Frank Wynne interview: 'Literature in translation is a powerful way of fostering empathy'

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?  

Like many people of my generation, I came to literary translation by happy accident. I had no idea what skills or qualifications would be required to undertake the glorious yet onerous task of bringing other voices, other stories into English. An editor once asked why I choose to translate rather than to write, and I said, because through the art of translation I can be many very different writers, tell stories I could never have imagined or written, inhabit worlds that are at once familiar and completely alien. Like any role in the arts, it can be poorly paid and hugely frustrating, but the reward of recreating a text, rediscovering a voice, is unlike any that I have known.  

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

Since the dawn of language, human beings have told stories so that they can share their thoughts, their experience, their history, their culture. To my mind, literature in translation is the most powerful way of fostering empathy, of nurturing curiosity, of developing an understanding not only of others, but of ourselves. The history of literature written in English (or indeed any language) bears the mark of all the translations that have fed into the rushing torrent of voices that make up our world. How much poorer would we be without The Iliad, The Tale of Genji, without Don Quixote, without the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, the nightmare worlds of Kafka, the fever dreams of Bora Chung, the harrowing power and warmth of the novels of Mani Shankar Mukherjee. Literature, like music, expands to accommodate a multitude of voices, and celebrating those voices, those stories is, to me, the essence of what it means to be human. 

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

An impossible question, but I’ll give it a try:  

The novel that first exploded in my mind with the possibility of language, sound, music and emotion was Riddley Walker, the towering, poignant apocalyptic vision of the late, great Russell Hoban. 

Many books have marked my career as a translator, but perhaps the most important is Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma, a brilliant, biting satire of post-colonial Africa that marries an oral tradition as old as time itself with a warmth, a wit and a savage power that can evoke a whole world and reshape it in the conjuring. 

More recently, Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium (translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen) was among a series of novels (including Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft) that burst into my consciousness and forced me to rethink everything I thought I knew about literature. That is the real power of stories, and the true greatness of translation.