An interview with Vincenzo Latronico and Sophie Hughes, author and translator of Perfection

Vincenzo Latronico

The inspirations behind Perfection, and how I wrote it 

I had tried for years to find a way to tell a story set at the intersection between our physical and our digital lives – how the two shape each other and our inner horizon. But it never worked – there is something about the way time spent online vanishes, about the simultaneity of it all, that seemed to resist any linear plot. Then I read Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties – which is about how consumerism changed a couple’s inner horizon – and immediately started annotating how it would play out today. The analogies seemed to write themselves. So I tried rewriting it, initially very closely, then taking some liberties along the way until it became a novel in itself. 

When I finished, at first, I was a bit dispirited. It is a short novel without real characters, without dialogue, with no explicit plot and almost completely made of descriptions. This makes it sound abstruse and boring. When I sent the first draft to my agent, I apologised profusely. I still read that email from time to time and have a laugh. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading / writing  

It’s the same, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I read it over the course of a single day at 15 because it was referenced in a comic book – my only reading at the time. I remember feeling my pulse increasing while finishing The Cask of Amontillado and thinking that if literature could do this – this spooky action at a distance in time and space, this guiding of dreams – I wanted it to be the centre of my life. 

Sophie Hughes 

The inspiration and process behind the translation of Perfection 

I’m always slow, but this short book took me a particularly long time to finish, in part because I had a baby, but also, I think, because it is my first published translation from Italian, so I was particularly dithering and tinkering, in a way that I no longer am with Spanish. I agree with Damion Searls that ‘decisions tend to get made unconsciously and instinctively, even if the translator likes to rationalise them afterward’. But something about the precision of Perfection’s descriptions and the level of detail meant there was a lot of time-consuming rationalising happening all the way through.  

It helped a lot that, despite not having met Vincenzo in person, I got to work closely with him. He’s an experienced literary translator himself, and instinctively understood what sort of input might be useful. Because the prose is quite stylised, and in part styled on another writer, Georges Perec, Vincenzo gave some initial notes like ‘I tried to keep figurative language to a minimum’. Most were things I would have hoped to notice anyway, but I liked working with Vincenzo because he cares about the smallest details, knowing from experience that over the length of an entire novel, making these seemingly inconsequential changes is actually the most important part of the process of reconstructing style in another language.  

Biggest challenge… I’ve never been to Berlin. But Douglas Adams never went to space.  

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

Reading as a child was all pleasure. I loved Spike Milligan’s Silly Verse for Kids, and I have a strong memory of a now out-of-print picture book called Mr. Bill and the Runaway Sausages that made me laugh and laugh. In the copy I now read to my children, my sister and I have written and crossed out ‘This book belongs to…’ several times. I remember being delighted when books included characters called Sophie: The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The BFG, Dick King-Smith’s series Sophie Hits Six etc. Now I can see that this was an early expression of what, as a teenager, turned me on to the power of literature: reading poetry that seemed to have been written for me, that might not feature a Sophie, but absolutely spoke to my first intense experiences of falling in love, being dumped, travelling alone, being a Londoner etc. There was a lot of poetry in the house thanks to my mum, and now there is a lot in mine.  

The book that made me want to become a translator   

For my MA thesis I had to read all the fictional works of the late Spanish writer Javier Marías. At a certain point, stuck for time, I cheated, reading one or two of his novels in Margaret Jull Costa’s translations. I was a few chapters into Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me when I remembered I was reading a translation and not Spanish. Jull Costa was Marías. I wasn’t cheating. Translations weren’t next-best-things. The translator was a writer. I wanted to have a go. 

The translator whose work I always look out for   

I’m lucky enough to get to watch Annie McDermott in action because we co-translate sometimes, and she has all the regular qualities I admire in a translator (perceptive, large vocabulary, natural ear for rhythm and dialogue, discerning self-editor), but she’s also demonically, infectiously optimistic! Even when a Spanish text is particularly difficult and fights back, she keeps going, trying this and that with a smile on her face until it’s right (it always turns out right with her), and she seems to love the book all the more for its inhospitality.