On Sept. 18, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative hosted the “Creative Crossovers: Translators as Fiction Writers” event panel, delving into the intricacies of translating another author’s text and the connections between fiction writing and translating.
The event welcomed translator-authors Jennifer Croft and Lily Meyer, who are renowned for both their translations of various texts in different languages and their original works. One of Croft’s best known works is her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, for which she was awarded the 2018 International Booker Prize. Aside from her translating and creative writing, Meyer also serves as a contributing writer for The Atlantic.
Moderated by Professor Nicoletta Pireddu, director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, and Professor Emily Francomano, director of the Global and Comparative Literature Program, the panel covered what it means to be a translator and how the writers’ experience in translation has influenced the writers’ creative works.
In an interview with the Voice, Pireddu explained how she came to organize the event with the two authors, highlighting her previous familiarity with their works. Pireddu recounted how Meyer had reached out to her regarding potential interest for events about translation at Georgetown, and then Pireddu saw Croft discussing her new book The Extinction of Irena Ray at a conference in Paris.
“I had read, actually, an article in The New York Times where both of them were featured along with other translators who had ventured into creative writing,” Pireddu said. “Not only were they sharing this passion for this new way of approaching language and writing but there were also interesting differences in the styles of the two novels. So, being a comparatist always sensitive to both analogies and differences, I thought this would be an interesting panel.”
Pireddu noted how translation seeks to connect cultures rooted in different languages. She described how important it is for translators to examine all the aspects of the languages they are translating—such as form, style, values, experience, and content—in order to stay true to the original text.
“With translation, you literally carry across cultures, across time, across space, across different values,” Pireddu said. “You bump into so many obstacles, you have to make choices, you have to exclude, you have to confront the dilemmas. So it’s a very rich occasion to appreciate things that otherwise we take for granted in a very speculative, perfunctory way.”
When asked about the duality between the authors’ translation and creative writing work, Meyer—who originally had wanted to be a writer before a translator—highlighted the difficulties in preserving the author’s intentions while essentially creating a new work based on the original text.
“My writing preferences are my strength as a translator, but they are also the voice in my head I most frequently need to shut up. Because when I’m writing, I have control over everything,” Meyer said. “When I’m translating—on the one hand, I do have control over everything. I am the boss of the words. But I’m not actually the boss of what the words mean.”
On the other hand, Croft described how translation has been a huge asset to her creative writing, picking up styles and techniques from various works she has translated. She also noted how translations rely on the close reading of the translator.
“You spend so much time kind of dwelling in this world that’s created by somebody that you hopefully admire, that was always the case in my case,” Croft said. “And so I think everything that I have written since I started translating, I owe such a huge debt to the people that I have worked with as a translator. It’s influenced me so much.”
The authors then went on to discuss translatability; the ability to effectively share different cultures and languages through translation. For Croft, she explained how she views her work as a collaboration with the original author, finding new meanings as she translates the “untranslatable” across different languages.
“It’s a weird sort of paradox. I mean, everything is untranslatable of what translation means with making something new that stays exactly the same, but that isn’t what translation is and it isn’t what translation should be,” Croft said. “Like [Meyer] was saying, we’re embodied beings, humans who are participating in the creation of something new.”
Meyer elaborated on the differences between the original and alternate meaning of words across languages, but also described how she aims to preserve the text’s nuances and cultural differences. She used an example from a novel she recently translated, The Invisible Years by Rodrigo Hasbún, when she stumbled across a food that seemed alike to what Americans know as popcorn.
“Pasankalla, it looks like popcorn. It is popped corn,” Meyer said. “I could have translated it as popcorn, but I was working really closely with Rodrigo on the text, and I said, ‘Is it popcorn? Is it pasankalla? Is it a snack that all of these American readers know? Or is it something different that they don’t know because they haven’t been to the place and they haven’t eaten this specific popcorn, which tastes different?’”
Meyer then recounted how Hasbún wished for the original pasankalla to be represented, as he believed it was important to the authenticity of the text. As a translator, Meyer noted that she respects the authors and books that she works with, wanting to reproduce their work as faithfully as she can.
“So I put pasankalla. It could have been popcorn too. That’s how I feel about translatability. It’s always an option,” Meyer said.
The panel then let each author introduce and read an excerpt of their most recent original work. Croft read from the beginning of her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, for which she received a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, while Meyer read from her own novel Short War.
When introducing her book, Croft detailed how The Extinction of Irena Rey is as close as she will come to writing a book of translation theory, with the main premise centering around eight translators trying to translate a famous author’s magnum opus and “go wild” in a primeval forest on the border of Belarus, where the author in the novel resides.
“But when they get there, they find that she has been totally transformed. They can’t even recognise who she is anymore,” Croft said. “Then the next morning she vanishes, leaving them in a state of utter bewilderment, and they have to kind of navigate their different relationships with one another, and things get really crazy, really quickly.”
Looking to the future, Pireddu shared her vision for the remaining events—the next one being a workshop hosted by Lily Meyer on “How to Start a Translation” on Oct. 14—within the translation seminar series, highlighting that she is continually trying to find spaces to bring people together meaningfully on the topic of translation. She also emphasized how Georgetown’s values of intercultural dialogue correspond with the nature of translation, when thinking about future opportunities to explore translation in academic settings.
“My aspiration, and this is not a secret, is hopefully to in the end launch a certificate, an initiative, ideally, a minor. Georgetown is the ideal place to do this. It’s a very international university [and] the Jesuit mission is all about creating dialogues,” Pireddu said. “It is there, not only as a rational approach to language, but as a set of values that transcend the content of a course. It’s really the spirit of Georgetown.”
