When reading works in translation, do you ever wonder about the decisions the translator makes? Why did they choose a specific word? How long did it take them to figure out the proper way to evoke a feeling? Is it difficult to find a similar translated saying? We wanted to better understand what exactly goes into translating fiction, so we asked Ginny Tapley Takemori, translator of Japanese fiction for Sayaka Murata, Diane Oatley, translator of Norwegian for Winter Stories by Ingvild Rishøi, and Bruna Dantas Lobato, author of Blue Light Hours and translator of Brazilian literature.

 

How did you get into translation?

GTT: I first got into translation when I was living in Barcelona and started working for a translation agency translating cultural documents from Spanish and Catalan to English. Later, I worked with a literary agency specializing in foreign rights and started to form the idea of trying literary translation. Then I discovered Japanese literature, dropped everything and went to study a four-year degree at SOAS, London University. Upon graduation I wrote to a senior editor at Kodansha International, at the time the foremost publisher of Japanese literature in English, and he ended up offering me a job as an editor, so I moved to Tokyo. After some years I decided to leave and focus on freelance editing while I transitioned to translation. I have been translating literature exclusively for probably around ten years now.

 

What is your favorite part of translating works from other languages into English?

GTT: I love immersing myself in the world of the original work—getting to know the characters and the lives they live and working out how the narrative voice should sound in English, how the characters talk, and then seeing the work come alive again in English. It’s a process that takes time and begins with a struggle, but as all the pieces start falling into place is an absolute joy. It’s a process that I never tire of.

 

How long does it take to find the perfect word or phrase?

GTT: Anything from a few minutes to days, weeks, months . . . ! Often when it’s something I’ve been struggling with for a while, the perfect solution will just come to me when I least expect it—and that is immensely satisfying!

 

Do you write? If yes, how has translating impacted your own writing?

GTT: Other than the occasional short essay, I don’t write anything for publication. I do tend to write poetry and random thoughts just for myself—as it helps me clarify my own thoughts—but I never show it to anyone! People often ask me why I don’t write for publication, but the fact is that I just love translating amazing works of literature—that is what really stimulates me and makes my life worth living. If I ever write something I feel is worth publishing then I will pursue it, but it’s not particularly an ambition I have.

BDL: My fiction writing and translation work feed into one another. Translating has made me more aware of language and what it can do in terms of form, texture, and style. I don’t take it for granted that everything in the English language is a feature of the English language. Garielle Lutz has written beautifully about how a good sentence has “tactual materiality” and “cubic bulk,” and that’s evident when I’m comparing sentences in different languages that have similar meaning, but one somehow feels denser or lighter or crisper than the other and therefore delivers its meaning differently. At this point, I’ve tried my hand at being many kinds of writers, in different genres and even in different time periods. All that experience and practice have made me more intentional as a fiction writer, hyperconscious of how form and content go together. And of course, you have to be a good writer in order to be a good translator, so all my writing knowledge goes right back into my translations.

DO: I am also a writer. I was a dance critic, have done academic writing about dance and literature, written poetry, and now mainly write creative nonfiction and personal essays. Translation has impacted my writing in a number of ways, and my writing also impacts my translation work. It wasn’t until I finished my first translation of a novel that I even considered the possibility of attempting to write a long-form literary work. There was something about having accompanied the author on part of that journey that not only inspired me but also gave me a visceral sense of the range such an undertaking demanded from the writer—a range I suddenly felt that I might find within myself. The translation process also taught me a great deal about layering and narrative structure, not to mention the amount of editing and attention to finer details involved in writing a novel. As a translator you also have to develop this ability to work on both a micro and macro level, to see every single tree, as well as the forest.

I have a master’s degree in comparative literature, but the work of literary analysis is very different from creating or translating a literary text. So, I guess I would say that translation has taught me a lot about writing and as my writing has improved, I know that has fed into my translation and editing work, has affected the way I approach especially literary translations. My exposure to Scandinavian authors has had an impact on my writing, in terms of the stylistic choices I make and my ideas about what literature can be. I am actually working on a series of personal essays about this subject, where I address works by Vigdis Hjorth, Suzanne Brøgger, and Liv Køltzow, among other authors, in an exploration of how the themes they write about and the narrative strategies they employ have shaped my perception of the world, and by extension, also decisions I have made that have had real-life consequences.

I was inspired to start writing about this after attending a writers’ workshop in the US, at which time I was confronted with the fact that I was drawing from a personal library of works that was very different from that of the others at the workshop, most of whom had studied only the Anglo-American tradition. I was born and raised in the US, but my mother is Norwegian, and I have spent my adult life in Europe, where I have studied in addition to Scandinavian authors, also French, and more recently, Spanish. I began thinking about how having studied especially female authors from other cultures has affected me as a person and as a woman, and by extension, how this has also affected my writing.

This became a series of essays that ask what would happen if you were to take your cue from your favorite authors’ ideas about female autonomy, and by extension, about desire and sexuality? How would this play out in real life? Literature becomes a template disclosing the potentialities of the self. Life mirrors art, but more importantly, the authors become mentors, and literature becomes a handbook for navigating, in my case, a polylingual, culturally divergent existence.

 

Do you have authors that you regularly translate for? How has translating for them changed throughout your time working with them?

GTT: I work closely with two authors, Sayaka Murata and Kyoko Nakajima. They are both very different authors, but they are both very generous with their time and open to my questions. In Sayaka’s case, she frequently revisits the same themes in her work, often from a different angle, and every time I come across a theme or word that I’ve struggled with before, I feel like I gain a deeper insight. It starts feeling like meeting old friends again! Her style is very idiosyncratic, and it is quite a challenge to capture in English, but I find it comes a little easier to me the more I translate by her. In Kyoko’s case, she also understands English—and translation—very well, so I send my completed manuscript to her look over and let me know if there is anything she feels I haven’t got quite right.

 

When you come across a sentence, phrase, or idiom that doesn’t have a direct translation how do you go about evoking the same meaning in English?

GTT: If it’s an idiom, I will see whether there is an equivalent idiom in English that will work in the context, and if there isn’t I will probably try to make up something that sounds like an idiom! Word play is something that often features in Japanese as the language lends itself to it, and I will do my best to try and come up with something that works in English. Kyoko Nakajima loves wordplay and often uses it, and one example I could give is from her Naoki Prize–winning novel The Little House, which is written from the perspective of an elderly woman called Taki reminiscing on her days as a maid in a well-to-do household in Tokyo in the years leading up to World War II and the Pacific War. Taki had written a bestselling book on housekeeping tips, and her editor is now trying to persuade her to do a sequel, but Taki has a different type of book in mind. In that case, the editor tells her perhaps she should talk with jihi shuppan, the division that publishes at the author’s expense. Taki mistakes the word 自費 (self-funded) for its homonym 慈悲 (charity) and is offended. To retain the wordplay here I hit upon vanity publishing, which she mistakes for vanity meaning excessive pride. Not exactly the same, but it fits the context and gets the pun. The final passage read:

“I could introduce you to someone from vanity publishing services if you like.”

That was a disagreeable way of putting it. I was beginning to think that if it was a matter of vanity, I didn’t need to have them publish it after all.

BDL: I think about what the sentence is doing in that paragraph and in that chapter and in the piece as a whole. It’s never doing only one thing. Sometimes it’s offering comic relief, a shift in tone, and a moment of introspection for a character, all at once, so I try to take a step back and hit those marks. It’s helpful to think of meaning at both the micro and macro levels and not get so caught up in the literal meaning of an individual phrase that I can’t see the forest for the trees.

 

What work in translation do you think everyone should read? Bonus if it’s written by a woman.

GTT: Oh dear, it’s so hard to pick just one! Maybe Enchi Fumiko’s Masks, translated by the wonderful Juliet Winters Carpenter who sadly passed away a couple of months ago. It is an extraordinarily complex modern novel that is both compelling and deeply rooted in Japanese culture, drawing on The Tale of Genji and Noh theater.

DO: The authors I find the most interesting are those who “make up” their own language, for whom the use of language is as much the story as any plot events or narrative arc. I recently read The Besieged City by the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (born in Ukraine), who is one of my favorite authors-in-translation. The Besieged City is one of her lesser-known novels, and is unique for a number of reasons, among them that she kept working on the book after she’d “finished” it. It was as if the book kept evolving inside her, even after it was supposedly done. The book had a life of its own and she felt bound to follow its lead.

The book is about many things, but I was particularly inspired, again, by the literary voice. The author is uncompromising in her rendering of the almost violent impact of the physical world on the senses of a young female subject, who exists in an almost constant state of sensory overwhelm. This was the first time I’d read a work of fiction that did not hold back in endeavoring to evoke that which would now certainly be defined as a non-neurotypical consciousness, but without seeking to diagnose, psychoanalyze, or pathologize it. It is presented as the worldview of a perceptively “besieged” female subject.

Not only do I think that everyone should read this book—not least as a counterweight to AI’s over-definition of what it is possible to know or express through language—but also that we need to do more to make this type of literature visible so we don’t forget what poetic language is supposed to do, what it gives us as it creates new worlds, inspires us, comforts us, offers alternative visions of what is possible, and more broadly helps us not to lose sight of the radical potentials of creativity in general.

Reading books in translation is another part of this, because by definition works in translation open a window not only to other worlds, but also to other ways of being in and understanding the world, through the possibility of immersion in a foreign culture that they offer. This is also an important form of resistance to the commodified flattening of language that occurs through AI specifically, but also through the increasingly standardized content, i.e. language use, found on the internet and social media in general, as well as in more commercial fiction.

Poetic language is also rooted in the body, and in the most basic sense reminds us of the wealth of knowledge we have access to through our senses. Again, it feels like AI is affecting a kind of disconnect here, fueling a process of increasing estrangement from our own bodies.

 

What kind of books do you gravitate toward when seeking out works to translate? Are there specific elements in a piece of fiction that draw you in?

GTT: I have a very eclectic taste, and I guess my only real criteria for enjoying a book (as reader or translator) are that it engages me mentally and emotionally, fires my imagination, and leaves me a little bit changed from before I read it.

 

Do you have a favorite word that you’ve come across while translating that doesn’t have a direct translation into English?

GTT: Well, that has to be irasshaimase—this is the word that you will hear everywhere you go in Japan, when you enter a shop or a hotel or restaurant etc., often in a loud chorus by all the staff there. It is essentially welcoming you in as a customer (not requiring a response on your part) and does not have an equivalent custom let alone word in English. Normally if it appears as a one-off in a translation, I will write something appropriate such as “Good morning,” but in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman it appeared so often it started taking on the presence of a character in its own right! I puzzled over that for a long time before realizing that the only true solution would be to leave it in Japanese—and it works amazingly well, as it happens!

 DO: When one takes part in discussions about translation, these types of questions about any specific words that are particularly resistant to translation are often used as an icebreaker, a way to get the discussion going. But rather than a specific word or phrase, for me, the answer would be all the words, which is another way of saying that what I find most challenging and also the most fascinating about translation is the process of capturing the voice of the author, how the author inhabits language.

I recently translated a short story by the Norwegian author Per Petterson. The story was written in deceptively simple language, which made it extremely difficult to translate. The setting was a neighborhood of Oslo that has a particular character and atmosphere that I know quite well. The challenge involved transposing the local flavor and cultural specificity, both of which were also implicit in the voice. When the writing is so transparent, so devoid of embellishment, there is nowhere to hide. Every single word must be unassuming in its precision, a poetic language of understatement that transmits entire inner and outer worlds without use of overtly complex literary devices.

I try to be as attentive to sonority and rhythm when I work as I am to the meaning of specific words. Or to put this differently, the physicality of the language is a critical part of the meaning. Sometimes when I have done a first draft of a translation and reread it, the English version sounds very flat to my ears compared to the original. I will then go through it, comparing the translation to the original, phrase by phrase, and making small adjustments and notes along the way. I will sometimes read sections aloud, in both Norwegian and English, so I can hear both versions and get a better sense of the musicality of the source text. Then I will put it away and return to it again the next morning. Revision, revision, revision.

As a translator, the sense of connection with the author’s voice is sometimes immediate and sometimes a bit more elusive. In the latter case, the connection arises gradually as I work my way into the text. Ideally, the work will “move” me, by which I mean push me outside of my own little mindset, oblige me stretch to find or create modes of expression I would normally never use in my own writing. You must let the author’s voice have its way with you, all the while maintaining the necessary distance. The translator has to expand internally to make room for the author’s universe, while at the same time become very small and attentive. There is a kind of chemistry at work, on the one hand, between the voice of the author and the translator’s own experience of the text, and also an undefinable something which you have to catch on the fly as you’re working.

 

Why do you think it’s important for people to read works in translation?

GTT: Translated fiction gives you the power to travel to other countries and worlds, immerse yourself in different countries, learn how other people live and think, and essentially broaden your own world. Ultimately, it gives you a different perspective on your own culture.

BDL: It pushes readers to think about language, narrative, and humanity beyond their own traditions. Plus, there are so many great books out there. I feel like I’m missing out on most of the world when I’m only reading books from the Anglosphere. It’s such a small part of the world, but it keeps taking up more space than it’s due on everyone’s shelves (and movie theater screens, newsfeeds, etc.). We got to maintain some balance.

 

What are you currently working on (if you can talk about it)?

GTT: Last September, Penguin Classics published my retranslation of Akiyuki Nosaka’s semiautobiographical novella Grave of the Fireflies, which was the inspiration for the Studio Ghibli animation movie of the same title, to commemorate eighty years since the end of WWII. I am now translating the remaining stories in the collection, for which Nosaka also drew on his own experience to paint a striking portrait of the immediate postwar years in Japan. In addition, I am currently examining an amazing but challenging novel by a different (woman!) author to see whether I feel I can do it justice in translation but can’t say what it is at this stage.