Honoring the Art of Literary Translation: Lisa Dillman, Michael Meigs, and Brian Robert Moore
We live our lives translating. What are interactions between two human beings, even within the same language, if not constant acts of translation and interpretation? Undeniably, translation gets smoother or becomes more of a second nature if there is a shared history between the two participants and a built-up habitual understanding behind their communication. But think about, for instance, double entendres or double meanings—which can sometimes become triple or quadruple—how many times do we say or write one thing yet mean another? How often does our interpretation of what is said or written to us miss the mark, at times going far astray of the speaker’s or the writer’s intention? If such fine nuances of personal translation haunt communication in one language alone, then how can humans not be in awe of the process more commonly known as translation: that fascinating, complicated, and elusive transfer of meaning between two completely different languages? I know I am. In absolute awe.
I have always thought the ability to translate well as a kind of superpower and translators as often unsung superheroes who perpetuate the reach and international life of an author’s text. It takes exceptional linguistic and intellectual nimbleness and creativity as well as a willingness to constantly expand one’s universe of knowledge to be able to do the work of a translator. I have had the immense joy to meet three noted literary translators, Lisa Dillman, Michael Meigs, and Brian Robert Moore, who each offered me a glimpse into the universes of their craft.
Lisa Dillman has translated several works by Madrid-born writer Andrés Barba (Rain Over Madrid; August, October; Death of a Horse; Such Small Hands – winner of the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award– and A Luminous Republic) as well as Signs Preceding the End of the World, Kingdom Cons, and The Transmigration of Bodies by Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, The Bitch by Colombian writer Pilar Quintana, and Above the Rain by Spanish writer Víctor Del Árbol. The seed for Dillman’s journey to becoming a translator was planted in college when she spent a year in Barcelona and fell in love with the city and Spanish literature. Upon arriving home, she longed to share her newfound passion with family and friends but became aware that some things were simply untranslatable: “It was the realization that translating just words frequently does not translate the emotion, the feeling, the humor behind something. Even localities have their own sense of humor and humor is very difficult to translate. I found those sorts of challenges enticing and that’s what started it all.”
What is a translator’s initial approach to the original text? For Dillman, every text requires its own plan but, generally, it is essential to read it in depth and determine its most significant characteristics such as style, syntax, dialogue, usage of slang and diminutives, to name a few. Then begins the process of thinking about how to recreate those characteristics in English. I ask her if it all seems like a dance: the negotiation between her own creativity and staying close to the source text. She agrees and elaborates: “It is a dance! Well, there are 1001 metaphors that people use for it. I often think of translation like acting and getting into character, and what that requires depends on each text. I wouldn’t say that I am not a literal translator—I mean, people misuse the word ‘literal’ anyway—but there are definitely texts that can benefit from a closer translation and texts in which a closer translation could be catastrophic; it would lose the art and the beauty and make people wonder why this is a good novel. Part of the process is intuitive, but much of it is strategized and analytical.”
Dillman brings up the concept that translation is no substitute for the original. However, she adds, “As David Bellos says, the irony is, of course, that that is exactly what translation is!” She views translation more as an iteration or almost another version whereas: “if you only think of it from an instrumentalist’s perspective then it’s inevitable that you speak about translation in what Lawrence Venuti calls a rhetoric of loss, about things that were missed or did not communicate.” She explains some of the challenges especially in her current work, the translation of another book by Pilar Quintana, a writer who uses many diminutives in ways that seldom mean “little.” Often Colombians and Mexicans use diminutives to endow an expression with affection or intimacy. For example, take “ahorita,” the diminutive for “ahora” (now); one cannot translate it as “little now.” Dillman clarifies: “Depending on the speaker, sometimes ‘ahorita’ can mean right now!’ Other times it can mean ‘in half an hour.’ In the same way that we can think in English: a minute is sixty seconds, but people can say ‘I haven’t seen you in a minute!’ And that could mean six months. Or we can say ‘she sped out of here in a New York minute’ and a New York minute can be like a second.”
The translation of a tricky diminutive may also change the location of the translated word or phrase in the text. There are times when right within the same sentence Dillman comes up with something that works to serve a similar function, but frequently that will occur in the sentence before or after. She might also use a little tag question or the word “just” or certain filler words that can sometimes give an equivalent effect: “It all comes back to the realization that it’s my reading, so my reading is probably going to be different from any other person’s reading. But I need to commit to what I believe the expression is doing here and there, and then I need to justify what I’m going to do about it.” Ultimately, it is also about capturing the essence and the feel, and how to transmit them. That is the magic of translation: the transference of an entire realm of feeling invoked by words from one world to another.
Aside from diminutives, what else is particularly challenging when translating from Spanish into English? Dillman reveals that another common problem has to do with subject pronouns. The novel she is presently translating uses short sentences with no subject pronouns, such as “Se despertó. Se fue al baño. Bajó.” In English, the subject pronouns are required and yet it sounds awkward to write “She woke up. She went to the bathroom. She went downstairs.” Yet another difficulty lies in slang or in how located the Spanish language is: “If something is notably Colombian Spanish how do you render the Colombian-ness of it in English? Or if it’s notably Cuban or Argentinian, what do you do about that specificity, do you get rid of it, do you try to create some other accent? This happened with writer Eduardo Mendoza: he had these gangster characters in the bajo barrio (low neighborhood) of Barcelona speaking in a distinct localized way, and in English one of the translators translated it into Irish brogue.” Syntax is often an issue as well because Spanish favors much longer sentences with multiple clauses and English tends to be more direct.
Typically, the translation of a novel can take a year for Dillman. She believes it is important to have a solid third or fourth draft and then leave it in a drawer for as long as possible in order to return to it with fresh eyes. As for writing independently of translation, Dillman tells me that she used to write poetry, but not anymore: “I love the sort of limited creativity in translation where I know the shape I’m supposed to make and then it’s up to me to make the variations on a theme. The creativity of coming up with the intricacies of the plot I cannot imagine. Maybe one day, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
In the translation sphere, interpretation is an art in itself, and that art is what set Michael Meigs on his path to becoming a translator. Meigs studied foreign languages at school. He went into the Peace Corps and spent time in West Africa for four years where he actively used the French language as an interpreter: “Interpretation skills involve direct communication; you’re exposed to live language. It’s about being able to understand what’s being said to you and being able to generate an appropriate and effective response, which demands readiness and a willingness to engage. You have to be very agile and there are times when you partner with another translator and alternate.” Meigs’ knowledge of Spanish served him in his subsequent work as an interpreter in the Foreign Service on assignments to Quito, Ecuador, for three years and the Dominican Republic for four years.
In transitioning to literary translation, Meigs believes that he has been extremely lucky. “I haven’t really marketed myself. I attended a seminar at the American Literary Translators Association when Amazon Crossing was first setting up its venture to bring foreign popular fiction into English. They had a couple of authors who did readings and there was the possibility to sign up with them. They built a list of contacts of people willing to respond when they sent out a 600-word sample, thereby giving the editor a choice of styles. I just stumbled into that.” He also took a chance on going to the book fair in Gothenborg in Sweden and walked around passing out his resume and translation samples, which gained him a number of small jobs translating samples that agents or publishers wanted to offer for foreign rights.
Currently, Michael Meigs is an established literary translator of impressive prowess: he doesn’t just translate from one language, but from four: Swedish, German, Spanish, and French. He has translated several novels, including the The Dean by Swedish novelist and poet Lars Gustafsson; All This I’ll Give to You (winner of the 2020 ATA Lewis Galantière Translation Prize) and The North Face of the Heart by Spanish writer Dolores Redondo; and two novels in a trilogy by German writer Corina Bomann: Agneta’s Inheritance (The Inheritance of Lion Hall) and Mathilda’s Secret.
In approaching a text, Meigs reads it as closely as possible: “I’m following the story and at the same time, putting it into my own language. That’s just the first pass which is often quite inelegant because sometimes you’re translating too literally just to get the sense first. On subsequent passes, you work on taking that raw material and shaping it. My ambition is to render the product that’s faithful to the story and the general style but make it sound like it was originally written in American English.” He also believes in letting a draft sit for a while to return to it with fresh eyes, although knowing when to stop editing is a welcome skill: “It’s a perpetual process of revision but there comes a time according to the deadline and your own estimation when you really have to let it go.”
In a novel like Agneta’s Inheritance in which Corina Bomann writes about the South of Sweden and Stockholm between 1909 and 1918, the time period can engender distinct decisions in translation. Meigs conducts a temporal negotiation by keeping the narrative voice modern while, in his word choices for the exchanges between the characters, he strives to capture a language that one would have heard in 1910 in the U.K. The level of intimacy between characters can also prove complicated, especially when translating from Spanish and German in which there are two ways of saying “you” – formal and informal: “There are different terms of address according to the intimacy that one has with the individual, but that really hasn’t existed in English since Shakespeare’s time, except as preserved in the King James Bible. That’s a challenge: when the characters shift from a formal relationship to an intimate relationship, and it’s reflected in the language. In English, you could do that perhaps by adding, let’s say, more intimate terms of address.”
Not to mention that German actually has three genders: “In English, by and large, we have only two, although in current usage that’s emerging quite differently with the revisions of the they/their pronouns, but I haven’t yet found that in the works I’ve been translating. Generally, one can go from German into English and preserve the ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it.’” Although he can switch easily between languages, Meigs hasn’t had to alternate simultaneously between multiple languages very often, since his longer projects permit him to concentrate on one language at a time.
Which language comes easiest? I ask him. He begins by stating that the work is similar for all: “Translation is jeweler’s work. What you’re doing is you’re setting your stones, your valuable gems as precisely as possible. That part of the work is pretty much standard. The language I’ve had less direct exposure to is Swedish, so I have to be particularly careful to understand exactly what the text and the idiomatic expressions mean. I’ve lived in countries where Spanish and French are spoken so they are not much of a problem. German is essentially an acquired skill, in an academic or reading type fashion. To put this on a continuum: French and Spanish are easiest for me, then comes German, and then Swedish because I learned it much later and I have not had the opportunity to spend more than four weeks in Sweden.”
Meigs’ other longtime passion is theatre. He has established a website, Central Texas Live Theatre, on which he reviews performances and reports on theatre news in Central Texas. Between theatre and translation as well as participating on the board of a non-profit, he leads a fulfilling professional life: “I enjoy what I do, and the rhythm of translations coming in has been very good for me, not over pressing.”
For Brian Robert Moore, the encounter with translation happened in what he sees as a roundabout way. He studied comparative literature and Italian at Brown University. Since he was interested in literature and the relationship between books and readers, he realized that translation was at the heart of “bringing books from different areas in dialogue with different people.” After his Master’s, he moved to Italy where he worked in publishing. It was then that he began translating book excerpts and promotional material for Italian publishers and agents, which he considers a great school for a translator as one gets exposed to a variety of books and styles. When Other Press decided to publish Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, an Italian writer who became a huge star posthumously, Moore did a sample translation and was selected as the translator for the novel. His translation was just published this past May.
Recently, Moore won a PEN grant to translate Tetto murato by Lalla Romano, an Italian author from the last century who has been somewhat neglected in the Anglophone world. He already has an almost full draft: “It’s at the point where I am nearing the end but, as Romano says in the book—and this shows you how much I am living in this book— ‘it’s an infinite end.’ You see the endpoint, but you could just go on and on and edit forever.”
In translation, voice is of crucial importance for Moore, and that is not easy to pinpoint immediately. “You can take creative leaps, but it also depends so much on the author and what feels right for them, what you can sense fitting into that voice. At the same time, it is their voice, but you also have to recreate.” A first draft can be what one might think of as a literal or essential translation yet even that cannot be too literal: “It’s really hard to get a rhythm and a voice when you’re too focused on the source text. Especially rhythm because you can’t feel it in English if you’re looking too closely at the Italian rhythm.” It is after the first draft that the real work begins. Moore continues to return to the original all the time, but from that point, it helps to envision the translation in English as being its own text: “It’s almost a second translation after the first translation.”
To the array of metaphors about translation, Moore offers his own: music performance. “People talk about translation metaphorically because it’s a kind of strange art form that doesn’t get conceived of as an art form or it’s like a secondary art form, and I’ve been thinking that it’s like a musical performance. Many times, and throughout history, the majority of musicians don’t perform original music but that doesn’t make it any less of a creative process. In a way, you have to perform the text in a translation.” Moore’s original interest in the arts, starting in his preteen years, was actually in music: he played guitar and sang, mostly rock music. In college he ventured into classical singing. “Even when you’re learning a language it feels like a performance; you have to pretend until it comes naturally.”
The element of performance certainly shines through in Moore’s experience of translating Meeting in Positano, which is not surprising given Goliarda Sapienza’s own history in theatre and film. One of the two main characters, Erica, tells her whole life story over several evenings, as Moore says, “she hijacks the narrative.” Her confession feels like a theatrical monologue in an intimate setting: “It has the spoken, almost literally performative feeling to it and the sonorous element needed to be there.” For Moore it was liberating to dive into the directness of the spoken voice. And he believes that this is, in fact, symbolic, a reflection of the actual liberation that occurs in the novel when the character finally lets it all out by telling her life story. Sapienza’s writing itself is complex and differs from her earlier writing. She is best known for her controversial book The Art of Joy which, Moore says, “is stylistically much more straightforward, line by line, though it’s complex in a different sense because it’s an epic novel.”
Envisioning translation as a musical performance also suggests the musicality of each language; the sounds and the rhythm matter immensely. Moore finds that many Italians don’t actually think of Italian as musical because it is their native tongue. He feels that the musicality is more obvious when one comes from a dual perspective and appreciates it as a non-native, yet based on his own experience, he adds: “the more I am immersed in it, the less I’ll necessarily note its musicality because I get to hear it as standard. Then you have to really consider what is musical, poetic or just strange or playful, and it’s equally important and difficult to capture the right balance.”
As a writer, Moore has penned yet unpublished fiction and some criticism. He presents an intriguing perspective on being both a writer and a translator: “You’re definitely a writer as you’re doing translations. But some people think it’s too tricky, like you’re going to have too much of your own influence and your own interests if you’re a writer doing translations in general; they think it’s too messy to merge those things. Above all, you have to consider what is appropriate for the writer you are translating, and to that extent, I don’t think it is too tempting to let your own interests over influence the text. The hardest thing in writing is also the hardest thing in translation, which is discovering, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, what reads well.”
At the moment, as he is fully immersed in Lalla Romano’s restrained style, Moore feels that this style could influence his own writing in the opposite direction: “Now if I were to start writing something, I’ll probably do this crazy, eccentric, over the top monologue, à la Erica in Meeting in Positano.” Speaking of eccentric, what about translating archaic language into today’s American English? As languages are constantly evolving, Moore believes that this is a fine line to tread: “The internet makes changes in language so rapidly at this point and many new terms are coined all the time. That’s the kind of language you have to be careful with, anything that sounds too new and too dated—not dated to the past but too contemporary. It is a balancing act that has no clear answer.”
And isn’t this, in fact, what translation is—a balancing act that evades a clear-cut definition or prescribed formula? It certainly sparks the imagination to think of translation as acting in Lisa Dillman’s vision or jeweler’s work in Michael Meigs’ concept or, from Brian Robert Moore’s perspective, musical performance. Regardless of the metaphor, what remains unambiguous is that the art of translation infuses our lives from our most basic personal acts of translation to the astonishing mastery of linguistic meanings that Dillman, Meigs, and Moore share with the English-speaking readers of the novels they translate. So, the next time we revel in reading translated works, and perhaps dive right into researching the author, let us also acknowledge and get to know the translators. Because, without them, life would be considerably deprived of an abundance of multicultural knowledge and literary pleasure.
Top photo: Bigstock
