It feels entirely appropriate that when I tried to listen back to my interview with author and translator Jen Calleja, all I heard was an indistinguishable hiss. A burst of voices would occasionally emerge through the feedback, while the rest resembled a soundtrack to some sort of underwater seascape. It was, in a word, untranslatable.
Calleja is somewhat obsessed with the boundaries of translation and deciphering the undecipherable. The characters inhabiting her novel Vehicle, rogue researchers and maverick translators trying to survive in a time when history is gradually being erased, would have made much of our compromised transmission. The researchers slowly see their illicit finds ebb away, as they try to reconstruct the past. It mirrors the frustrations inherent with translation.
These frustrations populate Jen Calleja’s latest book Fair: The Life-Art of Translation. In this playful, experimental memoir, the author guides us through a sort of Calleja Convention, a fair dedicated to her and to her adventures in the translating world. As Calleja explains, through school, higher education and into her career, she continually butted up against people with firm views on what translation should be and what translators should look like, which, she often felt, wasn’t her.
Translation has traditionally been dominated by academics and gatekept by those who feel translators should be seen and not heard. Calleja, who comes from a working-class background and has firm punk-rock credentials, wishes, like the authoritarian forces in Vehicle, to erase this particular history.
Translation is an essential job. And yet it’s continually overlooked, undervalued and underpaid. “I’m still getting paid the same rate that I was getting when I started,” Calleja told me, in one of the salvaged scraps of our conversation.
Worse, big publishers are employing AI as a cost-cutting measure. “That’s already happening,” Calleja reveals. “I’ve been sent manuscripts that have been through AI. They don’t seem to understand that it takes so much more work to use that as a source than the original text.”
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The boom in translated works being released in English, coupled with the same lack of respect aimed at those who translate the work, has given rise to a new breed of more radical translators, including Calleja, who insist on having their work recognised for the integral, creative endeavour it is.
They see translation as more of a dance between the author’s original ideas and the translator’s eventual output, which adds an additional dimension, eking out hidden themes and rhythms and reflecting untranslatable, cultural elements.
If there’s one thing that can be taken away from Fair, it’s that people have very strong feelings about translation. Purists hate feeling that they’re being offered something inaccurate, others fear they’re being tricked in some way, that the translator is bleeding too much of themselves into the work.
But a written work can never be a simple exchange from one language to another. In another recent book on translation, Speaking in Tongues, JM Coetzee delves into language with his translator Mariana Dimópulos. As they note, English has no differentiation with the word “you”, unlike French or Spanish that deviates between formal and intimate, which instantly poses a translating conundrum. Are the people concerned strangers or lovers or something in between? Which you do you use?
In her translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, Sophie Hughes uses British slang and colloquialisms to represent the language of the poverty-stricken residents of a deprived Mexican village. She utilises the arcane (pipsqueak) to the deeply profane (many c-words) to reflect the distinct vocabulary of working-class Veracruz. (“I think Sophie Hughes is a genius,” Calleja told me).
As Calleja discusses in Fair, Kafka uses the word “Ungeziefer” to describe Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis. It translates as “vermin” or “pest”, but has been translated as everything from “cockroach” to “bed bug”. And all these translations are accurate. “And we can’t ask Kafka,” she says. “Because he’s dead.”
But it’s the fact that translation can change its mind in this way that unsettles people – this instability leads to mistrust and misunderstanding. But for the new vanguard of translators, it offers a frontier waiting to be conquered.
Fair: The Life-Art of Translation by Jen Calleja is out now via Prototype Publishing
Dale Shaw is a television and radio writer, journalist, fiction writer, performer and musician
