going to the text. But, even though it was an involved process, something I always felt positive about was the Sema encouraged me to seek out my own authorial capacity – my way of making the constructions of the book sensuous or supple in English.

    You speak in your afterword, Nick, about the novel being ‘written in the coloniser’s language’. Translation into English is often bound up with a history of colonialism; there’s a reason English is prevalent, and that it offers access to wide markets. I wondered if there was something particularly fraught about translating between two languages that, in a conception, are both colonising languages?

    NG: That’s something I spend all my free time thinking about. A lot of the ways in which world literature is framed are about building bridges. But that denies the political, historical and economic violences that subtend cultural contact-zones. It’s totally fraught, and there’s no easy answer. It’s one of the many paradoxes that tear through this book, and make it what it is.

    SK: I’d add to that: whilst every word, on its own, is innocent, the context it is written or means with is not. Nick’s job of transforming Every Fire You Tend into English is paradoxic, yes. But the fact that the book absents masculine and orientalist narratives means the job is, perhaps, a little less fraught.

    Has is taken a combination of you, Sema, as a writer; you, Nick, as a translator; and Tilted Axis as a publisher to make this book work?

    NG: We pitched it a lot. One thing I heard from a lot of editors was that it seemed too experimental. But then wheat is literature if not experimental? If not about new ways of thinking and speaking? Who wants to publish non-experimental literature?

    Capitalists?

    NG: Exactly. Even if the act of translation is about rendering into a colonial language, there are still ways of avoiding the problematics of capitalistic world literature – like Sema refusing the monikers of Turkish writer and Muslim writer. These kind of refusals are important. One of the central points of Every Fire You Tend is that language is always insufficient, but it’s also always all we have. And that’s true of the life of the book itself, too.

    Sema, I want to ask about danger. The environment for Turkish-language writers is fraught, but the Turkish-language literature being translated into English – particularly work by women – is vital and powerful and oppositional. Could you speak a little about your relationship to danger?

    SK: I live some difficulties. But I deny speaking them. I cannot say I’m in danger; if I speak my bravery, I’m really speaking my fear. Living in Turkey, at this moment, is easy for no one. But it is the journalists in prison and academics in exile who are those that can really speak about danger. How can I speak about danger?

    It’s also larger than Turkey. When I’m invited to speak in Germany – an apparent democracy – I think about the fact that they still sell arms to Turkey. When I speak in Germany, I don’t want to allow my existence to become a vehicle. Anywhere in the world, at a moment of crisis, fascism, sexism, essentialism and speciesism emerge. This is why Berlusconi, Erdoğan, Johnson are all the same man. Their differences are just in tone.

    And you’re very sensitive to differences in tone. In being so, you reveal things we aren’t always readily able to see. I was struck by the way you tell violence as silence, and silence as violence. In Every Fire You Tend, atrocious things are described with beauty and lyricism, and lyrical, beautiful things horrifically. I think of the image of the ‘baby struggling to nurse at the breast of the dead mother’. It’s a moment when the beauty of life, with a specific focus on gender and maternalism, is turned into something abject. What do these inversions do?

    SK: To write very raw, brutal moments as raw and brutal requires a certain degree of narcissism. So instead of writing them directly, in this narcissistic register, I took a more wayward path.

    NG: A part of the work of the book is about trying to disrupt our ways of understanding representation. The wayward ways of representing, which Sema talks about, is a way of calling to attention. You likely wouldn’t have been struck by this passage had it not been written in this paradoxical way.

    Yes, sometimes we have to do that. Sometimes, when we are so desensitised to the traumatic, it is only in describing in non-traumatic ways that we’re arrested.

    To finish with a question for both of you, is this novel a celebration or a lament? What do its ‘wail’ and ‘sigh’ signify?

    SK: It celebrates, even as it laments. Everything on earth is divine – even, in a way, our tragedies. But it is not the church of the mosque that has divinity; it is language, which makes everything.

    I think humans want to be gods. But we must ask what kind of god we will be. We do not want to be the sort of prophets who use language that makes us politicians, traders, and slaves to civilisation. If we use the divinity of language, we must look to give the future ethics. We don’t need temples; we need poets. And, really, we are all poets.

    So Nick, with this translation, are you on your way to becoming a god?

    NG: Maybe. To answer your question, I think it’s both. Sema mentioned Walter Benjamin earlier, and I think that part of his philosophy of history is about encouraging us to see ourselves as agents of history – as agents who can stop the ongoing accumulation of destruction and debris. We have this messianic power; this capacity to do so.

    The book, for me, is about how language can provide us with the tools to arrest history. It’s mourning a tragedy, but it’s also a celebration of the human will to make history for ourselves.

    Sema Kaygusuz (born 1972) is one of Turkey’s leading female writers and the author of Every Fire You Tend. She has published five collections of short stories, three novels, a collection of nonfiction essays, and a play, which have won a number of awards in Turkey and Europe and have been translated into English, French, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. Her short story collection The Well of Trapped Words was published in an English translation by Maureen Freely (Comma Press, 2015).

    Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator of Turkish literature. He is also a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya. He is the translator of Every Fire You Tend.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • Translating Ulysses for Iran

    Translating Ulysses for Iran

    Iranian-Canadian novelist and translator Akram Pedramnia writes on translating James Joyce into Persian, evading the censors, and imperial co-option of resistance.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    The Iranian novel must fight on two fronts. The first attempts to control its narrative through a system of censorship: the Iranian government has firm control of the information published within the country. This control of the ideas that enter the consciousness of the Iranian people and has implications broadly for Persian literature, and implications specifically for my current project: the translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses into the Persian language.

    Systematic censorship means that the many and varied narratives of Persian literature is eclipsed by the singular narrative of the dominating group. For readers in Iran and internationally, the result is an inaccurate representation of Persian literature, and a false account of Iranian lives and their social experiences. With time, state censorship has stifled the creativity of many Persian writers.

    Ulysses has all the features that makes a Persian translation prone to censorship: sex, politics, religion, alcohol consumption, male-female relationships and LGBTQ characters. A version of Ulysses that would pass the Iranian censors would require the translator to conceal the meanings of words and sentences, obscure the qualities of characters, and eliminate whole chapters from the book. The result, for an important piece of literature, would be inaccuracy and loss.

    I am producing an entirely uncensored translation of Joyce’s book. It has been banned from publication within the country. For this reason, the first volume was published in the UK and is being distributed illegally in Iran. Early on, Iranians abroad would smuggle it into the country for their friends and family. Now, venders in the underground market are reprinting and distributing it to the public. Soon, its eBook will be offered for free online download. But all this has a price for the translator. I face immense pressure from the Iranian government’s cyber army, who try to suppress my work from online publication, even beyond its own borders.

    ~

    The second front against which the Iranian novel must fight is the control of its narrative by global imperialism: a fear of many Iranian activists and writers is having their anti-oppression struggles co-opted and, in the worst cases, used to justify western interventions.

    So alongside the oppressions imposed by the Iranian government, the public simultaneously face structural violence from imperial powers and decades of western intervention. By ‘intervention’, I mean sanctions, coups, occupation, and expropriation – all of which shape the social and economic issues Iranians face. As Iranian writers, we always risk giving these interventions strength.

    Narratives of western imperialism are often hidden from the public to construct an image of Iranian society as inherently disorganised and socially chaotic; such hidden narratives are, in turn, part of a greater global project of controlling discourse. A sole focus on Iranian society as a space of destitution without an explanation of its origins enables imperial social actors to justify the actions that cause social and economic strife. Too often has the discourse of political chaos been used to justify military intervention – the situation under which the population of the occupied country experiences the greatest violence. Western social actors – even those who are well-meaning – co-opt our resistance efforts and silence the voices of Iranian people and their struggles for freedom from oppression. This is true in my anti-censorship work: framing Iran as destructive society – one in which people do not have freedom of speech – allows imperial actors to justify inntervention under the guise of anti-censorship solidarity. Co-opting Iranian anti-censorship struggles into the narratives of global imperialism has led to a situation in which Iranian authors have no choice but to take caution when discussing political and social issues. The Iranian public should be free to support their own anti-censorship struggles, without the fear of intrusion from global social actors.

    ~

    The Iranian government and global imperialism each present a narrative that benefits and reproduces their respective power of control. The Iranian writer must, therefore, fight on both fronts.

    The future of an uncensored translation of Ulysses may be one that sets a precedent for Iranian writers and translators: a pulling-away from publishing under a system of censorship, and from distributing uncensored literature illegally on a national scale. Anti-censorship as a form of resistance introduces new knowledge to the Iranian public, and offers tools to build on critical awareness. As a work, Ulysses resisted the imperial powers of its time, revealing the political activities of colonial social actors and their implications for the occupied people. Greater access to these ideas enabled, perhaps, the population of the time to cultivate critical consciousness further.

    Ironically, we are in a time when publishing an uncensored translation of Ulysses has the potential to be appropriated by social actors who seek to reinforce the current imperial system. Upon completion, however, the volumes of the Persian translation will be free for readers outside of markets systems. Such access is the first, although not only, step to achieving educational sovereignty for native Iranians.

    As an Iranian writer and translator, I face two systems of imposed censorship: one that prevents me from sharing complete works with people and the other that conceals political activities against those very people. I will continue to fight, on both fronts.

    Akram Pedramnia is an Iranian-Canadian writer and translator. She is the translator of James Joyce’s Ulysses into the Persian language, which has received the Literature Ireland Translation Grant. She is a recipient of the Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation Scholarships 2019 and the Joyce Scholarship and Looren Residency 2020. Among others, she has also translated F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (2009) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (2013), the latter of which was disseminated through the Iranian underground market. She has authored five novels in the Persian language on themes that reveal underlying social issues in Iran.

  • With this Novel, I Return: An Interview with Rafik Schami

    With this Novel, I Return: An Interview with Rafik Schami

    Syrian-German novelist Rafik Schami discusses liberty, storytelling, language and exile.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I’ll start with something large: freedom. Sophia, your latest novel, seems to have forms of freedom – personal, national, religious, political – at its centre. How do these forms of liberty interact?

    Sophia is a novel about freedom and its oppression under a dictatorship. It’s less about abstract debate than about the fate of people: freedom shapes people and empowers them to perform higher tasks; their oppression deforms them and reduces their goals to bare survival. But freedom is indivisible. One cannot be politically free if one is religiously or nationally unfree. One can pretend or imagine that one is free in an unfree society because of one’s wealth, but one is, ultimately, a slave of the oppressors. One can lose all rights and wealth, and find oneself, the next day, in prison.

    These interactions are realised through formal, generic ones. Sophia is, at bottom, thrilling, novelistic storytelling: it’s driven by plot, epic forms, and it’s readily readable and consumable. But it’s also deeply ideological (or, perhaps, ideocritical). You write about heavy things via lightness, and I want to ask how the parts of your self – the political thinker and the storyteller – combine in the act of writing?

    With this question, you touch upon a very important decision I have made for my writing. Many literary critics will wake up only in the next century, and understand that it is possible to tell complicated stories with lightness and to avoid boredom and moral preaching, even when the content or subject matter is heavy. My hope is completely fulfilled knowing that my readers love my books. Of course, as a political person, I fight for dignity, freedom, democracy and the preservation of nature, and against racism. And I believe that the more committed you are, the more exciting your writing will be. 

    What good will it do me if my readers throw down the book after three pages? But your question goes even deeper. I have always to put my humanitarian views aside in the development of the characters to ensure they remain credible and believable. This the case in Sophia: Salman is a complicated person, and at times appears as a swindler engaged in fraud. And that’s how he should appear. You can’t write a good novel with all the characters being angels.

    Readers of this conversation are receiving it in English. What’s your relationship to language – to German and Arabic? It strikes me as significant that you write in German, but that you founded Swallow Editions, a press that brings new Arabic voices to anglophone readers.

    I have a strong love affair with language. As a child, I spoke Aramaic with my parents, Arabic on the street and at school, and French in the Lebanese monastery (it was my father’s dream that I become a priest). Later, English was added (unfortunately taught by an unqualified teacher). So German became my fifth language. Arab publishers rejected my novels, so I decided to learn literary German and make it my language. It took me years to master it.

    My aim with Swallow Editions is to introduce the work of young, talented Arab novelists to the English-speaking world. Because the novels published under Swallow Editions are translated into English, they can reach a much wider audience. But I am also happy that all the novels are published in German language, too.

    Translation’s virtue rests in its ability to share contexts and narratives across national and linguistic borders – to foster understanding and exchange. But I want also to discuss the risk that carries. Political and military exchanges and interventions between Western Europe and the Middle East have been accompanied by certain (often problematic) narratives. Does literary exchange carry risks of imperialism and homogenisation? If so, how do we avoid them?

    Translation is a great – but underrecognised – art. The translation must reinvent the story, make it understandable to readers of another culture, without causing any loss of original substance. Unlike military intervention, which always destroys something, translation is an attempt to build a very delicate, sensible bridge. But, as soon as the translation puts the host country’s own national interests above the original language of a work, the bridge collapses. The damage remains small because it concerns only this one translation of the novel. If the original novel is a piece of art with enduring value, it will be discovered and translated correctly.

    For twenty years, I have rejected all offers from Arab publishers to publish my work, because they always want to make changes and censor my work. In my experience, if the translator censors or changes a work, they become a henchman of the dictatorship. However, after a long search, I found my current publisher, Manshourat al-Jamal of Camel Publications, who does not censor a word I write.

    In other interviews with you which I’ve read, the conversation has turned quickly from the literary to the strictly political. I’m aware that’s what I’ve just done, but I want to ask how you find that tendency – to talk to you as a writer, first, but hastily to ask you instead, as a Syrian in Germany, about the situation in Syria?

    Thank you for your very sensitive wording. I sometimes find it frustrating that some journalists come to their own conclusions or statements without having done their homework. Instead of taking their own stand against the dictatorship, they expect it from me. That is the reason why I reject many interviews. And this is also the reason why I only conduct interviews via email, which I can check very carefully. I often send the questions back unanswered. I have written a lot about, and have been very vocal against, dictatorship, but making myself a source of information for journalists who are unwilling to take the time to do proper research is a disposession of my literary work.

    And so, finally, to submit fully to that tendency, I want to ask about exile and return. I think of Salah Al-Hamdani, who also left the Arabic world for political imperatives in the 1970s, settled in Western Europe (France), and wrote about the country of his birth in the language of his adopted home. He frequently discusses his one return to Iraq, to see his family. This is something you’ve not been able yet to do. In 2011, you said that, should the Assad regime fall, you would ‘go back, but as a visitor’. How has this hope for return shifted in the last eight years?

    My answer remains the same: if I returned to the places of my childhood, I would only do so to see them again and share them with my wife and son. But after eight years of tragic war, the hope for a peaceful development has faded away. Sophia describes the impossibility of return. I have sewn all the experiences of my friends in exile, all my feelings, desires and fears, dreams and nightmares into the novel, and sent Salman on the journey that I always wanted and feared.

    With this novel, I return to Damascus. I don’t return physically, but with my longing. That’s what I’ve been doing for forty years.

    Rafik Schami was born in Damascus in 1946, came to Germany in 1971 to study, and stayed on to become a leading German novelist and a pivotal figure in the European migrant literature movement. His novels have been translated into over 40 languages and have received numerous international literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize. His translated works published by Interlink include Damascus Nights, The Calligrapher’s Secret, A Hand Full of Stars, and The Dark Side of Love, which was a 2010 Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

    Photo credit: Arne Wesenberg

  • Always Against the Idols: A Conversation with Chus Pato and Erín Moure

    Always Against the Idols: A Conversation with Chus Pato and Erín Moure

    Galician poet Chus Pato and Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure discuss collaboration, Francoism, language rights and iconoclasm.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I want, first, to ask about the nature of your collaborative work. What influence has your collaboration had on your respective poetic practices, and how has working in each other’s cultural context shaped your individual work?

    CHUS PATO: In some ways, writing poetry means to attend: to be attentive to everything to do with the senses, every type of traffic, desert, utopia, absence, thought, sensation, music, dream, darkness, love, life. Above all, it means hearing, listening to the other materials that lift a language toward suspension of its servitudes: toward the suspension of its passwords and impositions; suspension of the delusions of an ‘I’, the delusions of communication. The language of the poem has an osmotic relation with muteness, and it might be said that the absence of articulated language is its power, its possibility; this means stretching the ear, heightening the intensity of our attention.

    First and foremost, before continuing, I have to say that I come from a generation educated under Francoism and, as its educational system precluded me from learning languages, I don’t know English. In principle, this is a barrier to any influence from Erín Moure’s poetry on my poetic praxis. But this isn’t the case, as my lack of knowledge has been supplanted instead by an intense friendship of almost twenty years. I can’t conceive of my poetic praxis without Erin’s translations.

    Our friendship has brought me along with her into her territories, which are many and diverse. It has meant learning about and being very attentive to other Anglophone poets and getting the chance to read with these poets in a variety of places, from humble bars and cozy bookstores to the most rigorous centres of academic culture in North America and the United Kingdom.

    All this implies an amplification, a polarisation, and a tension that fit very well with what I feel is vital to any attempt to write poetry.

    ERÍN MOURE: I think it’s more me who works in Chus’s cultural context, though it is still foreign to me, of course; when I am in Galicia, I am no less Canadian. I do need to be in Galicia – to hear Galician, communicate in Galician, engage with my friends and with the cultural and poetry community – to translate Chus well. Our friendship has made much of my learning possible, for certain. We laugh and dream and walk, together. I always know Chus is there to give me support, and not just in translating her: it is simply enough that we are both alive, and that we know and care about each other. We write alongside each other, in so many ways, in our different places. Her concerns in poetry overlap my own and always have, though our work is different. Hers gives me courage for creating my own. And, certainly, the fact of reading Chus and of learning Galician to translate her – not just because she speaks from a minority language for which I have great affection, but because what she brings to poetry is universal – can have an impact on Canadian and UK poetry as well. To other poetries in English. To possibility in language. That’s something that excites me.

    Chus, I want to ask you about writing poetry in Galician. There are aesthetics specific to the form and language, and there are politics specific to them. What are the relationships? 

    CP: Every Galician poet today or in the past can choose to write in Galician or in Castilian, because we all speak both languages. It’s a political decision.

    In my case, writing in Galician means a kind of restitution. As a child of Francoism, I was educated in Castilian, although the mother tongue of my family and all my ancestors was Galician. I considered theirs to be my language, too. I’ve always thought that if the legal and republican side had not lost the Civil War, Galician would be my first language, instead of the linguistic conflict that is my true mothertongue.

    Writing in Galician is thus the attempt to restore normality, and to do it in the face of Fascism; it is to remain loyal to the Republic, to resist and battle the prohibition of a language, and to claim justice for that language.

    Fortunately, the medieval cantigas (of the Iberian peninsula) were written in Galician and, since the end of the eighteenth century, Galician poetry has only grown in quantity and quality. When I started to write, the works of Rosalía de Castro, Eduardo Pondal, Manuel Antonio, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Uxío Novoneyra, Xohana Torres, and Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín were at my side. The Galician poetic tradition reached the poets of my generation ready for any adventure, and we have been ready to slake our thirst endlessly in its indomitable cascade.

    And, Erín, what political and aesthetic concerns are lost and gained when we translate this into English – a bridge language, but also a language with a thick history of problematics?

    EM: English is, yes, problematic; not only is it hegemonic, unlike Galician, but it is very absorptive of influences – from all over – without marking difference. I risk homogenising the authors I translate, and this is something I am constantly aware of, and that I actively write about. English is, though, a bridge language, and as such it is important to translate into it as it gives people in other cultural, linguistic, and national communities access to the work of Chus Pato. In my own work as a translator, I try not to suppress the Canadian difference of my English speech and writing, as translating Chus into Canadian English is one thing that can help make Galician difference present in English. It’s English, but it’s not from ‘the centre’. A small thing, perhaps, but it is something. I translate to share the urgency of what Chus does – her pushing of language, her breadth of understanding of European history. Her radicalism or experimentalism in language also pleads in its very sinews for justice for peoples, for the right to self-determination and to one’s own mothertongue or native language. This, too, is important to me.

    You are both working out of contexts where the relationship between nation-state and linguistic communities is fraught – between Spain and the Galician, Catalan, Aranese, Basque communities, and between Canada and First Nation communities. They’re both nation-states with a history of barring, educating out, and breaking the genealogy of languages. What can writing do for these fraught relationships? 

    CP: To what I’ve already said on this, I’ll add that writing in Galician has both advantages and difficulties. Galician is beloved and at times hated by the people who speak it, and the loss of speakers is a reality that alarms us. The transmission from parents to children is complicated for two obvious reasons. On one hand, we are a country that bears the weight of two centuries of emigration and, as well, still bears the weight of Francoist prohibitions, which did not end in Galicia with the current democratic period. 

    We are children of parents who had to rip from their own mouths the language they spoke as children and throw its words away, as if getting rid of something abject, so as to forcibly learn a language that was never their mothertongue. These mothers, these parents, did not want their children to experience that same pain.

    To have Francoism as one’s first language, to have a linguistic conflict for a mother tongue, is violent, humiliating, and irremediable. To write in that language is the same. In this lies the greatness and also the difficulty of the decision to write in Galician.

    EM: I think I could answer more as to what translation can do when languages’ generational transmissions have been broken by government policies, like Canada’s past policies of the forced removal of children from Indigenous nations to residential schools. Translation validates the importance of writing in those languages by valuing what is written in them, by reflecting to the world that they have something to offer to humanity, to the human condition, to the possibility of humans thinking – particularly in this time of environmental disaster, when we vitally need such thinking – as well as being vital for maintaining the specificity of an individual culture and cultural DNA.

    At the same time, as young Dene filmmaker Sinay Kennedy, from Clearwater River Nation in Saskatchewan, demonstrates in her recent short film Plus qu’un stéréotype / More Than A Stereotype, young people who have had their language genealogy broken have not lost their culture. Indigenous people, as I know them, have resilient and adaptive cultures, underpinned by strong ethics of sharing and community. They are people of the present and of the future. They are still fighting for justice for their peoples and for their lands; they still don’t have their fair share in Canada, in any sense. Today, they are at the forefront of environmental struggles, here to protect water and land for the future. It is important that we work alongside each other, and that we newcomers listen to their speaking, however they choose to speak, and support their actions.

    In my own poetry, over the past 25 years of my practice of 50 years, I’ve made space for multiple languages and tongues simply because they are in my head, part of my thinking. In my most recent book, The Elements, I went as far as to include a poem in French translated into Galician. It does not exist in English, this poem. The book is English, and so the poem physically incises a different spacing there. To me, it’s important to demonstrate that English is not an infinity pool that contains all poetic thinking, and that part of reading in English – being intelligent in English, being alive in English – is to confront and respond to the material and sonic presence of other languages.

    Chus, your practice pushes what language is and does, and how, as poetry, it relates to, works on, and works from our world. You’ve been called an ‘iconoclastic’ writer. How do you view that label? 

    CP: I believe, and it wasn’t me who came up with this, that poetry is a language within the language in which it is written. A language of its own that keeps faith with what is an immemorial poem and never written down, and yet one that changes in accompanying the age in which it is written. The language proper to the poem is a limit-language, one that palpates, that touches via the senses, the limits of the standard language we use to think, to narrate, to communicate with each other. Yes, I would say that this poem always exists at the limits, the borders, the frontiers of the sayable.

    There are many kinds of poems, and the ones that interest me are those that do not evade the existence of the historical avant-gardes. I’m not saying we should write like the poets of the avant-gardes, but I do see the line they traced as one that opened up the world in which we live, and it’s good for poetry to know and engage this inheritance that changed our relationship with language. It’s the heritage of limits and of the linguistic turn: we know that no language is innocent and that, without language, thinking and knowledge are not possible.

    As I indicated at the start of this interview, the poem that I value is one that transforms me; it’s that poem which brings linguistic servitudes to a close and signals a writing that’s free, and in being free allows whoever reads it or writes it to be free as well.

    To be free is from my point of view the greatest aspiration. If this is being iconoclastic then I can gladly accept not the label but the word.

    Always against the idols.

    And, Erín, do you feel you’re translating an iconoclast, and are you one yourself?

    EM: I don’t know if I am an iconoclast. I neither ‘attack’ nor ‘destroy’. I cherish. I consider poetry to be akin to a thinking, a seeking of possibility and not a set of closed forms always in one sole language. I’m an allergic person, a queer person, a woman, a daughter of an immigrant, and have never have been ‘inside’ the game. Even my name is strange in English, to English. My mother spoke another language but did not pass it on to me because of the shame and fear inculcated in immigrants. When she was dying, she wanted to speak to me in that language, to hold those words in her mouth and sound them again. It was as if she was bringing her own mother close to her once more. But I was only able to understand a bit: ‘very good’, and ‘I don’t know’. In my own work, maybe those are my touchstones. I listen to and work for language, and for the possibility of thinking in poetry that can exceed the narrow straits of logical and accepted discourse (which is often not logical at all). Who we are ethically – as human beings, as search procedures, as persons – and how we relate to each other, is critical to me: how we can exist and be as persons and as citizens. These being my primary propulsions, of course I want to translate the work of Chus Pato.

    Chus Pato is one of Europe’s greatest contemporary poets. She lives in Galicia and writes in the Galician language. m-Talá, her sixth book of poetry and first in her pentalogy Decrúa (Delve), appeared in 2000. All five books of the pentalogy, translated by Erín Moure, have appeared in English: m-Talá, Charenton, Hordes of Writing, Secession (published with Insecession by Erín Moure), and Flesh of Leviathan. Her books have been published in Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and Bulgarian translation, among others. The original Hordes of Writing in Galician received the Spanish Critics’ Prize in 2008 and the Losada Diéguez Prize in Galicia in 2009. In 2013, the Galician Booksellers’ Association fêted Chus Pato as Author of the Year. In 2015, she became the first Galician poet to be recorded for the sound archives of the Woodberry Poetry Library at Harvard University.

    In November 2019, she read from her works with Erín Moure at The Queen’s College, Oxford University, as part of the Translation Exchange’s International Translator in Residence program.

    Erín Moure is a Canadian poet and translator of poetry and poetics, based in Montreal. She has published 18 books of poetry, a volume of essays, a book of articles on translation, and two memoirs, and is translator or co-translator of 18 books of poetry and two of non-fiction (biopoetics), from French, Spanish, Galician, Portuguese, and Ukrainian. In Canada, her work has received the Governor General’s Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, A.M. Klein Prize twice, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize (two of these for translation). 2017 saw publication of a 40-year retrospective of her work, Planetary Noise: The Poetry of Erín Moure (edited by Shannon Maguire) from Wesleyan University Press, along with her translation from Portunhol of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat Books), and her translation from Galician of Antón Lopo’s Distance of the Wolf: A biography of Uxío Novoneyra (Fundación Uxío Novoneyra). Her most recent book is The Elements (Anansi, 2019), and most recent translations are a co-translation with Roman Ivashkiv of Ukrainian poet Yuri Izdryk, Smokes (Lost Horse, 2019) and a translation from the Galician of Lupe Gómez, Camouflage (Circumference Books, 2019).

    As International Translator in Residence at The Queen’s College, Oxford, in November 2019, she completed a translation of Chus Pato’s Un Libre Favor (The Face of the Quartzes).