There is one conversation I remember most distinctly from my MFA in literary translation. I was chatting with a nonfiction student about the novel I was translating at the time when she said with a slight air of amazement, “I could never be a translator. I’m too selfish.”Article continues after advertisement
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. I had no idea what translating had to do with selflessness.
“I want what I’m writing to be mine,” she replied.
I’ve thought about this conversation frequently in the years since, first as a translator who didn’t think I had an interest in writing my own prose, and later as a soon-to-be novelist. There is the obvious fact that, as a translator, our names are never going to come first on the book cover. It will be in small letters underneath the author’s name, if it’s there at all. Translators will also always have to share the text that we’ve worked so hard on. We may have come up with all the English words on the page, but many readers won’t see what we’ve created as our own, because they don’t realize that translation involves a lot more effort than one-to-one correspondence of vocabulary.
If translating a novel felt like putting the drywall on the foundation of a house, writing a novel felt like putting the beams of the foundation up myself.
