Following an intense day of head-scratching in the translation workshops, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the students at the BCLT translation summer school would have retired to the bar for the evening to discuss nothing more taxing than which drink to order.
Not a bit of it. On the day I was there, we traded the workshops for the lecture theatre to hear Piotr Kuhiwczak (until very recently Associate Professor at the University of Warwick) ask the question ‘Is Trauma Translatable?’ Using autobiographical narratives such as Ariel Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North and Binjamin Wilkorminski’s discredited Fragments, alongside a screened excerpt from Claude Lanzman’s harrowing nine-hour documentary Shoah, Kuhiwczak questioned whether traumatic narratives could be communicated across cultural and linguistic boundaries. In the case of Shoah, we saw the testimony of the rural Poles translated twice: vocalised as French by an interpreter, and subsequently translated into English for the subtitles. Kuhiwczak also highlighted a third level of translation, which would have taken place as the Jews on the transports attempted to interpret the gestures made by the Poles.
A much-needed hour’s break later, we regrouped for dinner, after which the workshop leaders told us how they got into translating in the first place. Shaun Whiteside (here to run the German workshop, but also a translator of French, Italian and Dutch) described himself as a translation addict who, despite several attempts to wean himself off the drug, has always ended up ‘using’ again, with no real intention of quitting.
Sarah Ardizzone (French) came to translation via physical theatre in Paris and International PEN in London; her translations of fiction by Faïza Guène, Daniel Pennac and Timothée de Fombelle have won her many awards. She had some succint words of advice for the assembled students: translating is a solitary business and it will ruin your back ('get some voice recognition software'). Otherwise, she loves it.
Daniel Hahn, like Sarah, never intended to be a translator, but his knowledge of Portuguese led him to have a go at translating a novel by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa. Four Agualusa novels – and a biography of footballer Pelé – later, he’s still at it (when he’s not writing biographies of famous poets or editing literary reference works).
Susanna Basso’s deep commitment to, and love of, translation is evidenced by the students who come back year after year to take part in her summer school workshop at BCLT. A glance at the authors she has translated from English into Italian will give you some idea of her abilities: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, Henry James, Alice Munro, Angela Carter, the little-known Jane Austen … The list goes on.
Nicky Harman ended up learning Chinese, she said, because her uncle wanted someone in the family to speak the language. She graduated from Leeds with a degree in Chinese Studies, but didn’t put these skills to use for several years – by which time she’d forgotten many of the characters’ meanings. Having relearned these essentials, Nicky begain translating both fiction and non-fiction; her authors now include Xinran, Hong Ying and Han Dong. She is also involved in Paper Republic, a website promoting Chinese literature in translation.
Nick Caistor’s love of translation stems from an excess of Latin lessons in cold, damp classrooms while he was a schoolchild in north-west England. Every time the teacher of another subject was ill or left, Latin was substituted. By the time Nick came to turn over the Latin ‘unseen’ exam paper, he was an expert – and hooked. Fluent in French and Spanish, Nick has translated more than 30 novels from Latin America and Spain, and many films.
So. Six translators; six very different journeys. What they each quite clearly have in common, though, is a love of the work they do. The pay’s poor, you’ll hurt your back, you always end up doing much more than translating the book (you’ll probably have to do some editing and some advocacy on behalf of it), and it’s solitary work, but this lot wouldn’t miss it for the world. Neither, judging by their enthusiasm, will the summer school students, all of whom seem intent on doing this most exacting work for a living.
James Smith, website editor (July 2009)
