A reworking of the Preface of Essays 2 and a response to “Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining)” featured in Essays 2 by Lydia Davis

(a completely non-collaborative collaboration, written with great admiration)

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A note on the below pieces: 

When I was invited to participate in this cluster dedicated to Lydia Davis, my first instinct was to respond to her work in a creative-critical way. This aligns with both my current creative-critical research into contemporary literary translator memoir, and also the excitement and bodily thrill I feel whenever I read Lydia Davis's fiction and essays on translation. In the first piece, I "insert" my own experiences of language learning into the corresponding passages about Davis's acquisition of languages in childhood and early adulthood in the Preface of her Essays 2. I replace the details of her life with my own, sometimes trimming words that don't serve my bending of the narrative, and this piece is perhaps best read side by side with Davis's actual Preface. The intention is to gesture towards the multiple ways literary translators start their journeys into translation, and to playfully illustrate, in a heightened way, that translating a text is a display of personal, individual creativity within the parameters of a pre-made text. The second piece is a response to the first essay in Essays 2, "Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining)" (an extended version of Davis's "Eleven Pleasures of Translating," which appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2016). Before introducing her "pleasures," Davis writes of the potential of translation problems to haunt you, potentially for life, and, as if to scare away the ghost, she writes twenty-one things she cherishes about translation. In my "Twenty-one Pitfalls...," I hold onto the things that haunt me about being a translator while responding to her twenty-one pleasures. I could have easily also written twenty-one things I love about translation, and have written countless articles, reviews and columns in support of it as a practice. But at the time of writing I was feeling burnt out, worried for the future of myself and others who freelance in publishing, about translators' rights, about money. When translating on a bad or just off day, a translator's mood may inevitably leak into their translation. I believe that the process of exposing anxieties, preoccupations, and above all complaints about one's precarious work — as inspired by the work on complaint by Sara Ahmed — is not a display of pointless negativity; it is necessary for change. 

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Prefacing Myself

...an important experience behind my lifelong preoccupation with other languages must have been my lack of exposure to Maltese between the ages of 0-34 where I had no choice but to never learn the language.

...an important experience behind my lifelong preoccupation with other languages must have been my exposure to German at the age of fourteen in a Year 8 classroom in Shoreham-By-Sea, West Sussex, where I had the choice but to stop learning the language after just two years, but didn't.

[...]

The languages weren't all around me for most of the time, not consistently in the classroom, never as I hung out with friends, walked on the streets, rode the bus, went into shops, and passed through the door of the house where, for the first eighteen years of my life, my family and I lived. There, on school mornings, I was expected to get up to the knock on my own bedroom door and dress on my own. If I arrived downstairs in the living room on time, I could have marmite on toast (yeast extract on burned white bread). If I was late, I had nothing (rien, nichts). I had barely any practice in German and none in Maltese, therefore, and even though I picked up some of the language when I moved to Germany aged eighteen, the vaguer, thrillingly mysterious sense of how a German sentence is constructed, as well as much of the sixth form (teenager's) vocabulary, never went away.

This experience was also a teenager's confusing, disorientating introduction to the concept that communication can take other forms, with other music and social cues. I cringe now that I must have gone through a few months or even years, at least has it ever ceased, of some frustration and self-loathing, as I listened to quite insistent sounds coming, though so persistently, from my employers'/colleagues'/friends'/lovers' mouths, accompanied by expressions on their faces that were, by contrast, completely unfamiliar to me — of attentiveness, desire, dislike, care and hysterical joy. Then, this frustration must have been followed by gradual intrigue as I became progressively more familiar with the motivation of what I was hearing and reading, and eventually it must have implanted in me a hunger to repeat these words, or at least a strong desire, at the sight of words that mean nothing to me, to find out what they mean.

Lessons in other foreign languages followed a very basic curriculum. In school back then in Shoreham-by-Sea I was introduced to French, then to German; later, in sixth form, to an Italian exam when there was some confusion about my nationality. By the end of my time in high school, my parents hadn't been able to take us on holidays or to send me on the school trips abroad to ski or visit museums, the forms were like micro fictions, my dad the sole earner, my mum too sick to work. I moved back in with them after graduation and, living for six months of that year in Shoreham-By-Sea, began to write fiction in earnest — I would sleep during the days off work and then write a little story or diary entry in the evenings. (This still seems to me one good way to approach a writing life: practice using it, and then, later, look up the "rules" behind what you have been trying to do.)

There is not much more to say about exposure to foreign languages, but, over the years, perhaps compelled by the mental conditioning of that tragically monolingual childhood and first experience in Munich, I have spent countless hours of countless days studying other languages, either playing Italian on Duolingo or trying to unwarp my memory of the sound of Maltese, or learning this new/absent languages on my own, chiefly through publishing Maltese literature and taking an online course.

Twenty-One Pitfalls of Translation (and a Silver-Tongue)

1) Sometimes the blank page that awaits you before starting a translation seems to be a text written in white saying things like what if you've forgotten how to translate, what if your german doesn't cut it this time, what if you've completely misunderstood the book in question, will this translation sound too much like the translation you've just finished or are still working on, you don't know how to write, you know, you're only as good as your last translation.

2) Sometimes a translation problem haunts me for days and nights, interrupts my every thought, becomes the only thing I can think about.  

3) I translate best when I'm the right amount of hungover or on day two or three of my period, so, not very often. These states of exhaustion take the edge off my frantic and fuzzy thoughts, and leave me in a blissfully focused frame of mind. During the pandemic, I became so depressed and unmotivated I couldn't translate for six months.

4) I can tell that my author doesn't really want to be talking to me. They have other things to do, like writing their next book. Our Zoom is brief. I WhatsApp my favourite author-friend in another country to see how she is, using the pet name I have for her, and she responds about missing me with her nickname for me. I see a translator-friend is sub-tweeting about an unpleasant experience with a publisher, a translator-acquaintance has posted on Facebook about an abusive editor. My sometimes-cotranslator and always-friend is sending me memes over Instagram about the actor we both fancy, we can't be bothered to talk about her editing my next translation.

5) Publishers would rather I was good and wanted to remain anonymous, but I want my name on the cover, I want a better advance, I want a royalty. Everything I translate is me. I can't write like someone else, I can only do my own version of writing like someone else. I don't decorate or colour in the author, I build them from scratch. I don't want to be the author, I want to be the translator of a text.

6) You can get whiplash and brain fog from translating a new author every few months. But you get what you're given.

7) I have accompanied refugees across the sea, witnessed over and over a sexual assault I could not prevent, spent the night in a suicide forest, and discovered a hidden concentration camp.

8) When I play Scrabble, only German words come to mind. It makes for a terrible excuse when I'm losing, and I'm a terrible loser.

9) When I lived in Germany, people either adored or despised Britain. When I was there, I felt the former for my place of birth and residence, now I often feel the latter. I know the German-speaking world despairs for us, I long to be back with them.

10) I still don't know how to use past and passed correctly.

11) I wonder, while I'm translating, if I, too, will one day be a bestseller, or ever win a prize.

12) "Erasing the signs of labour under the signs of happiness" is part of the title of an essay by Sophie Collins, with whom I wrote an essay about versioning vs. translation proper. I enjoy translating, but it is my job. I am glad it is my job, but it is still my job, and it is badly paid and unreliable. Recently, when Condé Nast workers unionised, their statement included the line: "Dream jobs, it turns out, are just jobs." I gladly turned down a job once because I found the book inherently misogynistic. I sadly turned down three or more jobs because either the deadline or the fee was impossible.

13) I've sometimes posed a translation conundrum to friends before I've even asked how they are. Is it healthy to always use others as a resource, even if they don't seem to mind?

14) My search history and screengrabs reveal an imposter, a pseudo-polyglot, a pseudo-polymath.

15) I cannot read a sentence in German or English anymore without dismantling it, unscrewing the panel, and pulling out the wiring.

16) "...I also wince when I read, yet again, a problem not perfectly solved. The compromise involved in any translation can be painful."

17) More often than not, emails from readers of my translations are writing to flag typos, grammatical queries or to question my solutions.

18) At times I can't bear to read other translations from German. It can be unbearable for many reasons.

19) For instance, "reading bits of the original through the English, but, in fact, reading both at the same time." My mind tries to triangulate a third text, and I get brain freeze.

20) On hearing some unwelcome news last year, I sat down and translated for hours on end non-stop. Afterwards, I felt ashamed that I couldn't face the news head on, that I had to channel my anguish into productivity rather than resting or being kind to myself or talking about it, using my words for me alone.

21) I feel such a keen sense of responsibility and camaraderie as a translator that it pains me to think of a single translator suffering for their art.

Translation, for me, is the größte Ehe, the größte Freude, the größte Herausforderung, the größte Inspiration, everything I write, every poem, story, column, essay, is dedicated to translation, it's why ich mache weiter, and will keep maching weiter, because I believe in it, mind, body and soul, I'm in love with it from the bottom of my heart, I feel for it with my whole being, at times, I fear, I'm addicted, obsessed, that I care about it too much, I'm its biggest cheerleader, its größte Fan, but it's not posters of translation on my walls, it is, ultimately, my fellow translators, my authors, the books, my very self, pinned to the corkboard (and, some days, those final demands). Bonne chance!

With thanks to Penguin for generously sending a pre-publication copy of Essays 2.

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Jen Calleja (@niewview) is a writer and literary translator. Her books include I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For (Prototype) and Goblins (Rough Trade Books). She has translated almost twenty books from German, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her work. She was the first Translator in Residence at the British Library and writes a column on translation for the Brixton Review of Books. She is currently completing a creative-critical PhD at UEA in literary translator memoir.

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