How does it feel to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023 - an award which recognises the art of translation in such a way that the translators and author share the prize money equally should they win - and what would winning the prize mean to you?   

It’s quite an honour, needless to say! I put a lot of hard work into my translation of The Birthday Party, of course, but even so I’m moved and just a bit incredulous to see my efforts put on par with the author’s. Winning would above all be a welcome opportunity to fund some new translation projects for my own small press, Fern Books. 

How long did it take to translate the book, and what does your working process look like? Do you read the book multiple times first? Do you translate it in the order it’s written?   

It took six very intense months, and the process – which I’ve described at length here – was as propulsive as the book itself, though slightly less ominous and significantly less classy. I read the book once before starting the translation, and went through it in order, albeit in multiple passes (I’ve seldom done it any other way). 

What was the experience of working with Laurent Mauvignier like? How closely did you work together? Was it a very collaborative process? Were there any surprising moments during your collaboration, or joyful moments, or challenges?   

I had a few exchanges with Laurent (which were extremely pleasant), but he told me early on that his English wasn’t good enough to weigh in on my translation, so I approached him for help only as a last resort – when I couldn’t figure out on my own why he chose to write this or that sentence in this or that unconventional way. His answers were not always, shall we say, entirely forthright. 

Aside from the book, what other writing did you draw inspiration from for your translation? 

Despite the various authorial comparisons I’ve seen bandied about – Javier Marías, Rafael Chirbes, Virginia Woolf – I’ve never read a book quite like The Birthday Party, so my answer is ‘being aware of but refusing to watch Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (both versions)’. 

What was your path to becoming a translator of literary fiction? What would you say to someone who is considering such a career for themselves? 

It was certainly circuitous. I knew early on that I loved writing, but more at the level of the sentence than that of the story, and translation seemed like a great way to get deep into creative decisions about word choice and syntax without being responsible for deciding what happens when, why, and to whom. (It is indeed that, among other things.) In a way, though, The Birthday Party is the first honest-to-goodness fiction I’ve translated. I’ve done non-fiction and memoir and poetry and a whole lot of unclassifiable literary experimentation, sometimes for work and sometimes for pleasure, but never something as monumentally A Novel as The Birthday Party. To someone interested in translating, I’d say don’t wait for a contract to start playing around in the limbo-space between languages, grappling with the unanswerable problems that lurk there, and finding your strengths and affinities. Opportunities will make themselves known. But also don’t expect it to become an exclusive ‘career’ any time soon. 

Why do you feel it’s important for us to celebrate translated fiction?    

I suppose literature in general needs all the celebration it can get, but boosting translated books in particular sustains a market for publishers doing high-risk ambassadorial work and readers curious about how people in other places make sense of their world and imagine alternatives, for better and worse. The more we read across borders, the more complex our notion of universality gets, and that’s as important now as it’s ever been. 

If you had to choose three works of fiction that have inspired your career the most, what would they be and why?  

Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller (translated by William Weaver), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi (Life A User’s Manual, translated by David Bellos) all expanded my sense of what fiction could do and be, beyond a simple enumeration of events that occurred to some people who may or may not have really existed.