it's a silent conversation': authors and translators on their ... and translators...

2021-04-08, 7:41 AM'It's a silent conversation': authors and translators on their unique relationship | Fiction in translation | The Guardian

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'It's a silent conversation': authorsand translators on their uniquerelationshipClaire Armitstead

Soul mates … English language translator Flora Drew with Chinese author Ma Jian. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The

Observer

From Man Booker International winner Olga Tokarczuk to partners Ma Jianand Flora Drew … leading authors and translators discuss the highs andlows of cross-cultural collaboration

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On the night of last year’s Man Booker International prize ceremony, twowinners swept up to the podium – novelist Olga Tokarczuk and hertranslator Jennifer Croft – but a third was back at their table cheering louderthan anyone. “I was thrilled to bits, I still am,” says Antonia Lloyd-Jones.What makes this unusual is that Lloyd-Jones is the Polish author’s othertranslator, who has been working with her far longer, but wasn’t responsiblefor the winning novel, Flights. With a shared purse of £50,000 at stake, wasthere not even the tiniest bit of envy? “We’re a team – of course it’s Olgaand Jennifer’s win, not mine, but it’s great for all of us who have spent yearstrying to popularise her books outside Poland, and it’s great for Polishliterature in translation,” says Lloyd-Jones. “This was a major breakthroughafter almost 30 years of work. And it has done sales of my own translationsa lot of good.” Nifty scheduling by the indie publisher Fitzcarraldo hasmeant that these include Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones ofthe Dead, a quirky eco-thriller very different from Flights, which has wonTokarczuk her second Man Booker International prize longlisting. This year’sshortlist will be announced on Tuesday.

It’s not just Polish novels that are enjoying a boost. Sales of fiction intranslation were up in the UK by 5.5% last year, with sales of translatedliterary fiction increasing by 20%. As the UK turns inwards, caught up in anincreasingly bitter fight over leaving the EU, readers are looking outwards,with literature from mainland Europe accounting for a large part of thegrowth. Jacques Testard, who publishes Tokarczuk, is part of a new wave ofindependent publishers who hope for further integration of translatedfiction into the mainstream, pointing out that it is only in the UK that foreignliterature is corralled into a separate compartment from that originallywritten in English. “In France, where a fifth of all books are published intranslations, you’ll find Balzac and Bolaño, Calvino and Carrère on the same

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shelf in bookshops. It’s only in the Anglosphere that it gets set apart.”

That separation is in evidence in the awards world, as well as the bookshop,with the Man Booker International the biggest among a host of grants andprizes for fiction in translation. How did Croft and Lloyd-Jones decide whowould take responsibility for the Tokarczuk novel that eventually went on towin? “It’s a matter of trust,” says Tokarczuk. “I’m definitely not the righttranslator for Flights,” says Lloyd-Jones, “but when it came to Drive YourPlow, Olga said I should do it. She joked that, at 57, she and I are more like[the eccentric narrator] Duszejko, and, well, there’s some truth in that.”

‘A matter of trust’ … Translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones, left, and Jennifer Croft, middle, and novelist Olga Tokarczuk.

Team Tokarczuk might be close but they are not as intimately connected asthe Chinese novelist Ma Jian and his translator Flora Drew, who is also themother of their four children. “Flora is the only person who has translatedmy books into English. She came to interview me in Hong Kong on the eve



of the handover. Her Chinese was very good, so I gave her copies of mybooks, and said, half-jokingly, that she could translate them into English ifshe liked. It was a strange thing to say, but there was feeling of destiny,”says the novelist. Their most recent collaboration was on China Dream, aferocious satire charting the mental breakdown of a corrupt localgovernment official. It was published in English last autumn but is unlikelyever to be read in the original Chinese – which Ma nevertheless regards asthe master copy – because censorship in China is now so extreme that evenHong Kong publishers no longer dare defy the ban that has long preventedhis novels from being published on the mainland.

I never feel I’m translating the words of the person I’ve just hadsupper with. Knowing him so well though means I can in somestrange way become him

Ma speaks little English, so he talks through Drew in life as well as work. Is ita challenge to separate the professional from the domestic? “The Ma Jian Itranslate is a very different entity from the Ma Jian I live with,” says Drew.“There is never any confusion. I never feel I’m translating the words of theperson I’ve just had supper with, or who’s just taken our children to thepark. Knowing him so well though means I can in some strange way becomehim, and write the translation not as a friend or a translator, but as Ma wouldif he were writing the book in English. There are times during the translationwhen I feel we are having a silent conversation with each other that wedon’t have time for in real life. Many of his books have references to placeswe have been together, dreams of mine that I have told him about or thingsour children have said.”

Relationships between writers and translators are not usually so close, andnot only because they can often live thousands of miles apart. Sam Taylor, aFrench specialist now living in the US, is also on the Man Booker

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International longlist with Four Soldiers, a novella by Hubert Mingarelli setnear the Romanian border in the last days of the Russian civil war. Heproposed the book himself to its publisher Granta. His output in the lastcouple of years also includes two controversial novels, Lullaby and Adèle bythe Paris-based Moroccan-French writer Leïla Slimani. In neither case didhe meet the authors before taking on the novels. “I don’t remember havingany direct interaction with Leïla on Lullaby, although she wrote me a verynice thank you email afterwards,” he says. “With Adèle, I had a list of about15 questions that I sent to her after translating the book (and beforerevising it). She answered those questions and we exchanged a few emails.”

The pairing with Slimani is particularly striking in that Taylor is male, whileSlimani’s work is strongly sexualised and centred on the female body. Dideither of them ever question whether it might be a job for a woman? “Ofcourse not!” says Slimani. “Littérature is meant to be universal. I write aboutwomen but I hope men can identify with my characters. And Samunderstood in a very subtle way my characters and also my style, whatatmosphere I wanted to instil, what music I wanted to create with my words.It is magic when you feel that someone understands and respects yourwork so much. When I read my book in English I always think: that’s theexact word I would have chosen.”

Taylor was aware of gender as a potential issue, although, he says, “neitherLeïla nor the book’s female editors ever mentioned it. In the original French,all genitalia, male or female, is called simply “sexe”, which is a very neutralword. There are no neutral words for genitalia in English – everything tendsto sound either scientific or pornographic or comical – so I used the wordthat, in each case, seemed to best fit the context. But I didn’t want to be aman imposing my viewpoint or sensibility on a female protagonist andfemale author, so I highlighted most of those word choices in the text andasked Leïla and my editors if they thought this was the right word. I don’t



think any of those choices were changed or even questioned, but it seemedimportant to put them up for discussion.”

‘When I read my book in English I always think: that’s the exact word I would have chosen’ … Leïla Slimani, left, and

Sam Taylor

A novelist as well as a translator, who fell into translation after giving up acareer in journalism to write books in France, Taylor doesn’t take everythinghe is offered. “I turned down the chance to translate Michel Houellebecq’sSoumission because the Charlie Hebdo attack occurred a couple of daysafter I received the offer. I have no regrets about that,” he says (the job wentto Lorin Stein, former editor of the Paris Review, who has since gone on totranslate two novels by France’s new enfant terrible Édouard Louis).

The literatures of French and English might be different, but as Taylor pointsout: “Most European languages (and certainly French) are underpinned by aroughly equivalent set of philosophical values and a shared history.” What of

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those languages that are the product of cultures with little commonground? The traditional answer has been that they rarely get translated,though research commissioned by the Man Booker International prizerevealed the situation to be slowly improving, with a growing demand forChinese, Arabic, Icelandic and Polish languages.

“Chinese and English are as far apart as any two languages could be,” saysDrew. “I can read a book in French easily, but after all these years, Chineseis still a struggle – there are many characters I don’t know, or haveforgotten, classical allusions that I miss. Chinese has no tenses and is moreconcise than English, so meaning is often inferred through context. Butalthough Chinese sometimes feels like a different universe, I’m alwayssurprised by how much can be translated – how images and metaphors canwork across cultures.”

Among the initiatives that encourage a wider range of writing in translationis the new EBRD prize, which awards €20,000 to a book from theinterestingly arbitrary landmass served by its sponsor, the European Bankfor Reconstruction and Development (which extends from the Baltics tocentral Asia and the Mediterranean countries of Africa). Last year’sinaugural prize went to the Kurdish/Turkish writer Burhan Sönmeztranslated by Ümit Hussein. This year’s was won by the first Uzbek novelever to be translated into English, The Devils’ Dance.

Its author is Hamid Ismailov, a genial 64-year-old journalist who came to Londonshortly after being forced to fleeUzbekistan in 1992 and has had a dayjob at the BBC ever since. He wasmatched with his translator, DonaldRayfield – an emeritus professor of

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Hamid Ismailov. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/TheGuardian

Russian and Georgian – by a newtranslator-run publishing house, Tilted

Axis, set up in 2015 to champion neglected languages. When I meet up withthem in the BBC’s London headquarters, their rapport is striking. “I was thelast person to choose for this,” jokes Rayfield, “but as the Russians say: ‘Ifthere’s no fish, a crab will do.’”

Rayfield not only had to learn Uzbek to translate the novel, but had to boneup on Tartar, Farsi, Tajik and Kyrgyz as well. How many languages doesIsmailov speak? “When you speak Uzbek,” the novelist quietly explains,“you understand many Turcik langages and with Russian you canunderstand many Slavonic ones.” He is a translator himself, working in bothdirections between Russian, Uzbek and various European languages.Several of his own novels have been translated from Russian into English,but the impossibility of getting an Uzbek novel by a banned writer into thehands of any readers at all inhibited his reputation in his mother tongue untilthe internet solved the problem for him. He published The Devils’ Dance inchapters on Facebook and it went viral through the “Stans” – the fiveformerly Soviet countries in central Asia for whom his central character, thereal-life early 20th-century writer Abdulla Qodiriy who was executed in1938, was a hero. The pair are less forthcoming about a third name thatappears on the novel’s title page – John Farndon – credited with translatingthe poetry in the novel. “There was no conversation. I was somewhat takenaback by changes to my original translations,” recalls Rayfield.

The difficult birth of The Devils’ Dance in English underlines the extent towhich translation is not only a two-way but a three-way relationship, withthe publisher – the person who takes the financial risk – as the third partner.Tilted Axis was set up by Deborah Smith partly with the prize money fromher 2016 Man Booker International win for her translation of Korean authorHan Kang’s The Vegetarian. Smith made substantial cuts to The Devils’



I have a Dutch translatorwho keeps telling me aboutthe mistakes I’ve made inmy own books

Tim Parks, author andtranslator

Dance (though it still checks in at more than 400 pages). Her decision tobring in a poetry translator was in line with a time-honoured tradition inwhich a named poet works from a literal translation rather than the original.

Smith is better placed than most to understand the demands of culturaltransposition: as translator of three novels by Han, she had to negotiateKorean systems of religious belief, family relationships and linguisticpractice. She too learned the language specifically to translate the novelsand found herself at the centre of a storm when her translation of TheVegetarian was challenged on the grounds of accuracy.

“A scene where I had the main character close a door with her foot insteadof her arm is one Korean academics like to bring up,” she says. “There were67 [errors], by the way. I like to state that publicly in case anyone mistakenlyassumes it’s something I’d want to hide.” The errors were corrected in latereditions and Han Kang’s faith in Smith is unshaken. Smith is currently livingin South Korea and working on a novel by another female Korean novelist,Bae Suah, which is due to be published by Jonathan Cape next year. She’snot about to diversify into other languages just yet. “I’m trying to finddifferent ways to spread the translation gospel: publishing, teaching,mentoring. Writing about all aspects of translation: the flow betweenlanguages, the discourse around it, all the people who make it happen.”

Faithfulness, as opposed to accuracy, is always adifficult issue, as novelist Tim Parks concedes. “Ithink there’s usually a mistake of nuance on everypage of every book. Sometimes scandalously so,”he says. As an author and a translator he hasexperience in both directions, and he stresses

that translators are often the best readers. “I have a Dutch translator whokeeps writing to me and telling me about the mistakes I’ve made in my own


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books. It can be spelling or continuity, and she’s always right. Justoccasionally it’s really embarrassing, but people like that give you thechance to fix the next edition.”

Parks has written that: “The translator should do his job and then disappear.The great, charismatic, creative writer wants to be all over the globe. Andthe last thing he wants to accept is that the majority of his readers are notreally reading him. His readers feel the same. They want intimate contactwith true greatness. They don’t want to know that this prose was written onsurvival wages in a maisonette in Bremen, or a high-rise flat in the suburbsof Osaka. Which kid wants to hear that her JK Rowling is actually a chain-smoking pensioner?”

But translators fall into different camps, described by New Yorker criticJames Wood as “originalists” and “activists”: “The former honor the originaltext’s quiddities, and strive to reproduce them as accurately as possible inthe translated language; the latter are less concerned with literal accuracythan with the transposed musical appeal of the new work,” he wrote. Anydecent translator must be a bit of both.” Or, as the cultural critic MarinaWarner has put it: “Should a translator respond like an aeolian harp,vibrating in harmony with the original text to transmit the original music, orshould the translation read as if it were written in the new language?”



‘The biggest disagreement we had was whether to use the word bathroom or lavatory’ … Jay Rubin and Haruki

Murakami

“It’s obviously a simplification, but I imagine I would be closer to the activistside of the spectrum,” says Taylor, whose less aeolian approach set him atodds with one French writer, Maylis de Kerangal. Her novel’s French titlewas Réparer les Vivants, and Taylor called his translation The Heart, whilethe Canadian poet and translator Jessica Moore chose the more literalMend the Living for this story of the day in the life of a donated heart as it isrushed from one person to another. The translations were commissionedsimultaneously by editors in the UK and the US, and both won awards(Mend the Living scooped the Wellcome prize while The Heart won theFrench-American Foundation prize) but De Kerangal has ruled that Moore’sis more faithful to her writing and she should therefore do all her futurenovels: “It is so fascinating to see what choices were made at every turn.The opening sentence, for example, feels completely different to me in ourversions,” says Moore. Even the dead boy’s surname is different, though



I drove Murakamiabsolutely crazy for awhole day giving him littlequestions one afteranother. This is not a verykind thing to do to anauthor

interestingly it’s Taylor who kept De Kerangal’s Limbres, while Moore wentfor Limbeau.

According to another busy translator, Frank Wynne, problems often arisewhen a writer thinks they have a better command of English than theyactually do. One of his worst experiences was with French film directorClaude Lanzmann who was “hugely intrusively involved” in the translationof his 2012 memoir The Patagonian Hare. “He binned the original Italiantranslation and redid mine line by line. He insisted on using the phrase‘leonine contract’ to mean a contract in which one person took the lion’sshare. I didn’t in the end meet him and it might have been useful if I had, sothat he’d gone into it with more of a sense of trust.”

A translator from both French and Spanish – whohad novels in both languages on the longlist oflast year’s Man Booker International and iscurrently based in Mexico – Wynne’s relationshipswith writers tend to be brisk. “Some don’t reply atall. The trouble is the more successful a writer is,

the more languages there are.” One of his top-selling authors, the Frenchcrime novelist Pierre Lemaitre, deals with the problem by collating questionsfrom all his 35-40 translators into a round-robin crib sheet.

Jay Rubin, one of the four translators who have made the Japanese novelistHaruki Murakami into an English language superstar, says he learned earlyon to correspond sparingly. “The worst thing I did was with The Wind-UpBird Chronicle. I got together with him in Tokyo and drove him absolutelycrazy for a whole day giving him little questions one after another. This isnot a very kind thing to do to an author.”

Rubin co-translated the book Bird Chronicle with Philip Gabriel, because it

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ran to three volumes, and its length defeated him. Did they collaborate?“The biggest disagreement we had was whether to use the word bathroomor lavatory.” (Murakami ruled in favour of bathroom.) But, he says, “All of usstick pretty closely to the tone and style of Murakami’s writing, and thanksin large part to the simplicity of his style, the voice is pretty consistent.There aren’t that many ways to say ‘Sunday was another fine clear day’.”

If that sounds like damning with faint praise, the compliment was returnedby Murakami, when he wrote the introduction to a well-received recentanthology of Japanese short stories edited by Rubin, which Rubin himselfthen translated. “Some [stories], of course, could be characterized as‘representative’ works, but, frankly, they are far outnumbered by storieswhich are not,” wrote the novelist. How did that make Rubin feel? “I giggledwhen I read that ‘frankly’,” he says. “But you’re getting the unvarnishedMurakami view of the book.”

‘Some of his dialect I intuited. Other terms, rife with violence and obscenity, he politely translated into Italian for



me’ … Jhumpa Lahiri on Domenico Starnone

For Ann Goldstein, translating a more recent superstar, Elena Ferrante,there was no such back and forth. She had no direct contact with theauthor, whose true identity is a closely guarded secret. She was chosen onsubmission of a sample translation of a previous Ferrante novel, andcorresponds with her on email via her publisher. Though the novelsthemselves weren’t written in Neapolitan dialect, the dialogue in the HBOTV adaptation – partially scripted by Ferrante – is. “My role has beentranslating them so that HBO can read them,” says Goldstein.

Just how difficult Neapolitan can be, even to someone steeped in Italian,became clear to the author Jhumpa Lahiri when she took on two novels byanother of the southern Italian city’s writers, Domenico Starnone. Lahirimoved from the US to Rome and dedicated herself to writing in thelanguage of her host country, the progress of which she documented in afascinating bilingual book, In Other Words. Immersion in standard Italiandidn’t prepare her for some of Starnone’s language though. “Some of hisdialect I intuited. Other terms, rife with violence and obscenity, were politelytranslated into Italian for me by Starnone himself,” she has said. Lahiri’sworking relationship with Starnone is a passionate cross-culturalconversation, which for their latest collaboration, Trick, took in Kafka andHenry James. At a public launch in London last year, an overawed fan askedif it was necessary to know so much. Not at all, replied Lahiri. For mostreaders, it’s just a story of a grandfather left in charge of his four-year-oldgrandson.

Starnone is now going to translate Lahiri’s English introduction for the Italianedition of her new Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. But she is savingthe biggest challenge for herself: the English translation of her own firstnovel written in Italian. Dove mi trovo has already been published in several

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other languages. “The idea of my own creation in Italian not having a life inEnglish yet is interesting,” she says. “The problem is: how do I turn myselfback on myself? Mentally I have to go into a place where I’m two people.” Isself-translation the most intimate relationship between a writer and atranslator? Perhaps not. “In Chinese,” says Ma Jian, “a soul mate isdescribed as zhiyin – someone who ‘understands your music’ and that iswhat Flora is to me.”

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