A Playful Re-enactment

I approach Fair: The Life-Art of Translation by Jen Calleja with trepidation. Until now, satirical and experimental books have been beyond my reading repertoire, yet I find its subject matter enticing. Given the author is a writer and translator, I want to read it in solidarity and fellowship. I’m also intrigued by the title, Fair, by the rich and ambiguous meanings it evokes – just, equitable, satisfactory, reasonable, beautiful, fine (weather), favourable (wind), light-coloured, to a high degree, market, fete, exhibition… I hear an insistent voice, tuning up to a piercing cry. The four bold capital letters are printed horizontally in black, filling the entire front cover, reminiscent of a big-character poster, a statement in itself.

The opening line is captivating: ‘I’ve been working on something spectacular.’ The setting is magnificent, though disorienting at first. We’re called to imagine a book / art / fun fair, which is also ‘a medieval walled city, a mall, a multiplex, a multimedia arts centre. It’s multipurpose. An epic maze of stands, stalls, booths, installations, rides’. Even more destabilising, it’s out at sea off the coast of Hastings. I think of the iconic Luna Park, its entrance a giant clown face looking out onto Sydney Harbour. On a corporate volunteer day years ago, some of us took a group of children there, all of whom had autistic siblings. We had stacks of tickets but one of the children, Russell, didn’t want to get on any of the rides. I stayed with him. The two of us meandered into a building called Coney Island, featuring various old-fashioned contraptions. He asked the woman at the door several questions to which she patiently responded. Only then did he agree to take the plunge.

In the first vignette titled ‘Welcome – Glossary of Terms / Terms and Conditions’, we learn that this is ‘a Translation fair, a Translator Fair. A fair themed around the life and work of a single literary translator.’ The book consists of over sixty vignettes, a mixture of episodic recollections, quotations, references, circumstances, and hypothetical scenarios. ‘I’m making an exhibition of myself, making a lucky dip of my life.’ So goes this courageous N=1 experiment. At ‘Threshold / Balloon Arch’, we’re promised ‘the art of translation’, ‘the craft of translation’, and ‘the act of translation’. The balloons are irresistible.

True to her word, Calleja describes the craft of translation with procedural precision. She’s often working on three projects simultaneously, all at different stages of completion, with ‘each translation taking anywhere from four to twelve months’. Translation starts with reading the source text. Calleja’s reading of German is idiosyncratic:

Referencing John Berger, Calleja sums up the magic: ‘translators don’t translate words, we translate that mysterious place where the words originated’. To me, ‘that mysterious place’ refers to the profound understanding a good translator has of a text, which often goes underappreciated, even by those within the translation community. Once, in a workshop organised by an academic, I sought to more fully comprehend a simple line. He said I should just translate literally. But words in different languages don’t always line up or exist in a one-to-one relationship. How do we translate ‘To be or not to be’ literally? I despaired at this disregard for the primacy of understanding.

The actual process of translation can be agonising. In ‘G5 – Hall of Mirrors (Reflections on a Sentence)’, a translator’s multiple selves are having a surreal conversation over translating the first line of a novel. It goes on for seven pages without their coming to any agreement. ‘You have to weigh up all the options to find the one that holds as many of the qualities of the original as possible – meaning, sound, connotation, register, inference’. Calleja likes to read her works-in-progress aloud, especially the poems, to make the words sing. I do the same. After I translate a poem from English to Chinese, I remember the translated text more than the original. Because Chinese is a tonal language, I remember the poem like a song.

Translation is physical. In ‘X7 – Workshop Room 1: Salt Dough Workshop’, Calleja gives a detailed description of the physical labour involved:

As a fellow translator I couldn’t agree more. Calleja has achy wrists, I have sore shoulders. Creative work is also 24/7 which means there’s no time to rest. Like Calleja, ‘I carry around the clutter and half-made things wherever I go. The working day is never truly over.’

The English word ‘translation’ derives from the Latin ‘translatus’, meaning ‘carrying across’ or ‘bringing over’. Being immersed in the task of translation, constantly swimming from one shore to another, can bring about change in oneself. In ‘O24 – Haunted House’ Calleja explores literary translators’ embodied experiences. Some feel they are inside the writer’s body, inside their brain, possessed, haunted. As for Calleja, ‘If I’m possessed by anyone, it’s the characters and the text as it appears as a voice in my head […] If anything I’m like Dracula, absorbing [the author’s] skills with every bite.’

My own experience corroborates Calleja’s. While translating Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, I internalised the translated text and dreamed of the female protagonist. In those dreams her name became mine. I turned on the television one day and saw a program about a train trip across Ireland. I called out, ‘Sligo!’ And I was right. I’d never been to the northwest of Ireland but recognised the river, the bridge, and the summer’s burning green, all vividly described in the novel. Translating the novel taught me how to excavate the past to construct a fictional tale, how to convey historical context concretely, how to splice together different topics of interest. My next writing project, loosely based on the family history of my mother’s side, has evolved thanks to the book’s influence and inspiration.

In addition to translating text, the job of a literary translator also involves extensive literary research, writing reports on books and making assessments on their suitability for translation, holding dialogues with living authors, endless drafting and redrafting, pitching to publishers, taking part in translation forums and panels, mentoring upcoming translators, and more. Calleja paints an honest picture of ‘the reality of the vocation’, the working conditions, the randomness of opportunities, and the precarious financial prospects. Sadly, translators are often underpaid, overworked, and under-recognised.

Money matters. In ‘S6 – Custard Pies’, with good humour, Calleja tackles the economics of translating. Someone who has received funding for a poetry translation project beseeches Calleja to mentor them but refuses to pay even a very modest fee. They suggest that ‘literary translators should get full-time jobs and translate on the side, so doing events or answering questions for emerging translators […] could be done for free’. Calleja points out how individuals and organisations frequently take advantage of the intangibility of freelance creative labour. I fall into the category of someone working fulltime while writing and translating on the side, here and there, whenever I can, at odd hours. I translated The Secret Scripture entirely on public transport, wary of missing my stop. Weekends mean not rest but longer hours to concentrate. I admire Calleja’s courage in making a living from making art.

Calleja likens translators to ghost writers and is vocal about the lack of recognition they must endure. It’s surprising to me that translators’ names have only recently started appearing on book covers in the West, where it’s long been the practice in China. Think of music: surely a listener would want to know the name of the pianist playing Chopin’s nocturnes. Calleja’s father was once an engineer at British Telecom. ‘He has always worked extremely hard, and though modest, has always sought credit for the work he has done.’ Like her father, Calleja fights for her own rights and the rights of others. ‘Maybe the scandal isn’t simply that literary translators get paid like cleaners, but that cleaners and translators both get paid unfairly.’

I can’t find the percentage of books published annually in Australia that are translated from another language. It’s roughly three per cent in the United States and twenty-two per cent in China. Australia is likely to be on par with the United States, or to have an even lower percentage if we count only books published here, since few translations are commissioned by local presses – a mere handful of titles each year. My observation is that in Australia, translated works tend to be an exception to, rather than a routine part of, one’s reading regimen, which those accustomed to reading literature in translation will find peculiar. If there were more demand for books in translation, presumably there would be more reward for literary translators’ efforts. Our proximity to Asia and the statistics of inbound migration all suggest Australia’s comparative advantage in striving to become a centre of excellence for translation.

The marketplace of translation suffers from asymmetry. An author cannot generally judge the quality of the translation, just as the reader cannot generally judge the quality of the original. At a poetry slam, a famous British poet, though monolingual, challenges Calleja’s translation of a German word because the English word of her choosing isn’t the dictionary definition. Calleja patiently explains:

Jhumpa Lahiri argues the same point in Translating Myself and Others: ‘Even within a single language, one word can so very often substitute another […] it is the writer’s job, and subsequently the translator’s, to choose among them.’

The fact that there are multiple translations for the same text doesn’t mean one is right and the others are wrong, but that ‘translating is think again’. Constance Garnett is my favourite translator of Russian literature. I’m reading her translations of Chekhov and love them so much I find myself retelling the stories to others on the day I’ve read them. It saddens me to come across remarks like this one from a New Yorker article by David Remnick: ‘As a literary achievement, Garnett’s may have been of the second order, but it was vast.’ I’m not sure how to categorise achievements as ‘first’ or ‘second order’, but my preference for Garnett can be partly explained by Calleja’s translation decision regarding a German poem:

I have a copy of War and Peace translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, but they have kept the French, which I can’t read, and the extensive footnotes on the French quickly defeated me. Garnett, like Calleja, translates the French into English, making the translation more accessible. A later version of translation doesn’t negate earlier ones.

In a vignette titled ‘The Ungeziefer in the Room’, Calleja addresses the distrust many readers seem to have of translators. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an ungeziefer. The German word has been variously translated as ‘vermin’, ‘bug’, ‘insect’, ‘verminous insect’, ‘cockroach’, and so on, each for good reason. Calleja suggests that one might translate ungeziefer into ‘parasite’ if they read the story in the context of illness, people living on welfare. If ever given the opportunity to translate The Metamorphosis, Calleja would translate ungeziefer into ‘goblin’, in line with an interpretation of the novel as a critique of antisemitic sentiments at the time. Personally, I prefer ‘beetle’, as I first encountered The Metamorphosis in Chinese and the word (甲虫) conjures up the image of a beetle on its back, flailing. While writing this review, I even discovered the existence of a Metamorphosis video game. The music for the game, composed by Mikolai Stroinski and Garry Schyman, is most intriguing, haunting, filled with irony and humour. The composers experimented with Schoenberg’s expressionist techniques and employed Sprechstimme vocal delivery, half spoken, half sung, analogous to Peking Opera to my ears. I’m intoxicated by the generative possibilities of translation.

I hold Robert Frost and Sofia Coppola responsible for popularising the notion of ‘lost in translation’. So much would be lost if it weren’t for translation, and for every small loss in translation, more is found and gained in compensation. The spread of Buddhism is a good example. In an article titled ‘Translation and transmission of Buddhist texts’, T.H. Barrett succinctly explains Buddhism’s move upward from India to China, then outward to Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. Buddhism reached China in the 2nd century CE, when the Gandhari Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese, marking the beginning of a translation enterprise that lasted more than a thousand years. During this period, over one and a half thousand works were translated into Chinese, including many that haven’t survived in their original languages. These Chinese-language versions then formed the basis for further translations. New Buddhist texts reflecting local adaptations began to emerge in Japanese and Korean. Tibetans created a body of literature that was translated into Mongolian. The ready availability of Buddhist works in translation spread Buddhist ideas to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Other religions like Daoism in China and Shinto in Japan were influenced by translated Buddhist texts. As Barrett notes, translation enabled new words and concepts to be added to the Chinese language.

Let’s turn to a very different kind of translation: NASA’s Golden Record Project, which takes this kind of transmission into the future and outer space. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still drifting among the stars, each carrying a golden record of images and sounds that represent Earth. A child on a distant planet may one day find our message in a bottle washed up on their cosmic coastline, and end up reading our letter in translation.

An undercurrent that runs throughout Fair is class struggle. In ‘K5343 – Before the Law’, Calleja censures the rigid stratification of society and recounts the injuries she has suffered as a result. (I couldn’t decipher the logic behind Calleja’s numbering system and tried to map it out on a spreadsheet until I reached K5343 and abandoned the idea.) As a child Calleja was deemed bright, though underachieving. She couldn’t comprehend grammar, yet was able to write detailed stories by the age of nine. She had the feeling that she might be capable of thinking in a unique way and seeing things differently. When she took an IQ test at the age of sixteen, she scored in the top two per cent nationwide. After enduring a confusing admissions interview for Cambridge, where her interviewers seemed to be speaking in riddles, she decided not to go, accepting an unconditional offer from Goldsmiths College instead. When she applied to University College London for her postgraduate degree in German, she was subjected to a language exam that wasn’t required and no one else had to take. Such was the unfair treatment by these institution’s gatekeepers. Calleja describes her very first seminar, when the students were asked to share which schools and universities they previously attended:

Even more outrageously at a literary festival:

Calleja’s working class background is an obstacle that she must overcome again and again to become a literary translator. She asks, tongue in cheek, ‘Did every person in publishing go to Oxbridge?’ Through sheer determination and resourcefulness, she finds a way to bypass the gates via social media. Using Twitter, she contacts editors directly to pitch her translation projects and connects with other translators to share knowledge and experience. By refusing to play along with the rules of the establishment, she redefines the game.

If this book is a polemic, it’s also a celebration, of literature, creativity, friendship, and the power of language. ‘There is luck, there is bias, there is fighting active exclusion, there can be finding your own people.’ Calleja rejoices in finding allies, likeminded authors and collaborators, in English, German, and Maltese. At an exhibition she curates for an Austrian cultural centre, she invites ‘ceramicists, tattooists, makers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers to translate my translation of a short story […] into their mediums,’ One of them, a writer and an avid cook, writes a recipe for rice pudding.

Many writers are also translators. Proust spent years translating Ruskin, which profoundly influenced his own style. Paul Auster in his younger years tried to make a living translating French literature and considered translation itself as the most intense reading experience and the best way to learn the craft of writing. Jhumpa Lahiri has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone from Italian into English. Korean-American poet Don Mee Choi translates Korean poetry, among them works by Kim Hyesoon (in this book Calleja makes two references to Choi). In Australia, Chris Andrews, Peter Boyle, and David Musgrave are all poets and translators. Calleja argues that some translators are the best writers among us, regardless of whether they’ve written their own books:

I want to add my vote of confidence from a Chinese perspective. Many Chinese writers have been nurtured by literature in translation. Wang Xiaobo, a brilliant Chinese novelist who died at the age of forty-four, wrote a foreword titled ‘My Literary Lineage’ for his novel Wan Shou Temple. It opens with a section of Pushkin’s ‘The Bronze Horseman’, translated by Zha Liangzheng, a Chinese poet. Wang’s older brother read the poem to him when he was small, to illustrate the elegance and dignity of language. Another example Wang quotes is the first paragraph of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover as translated by Wang Daoqian, another Chinese poet. It may be a unique phenomenon, and quite unknown to the rest of the world, that at a particular point in history the best Chinese writers were not writing but translating, and their translations are widely considered models of style. Wang Xiaobo only wrote in Chinese. His foreword is a love letter from a great writer to those great translators, and an homage to translation.

 ‘Via L14 – Tunnel of Love’ portrays the various authors and author-translator relationships in Calleja’s life, especially her close friendship with Michelle Steinbeck, an award-winning Swiss author whom she translates. Though she celebrates their friendship, Calleja also mulls on the intersection between the personal and professional:

I made friends with the Chinese poet Zheng Xiaoqiong at a literary event. Two years later I visited her again and we travelled together in Guangdong. I recall how the place we stayed was behind a secret garden surrounding a dilapidated water tower, shielded from the roads by bamboo, our rooms overlooking a bend in the river. Her poet friends brought bags of purple mangosteens. We chatted late into the night, laughing, our fingers stained from the endless peeling, our tongues sharpened by the sweet tangy juice. I have translated four of Xiaoqiong’s prose poems. Unlike Calleja I’m not a poet but a writer of prose fiction and have stumbled into poetry translation because of my passion for language. How do I render poetry from Chinese, a language of flexible syntax, dynamic grammar, and embodied metaphors into English, a linear and time-stamped language? As with Calleja and Steinbeck, my friendship with Xiaoqiong gave me confidence to experiment.

Nestled in the vignettes of Fair are Calleja’s tender reflections on her personal history. ‘My dad is Maltese, my mum was Anglo-Irish, but I can speak none of my heritage languages apart from English.’ The sadness of losing her father tongue is poetically expressed: ‘My Maltese is trapped in a phoneline somewhere, heading somewhere else.’ Her mother was once a renowned knitter and suffered from mental illness. After finishing her A-levels Calleja goes to Munich to ‘move out of home, create distance between me and my parents’. Later in life, she tries to bond with her father again. There’s a moving account of father and daughter making salt-dough models together over Skype – she makes an English breakfast while he fashions mechanic’s tools. ‘I may not be able to speak Maltese, his language, but I now understand […] simply being together and producing something together is a kind of talking.’

Fair is carefully researched, engaging with works and accounts by contemporary artists, musicians, writers, and translators, all while scrupulously presenting the first-person singular perspective in an accessible, conversational style. There’s an excellent list of ‘Recommended Reading: Literary Translators on Literary Translation’ towards the end. I’d recommend this book to all translators, to everyone who’s learning a foreign language, to readers of books in translation, to lovers of language, and to anyone with an open and curious mind. I’ve learnt wonderful ideas and feel enriched by all the different approaches and perspectives within its pages. After this review I will need to copy down some of the quotations for future reference, for example, this one by Edvard Munch: ‘Painting must not merely reconstruct a moment, it must itself be a moment.’ The same could be said of all creative endeavours.

On the volunteer day outing to Luna Park, when Russell and I went into Coney Island, I’d try a contraption first and he’d follow. There was a passageway made of two drums turning in opposite directions. I ran through it. It was his turn. He lost balance immediately, and despite the operator slowing the drums down, he couldn’t get up. He simply sat inside, smiling at me sweetly, as if that was the purpose of the game. We reached the designated meeting place before anybody else. Leaning on a sandstone wall warmed by the afternoon sun, I asked what he’d do later. He thought about it for a moment and said, ‘I’ll ring my mum. She wouldn’t believe how much fun I’ve had.’ Thank you, Russell. That’s how I feel after reading this book.