Damion Searls
interview by Ryan Chamberlain
photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Jon Fosse’s seven-book series is a single sentence long, an incomplete one at that. Your translations are often challenging on a formal level. What is it about a difficult form that attracts you? It’s almost unfair to dismiss Rilke as an exception, but I’m curious why that attraction so rarely extends to poetry?
I wouldn’t say I’m drawn to formal experiments per se—it’s just always interesting to translate someone who’s doing something different, and that often comes out in the form. As for the poetry part of your question, I feel like that’s a publishing decision more than anything else: it’s hard to convince anyone to pay for translating poetry unless it’s a real canonical titan like Rilke. I’ve done poems for art books, and there’s money for that when the artist wants to include some poetry; I have a manuscript of Robert Walser’s late poems that I haven’t found a publisher for, and Jon Fosse and I want to do a collection of his poetry, but the UK poetry publishers all told me business is bad, talk to the Americans, while the US poetry publishers say there’s no home for a book like that here, talk to the Brits!
I loved your anecdote about translating German’s “not this but that” construction in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries. Were there any conventions in Fosse’s work that required that same kind of cultural intervention?
Thanks; the main thrust of that example, for anyone who doesn’t click the link, is that there are certain ways of phrasing something in one language that, even if possible, aren’t standard in the other language—so what you generally do is fix it and write the sentence the way English wants to say it. One simple example is turning a passive German sentence into an active English sentence: you don’t keep a syntax that would be bad writing in English just because it’s fine writing in German. And yet, when a good writer is using that aspect of the original language, it becomes hard to know what to do, because it’s not just a tic of the language anymore, it’s the author’s particular voice and agenda. I think about this in terms of a text pulling away from or lifting off from the “baseline” of its language, and the translator needs to re-create that same arc, despite starting from the totally different baseline of a different language.
In Norwegian, one example of that would be handling negatives. Negatives are often interesting moments in translation, because in some languages, “he never does” things; in others, “no one ever does” them. The negative is attached differently. “They had never,” “They hadn’t ever,” “No one ever had,” “Everyone had always not”: these are natural or not in different ways in different languages; the baseline in a given language might be the positive or negative form, the individual or collective formulation, and so you often need to translate negatives as positives or vice versa. There are a lot of times in a Norwegian conversation when people stop and look at each other, or just look down, and “det vert stilt,” while in English, silence is typically an absence of something, not a thing in its own right. It is awkward to translate these phrases as “A silence fell” (or “descended”), or “It got quiet,” or “There was a pause,” or even “They fell silent,” although these are dictionary definitions of det vert stilt. More natural translations into English use a negative subject, or negative verb, or negative object: “No one said anything,” “They didn’t speak a word,” “They said nothing for a moment.”
That kind of example is just inherent in the language pair, not especially specific to Fosse, especially since his use of Norwegian is so non-standard to begin with. I had to intervene more to keep his non-standard usages. For example, he doesn’t put a question mark at the end of all his grammatical interrogatives, and does sometimes put a question mark at the end of declarative sentences. In the first book of his I translated, the editor said, How do we know this wasn’t just a mistake? Well it was very obviously intentional, obvious to me at least, but since Fosse is askable I told the editor we could just ask him, and of course Fosse answered that he felt strongly that it was morally wrong to put a question mark at the end of something a person wasn’t truly asking. So that meant I was allowed to follow the original.
László Krasznahorkai, another writer of pages-long sentences, has said that there’s something persuasive about a speaker who doesn’t pause. I felt similarly emboldened being so close to Asle’s narration of the Septology, and I think I needed to be: though full of flashbacks, everything is told in the present tense; characters have similar or identical names; their stories crisscross and even bleed into one another’s. How did you feel Fosse’s breathlessness working on the novels, being that much closer to Asle?
Breathlessness is not how most people describe the experience: I think his writing usually registers as hypnotic, incantatory, or even like breathing itself. I read online somewhere that his books are like “literary ASMR”; he himself has called the Septology “slow prose,” which at first made me laugh a little, because it’s not like his earlier books are exactly speed demons! It can take fifty pages to leave a room. Anyway, I move through a text very slowly when I translate—you can’t skim, you really have to grapple with every single word—and I’m slowest in Norwegian, the language I translate from that I know least well. But I think this constraint works well with Fosse: being forced to read his books extremely slowly makes them work very powerfully on me as a reader.
You brilliantly dispel some of the myths hurled at translators—like the supposed futility of any given translation to stand up to its original—in your forthcoming book on the philosophy of translation. I’d rather let that book to speak for itself, so I’ll ask: can you describe what a fair appraisal of translation should look like?
I’m afraid your strategy here isn’t going to work. I end my philosophy of translation book, in the current draft at least, with a chapter on more practical matters, including how to appraise translations, so what you’re asking me for is going to be a spoiler anyway! What I say there is that it’s weird how many otherwise confident and intelligent people are scared off by translation: “I can’t judge a book that’s been translated!” says the professional reviewer who judges books by other people every day. A translated book is just a book—translators into English write books in English, they’re writers—but very smart people often tell me that this way of framing translation blows their minds, they have never thought of translators like that, only as linguists or decipherers or popularizers or something.
People think of translation precisely as something to be “appraised”—their first-choice verb for just reading might be to “read” a book, or “enjoy” a book, or even “judge” it, but not “appraise” it. The reason, I feel, is that educated people tend to think of translation in the context of a French 1 or Intro Greek class, where a student is handed a passage to test their knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, and the activity of demonstrating that knowledge is called “translating the passage.” Whereas that is not what actual translators do. I heard Emily Wilson, the translator of Homer, talk about this in the context of Classics, but it’s true more generally: people tacitly think a translation is something to be graded by a language teacher, and if you’re not qualified to teach a foreign language class then you’re not qualified to evaluate a translation. When these same people were three years old and hearing stories about Cinderella or Poseidon, they had no problem handling translation from French or Greek just fine, but that kind of experience doesn’t count anymore once someone decides that reading a translation is somehow more specialized than other kinds of reading.
Whatever you feel entitles you to pronounce judgment on books originally written in English—whatever your criteria of evaluation, the demands you make of the book and the rewards you describe reaping—all are quite literally the same with works in translation. Unless a translation was made for a different purpose, like an annotated bilingual critical edition for the classroom, but I assume we’re not talking about that. I would say readers and reviewers should feel as confident about judging, or just liking or disliking, a translated book as they are with responding to an actor’s performance in a movie even though they haven’t read the screenplay.
How do you choose your next translation project? Are there any rules you try to follow? I’m thinking of the challenges in maintaining your four languages. Do you feel the need to choose a Dutch title, for example, if you’ve just finished a French one?
No, no rules like that. It still largely depends on what projects come to me, from publishers or agents or just what I happen to run across as a reader. That said, I do like variety. I have three translations coming out that I’ve recently finished, all canonical German-language male authors from around the 1920s—Thomas Mann’s New Selected Stories, an anthology of Hermann Hesse bits on trees, and a retranslation of Felix Salten’s Bambi—so I was on the lookout for different kinds of book, and three of the next books I’m doing were published last year by living women in their early thirties, two Swiss and one Norwegian. Though I was also asked to retranslate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, so I’m not out of the male 1920s yet.
Your translation of the Septology is so musical, to borrow a word from Fosse. In your LARB interview, you said that this comes from “revisions and ear.” Could you share what your revision process looks like?
I think what I was trying to say with “revisions and ear” is that there’s nothing to say! I just reread it as many times as I have time for and tinker with the sentences to make them sound better. With Fosse’s style, it’s mostly making sure that there aren’t any jarringly fancy words, or unintended ambiguity or confusion that will trip the reader up in that long sentence strung together with commas and “and”s. I do usually do the last several read-throughs without referring to the original—especially with Fosse, it matters far far more that it sound right in English than that it mathematically repeat “he” or “and” the exact same number of times.
I’ve heard you compare a translation’s relationship with its original to pianist Glenn Gould’s connection with Bach (have we not heard Bach listening to Gould? How could we get any closer?). You’ve also compared yourself and Fosse to an actor/director pair. Is there a particular metaphor you return to when you sit down to translate? Does it change between books?
I’ve been struck in doing my philosophy of translation book with how all these different metaphors are right, they just describe different things. “Playing a score” or “acting a script” captures how a version is not a less valid version of an original, it’s how we get access to the original. If you want to emphasize the changes—every word is different, after all—then you might say the translator is “arranging” a piano piece for saxophone or symphony: there’s not a score telling you where and when every note comes, because the new language is a different instrument. Both of these metaphors express real truths, even though they’re mutually exclusive.
When I’m sitting down to translate there’s no metaphor at all really. The metaphors are just for interviews, or for talking with people about what translators do. When I’m translating, I’m just reading—trying to pick up on as much as I can of the original, the meaning and sound and allusion and tone and point of view and emotional impact. There’s an implicit evaluative process where I’m filtering what is most important and indispensable from what I’m willing to lose (my favorite after-the-fact metaphor for this is “gerrymandering”), and then after I try to write that indispensable thing in English, I reactivate the reading part and try to anticipate as much as I can of what an English-language reader will pick up on. Will something sound wrong, or remind them of something inappropriate, or be funny or unfunny, and so on. The process changes between books no more and no less than it feels different to read different books.
Coffeeshops have played a resourceful role in your life as a translator—you’re surrounded by people who might know the word or expression you’re trying to find the English for. How has COVID affected your relationship with this more lively alternative to a dictionary?
Ha, well, I don’t think it’s really affected my translations, it’s just made my life sadder and worse. When there’s no one to talk to, you turn to the internet, same as in every other part of life. I do my best to look up what I need to with the tools I have.
Damion Searls is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has received Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships and numerous translation prizes, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Uwe Johnson’s four-volume Anniversaries; he was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize with Jon Fosse for A New Name: Septology VI-VII, his seventh Fosse translation. He has also edited a widely loved one-volume abridgment of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal. His own writing includes poetry, essays, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (stories), The Inkblots (a history of the Rorschach Test and biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach), and The Philosophy of Translation (forthcoming).