Three Short Interviews with Literary Translators

Katia Grubisic

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

KATIA GRUBISIC: I had always written—I’ve always thought of the world in worded images, and I’ve always had stories rolling around. In a manner of speaking, I had also always translated—helping my father draft translation from his cribs … He’s a writer, but English is only his eighth language or something.
I don’t think I had ever thought of the authorship of literary translation, however. I don’t think it had ever really occurred to me to read the books I was reading, in French, with an eye to rendering them in English. I had co-translated a play for a friend of mine. I had published my own work, I had translated poems here and there and had some work in journals, but I had never thought of the whole armature of literary translation: you have to think of the books from the point of view of the individual reader, as well as the wider readership, editorial concerns, publishers’ styles and approaches, and the market.
When Peter McCambridge founded the QC Fiction imprint in 2015 and contacted me to ask if I wanted to translate David Clerson’s Frères, it was more serendipitous than it was the result of any organized professional effort or intention on my part.
That translation, Brothers, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, which opened other doors. And, especially, it introduced me to Clerson’s writing, which I’ve continued to translate; it’s so wonderfully baroque, moving, and reality-altering. I really like his voice and his work; it fits me like a tailored coat.

TVL: It is an incredible skill to be able to translate a work from one language into another without losing the style and voice of the author of the original work. Is there a myth about the art of translation you wish you could dispel, or one thing about the practice of literary translation you wish more people knew?

KG: Especially as AI spreads the myth that linguistic equivalency conveys meaning equally (not to mention the extensive moral, ethical, and environmental issues around the use of AI), I find that the careful negotiation around the idea of creative freedom and voice that underpins—undermines, emboldens—literary translation becomes more relevant. Humanity is messy, complex, divergent, interpretive; and art, especially now, is first and foremost about humanity.
One word does not just mean another. Bad translations are often literal, just mirrors that distort just enough to make you doubt what you’re seeing. I think even many good translators can sometimes fall into the trap of wanting to cleave too closely to the words arranged like so in the original text.
What layers of meaning is that anxiety of faithfulness making us lose? What might we discover if we allowed ourselves to stray, to invent, to create? You have to be observant of the original, you have to listen to it so carefully it becomes a whisper in your own head, and ultimately you have to answer to it, and be reined in by it. But if you don’t try to push to the outer edges of what you might be able to make the words mean as a co-creator, there won’t be any depth to the translation. Art is inherently an iceberg; the meaning is seldom the part we see.

TVL: How would you describe your collaborative relationship with authors whose work you translate?

KG: So much of that depends on the book and on the author. With some, I’ve had the luxury of extensive discussion, and sometimes that’s necessary, and integral to their style, the book’s contexts, the writer’s approaches. In other cases, their voice feels like it just trips off my own tongue, and the back-and-forth tends to be about specific questions, intentions, or images later on in the process of writing and editing.
Translation is lovely because you get to fall into someone else’s project for a time, someone else’s world. I’ve been really lucky to work repeatedly with a few authors, like Clerson, like Marie-Claire Blais before her death, and with Marie-Célie Agnant on a novel and then on shorter pieces. So, then you get to evolve alongside them, you get to grow up together, to think with and against each other over books and years.
I’ve always valued long-term relationships between editors and writers, and I’ve been privileged to live a few, as a translator, with writers.

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

KG: Writing and translating has made me appreciate the hell out of editing. When I was starting out, I did a bit of everything, including some proofreading and copyediting, but as I’ve moved along in my career, and as I’ve benefited from incredible editors, I realized that the fine mechanics are just as much of a craft as the invention of the machine is an art.
I still do a fair bit of substantive editing, and especially bilingual editing; I feel like I have a kind of duty to contribute in that regard. And of course it teaches me things: whenever you have to articulate why something isn’t working, in order to let someone else apply their own abilities and strategies to solve it, it forces you to understand how the whole apparatus works: how come this character makes me react this way as a reader, how does structural stability or deliberate instability drive a narrative, how does the use of a particular pronoun create distance … ?
What a gift, as a writer of any sort, to be able to be the sum not only of your own thoughts, your own mistakes but also of mutual or even collective exploration and learning.

TVL: What would you say is the role of literary translation in today’s literary landscape?

KG: Literary translation is the art of rapprochement, of bringing together; I guess all art does that, but translation reaches across a rift more literally than others, perhaps, creating understanding where none may be possible. If that’s not necessary in the world today, I don’t know what is.
I really believe that art can save us, if we let it.

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

KG: I’m just wrapping up proofs for my translation of Catherine Leroux’s Peuple de verre, Republic of Glass, which will be out with Simon & Schuster this fall. Leroux’s previous books have been translated by Lazer Lederhendler and Susan Ouriou—giants!—so it was an honour to take on this novel. And it’s so good, beautifully written and inventive, and disturbing: in a proximous and not-implausible dystopian future, the housing crisis has taken on epidemic proportions, and leads to government measures that, unfortunately, aren’t too hard to fathom.

Katia Grubisic

is a writer, editor, and translator. Her collection What if red ran out was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book. Her translations of David Clerson’s first novel, Brothers, and of A Cemetery for Bees, by Alina Dumitrescu, were shortlisted for Governor General’s Awards. Her translation of Clerson’s short story collection, To See Out the Night, won the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation, and her translation of Marie-Claire Blais’s Nights Too Short to Dance won the Governor General’s Award.