Interview of the month – David Bellos

Interview of the month – David Bellos
(Princeton University professor – translator – writer) 

First of all, we’d like to say it’s an honour to have you on our blog. We have read your book Is that a fish in your ear? and we would like to ask what drove you to write it. It seems to be directed to a wider audience and not to translation professionals in particular. Would you say it’s an attempt to familiarise the public with the translation profession?  

You’re quite right: Is That a Fish in Your Ear? is not directed to translation professionals. They don’t need me to tell them what their job is!

The first spark was lit by a pompous, pink-faced parent at a gathering in Princeton, or rather, by his saying, as if he knew what he meant, that ‘translation is no subsitute for the original, of course’. I’ve always been irritated by received wisdom of that kind, but on this occasion the cliché struck me as more than silly—as just plain wrong. So I sat down and wrote a little diatribe. It amused me quite a lot. Then I wrote a few more essays on received wisdom about translation, and soon there emerged the idea for a whole book, initially called “The Truth About Translation”. From the start the aim was to get people who do not often think about translation to realise what sort of a thing it is. It’s a general education book, I suppose. And also an amusing one. Instruire et plaire, that’s always been my aim!

Do you think translators and the profession in general are sometimes underrated and why is that?

Yes, I do think that the profession is little understood and little valued. That is particularly true in the English-speaking world, which has the misfortune to speak the “top” language of the day. Misrecognition of the profession arises from lack of understanding of the nature, history, value and difficulty of the job its practitioners do. That’s what my book is about. But it is also about WHY translation matters, and it’s therefore, in its way, also a book about the nature of language and the nature of human life (or at least, one underlying dimension of it).

What do you enjoy the most in translation? Which are the biggest challenges you face?

That’s an entirely different matter. What I like about translating is the ways it draws on scholarly and technical knowledge, on the one hand, and on inventiveness and creativity, on the other. I enjoy that particular mix. But I also think (and know, from experience) that any text—every text—raises the same kinds of challenges for the translator, so I don’t really hierarchise text-types in terms of their challenges. From a translation point of view, there’s just as much interest, difficulty, and invention in a detective novel as in a poem by Rilke.

Tell us about Georges Perec, an author whose works you have translated. Is it this immersion into his work and mind that drove you to write his biography?

I was “driven” to write the biography by the unexpected and sudden success of the English translation of La Vie mode d’emploi. People wanted to know more about the author, and as I didn’t yet know very much myself, the best way to find out was to write a biography. I was very lucky, because the work on Perec turned out to be utterly fascinating, and I think Georges Perec A Life in Words is the best book I have written, or will ever write. It came at the right time.

We often see translators developing strong relationships with authors whose books they are translating. In your personal experience, what is the role of the literary translator and what is his relationship with the authors and the works he/she translates?

I have not worked with many living authors, and my relations with those I have translated have been quite varied. I get on well with Ismail Kadare, but that is partly because he has no doubt at all that what’s important in his work can be said in any language; he leaves me to be the judge of how to say it in English. Others are less accommodating. Translators into English have to cope with the fact that foreign writers often know some English, and think they can be the judge of the translation. (On some occasions, this may even be true.) Translators also have to cope with the fact that the English translation is by far the most important for the author’s career (and often for his income prospects.) The special role of English in the world today means that English translators of contemporary world authors have to be diplomats, negotiatiors and teachers too. It’s quite a strain.I try to explain the difference between “into English” and into other languages in my book with the distinction between “translating UP” and “translating DOWN”. It’s a crude distinction, but it grows out of my experience in the field, and also from looking at the history of the field.

What are your current projects? Are you translating anything at the moment?

I’ve just finished writing a quite big book about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and I hope to take a break for the next few months. I expect I’ll poke my nose into its translation into French and irritate my translator the other way round. (I should add that had immense fun with the French translation of Fish and that Daniel Loayza, the translator, did a first-rate job, joining true scholarship with a wonderfully witty way with words. I do recommend it! Le Poisson et le Bananier, Flammarion, 2012, is every bit as good as the original, and in some respects rather better!)

I will probably do another Simenon novel next year, and maybe also a detective story by Frédéric Dard—but not straight away. I also have a full-time job!