26 February 2009
Entry 17
Still nothing …
But a couple of other matters to report meantime.
The first is to tell you that I’m in Salzburg, where I’ve been spending the week at the Schloss Leopoldskron (beautiful snow-covered lakeside palace…) with a group of people from around the world all of whom are interested in promoting literature in translation. Writers and translators, publishers and funders, associations and press and others besides. I can’t list all the interesting people I was delighted to meet, but just to give you an idea of the range, the contingent coming in from the UK included Antonia Byatt and Kate Griffin from the Arts Council, Independent literary editor Boyd Tonkin, translator Shaun Whiteside who chairs the Translators Association, Caroline McCormick who’s the executive director of International PEN, writer Marina Warner, and Amanda Hopkinson, Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. That’s pretty good company. And then there are all the other countries…
Apart from the inevitable grumbles about how much we get paid (which is what happens when you put several translators in a room together – and, predictably, rather amplified when there are publishers and funders within earshot too…) there were all sorts of interesting discussions about strategies and individual initiatives for encouraging the publishing and reading of translated literature, predominantly in the English-speaking world (where there are particular problems) but more broadly too. The mixture of background – both in terms of the parts of the world the seminar fellowship came from, but also in professional terms (not just those of us here as translators but also people involved in all sorts of other parts of the translation chain – the promoters, booksellers, editors, etc.) led to some good recommendations and – I think – to a sense that good things will come out of this.
Certainly the seminar itself was very valuable – five days with lots of people thinking interestingly at each other – but the follow-up is where the change will happen, of course. The publication of a report with recommendations, the birth of projects that were born from discussions here, from the network that was built, great-sounding projects in one part of the world being replicated in others, etc.
(I’m pleased to say there were many people there I didn’t know who’d been following this blog, and saw it – and the contributions from those of you who have been reading it and writing in – as a really good way to bring together people interested in the subject, and to interest new people in it too.)
The translation seminar was also the perfect place to be for the announcement of the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (a prize cited several times this week as a good example of a really effective promotional initiative), and I’m delighted to say that my last book with Agualusa, My Father’s Wives, is on it! It’s my favourite of his books, and I think his best, too – the most ambitious and I think utterly beautiful and rich and surprising, but it’s less easy and less obvious than The Book of Chameleons so it’s especially lovely to have it recognised.
It’s lovely too, after a few days of discussing the promotion and business of translated literature, to be reminded of the work. Translators seem to spend an awful lot of time being advocates for translation (which is right and proper and often – as this week – extremely stimulating and enjoyable); but the translation is, of course, the thing.
The translation-advocate role of a translator is inevitable – and in certain respects it’s a role only a translator can fill (though this week I felt I was acting not only as translator and advocate but also as agent, keenly selling Agualusa on to other countries – will be emailing his real agent with an update shortly…). But it’s about producing quality translated work foremost, of course – so the Indy longlisting is a very welcome recognition of that for which I’m most grateful.
And while I wait for more on Rainy Season, I’ll leave you with what I think is my favourite paragraph from the just-longlisted My Father’s Wives, as a little taster in case you don’t know it. Read it aloud if you can…
[To set the scene: Bartolomeu (who narrates this section) has told us earlier in the novel about the death of his father, killed during the recent war. Now he and his friends are driving through the desert, and they stop in a middle-of-nowhere café for a bite to eat. When they get into conversation with the old café-owner it becomes clear that this was the man who killed his father. Bartolomeu, shaken, goes outside to compose himself. The older man – who has just realised what is going on – comes out to ask for Bartolomeu’s forgiveness, and offers him his hand…]
I took his hand, a broad, bony hand, a little calloused. I noticed his face properly now. He had light eyes, hazelnut-coloured, clean and sincere, with little wrinkles at the corners. Deep bags under his eyes. I remembered an old turtle from my childhood. He went by the name of Leonardo because he really liked listening to Leonard Cohen. Sometimes he’d disappear for weeks. But to bring him back all you had to do was put on the record of the Canadian singer – at the first lines of Famous Blue Raincoat –‘It’s four in the morning, the end of December, / I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better …’– Leonardo would emerge from some unknown abyss somewhere, still dragging behind him the torpor of a long sleep, he would get up onto his tiptoes next to one of the columns, he’d stretch out his neck, and for brief moments would seem to be completely happy. Then he would go back to being sad again. A sadness like the sadness of the deserts. This man in front of me now, he looked like Leonardo looked, the turtle, when the music came to an end.
I love it. More soon.
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
