I promised myself that I wouldn't write about this, since it might paint me like a pedant, but I'm so bad at keeping promises that no one is safe from my tendency to disappoint. In my defence, it so happens that translation is one of the several métiers that make up my portfolio career, as it is now fashionable to call professional failure across several sectors.
But not literary translation. I earn my grub with the unglamorous occupation of “translating garbage”, as Lina Mounzer bluntly puts it in this piece for the Paris Review. This garbage is often boring and routine, but it pays relatively well, and I can do it without exerting too much mental effort. And since translating is a thing I do in order to buy time to write — whatever I want, without pecuniary concerns — I have no regrets. Occasionally I land an interesting project instead of “garbage”, and translation becomes an enjoyable challenge, the kind of thing I could do more of, just for the pleasure of it. I also teach translation to final year undergraduate students at a London university, as part of a language module — here we work with literary texts and translation theory. Translating literature is beautiful, albeit ridiculously difficult and I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to closely engage with this practice for the past seven years, even if just in the classroom.
That being said, literary translation is a specific type of translation but it remains translation nonetheless. Many of the principles that apply to “translating garbage” also apply to translating the next Booker International winner. And for all the theoretical divagations, translation is the ultimate hands-on engagement with language: the truth of translation is always found translating.