'Spinning an illusion': what exactly do literary translators do?

Every text contains within itself the possibility of its translation. When we pick up a book by an author writing in our native language, there is a tendency to think of the work as definitive and closed. But when we read in translation it reveals to us an alternative vision of that work formed from an entirely distinct linguistic system. Language is never static, a book can always be otherwise.  

The late, great literary translator Anthea Bell, who brought the works of Franz Kafka and W.G. Sebald – as well as the French Asterix comics – to the English-speaking world, once wrote: ‘[translators] are in the business of spinning an illusion: the illusion that what the reader is reading is not a translation but the real thing.’ She suggests that translators are trickster figures, they take the conceit of fiction one step further. I would add that they also chip away at the discrete notion of single authorship, causing us as readers to reflect on writing as a collaborative process through which we can and do regularly speak through others.  

The International Booker Prize celebrates works of translated fiction from around the world and highlights the symbiotic relationship between translators and their authors. But how exactly do translators work? We’ve spoken to three translators: Daniel Hahn, Aaron Robertson and Polly Barton, who work primarily on translations from Portuguese, Italian and Japanese into English respectively.

Daniel Hahn OBE is a prolific translator, writer and editor who has translated the novels of José Luís Peixoto, Philippe Claudel, María Dueñas, José Saramago, Eduardo Halfon, Gonçalo M. Tavares, and others, as well as sitting on the Booker Prize Foundation’s advisory committee. He won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2017 and was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa.

Aaron Robertson is a translator and writer, as well as an editor at Spiegel & Grau; his translation of Igiaba Scego’s novel Beyond Babylon was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize, The National Translation Award and more.

Finally, Polly Barton won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and her debut book Fifty Sounds, a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, was published in 2021. Fifty Sounds was shortlisted for the 2022 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Her translations have appeared in The White Review, Words Without Borders and Granta.

Here, these translators take us deeper into their work, talking us through the ethical, aesthetic and political considerations involved in literary translation. 

How do you ensure you capture the tone of the original?   

Polly Barton: In a way, that question feels a lot like saying, how do you ensure that you’re a good translator? Capturing the tone is for me what it’s all about, and it’s quite hard to unpick wherein that lies; taking tone very seriously, but not so seriously that it blocks off your access to creative solutions. Acknowledging that sometimes taking the longer route – veering away from the translation that seems, prima facie, the most ‘faithful’ – actually takes you closest to the voice, the tone, the spirit.    

Aaron Robertson: Tone is definitely important for me. For instance, I have worked on projects that attempt to balance humour and tragedy in really fascinating ways. I worked on a memoir by a woman called Martha Nassibou; she wrote the book Memories of an Ethiopian Princess. She was a young woman in the Ethiopian aristocracy when the fascists invaded in the 1930s. She and her family were ousted. They fled their country and lived elsewhere for several years. Martha wrote this book decades later, when she was an older woman and the book has this anthropological tone. It was part memoir of course, but she was also memorialising this lost aristocratic Ethiopian class. It had an academic, formal quality to it. When I was translating it was super important to me that I maintained that sense of anthropological decorum. This was not a vision that she had explicitly laid out. She did not say this is a work of ethnography, but I guess that another part of the task of the translator is to interpret what kind of work it is, to ask: what tone is the author putting forward? And perhaps that means you have to be attuned to the author’s history. You’ve got to know where a project is coming from. It’s important to the task of translation to go outside the text and understand its context.    

Daniel Hahn: It requires intuition. It doesn’t just require knowing loads of vocabulary, there is a suppleness to translation and the way we think about our own language we are writing in. I’m always surprised how difficult translation is, which is quite nice in a way. It is fairly rare that I get to the end of a text and go, there was nothing much to that. It is a process of discovering the complexity and subtlety of a piece of writing. It is not a direct thing. You don’t just take one word and replace it with another word until you get to 85,000 words and then you have a novel. Even the simplest thing, the number of different ways a character might say hello to another character, is weighted with choice. There are always lots and lots of possibilities. There is almost nothing that doesn’t have a choice involved, which might be an aesthetic choice, or it might be an ethical choice, about what precisely you are choosing to represent, about the character, about the text, and you’re not necessarily making all of those choices deliberately or consciously.   

Have you ever been defeated, or almost defeated, by a phrase or passage that feels untranslatable?   

Aaron Robertson: The project that I’m working on now is the first novel by an author named Giullia Caminito, a young literary star in Italy. Titled La Grande A, it is set in the late 1930s in Fascist Italy – just before the Second World War. It tells the story of a young mother who leaves her children with their aunt and uncle in Lombardy to travel to Eritrea in East Africa where she opens a cafe and works odd jobs. It looks at the communities of white Italians who live in Africa during World War Two, who moved there to be a part of Mussolini’s great empire. The book is in a large way about interrogating what it means to belong to a nation. It asks, who is a citizen and why? And so a large part of the book is concerned with linguistic nationalism; the role language plays in regulating who belongs and who doesn’t. There’s a lot of dialect in the book and I would just say that while it hasn’t defeated me, it’s been very challenging. When I came across the passage that had to be dialect, I tried to do a lot of research on my own, but luckily I have friends and professors who help me out.   

Polly Barton: Constantly almost defeated! I feel like that’s an integral part of translation, for me. Although, actually, the last novel I worked on, Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai, that almost-defeat felt more intense. There was a period of time when I had this sick feeling that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. But then you go about solving the individual conundrums one by one, and gradually the balance shifts. Consulting other people often helps. I think it helps to remind myself that I experience that almost-defeat in other pursuits too – my writing, for instance. In an odd way, it helps to know that you just have to do it, you have to put something – and so then the question just becomes ‘how can I do the best I can with this, while knowing that a perfect solution is impossible?’ Which ultimately should be the question from the start, I think. Allowing the impossibility to free you, rather than constrain you, is the trick – although that definitely doesn’t and shouldn’t mean then abnegating all responsibility.    

Daniel Hahn: There are always going to be things in a language that seem untranslatable. I am of the belief that it is still possible to do pretty much anything with pretty much any language. But the way you do it might be different. It might be that you replace a word with a phrase. It might be that you don’t have a word at all, that you can’t make a character say one thing that conveys exactly what it conveys in Portuguese, but you can indicate that with something else like an action. There are two ways of looking at this. Either everything is untranslatable because languages are never identical, or nothing is untranslatable. And I think both of those things are true and that there isn’t one word in a language, in any language, that maps exactly onto one word in another. There will always be some difference, if only because it will sound different. I also think nothing is untranslatable because there is always some way of expressing what the original text conveys. You might replace a phrase with a paragraph, remove it entirely and draw a picture.