Three Short Interviews with Literary Translators

Jessica Moore

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Can you share what brought you to literary translation?

JESSICA MOORE: My path to literary translation is one of those things that is clearest in retrospect, looking back on the turns taken, the choices and synchronicities and overlaps. Or the encouragements and opportunities you only really become aware of later. I always thought I was going to become a writer (and maybe this is a good place to remind readers that the translator is, by copyright law, the author of the new text—think about it: using the map of the original text, every single word in a translated work has been chosen and arranged by … the translator!). From elementary school through high school, I had a firm root in French (a bilingual school program, an exchange to Lausanne, Switzerland, when I was sixteen, a French teacher I loved). I went into my undergrad planning to do a degree in English literature, but after my best friend convinced me to come on a year abroad with her to Aix-en-Provence, I had enough French credits that I ended up graduating with a combined degree in English and French (which is what allowed me to apply to master’s programs in translation studies). It was also during my year in France that I took my first class in translation and found it immensely pleasurable. It satisfied my desire to write, at the same time as fulfilling a certain leaning toward puzzling things out, or arranging them just so (as in logic puzzles, like a book I had as a child called Alice in Puzzleland, or the gratification of rearranging spice jars in my mother’s kitchen cupboard).

TVL: What is the biggest challenge you face when working on translations? And/or what is the most rewarding element of working on a translation?

JM: For me, the most rewarding element of working on a translation is the miracle moment when the story or poem comes through that wordless space—before or behind language—and lands in my own mother tongue, revealing more of the emotion of the work than I was able to access in French. That’s a strange thing, the way emotion can feel at a slight distance in a second language—this is why I fairly quickly gave up speaking to my kids in French, because for me, English is my language of the heart. It is the moments of writing coming together in a pleasing way, which has a little bit to do with a balance between 1) capturing (but it is actually un-captureable) or honouring a work, and 2) the translation stretching far enough to become its own. It has to do with space, spaciousness, and a movement that is like the settling of leaves.

TVL: You’re a writer in addition to being a literary translator. How does your writing practice influence your translations, and vice versa? Or do you find them to be quite separate from one another?

JM: I’m sure my writing practice must influence my translations, with emphasis on the word practice—because I keep up my practice of writing, I’m more toned or primed to apply that sensitivity to my translations, as well. And, just as reading something very closely (who will ever be a closer reader than a translator?) can influence my writing by bringing in new rhythms or attentions, my translations sometimes creep, rhythmically or obsessionally, into my writing. Maylis de Kerangal uses the word “sagittal” more than once and I covet that word a little. Also, I have in the past used lines from a translation (Turkana Boy, my first translation) as scaffolding or springboards into my own pieces (Everything, now, my first book, borrows several epigraphs from my translation). There is too the way that thinking in a second language stretches the edges of my approach to English, which I find infinitely valuable.

TVL: What advice would you give to budding translators who hope to make a career in literary translation in Canada?

JM: I would say, read so much and listen to programs in your source language. Find a text you really love, enough to enter into a long and deep relationship with it, and play with translating—really let yourself play. Walk the fine line between loyalty (a tricky word) and independence, where your translation does become its own thing without adding elements that are not there in the original. Take courses or a program in translation or translation studies. And the same advice I would give to writers—read, read, read, and keep up a steady writing practice.

TVL: What is one project you are currently excited about? Or what are you working on now?

JM: I’m currently finishing revisions on two exciting translation projects—one is the longest novel I’ve ever translated (726 pages!), called Sailors Can’t Swim, set in the seventeenth century on a fictional island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean where only the inhabitants of the walled city are safe from the equinoctial tides. The story follows an orphan named Danaé, who possesses the rare gift of being able to swim.
And the second book is Maylis de Kerangal’s latest novel, tentatively titled In the Wake in English, which, in her habitual and totally compelling style, tells a kind of quiet police drama in which the city of Le Havre is a main character; a novel that has been compared stylistically to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
And finally, my current writing project is called Porous, and is a memoir of motherhood and art.

Jessica Moore

is an author and an award-winning literary translator with a special interest in the shadowy corridors between languages, and between people. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books, 2012) is a love letter to the dead. The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood, 2020) is a true story blending long poem, investigation, sailor slang, and ecological grief. Jessica lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, where she tends to her twins and her urban garden. Her work-in-progress, Porous, is a memoir of motherhood and art.