My Feelings about My Writers and Your Feelings about David Bowie

I had been puzzled by how strongly people feel about David Bowie's death – the street renamings, the pilgrimages and flowers, the deep sadness, the need to share the tiny encounters or the life-changing effects of particular songs or Top of the Pops appearances. I have a different feeling about death to many people anyway, as a fourth-generation atheist, and have struggled to understand people's reactions in the past. A lot of them felt to me as though people thought the dead person was looking down at them and checking they were behaving suitably. Maybe they did think that, I don't know. When you've never entertained the idea of an afterlife that's hard to relate to. But I have at least learned something about the comforting power of ritual and sharing of grief.

So I had been idly reading various people's responses and it began to dawn on me that I had in fact felt something similar to that one-way devotion to someone who is unaware of your existence. And that's the feeling I have about my writers. I spend months or years mentally immersed in their creative work in a similar way to that time spent listening to favourite songs, poring over lyrics, interpreting their meaning, internalizing the rhythm, singing along at the top of your voice, imagining the song is all about you. Such a joyful teenagerly activity, best performed on a single bed with headphones and spots. I know you don't have to be a teenager to do it; here's the last song that did that to me.

And that's very like what happens to me when I'm translating a novel. It's a work of art that's been created entirely independently of me and even if I know the writer personally, which I usually do but not always, I will always know far more about their work than they do about mine. I will always think I know them far better than they know me – and yes, I know that's wrong thinking. But it's still a joyful activity, wallowing in the writing to create my literary cover versions. Sometimes translators do get romantically involved with their writers. I don't know about that really; it's always a secret yearning, I think, but could it ever be a balanced relationship?

None of my writers has died since I started working on them. It will be devastating, I expect. So now I understand the David Bowie sadness better.

Some Thank Yous

I have been quiet; I was in New York. Have I mentioned before how kind and supportive the literary translation community is?

Before I even got to New York, I got a phone call to say that my accommodation with a friend of a friend had fallen through; a burst pipe and no water for the foreseeable. Within minutes, another translator had offered me her flat for the weekend – she needed a cat-sitter anyway. So many people said I was welcome to stay on their respective couches that I decided to see a few different parts of town, spending two nights each in Greenpoint, Kensington and Upper West Side (I think). And everyone looked after me beautifully. I had (half of) the most ridiculous ice cream sundae of my life, went up on a roof, drank sake in a basement establishment I'm sure I'd never find again, had pink iced tea, went to a Polish diner, bought Statue of Liberty biros, admired various views, got lots of advice, talked to strangers, gave away and was given lots and lots of books and generally had a very interesting time.

So this is to say thanks to the Goethe Institut New York and the German Book Office New York – and to all the translation people who calmed me down and made my stay in their city so full of love. You know who you are. For everyone else, here's a home-swapping website for translators. OK, not quite everybody else.

Harry Rowohlt, 1945-2015

Germany's famous translator Harry Rowohlt has died at the age of seventy. He was the son of publisher Ernst Rowohlt but was never involved in running the publishing house before he and his half-brother sold it in 1982, although he did train at Suhrkamp Verlag and took an internship at Grove Press. He began translating from English in 1971 and was particularly loved for his live events, at which he would interrupt his readings with anecdotes and whiskey (he was apparently made an "ambassador of Irish whiskey" in 1996 and translated a number of Irish writers, including Flann O'Brien and Ken Bruen). And he also recorded hugely popular audiobooks, wrote occasional newspaper columns and played a tramp in the long-running Lindenstraße soap opera.

Readers were very keen on his translation style, which he applied to both children's and adult books. He had a hand for comedy, translating Frank Muir, Andy Stanton, David Sedaris and Robert Crumb, but also writers who are tough in other ways: Kurt Vonnegut, a little James Joyce and probably most famously A.A. Milne. I never met him; as far as I understand, he preferred not to keep the company of other translators. 

Harry Rowohlt made translators visible in Germany like no other, and did a great deal to establish an image for literary translators as creative writers with personalities of their own rather than dictionary-wielding robots. He will be greatly missed by his many readers.

Social Anxiety at the President's Palace

There's nothing like an invitation to the presidential palace to trigger social anxiety. Come round, wrote Joachim Gauck in an embossed envelope, we'll have some drinks and stuff in honour of the art of literary translation. Bring a date. Bring a date: "und Begleitung". Two little words; weeks of horror. Having asked one person whose response prompted me to change their first name in my phone so as never to ask them out again and one person who wasn't in the country on the day of the event, followed by some painful soul-searching of the "Daddy didn't love me enough" variety, I finally found someone with enough pity in them to accompany me to the president's gaff.

Sadly, said sympathetic character was struck down by illness the day before. So I went on my own. Rubbing it in, the security people asked "Are you on your own?" when I arrived. "Yes," I mumbled, trying to embrace my independence. It didn't work. I turned down the offer of a chauffeur-driven ride from the security gate to the front door. Just because I can't get a date doesn't mean I can't walk a hundred yards. And then of course there were hardly any seats left, so I found myself in a block of people I didn't know, most of whom seemed to be breathing out a day's worth of coffee fumes. I assume they were from the languages department at the Foreign Office; literary translators would have been intimidated enough to brush their teeth beforehand.

So there I am, all on my ownsome, trying to eavesdrop on the couple arguing behind me (I heard "Kotzt mich an..." and "Komme nicht mehr" from the woman but couldn't quite get what it was about) to stop me from crying, which worked to all intents and purposes, when Gauck launched into his speech. It was a clever speech, a good speech, a speech that expressed admiration and gratitude. Unfortunately, it was a speech by a a former Lutheran pastor. I've always thought of myself as a tolerant atheist, but someone telling me that my profession is proof of divine miracles sent me into the kind of rage diffused only by snorting audibly in a chandeliered room full of five hundred invited guests. Audibly to myself anyway. Of course I would always dispute Gauck's cautiously worded suggestion that producing understanding out of the mutually incomprehensible is made possible by God, like the Pentecostal whatever it was. Yes, translation is an impossible feat, but so are many other things. Love, writing, bringing up kids. If we must find some metaphor for achieving them nonetheless, let that metaphor be superhero powers. Or just magic in general, for fuck's sake.

I sat there and wished very hard that the politicians the Germans had elected had chosen Beate Klarsfeld instead, until Gauck commented that it was actually his partner Daniela Schadt who suggested the evening. And then I didn't know what to think, except that I was glad he mentioned German literary translators' terrible pay.

There followed a two-hour programme moderated by the critic Dennis Scheck, who politely refrained from blacking up on this occasion. To give whoever put it together the benefit of the doubt, it must be difficult to compile a two-hour programme suitable for the president at one end of the knowledge scale and a bunch of literary translators at the other. So as to help Gauck along, they chose mostly the kind of translators he might have heard of – prizewinning writers who translate on the side – and talked entirely about translating books by men. There was some music, which ranged from the sublime to the silly (in a good way), and then we got to stand up again. Which reminds me, we all stood up at the beginning when the president walked in and I felt all rebellious like when our old headmaster came into the classroom and we collectively refused to stand up, but I didn't quite manage to stay seated this time.

Wine, bubbly, little nibbles brought round that required the very nice waiters to stand next to you while you popped them in your mouth so you could return the stick to the tray. Smalltalk. Checking out the guest list. Why such a small proportion of actual literary translators? Why did they invite that critic who once told me translators shouldn't complain about pay because nobody forced them to be translators? Why did they invite that publisher whose editor said they were sick of translators wanting so much money? What was the army officer doing at an event celebrating literary translation? Who the hell were all these people? Why were they dressed so conservatively? Why did that renowned literary translator mistake me for someone else?

At home (taxi after arriving on the late side by bus) I googled the woman he took me for. She was totally gorgeous. I felt better. 

On Role Models

It's International Women's Day and I'm thinking about inspiring role models. Specifically, I'm thinking that the people I appreciate as role models have overcome certain hurdles to get where they are today. I think it's good to talk about our role models, spreading the love if you will, so that we realize that the straight path isn't the only one and women in particular can achieve great things via other routes.

I have some hurdles of my own. When I was a student of German Studies, merely being a woman was one of them. I was in a department (Birmingham University) with an all-male faculty, although the students were almost all women. Although my best friend and I got the best degrees in our year it was only men who continued their studies to MA level there – I think it simply didn't occur to us that we could have a career in academia, and none of our teachers suggested it to us. Actually that's not strictly true; I did happen to meet one then junior member of staff on the bus and he asked me if I'd be interested. I said no, I didn't like the academic atmosphere. Actually, what I said was (I remember it well), "I don't like the atmospheric academy – no, I mean academic atmosphere." I was a bit nervous.

It's OK, I know enough women in German Studies now to understand that it would have been tough for me, that career in academia, and wouldn't have given me the rich chain of experiences prompted by moving in to a one-room flat with coal heating in East Berlin with a trainee gardener rather than attending my graduation. But I'm glad that girls studying German nowadays are at least aware of the option, what with all the great women in the field to lead the way.

Now that I'm a literary translator, I can say that the things that have made it trickier for me are my slightly odd taste in books, my slightly odd sense of humour, being a single parent and thus really needing to earn decent money all the time and not being able to travel as much as some, not having attended the right kind of school or the right university and thus not knowing the right people, also because I'm in Berlin rather than London, and having a bit of a baby face when I do show it in public. None of them seem to be to do with being a woman – hooray!

So here are two of my role models, women who make me keep on plugging away. One of them will hardly surprise you: she's Anthea Bell. I love the way she raised two children on her own by translating, including children's books, and gave us her incredibly inventive Asterix translations and all sorts of other wonderful reading experiences, actively shaping my childhood without me realizing it for years. Here she is, very recently, on "Why Translation Matters". I'm thrilled that she's been gaining the recognition and honour she deserves, with prizes and an OBE and a big fat German medal and all-round appreciation. And she's still going strong. I suspect that if she hadn't divorced, we would never have heard of her – she'd have had no need to work so hard.

The other is a German translator, Karen Nölle. Karen has three children, including one set of twins (of course they're all grown up now) but she didn't let that stop her back in the bad old eighties in West Germany, when childcare was considered a sin and schools were out by noon because mummy was at home to make lunch. She moved out of academia to work as a translator from English to German and later edit too, and has been sharing her skills as a workshop leader for nearly twenty years. Indeed, that's how I know what a great translator she is, having benefitted from two awe-inspiring doses of her teaching. Karen is an active feminist, very supportive of other women in various roles, and enjoys translating books by women in particular, including Andrea Barrett, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Barbara Trapido and Janet Frame. In 2010 she co-founded the publishing house Edition Fünf, which re-releases books by women that have been unjustly forgotten. They make beautiful bright red editions, and I love what they say about their all-female list:

We don't think a writer's gender is a qualitative feature of good texts. What we're interested in, though, is lines of female tradition. We want to read what and how women write.

Isn't that a wonderful statement?

So on International Women's Day, why not spend a moment thinking of your role models and telling other people about how they inspired you? I note, having written all this, that the hashtag for the day is #MakeItHappen, which is tricky to fit in here but these are – hmm – two women who have indeed "made it happen" for themselves, their families, other translators and of course all their many readers. I have a feeling neither of them took the straight path but both of them are probably glad of it.

Anthea Bell Gets Cross

Our favourite translation heroine, the "grand dame" Anthea Bell, has been awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her great and lasting contribution to the promotion of German literature and services to translation.

You can read the ambassador's speech here, and while you're at it you can also read a rather fabulous Guardian article about her here. Anthea translated the first German book I read, The Factory Made Boy by Christine Nöstlinger. And of course she also did the Asterix series, with such incredible aplomb. And Sebald, and Freud, and Ruge, and Biller, and Funke, and Stanisic, and Franck, and just so many good writers that it's hard to stop. One of my favourite impressive things about Anthea Bell (OBE) is that she was a single mother when she started translating seriously, and raised two sons on the proceeds.

Three cheers for Anthea Bell! 

Some Links for Translators

I have three places for you to go today, and one for you to go on Friday.

The British Centre for Literary Translation turns 25 this year, and is celebrating on a Tumblr. Videos, photos and texts, including a very self-obsessed one by me.

The London Book Fair has now uploaded videos of all events at the Literary Translation Centre for you to catch up on. Talks on getting into the business, working with other translators, working with dead or living authors, women in translation, and much more.

And there's now a place for translators to vent about reviews of their work, The Translator Writes Back. The first open letter is from Alison Entrekin to Justin Cartright, who refers to "countless infelicities" in his review but goes no further than that. I'm not entirely sure this new blog will lead to a constructive conversation between translators, critics, writers and readers, but I like the idea that we now have a space to respond.

Finally, if you're in Berlin you should go to this event with David Bellos and his translators on Friday. I have no idea why it's only being announced in German, because it will take place in English. See you there.

Reasons to be Proud of Fellow Translators, Part 1

My friend and fellow translator Tom Morrison sent me this, and I share his sentiments: 

Ceremonial presentation of the Tarabaya awards for Turkish-German translation in the flash new Turkish embassy building in Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin on 12 February 2014. The traditional Turkish music is lovely, the speeches for the most part less tedious than one has come to fear, the black-suited diplomats on the whole professional and smooth. A placard from the Turkish board of tourism reminds us (just in case anyone was wondering) that there is nary a cloud on the horizon, Istanbul's Taksim Square a distant, irksome, dream. A grand bunch of prizewinners, and you admire them all. They tell their own stories as they talk about the stories they translate.

And then, introduced with affectionate aplomb by Joachim Sartorius, Sezer Duru -- bright face, big hair, words of thanks concise and clear as she talks about a career that began in the 1960s. And by the way, she casually winds up, it's time that Turkey installed the rule of law. It's an utter disgrace that XX has been in jail for the past four years just for translating such and such, or that XX was imprisoned for writing an article on this, that and the other. (To my own shame I can supply neither names nor titles.) The diplomatic smiles suddenly look frozen. Did I hear a pin drop? The applause from many members of the audience is notably animated, and you think, not for the first time, that there is reason to be proud of fellow translators.

Do send me other reasons, if you have them.

Daniel Hahn on Being a Translator

Danny Hahn is a very nice and very busy man, as a writer and translator and general advocate for both professions. Apparently, he found that many of the writers he knew had little idea of what their translators are expected to do. Translators into English tend to be in contact with the living writers we translate, at least to some extent, and in my experience they take great interest in our work and are rather flattered that someone would take the time to do it. But for some reason, that seems to be less the case the other way around. So Danny wrote an article for the British Society of Authors, neatly explaining our curious condition. It's an excellent summary of what makes literary translation a source of both joy and headaches. So many people wanted to read it that they kindly put it online.

Michelle Woods: Kafka Translated

Franz Kafka is the most commonly listed writer in a study of online dating profiles, followed by Milan Kundera and Paolo Coelho. Kafka has his own adjective and, as Michelle Woods points out in her fascinating Kafka Translated, has even made it into The Wire. You can't get much bigger. And yet Kafka made it big in English via a series of translators. Woods sets out to make those translators a little more visible, and to explore other aspects of translation in and of the writer's work. Her book's tagline is How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka.

She begins with his first translator, into Czech in this case, Milena Jesenská. Many readers know of her through the collection of Kafka's Letters to Milena. I read these letters once, only once, and then tucked them away safely on the shelf because I knew I ought never to read them again. Love letters between a writer and his translator. They can't be un-read and it's an idea a translator would probably do better not to have in her head. Too late. Jesenská's side of the correspondence has been lost, and she remains so invisible to this day that she rarely warrants a surname. Woods tells us how she has been dismissed as a "bad translator" by all sorts of people who don't read Czech, and romanticized by novelists. Her story as Kafka's lover and a victim of the Nazis is inviting but is rarely told with her as an active protagonist. Being a reader of Czech, Woods goes some way to redeeming Jesenská's translations and certainly lends her a voice of her own, as a journalist and translator. She also gives us some fascinating information on the literary climate in which Kafka's Czech translations were first published - a new nation interested in writing experiments and new styles, with much scope for non-domesticating translation.

The next maligned woman in the plot is Willa Muir. Like Jesenská, Muir led a ground-breaking life of her own accord, growing up in poverty in the Shetlands, being one of the first women to attend a British university, moving to Europe and then London and attempting to make a feminist idea of marriage work. What Woods does in her book is provide convincing evidence that Kafka's first translations into English were not done by Edwin Muir and his wife, but by Willa Muir with occasional assistance from her husband. The Muir translations have been subject to a lot of criticism (there's a pattern arising here) for their smoothing-out and domesticating, along with other petty things like their use of allegedly Scottish words. Woods is not naive; she admits that much of this criticism is legitimate – although some of the blame can be placed on Max Brod for his posthumous sanitizing of Kafka through the editing process. What she does here, however, is show that Willa Muir was probably perfectly aware of what she was doing and chose to domesticate because that was what publishers at the time wanted. Sometimes, I'm afraid, they still do. Based on Muir's diaries and an unpublished, thinly disguised autobiographical novel, Woods unearths a fiercely intelligent woman who was translating to feed her family and hated some of the work – notably Feuchtwanger – but loved some of it too, even though it kept her from her own writing. Also, she was very funny indeed.

Woods moves on to living translators, starting with the Irish-born Mark Harman, who pressed Schocken to publish his re-translations of Das Schloß and Amerika because of the drawbacks to the Muir versions. In this section, she focuses partly on the way a translator's own language and reading colour their work. Harman is a Kafka scholar and a great fan of Samuel Beckett, who apparently found Kafka difficult and said that he wrote "like a steamroller". Here, Woods traces the tiny impressions left in Harman's Kafka by Beckett, and looks at the issue of "mid-Atlantic English", something I'm not sure exists. Certainly, it's not a language I can produce, but Harman seems to think he can, having lived in the States for many years. It's in this part that Woods introduces us to an indirect argument between two writer-critics, Milan Kundera and J.M. Coetzee. Both of them have grumpily critiqued Kafka translations, something many writers seem to enjoy doing, as Woods reveals by the by. Coetzee is the baddy, arguing in the case of Harman's The Castle that the translator ought to have tidied things up more towards the end, been less stylistically faithful. When it comes to Michael Hofmann, however, Coetzee finds his Joseph Roth translations not faithful enough. Kundera meanwhile argues that it's important for translators to render not into conventional good French, or English, but to show the author's transgressions against accepted style. To his credit, while this may seem utterly obvious, he did write it in 1996.

The section on Michael Hofmann was the most exciting reading, for me. I have had a problem with Michael Hofmann for a while, presumably founded on envy pure and simple. It's a little late in this review to admit it, but I've only ever read two translations of Kafka, and those were two versions of Ein Landarzt by Michael Hofmann and by Joyce Crick, both built into Will Self's magnificent digital essay "Kafka's Wound". I absolutely adore Hofmann's version. It is playful and stylish and it embellishes very slightly to make up for anything that may have been lost along the way. Whereas Crick's is the translation students ought to read, because it's more accurate and sober. I loved Hofmann's voice as Irmgard Keun in Child of All Nations, and in general I am all too willing to admit that Michael Hofmann is an outstanding translator. I suppose the non-envy part of the problem must be that I don't share his literary taste, with a few exceptions. Michelle Woods contests that his taste is what makes him stand out as a translator, and I found that very interesting. Because he has in fact translated a large swathe of mid-twentieth-century German-speaking men whose work doesn't grab me in the slightest. Which has the major advantage of leaving contemporary writers for the rest of us. I do think there is a kind of translator typecasting at play to some extent, whereby certain translators end up doing historical fiction, some will do classics, one will do racy contemporary novels by young writers, and so on. The subject was discussed by readers at Vishy's Blog last November, and it was interesting to think about how much choice translators have in the matter. Hofmann, at least, speaks of his own "imprimatur" and his wish that people will see his name on a book cover and buy a translation on the strength of that. I think in a small way that already happens.

Woods conducted an interview with Hofmann, which helps matters further by making him seem less pompous than in some of his critical writing. I was most relieved, after about a hundred pages of translation comparisons highlighting euphony and metre and the use of plosives, to find that Hofmann is often motivated by impatience and that he tackles his translations instinctively. Those daring translatorial choices of his that I so much admire are not the result of hours of weighing up and syllable-counting but spur-of-the-moment decisions. So despite being closer to Willa Muir in terms of financial constraints on my work, I now feel I can genuinely aspire to translate as playfully as Hofmann, when the occasion allows. Where he details his working philosophy in the interview, I find myself nodding:

Everything I do is on a case-by-case basis. The degree to which a book is left in German or all goes into English – I call it the schapps or wurst (or brandy or sausage) question. Whereabouts on the Anglo-American continuum it goes.

And elsewhere, he wrote something I find equally inspiring and close to my own emerging understanding of translation as a utopian project. Woods quotes him as describing translation as "a mode of reading so sympathetic and transitive that the outcome is a wholly new work, it's hunch and nerve and (my own muse) impatience. It's approaching the avowed-impossible, and shrugging your shoulders and just getting on with it." Yes.

There is much more in Kafka Translated but the second half focuses on Kafka's reception, which is of less specific interest here – although well worth reading. For me, the first half is an inspiring read for all those interested in translation. Woods is inherently sympathetic to the translator as a creative individual and has done us all a good turn by shining a light on four of the people who have indeed shaped our reading. She argues that what critics often launch upon as "mistakes" are almost always conscious decisions and should be respected as such. I devoured the book in one day and would wholly recommend it to general readers as well as translators, if only it weren't so expensive. for those interested in exploring translation decisions for themselves, Susan Bernofsky's exciting-looking new The Metamorphosis is more affordable.

Two Uncles or Not Two Uncles

Last night I attended a very open and friendly panel discussion kindly organized by Transfiction, which was about money in the era of digital publishing. The speakers – (digital) publishing people – talked a little about Amazon and their frustration at being unable to work around it. I won’t go into great detail about that except to say that I’m trying harder not to buy books from Amazon now.

What I found most interesting was a discussion about payment models. I asked why e-publishers are using different payment models to print publishers for exactly the same services, i.e. translation and editing. The answer, essentially, was that they don’t have enough money to pay advances.

Volker Oppmann was one of the panelists, and told an interesting story. He set up the publishing house Onkel& Onkel in 2007 with a loan from his two uncles; hence the name. Apparently he paid it back recently after selling his other business, Textunes, to Thalia. My friend Nikola Richter (Mikrotext) said that new publishers don’t have the backlist income that established (print) publishers have, but that small publishers of all kinds pay smaller or no advances. I would argue that this is not necessarily the case in the UK, but we weren’t talking specifically about the UK. And Zoe Beck of Culturbooks said that what e-book publishers are investing is their time, which amounts to money. They’re experimenting to find ways to pay translators (I assume editing is done for free by members of the team) such as 100% royalties up to a certain cut-off point. They’re also, as far as I understand, only commissioning translators for short books.

The situation is difficult for me to deal with, as a professional translator. On the one hand, I’m excited by all these experiments and the idealism with which they’re being undertaken. Nikola pointed out that e-publishers are bringing out books of unusual lengths and with unusual content that otherwise wouldn’t be published at all – although Zoe (an author and translator as well as a new publisher) didn’t reflect on e-publishers’ role in her own point that writers are earning less through royalties now that publishers are bringing out more books. Although I see it as a good thing, more choice, including digital reading matter, means smaller shares of the pie.

On the other hand – and what comes next is not going to make me many friends, I suspect – I see translators as less attached to the literature we produce than the writers themselves are. My work contributes to the quality of the product but it’s not the only factor; the writer thinks up the plot and the characters, for instance. So while it may be acceptable to an author that she will be paid after the fact and depending on how well her book sells, I personally am not willing to take that risk. While my task is a creative one, I am usually commissioned by publishers to translate books they have selected. According to my logic, they should then assume the financial risk for that decision. I personally am not in a position to work without being paid a fixed sum to compensate for my time.

E-only publishing in Germany is at a very early stage. The way I see it, at the moment people are starting their own e-publishing houses with a great deal of enthusiasm but very little capital. It now seems possible to publish without borrowing money beforehand, because the costs of printing, storage and physical distribution have fallen away. And so the other costs – writing, translation, editing, design, etc. – must be got around too, by means of “investing time”.

Again, I’m torn. I think it’s a good thing that people without two uncles willing to lend them money can publish books. But if in doing so, they require others to assume part of the publisher’s traditional risk, my worry is that only those with two uncles willing to subsidize their creative lifestyles will be able to participate further down the line. I say this as a person with three uncles, none of whom is in a position to lend anyone money. And I say it at a time when we’ve actually achieved a situation in which someone like me can make a living, more or less, out of literary translation.

My hope for the future is that e-publishers will end up making enough money to use the payment models employed by traditional publishers. My worst fear in this respect, however, is that traditional publishers will pick up on these new payment models and try to use them too. In my disaster scenario, that would mean that translators (and editors, writers, designers, etc.) without two uncles could only afford to work on books that promised high sales figures. And that would not be good for literature.

Help with Emerging

I'm pleased to hear there's now a network for emerging literary translators in the USA, ELTNA. Inspired by the very active British equivalent, ETN, it's an informal group of people who want to get into literary translation but can't yet join a professional association because they haven't yet published a book-length translation. I know a couple of the people behind the ETN and it seems to be a wonderful and mutually supportive thing. It didn't exist when I was at that stage of my career, plus I was in the wrong country, so my informal networks were even more informal. But I wish it had, because talking to other translators has always been key to improving my work and finding out about opportunities.

There are also some more institutional programmes on offer for translators-to-be. The one I imagine to be most awesome is the British Centre for Literary Translation's mentorship programme, pairing translators "with promise rather than experience" with translators with experience and contacts. The application deadline is 11 November. Also in the UK, New Books in German runs its own Emerging Translators Programme, commissioning translations from German from upcoming talents, coupled with a workshop, editing and mutual support. You can also sign up for summer schools at the BCLT and Birkbeck College, which I think are well worth the fees.

Prizes are another good way to pimp your CV - and also give you essential practice at working to a deadline and just plain translating. Practice is what makes you better. Hopefully continuing every two years, there's the German Embassy Translation Award for British translators, which comes with a month's stay in Berlin. The Gutekunst Translation Prize is a similar initiative in the States - although it's only open to under-35s, which I think is a shame because literary translation is something people often get into once they're more mature and have the language skills required. The Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize does the same (open to 18-34-year-olds with any country of residence) but from a different language each year. British residents or citizens of any age can enter poems in translation for the Times Stephen Spender Prize, with a deadline in May. You've missed the 1 September deadline for the Asymptote translation prize Close Approximations, but maybe they'll do it again. But you have until 14 February to submit unpublished translations into English for the John Dryden Translation Prize, no matter who you are.

Sometimes established translators seem to worry that we're encouraging too much competition in a situation where there's not much work to go around. I think that as long as we're realistic about how glamorous literary translation actually is - i.e. not terribly - more people with a passion for it can only be a good thing. I don't think it's a coincidence that the tiny increase in published translations comes with an increase in people enthusing about international literature and our work. In Germany, young translators are few and far between and you can sometimes tell that a book has been translated by someone significantly older than its author. I hope that building a more diverse pool of translators can only benefit the quality of translations, which in turn benefits us all.

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Nominations

Hooray! Two translators from German are nominated for the venerable Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Here's the full list:

Tess Lewis for Lukas Bärfuss, One Hundred Days (translated from German)
Louise B. Popkin for Mario Benedetti, Witness (translated from Spanish)
Sam Taylor for Laurent Binet, HHhH (French)
Frank Wynne for Alonso Cueto, The Blue Hour (Spanish)
Philip Boehm for Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel (German)
Mike Mitchell for Jean-Pierre Ohl, The Lairds of Cromarty (French)

How very exciting. The prize honours an outstanding translation from a European language. I'm pleased to see that they had more submissions than ever. The winner – announced in early June – gets £2000.

Dan Brown's Translators in Berlusconi's Bunker

I've written about Dan Brown's German translators and the conditions they work under before. And now the German trade publication Buchreport has written about the latest installment, which is even more bizarre than the last ones. Eleven translators into various languages, all spending weeks working in a windowless basement room beneath the Mondadori publishing house in Milan. They weren't allowed to take mobile phones in there, had to access the internet under surveillance via one computer, and worked until at least 8 pm every single day of the week. Although they were allowed to use the staff canteen, they had fake alibis in case anyone asked them what they were doing there.

The Italian listings magazine TV Sorrisi e Canzoni - also published by Mondadori - ran a gleeful piece on the security measures and interviews with the translators of Inferno. Note the guard's gun in the first of these links. Most of the translators are surprisingly positive about spending two months deprived of daylight and contact to their loved ones - Stockholm syndrome, perhaps? It was interesting, they say, to work with other people rather than alone at home. All of them admit it was very tiring though. I hope they were paid very well indeed.  

The book comes out simultaneously in English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Portuguese on 14 May. The foreign publishers seem to feel it's a good idea to make their translators work under these backbreaking conditions so that they don't lose revenue to the English original by bringing the translations out later - and because they obviously don't trust them not to pirate the content. Lord knows Dan Brown can hardly afford to let anyone know plot details beforehand; in 2011 he was apparently worth $400m.

God, it makes me so angry. And Mondadori publishing the details in their own magazine makes it all seem like part of a rather sick publicity stunt.

Some lovely links: NBG, US/UK Translators, Me

Some lovely links for your delectation:

A gorgeous new yellow springtime issue of New Books in German, featuring 29 new titles, some fascinating articles about Vienna and Austrian publishing, a great interview with translator Shaun Whiteside, and if you look carefully a list of newly translated and upcoming German-language books in English.

An interesting piece in Publishing Perspectives, in which top translator and BCLT person Daniel Hahn talks about differences for translators working in the UK and the US.

An interview with me at Authors & Translators. Thanks to the delightful Cristina Vezzaro for that.

On International Author-Translator Relations

My friend and fellow translator Cristina Vezzaro has a shiny new blog, called authors-translators.blogspot.it. She was rather tired of translators rarely being acknowledged in reviews and so on, and so she devised a questionnaire to put to authors. It turns out that some writers are all too happy to talk about their work with translators.

The blog seems to be in several different languages. If you'd like to submit an author interview, go to the blog for a contact address. And here are the questions in English:

Have any of your books been translated? If so, into which languages?

Have you had an opportunity to meet your translator personally or make contact with him or her?
 
How did the meeting or the contact go?

Is it difficult for you to entrust your literary work to a translator, or do you trust them blindly?

Have you ever heard someone reading extracts from your books in another language? What was your reaction?
 
Do you feel you can assess the quality of a translation?
 
What languages would you most like to see your books translated into, and why?
 
What's the first thing that occurs to you when you think of the profession of literary translator?

Go ahead! Jump on the authors-translators bandwagon! It's a bit of a win-win situation all round actually, with free publicity for writers and translators. What an excellent idea.

Michelle Woods on Re-Translating Kafka

The other day I linked to Daniel Kehlmann's speech in praise of his translator, Carol Brown Janeway. I did so mainly because it's wonderful to see translators lauded in public, especially by such a high-profile writer. However, there was one part of the speech I actually objected to, and that was this:

Academic translating means, more or less, translating in order to make it sound bad. I am not joking. For quite a while now some of the more important University departments for translation have taught their students to stay as close to a text’s original syntax as possible, in order to make the reader never forget that he or she is reading a translation.

Now, I am not party to what goes on in university departments for translation - important or not - although I do have a modest insight into what happens in more practice-oriented translation workshops. But I do think Kehlmann missed the point with this comment. What I hope is going on is that translators are learning to find their own fine line between fidelity and betrayal, and also to question the notions in the first place. There are many times, in my opinion and indeed in my work, when I too think it's wise to retain a semblance of German syntax in English, but there are others when I feel it's asking too much of readers. There are times when I do in fact want them to remember they're reading a translation and times when I want to give rhythm priority over content, or whatever.

One of the places where I think and talk about translation in a practical way is the no man's land translation lab in Berlin. Literary translators, either professional or amateur, old hands, beginners or even those still thinking about trying it out, can come along and bring texts they're working on for us to go through in the group. A while ago one of us was translating Kafka fragments, so we were looking at how on earth to put Kafka into English, with the added difficulty that this was unedited, unfinished Kafka. What on earth did he mean by that, what might that word have meant in 1914 Prague, and just how important is that modal particle? In this case, most of us agreed that the translator Ina Pfitzner needed to stay pretty close to the original syntax most of the time. But there are other Kafka translations - for other purposes - that veer further away, for instance Michael Hofmann's excellent version of "A Country Doctor". What Hofmann does is embellish ever so slightly, teasing out the gruesome humour. Whereas Joyce Crick's translation of the same story is closer to the original and therefore more useful for scholarly readers. Neither of the two is objectively better for an imaginary universal reader.

Anyway, there is a fascinating interview with Michelle Woods - someone who does teach translation theory - at World Literature Today, in which she talks about her forthcoming book on re-translating Kafka.

LBF Literary Translation Centre

Most of the programme for the Literary Translation Centre at the London Book Fair is now online. I want to go to every single event. I'll be talking about becoming a literary translator with Jamie Lee Searle, Tom Bunstead and Anna Kelly on the 16th of April, which also happens to be my fortieth birthday. I can't think of a better way to celebrate.

The centre is a marvellous place full of fantastic people. See you all there.

SAND Translation Competition Winners

Here come the judge!

Order in the courtroom. The results of the SAND translation competition for under-30s have been announced. It says here:

Judge Katy Derbyshire chose Allison M. Charette’s story “Big” for its fully-formed, naturally fluent feel and well-rendered dialogue. The story is a novel excerpt from Grosse by Isabelle Rivoal. (...)

Catherine Hales was impressed by Julia Sanches’ translations of Ana Martins Marques’ poetry from A vida submarina (The Subaquatic Life) and Da arte das armadilhas (On the Art of Traps). She especially liked the sense of quietness at the heart of the poems, their poise and perfect pitch in the language.

I made them wipe all the names off the entries so I could perform my judging duties impartially. We'll be all workshopping together some time in the spring. Congratulations!

Masterclasses and Translating Sex

London is rather nice in the spring, you know. And if you're going anyway you could sign up for a translation masterclass at the London Review Bookshop, in collaboration with the British Centre for Literary Translation. Here's what they say:

Each half-day session focuses on a single language and will be structured around close work on texts sent in advance to participants. Discussion will centre on the differences in approach evident in variant translations of the same texts. Participants should have a good working knowledge of the language and will be invited to prepare their own translations of the texts under discussion.

The workshop leaders are pretty stellar, too: Edith Grossman, Anthea Bell, Howard Curtis... and at  £75 a pop the sessions are affordable compared to longer affairs. 

Plus, not only to grab your attention, the bookshop is hosting a live translation event on Translating 
Sex. Out of French, naturellement. With two babes of the translation world, Polly McLean and 
Adriana Hunter, going head to head on a specially commissioned saucy short story by Emma 
Becker. With Sarah Ardizzone in the middle, they'll explore the delights of translating erotic fiction,  getting down to the nitty gritty of sexy voice and vocabulary. Then the next day both lovely ladies will give a masterclass (each) to let you have a go at doing it too.