The Three Rs in Translation: Lisa Carter

Lisa Carter, translator from Spanish to English, editor, writer, blogger and bookworm is this week’s interviewee.

How did you learn your source language?

I learned Spanish entirely through immersion. In 1992, right after university, I got a job in the Canadian  pavilion at Expo ’92 in Seville, Spain. Though the lingua franca of the fair was English, I did get enough exposure to fall in love with the Spanish language.

I’d studied French and German and Russian in high school, and as an undergrad, but Spanish was the language that truly became part of me.

Once my contract in Spain was over, I moved to Peru. I initially took a one-year contract but wound up staying in that magnificent country for seven years, followed by a year in Mexico. I returned to Canada and my mother tongue (English) in 2001, but Spanish is still part of my everyday life through my translation work.

How did you come to translation in general, and literary translation in particular?

While working at a language institute my first two years in Peru, I mentored under two women who often did work for the American embassy. These were mostly transcripts, letters of reference and other documents for students applying to study abroad.

I enjoyed this work and slowly added other types of translation. Occasional side projects became a part-time job and eventually I began to work in translation full-time.

Literary was always the goal, even if only in the back of my mind. I dreamed about how great it would be to bring novels I loved to a new audience, but I had no idea how to begin.

Soon after returning to Canada, I decided to reach out to an author whose work I admired: Edmundo Paz Soldán. He liked the sample translation I sent and we agreed to collaborate to find an English publisher for his novels. I provided a sample chapter and his agent successfuly found a publisher. Within a few years we published both The Matter of Desire and Turing’s Delirium with Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

What does your day look like while you’re translating a novel?

There’s rarely a typical day when I translate a novel. It all depends what stage of the translation I’m at and what other work I have at the time. I can’t exactly send my stable clients away for the four, five, six, seven or eight months it takes to translate a book, so I usually have to juggle a few jobs at once.

But my favorite sort of day when working on a novel looks something like this. First thing in the morning, I read over what I translated the previous day. I smooth and refine the English. Then, over coffee and breakfast (ideally curled up in my favorite chair, in the living room, in the sun), I’ll read the next chapter in Spanish, over and over again. I read with a pencil in hand, jotting notes, underlining tricky words, particular elements of style I want to keep in mind. I keep reading the same chapter until I can hear the English in my head.

At that point, I race to the computer and dash off a draft, fingers flying over the keyboard. I don’t stop to look anything up at all, but simply try to get an intuitive draft on the page. Once I have that, I’ll spend the next few hours researching and revising.

Usually after a chapter my brain simply can’t process anymore, so I’ll take a break or do some other work for a while. Then it’s rinse and repeat the next day!

What are your favourite contemporary books in the source language?

Unsurprisingly, I have a soft spot for Peruvian authors. Santiago Roncagliolo is brilliant. His portrayal of the light and dark in Peruvian society is truly insightful. Red April was translated by the queen of Spanish to English literary translation, Edith Grossman.

Alfredo Bryce Echenique isn’t entirely contemporary (he started publishing in the 1970s), but quite prolific, continuing to release a new book every few years. My absolute favorite title is La amigdalitis de Tarzán, translated into English by Alfred MacAdam as Tarzan´s Tonsillitis. It’s the story of a long-distance love, a friendship via correspondence that lasts for thirty years as both parties live in exile in different countries.

What have you read recently in English that you loved?

Two books I read last summer have stuck with me ever since: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. The writing in both of these is rich and masterful.

I’ve just begun reading Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. I’m fascinated by both the voice she creates for her teenage Japanese protagonist Nao and the way she introduces Japanese culture through dialogue.

What novel have you translated most recently?

My most recent translation is The House of Impossible Loves, a novel by Cristina López Barrio, due out in June 2013. It’s a family saga of love and revenge, woven through with magical realism, snippets of Spanish culture and history. It’s both complex and yet a smooth, quick read.

What were its particular interests and challenges?

One of the most difficult things in this novel was to maintain the author’s subtle use of magical realism. In this novel, plants are alive, they sprout year round as symbols of hope and fertility. The sea is personified; it is both a man and a father. But all of this is understated, threaded into the fabric of setting and story. My word choice has to be quite deliberate to ensure this aspect was noticeable but not overly salient.

The characters, on the other hand, are exceedingly vivid. Each one has some odd quirk, is in some way larger than life. In the English, I had to make sure these unique characters didn’t sound like caricatures.

Which is your favourite novel of the ones you’ve translated, and why?

I feel almost guilty being asked to choose, like a mother forced to single out one of her children! Each book I’ve done is truly unique and I love them all dearly.

That said, one of the most challenging yet rewarding books I’ve translated is Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldán. It’s a complex, many-layered literary novel with more than one simultaneous plot.

In terms of writing style, there were several distinct voices to master, with chapters being told from an individual character’s point of view. One narrator speaks in second person (you); another is not entirely in his right mind; a third speaks in what was known as l33t speak – like text or chat speak today, but back then was only used by hackers.

Every word, every line, every paragraph and every chapter of this novel required extreme attention to detail. I worked closely with Edmundo to catch all of the many nuances of plot and style.

Do you write (fiction or non-fiction)?

Yes, I write creative non-fiction. I fall most naturally into lyric essays, which are a mixture of poetry, essay and memoir. My main project right now is a memoir of my time in Peru. It’s in the early stages yet, however; I’m still experimenting between lyric and more traditional prose.

What’s your third R, and why?

For me, life is all about Reading, Writing and yet more Reading. I am constantly gobbling up the written word: works I need to translate, works I want to translate, works to make me a better translator and a better writer, works I critique in all women’s international online writing group I belong to, works that simply interest or inspire me. I read all day long for work, into the evenings and on weekends for pleasure. I may be the very definition of a bookworm!

The Three Rs in translation: Nick Caistor

How did you learn your source language?

I translate from French, Spanish and Portuguese, and learnt each of them in very different ways. I studied French through school (the only foreign language taught) and then through university and as a post-graduate: so I had a lot of formal teaching. I learnt Spanish by going to live in Argentina, and so learnt it ‘on the hoof’ ( or ‘sobre el pucho’ as they say in Argentina). I started translating from Portuguese when I suddenly found I had to translate a soap opera from Brazil for television in Britain.

How did you come to translation in general, and literary translation in particular?

After living in Argentina during the dictatorship, when I returned to Britain I was involved in human rights work on Argentina, Chile, El Salvador and other Latin American countries. This involved a lot of translation work, and that led on to translating Latin American writers forced to live in exile.

What does your day look like while you’re translating a novel?

I try to leave at least half a day completely free so that I can concentrate on my translation, and set aside another hour to read what I have done the day before.

What are your favourite contemporary books in the source language?

Anything by Javier Marias (translated by Margaret Jull Costa);

An Englishman in Madrid by Eduardo Mendoza (which I translated)

What have you read recently in English that you loved?

The Emperor’s Tomb by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann.

What novel have you translated most recently?

If I Close my Eyes Now, by the Brazilian author Edney Sylvestre.

What were its particular interests and challenges?

The main challenge was the way the book talked about race and its problems in Brazil in the 1960s in a quite oblique but convincing way.

Which is your favourite novel of the ones you’ve translated, and why?

Invidious to say.

Do you write (fiction or non-fiction)?

I write non-fiction based on the journalism I have done on Latin America. My latest book is CASTRO–A CRITICAL LIFE, with Reaktion Books, London.

What’s your third R, and why?

Gardening.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

There’s a great feeling that comes when you start to read a book that is ostensibly historical fiction, yet doesn’t feel like it; the kind of book that adds wonderful period detail to inner lives that both convince us that they are of their time while also resonating with current sensibilities; the kind of book that research imbues with lightness and confidence rather than drag and bombast. Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, is precisely this kind of book.

The Flamethrowers is predominantly about a young artist and motorcycle enthusiast, recently moved to New York in the seventies and wondering how to meet people and make her mark (“I’d thought this was how artists moved to New York, alone, that the city was a mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place”). The narrator—known as Reno, after her hometown—becomes the girlfriend of Sandro Valera, wealthy son of the owner of a large motorcycle company. Reno, supposedly an artist making films about movement and speed, but in fact more interested in the speed itself and the machines that produce it, has the chance to drive a Valera bike on the Utah salt flats, breaking the women’s land speed record. Soon she is invited to Italy by Valera, but Sandro, who does not care for his late father’s business, still less for his girlfriend’s involvement in it, tries to prevent her from travelling. The two end up going to Italy, staying with Sandro’s insufferably prejudiced mother. It’s a period of intense labour disputes and struggles, and Reno becomes unintentionally involved in dangerous politics after a sudden rearrangement of her situation.

This is an incredibly thin summary for a fascinating novel. In addition and at the same time, the plot encompasses so many different things: New York, Italy, the seventies, motorcycles as both a working-class hobby and an expensive sport, art, the pretentiousness of the art world, business, love and betrayal, labour and class warfare, Futurism, machinery … the list goes on. Even better is Kushner’s ability to really know—or make you believe she knows—exactly what it’s like to be in a war, or a violent protest, or to be a man, or to be in jail, or to live during a decade she can’t personally remember (or so her photo suggests). The Flamethrowers is about all these things, but is also, quite simply, about people and about now. It is a dazzling achievement.

Review copy.

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Tirza by Arnon Grunberg

Having never read much (anything?) in the way of Dutch literature before, I was intrigued to read two very recently translated Dutch novels that seemed to have much in common in terms of mood and character. Both The Dinner by Herman Koch and Tirza by Arnon Grunberg were translated by Sam Garrett, the translator who answered my Three Rs questions last week, so I took the opportunity to ask him about this apparent coincidence.

To give a bit of background, The Dinner is narrated by Paul Lohman, a middle-aged, middle-class man, with a son in his late teens, and the entire novel takes place over a fancy dinner with his brother, would-be prime minister. Lohman behaves very reasonably at first, appealing to our supposed shared tastes and shared belief that the finer things in life should be tempered with reasonableness and moderation. Over the meal we gradually realise that the narrator’s hostility towards his brother is much more complicated than we at first thought, and the narrator himself becomes increasingly sinister. There’s also a very disturbing reason for the dinner in the first place, and as this is revealed our idea of which character is good and which is bad is constantly shocked into a new place.

My cagey summary stops there, despite the fact that the blurb reveals (as do most reviews) a lot more about the plot than I am setting out here. I rarely read blurbs before reading the novel, so I was possibly one of the few people in the world to read The Dinner without knowing what was coming. Sometimes advance knowledge heightens suspense, but in this case I think it would significantly weaken the novel’s power, which in my opinion is heavily dependent on the not-knowing. The voice would not have been so compelling and persuasive if I’d been expecting the events, having been tipped off by the blurb to interpret clues in just one way.

Tirza (published by Open Letter) is also narrated by a middle-aged, middle class man with a child in her late teens. The novel opens with Jörgen Hofmeester preparing sushi for his daughter Tirza’s high-school graduation party. His wife has recently returned to the house after an absence of three years, not because she wanted to mend the relationship with her husband or her daughters but because there was simply nowhere else to go. Tirza is essentially the story of a man whose life seems to be pretty much sorted, but who has in fact been unravelling quietly for some time. This unravelling gathers pace and intensity as the novel progresses, with Grunberg demonstrating quite masterful control of both characters and readers.

Both novels convey a very bleak view of humanity. While The Dinner shocks us with the adults’ apparent unconcern for rightness and honesty, and for the characters’ deliberate cruelties and sins of omission as well as their prizing of individual success over the common good, we can imagine a few people we know, or know of, having these discussions. Tirza’s dark events, on the other hand, seem to emerge from ongoing stress and pressure, individual and societal. Is this novel’s brutal twist more horrifying because it is so extreme and unbelievable, or is The Dinner more dreadful because we can actually believe that people behave like this?

An interesting question. In literary terms, I happen to think that Tirza is the more successful book, but together they are fascinating in the picture they paint of contemporary Holland. The two narrators desperately want, for their different reasons, to seem normal and reasonable, while being unable to stop dropping hints of a darker side that they are not able to entirely cover up. One difference between them is that Lohman in The Dinner seems to care little whether this dark side—in his own life and that of his child—causes damage, whereas Hofmeester is more troubled by changing moral standards and a perceived loss of certain values, yet feels partly compelled to pretend an acceptance of this new state of affairs. He makes much, for example, of not mentioning the teenage boys he encounters in the bathroom after his daughter’s one-night stands. This leads to Tirza feeling as though she can be very open with him about her life, but does not translate to the same level of comfort for Hofmeester.

Sam Garrett agrees that “the two novels share a view of human endeavor that is, well… not particularly optimistic. In fact, to say that Jorgen Hofmeester or Paul Lohman are flawed characters would be an almost hilarious understatement. It would be like calling Hitler an ‘influential German politician’.” He continues, “I’m not sure whether that shared world-view has anything to do with the ‘midlife crisis’ the Netherlands has been going through for the last decade or so. I think, however, that the Dutch wake up more often these days, look in the mirror, and aren’t sure they like what they see. Or at least they don’t like it as much as they used to. Both novels would seem to fit that ‘morning-after’ feel. Fiction, after all, isn’t Alka Seltzer. It’s more like the bathroom mirror and the merciless fluorescent lighting, isn’t it?”

I’d be interested in reading more Dutch fiction after this. Perhaps I’ll start with Sam Garrett’s recommendations: Dimitri Verhulst and Tommy Wieringa.

Review copy.

(c) All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content, except comments by others, copyright JC Sutcliffe.

The Three Rs in Translation: Sam Garrett

This week’s guest is Sam Garrett, a translator from Dutch to English. I asked Sam to take part in the interview series after reading two novels he translated. I’ll write about Tirza, one of those novels, next week.

How did you learn your source language?

I learned Dutch, in fact, as an antidote to boredom. During a long trip to Central America in the late 1970s, while I was lying sick in bed, my Dutch girlfriend began teaching me how to pronounce the language’s peculiar vowel diphthongs. Later, after we moved to Amsterdam, I started reading children’s books to wile away the time as I waited for my residence permit. Then – I suppose you could say – I moved on to bigger things.

How did you come to translation in general, and literary translation in particular?

Some of my colleagues actually have a university degree in translation studies. But I started out as a wire-service journalist: I learned the mechanics of writing prose before I learned to read or speak a second language. At first, translation in general was a useful way to make a living in an otherwise tight job market. The desire to translate literature, however, arose simply because I wanted to share with friends and family ‘back home’ some of the absolutely unique prose I encountered in the Netherlands.

What does your day look like while you’re translating a novel?

I start around 10 in the morning, knock off around 5 in the afternoon. Six days a week, if I’m in the midst of a big project. With lots of breaks in between, though, to read magazines or just get up and walk around: I have a very short attention span, about forty-five minutes, I believe.

What are your favourite contemporary books in the source language?

Flemish writer Dimitri Verhulst’s The Misfortunates and his Madame Verona comes down the hill are both wonderful. Tommy Wieringa is a fantastic Dutch writer (my translation of his Caesarion has just been shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize): his novel Joe Speedboat has so much flair and empathy, it deserves to have many more readers than it’s had till now. And give me almost anything by Arnon Grunberg, any day of the week: his novel Tirza is startling, a bleak mind-bender. And The Story of My Baldness, which he wrote under the pen name Marek van der Jagt, is a wonderfully weird Bildungsroman with a serious twist – set in Vienna, appropriately enough.

What have you read recently in English that you loved?

James Wood’s How Fiction Works, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds.

What novel have you translated most recently?

I just finished a huge non-fiction project, actually: Congo, a history by the Flemish writer David Van Reybrouck. A marvelously ambitious stork’s-eye view of the history of a huge country we’ve all heard of but about which most of us know little or nothing at all.

My most recent novel was The Dinner by Herman Koch.

What were its particular interests and challenges?

The voice and character of The Dinner’s narrator, Paul Lohman, was a joy and a challenge to capture. I myself have a fairly bare-bones style when it comes to prose, I believe, but Herman Koch actually goes me one better on that. I had to rein myself in, render and reduce.

Which is your favourite novel of the ones you’ve translated, and why?

What a terrible question! How could I pick just one?  I’ve loved a few. Do you expect me to kiss and tell?

Do you write (fiction or non-fiction)?

Both. I’ve had things, stories and essays, published here and there.

What’s your third R, and why?

That would have to be “razzmatazz”. In the words of Duke Ellington: it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. That applies as much to letters as it does to love.

Tenth of December by George Saunders

I stumbled across George Saunders quite by accident in the days before I really knew how to describe, much less how to find, the sort of books I really wanted to read. I read In Persuasion Nation and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil in quick succession, captivated by both content and form, plot and sentences. Being such an uninformed fan, I was taken aback by the strength of the hype, adoration, worship and so on that surrounded the release of Tenth of December earlier this year.

As I read the book I alternated between thinking how fantastic everything was and deciding it wasn’t all that different from other stuff I’d been reading recently. Both opinions remained with me throughout, although after I’d read a few other novels and short-story collections I did concede that Saunders truly is a master. One real ability he has that a lot of people writing in a similar genre lack is the power to stretch the ridiculous just far enough without pushing his characters over the edge (after which there’s an unsurvivable drop to the ground, with the characters’ smashed pieces revealing that they were never living and breathing in the first place). He shows the private details of lives, details that could be from our own lives, details we’re perfectly happy about while they are private, but embarrassed about when they become public. Kyle Boot and his family, for example, in the first story, “Victory Lap,” are a little unusual. Their house has a wooden indicator to show how many of the three family members are at home (but why is “All In” even necessary, Kyle wonders?). There’s also a system of points (Work Points, Usual Chore Points, Total Treat Points), which allows Kyle to cash in points for treats (TV minutes, yoghurt-covered raisins). So it’s a little over the top, setting the characters up to make his point, but far from impossible. And who doesn’t secretly find that appealing know plenty of people like that?

Kyle is supposed to be doing a job for his father, but is instead getting mud microdust on the carpet and making up swearwords in his head, when he notices–because he has to fill in the Traffic Log—an unusual van. Because the driver is a stranger, Kyle is duty-bound to stay in the house until his departure. Then he realises this man, dressed as a meter-reader, is threatening and trying to abduct his neighbour Alison (whom he considers a national treasure and the dictionary definition of beauty). We’ve already met Alison, and seen her curtsying in front of the mirror, dreaming of {special one} and appreciating her lovely normal family—and we’ve seen how she pities and even despises Kyle. Can Kyle disobey his father’s directives (Major and Minor) and help Alison, or will he stay on the deck, watching helplessly as she’s dragged away? For several long seconds, he doesn’t know, and neither do we. The story is, I suppose, a commentary on all kinds of things—on helicopter parenting, infantilising children, the loss of a sense of community responsibility. It’s hopeful in several ways too, that despite the mind-your-own-business-unless-you’re-posting-photos-of-the-event-on-the-web-instead-of-helping world we’re supposed to live in (which is partly true, but only partly) these teenagers can still drag enough decency out from somewhere.

As well of exploring imaginary places and worlds, Saunders is also interested in investigating the inner minds of all kinds of “unusual” people, including teenagers, making them seem authentic, familiar and wholly unexpected all at the same time. One of my favourite stories was “Escape from Spiderhead,” a tale in which the narrator, Jeff, is given a drug that testers hope makes people fall in love. To control the test, Jeff must then choose which of the two women he has fallen in love with that day will receive a dose of Darkenfloxx–a drug that causes the patient to feel utter despair and is sometimes fatal. The characters in the quirkier stories (perhaps even in the more realist stories) turn out to be a little two-dimensional on a second read, but that seems oddly unimportant. A little stranger is the fact that a lot of the stories seem to have socio-political messages, but Saunders is sometimes puzzlingly disingenuous in interviews about these messages. In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” for example, which shows an American family buying into status pressure and acquiring three SGs–impoverished immigrants who function as live lawn ornaments, you might assume the commentary was about, say, Filipina nannies or exploited immigrant workers more generally. But in an interview on the New Yorker blog, Saunders first agreed that such an interpretation was valid, but then said, “If the only thing the story did was say, ‘Hey, it’s really wrong to hang up living women in your backyards, you capitalist-pig oppressors,’ that wasn’t going to be enough. We kind of know that already.” Of course that’s true, but we also know that fiction with a message has to have something much stronger than the message if it’s to succeed. Perhaps it comes down to being afraid of accusations of earnestness.

The persistent feeling that it wasn’t that different from other things I read is probably true, but it would not have been true if this book had been around when I first discovered Saunders. I enjoy two main features of his writing: his focus on sentences, and his portrayal of a world that resembles our own but is not our own. It seems to me that there’s a lot more of this around in the literary genre than there was, but there’s still plenty of space for it to develop.

Review copy

(c) All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content, except comments by others, copyright JC Sutcliffe.

The Three Rs in translation: Stephen Henighan

This week’s guest is Stephen Henighan, writer, translator and literature professor.

How did you learn your source language?

I’ve learned most of the languages I know in the same way:  rigorous study of the grammar, then, once the grammar and basic vocabulary is anchored, total immersion in the environment, followed by rampant reading until I internalize the construction of sentences and develop a certain innate sense of the weight and value of particular words.  This process unfolded over a number of years with French, the first language other than English that I learned;  with subsequent languages it was accelerated.  It’s important to stress that at the time I was learning these languages, it didn’t occur to me that I might one day translate from them –or that I might translate at all.  My learning was motivated by the desire to communicate with my fellow citizens (in the case of French),  by my yearning to travel knowledgeably in faraway countries, and by my hunger to read literature in languages not my own.   From an early age, I regarded this as one of the most important activities to which a person could devote himself.

How did you come to translation in general, and literary translation in particular?

Until 2006, when I was invited to serve as volunteer General Editor of the Biblioasis International Translation Series, the idea of doing literary translation had rarely crossed my mind. Over the years I had become aware that sometimes when reading a novel in another language I was able to hear, in an intuitive way, what it should sound like in English.  This heightened my awareness that on certain other occasions, no matter how much I liked or admired a book, I could not hear what it should sound like in English. I had translated half of a novel from Spanish while working in Guatemala and, while living in Quebec, I had translated some poems from French as a stylistic exercise. But these were not serious efforts at becoming a working literary translator. That’s only come to the fore in the last six years or so, quite suddenly, but also with a kind of happy inevitability.

What does your day look like while you’re translating a novel?

Since my motivating drive in life is writing fiction –I’ve published three novels and three short story collections and have a couple of other books of fiction in the pipeline– and since I also hold down a demanding full-time job at the University of Guelph, when I’m in Canada my days all look pretty much the same. I get up early in the darkness and write –usually fiction, but occasionally journalism or academic criticism– from about 6AM to 9AM. Then I have a quick breakfast and leave for work. I teach, do administration, counsel students, engage in the blood sport of academic politics and so on.  If I’m translating a book,  that gets slotted in at the end of the day. I used to stay at the office until 9PM or 10PM, but these days I have a more stable private life and try to return home in time for supper at 7PM or 7:30PM. My translating is done at high speed at my office computer, during the last hour or so that I’m at work — usually between about 5PM and 7PM. When I’m translating a novel, I try to do at least a page a day and preferably two. Once I tap into the voice –into what it should  sound like– the first draft comes out very swiftly, though it does require revision.

What are your favourite contemporary books in the source language?

So far I’ve translated novels from Portuguese and Romanian. In Portuguese, I’m a big fan of Lusophone African literature, an extremely rich tradition which until recently was little known in English and is still translated only in a rather spotty manner.  It’s been wonderful to be able to include novels by writers like Mia Couto  and Ondjaki in the Biblioasis International Translation Series.   In Romanian, I’m a big reader of what’s called the inter-war period, the flourishing of Romanian fiction in the 1920s and 1930s.  I was amazed when I learned that Mihail Sebastian’s gloriously romantic novel The Accident was unavailable in English. I knew I had to translate it. I’m less well versed in contemporary Romanian literature, though I’ve read some of the major figures such as the poet Ana Blandiana and the novelist Mircea Catarescu.

What have you read recently in English that you loved?

I thought that Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending was a phenomenal novel. I was very impressed by Gore Vidal’s novel Julian;  at his best, Vidal, though remembered primarily as an essayist, was a better novelist than he’s given credit for being. Two Canadian short story collections have stood out for me in recent years: Clark Blaise’s The Meagre Tarmac and Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13. I should say that most of my reading over the last two or three years has been in Spanish and French, so I’ve read less in English recently than might normally be the case.

What novel have you translated most recently? What were its particular interests and challenges?

I’ve just finished translating the novel Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret by the young Angolan writer Ondjaki, which will be published in 2014. The narrator is a pre-adolescent boy who lives in a southern African beachfront suburb in the late 1980s. The language is both intensely colloquial and lyrical in a  peculiarly concise and compact way that betrays an acute awareness of the natural world tempered by pre-adolescent impetuosity. Capturing this tone required the development of a very particular, oddly offhand linguistic register. I worked hard to convey the discreet yet firm Angolanness of Ondjaki’s Portuguese, which distinguishes his language from that of Portugal, Brazil or even Mozambique.  By far the biggest challenge from a translation point of view was the novel’s bilingualism. Since it’s set at a time when most of the doctors and teachers in Angola were Cuban, there are extended dialogues where authority figures speak in untranslated Spanish and the African kids reply in Portuguese, sometimes resulting in comic misunderstandings. Since there’s no other language that’s as treacherously close to English as Spanish is to Portuguese, linguistic gymnastics were required to recreate these dialogues in English.

Which is your favourite novel of the ones you’ve translated, and why?

I’ve only translated three novels so far.  I hope to be able to add many more to the list before I have to choose a favourite.

Do you write (fiction or non-fiction)?

I mentioned my fiction above. One point I would make is that, even before I began translating, I explored translation themes in my writing.  My novel The Streets of Winter, which is set in Montreal,  uses various stylistic and linguistic somersaults to convey the confusions of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic conflicts and clashes.  My short fiction, in many ways, is about “carrying over,” as the Germans say, from one culture to another.  This is very evident in A Grave in the Air, my collection of short stories that engages with Central European history, but I think it’s been there from the beginning, suggesting that, in one form or another, the way that cultural goods change as they cross cultural boundaries was going to be one of my main preoccupations.

What’s your third R, and why?

It’s all too clear:  my third R is Roaming.  I grew up on the move, and it was the assumption that wandering from place to place was a normal way to live that started all the rest, particularly my curiosity about other literatures.