Throughout Ismail Kadare’s autobiographical novel The Doll, recently published in English by Counterpoint Press, the narrator voices a dilemma that most writers know well: the insufficiency of language. “It was hard to explain because there were no words for it,” he says at one point. “Either I didn’t know them, or they weren’t yet invented.” And later: “No language could describe what I felt in my heart. I needed a different one. The one I had would not obey me.”
So much of the literary translator’s work lies in courting the obedience of language. Translation makes intelligible the previously unintelligible, imagines new words to convey preexistent meaning. John Hodgson knows this well: The Doll is the sixth book of Kadare’s that Hodgson has translated. Considering his outsized role in bringing Kadare’s work to English-language readers, he cuts a modest, unassuming figure. One of the few Albanian-English literary translators working today, Hodgson has translated Kadare’s novels The Three-Arched Bridge, The Traitor’s Niche, and A Girl in Exile, among others. In comparison to the Albanian writer’s previous novels, Hodgson describes The Doll as “a gentle, reflexive, and humorous book” and found “the experience of translating it was correspondingly relaxed.”
Hodgson and I recently discussed his work as an Albanian-English interpreter and literary translator, as well as the inimitable pleasures of “a Kadare sentence.”
—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor
Sophia Stewart (SS): You were born in England and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle. What initially drew you to the Albanian language, and what led you to pursue Albanian translation professionally?
John Hodgson (JH): In the 1980s, I taught English in several now vanished Eastern European countries: the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The British Council sent me to the University of Prishtina in Kosovo. I knew nothing about Kosovo when I arrived, but I was enthralled by the life there. Now, during lockdown, I’ve written a short book in Albanian about this time, which I recall with great affection. Soon afterwards I was head-hunted by the United States Government to translate Marxist-Leninist propaganda.
SS: Seeing as you were born in England, and therefore speak British English, do you actively avoid Briticisms in your translations? While there is no such thing as “standard English,” do you attempt to make your English translations as universally intelligible—that is, “unmarked” by dialectical indicators—as possible?
JH: When I worked for the United States government, my computer would bleep whenever I used a Briticism, and this taught me, for instance, not to write the word “whilst.” English is very rich and capacious, so it is possible to write in an “unmarked” style without lapsing into bland UN-speak. Albanian also has a lot of variation, particularly between the north and south, and Kadare writes in a non-regional literary Albanian that is quite a recent flowering, and which he himself has done a lot to shape and infuse with expressive power. Recently he has been consciously reviving old words and creating neologisms. A Kadare sentence in Albanian is quite unlike any other writer’s. I was pleased when a reviewer described the prose of one of my translations as “pleasantly odd.” I thought I had perhaps captured something of this. Dialectical indicators in the original language pose more intractable problems than a translator’s own idiom. So does slang. Kadare hardly ever uses slang, and presents none of the difficulties of, for example, the soldiers’ Bosnian in Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure.
SS: The author-translator relationship can vary so much depending on the particular project or pairing. Having translated so much of Kadare’s work over the course of more than two decades, what does your working relationship with Kadare look like?
JH: Kadare has had dozens of translators and he can’t spend all his time dealing with us. I have been grateful for the confidence he has shown in me. Generally, after I have completed the first draft of each book in English, the editor and I put together questions for Kadare, which he has always answered conscientiously. He doesn’t use the internet, and I like to respect his privacy.
SS: As well as a literary translator, you are also an Albanian-English interpreter, having worked at the International Criminal Tribunal. Can you talk a bit about the differences between literary translation and interpretation? How do you experience them differently, and is there one you personally prefer?
JH: As an interpreter you cannot spend time polishing what you say. An investigator at the Tribunal once looked up wearily from his laptop and said to me, “We’re not aiming for an Academy Award.” A privilege of working in a relatively uncommon language is that you get to do a lot of different things, and you are not shunted into a specialist field. Interpreting is very satisfying at a personal level, for you come out from behind the computer screen and talk to people. It is rewarding even though the situations are often extremely painful, as at the Tribunal. Interpreters are rarely asked to translate good news.
SS: In a 2016 interview, you were identified as “one of only two literary translators working from Albanian today.” At the same time, Kadare himself once claimed that ten million people in the world speak Albanian. This is about the same number of Swedish speakers, yet there is an entire association dedicated to Swedish-English literary translators (and it certainly has more than two members!). Why do you think you have so few colleagues in the field of Albanian-English literary translation? What, if anything, can be done to support Albanian-English literary translation?
JH: These ten million Albanian speakers are spread among several Balkan states and a large diaspora. Long political isolation also deprived Albania of cultural contacts, and the country has struggled to build up “soft power.” However, there are more translators into English now. Ani Kokobobo, who left Tirana for the United States as a teenager, is translating Kadare. But a lot more could be done from the native Anglophone end, because a proper culture of literary translation depends on both sides. There is no degree course in Albanian at any English-speaking university that I am aware of, although several universities offer a component, so the universities would be a good place to start.
SS: How would you assess or describe the Albanian literary landscape today? Has Albania’s history of political instability had any impact on these landscapes?
JH: It is thirty years since the fall of communism, and its scars are far from healed. However, many younger writers are tired of this endless hangover of a system they never knew, and have a much more cosmopolitan outlook, as well as an instinct for the fantastic and absurd. Quite a few write in other languages. Elvira Dones writes in both Italian and Albanian. Her novel Sworn Virgin, the first novel she wrote in Italian, has been issued by And Other Stories in London. Gazmend Kapllani wrote his best-selling novel A Short Border Handbook in Greek. The Kosovo-born novelist Pajtim Statovci, in My Cat Yugoslavia, wrote his extraordinary account of—among other things—the collapse of the traditional Kosovo patriarchal family in Finnish. In Albania and Kosovo, there are also countless enterprising little publishing houses, and the annual book fairs in Tirana and Prishtina are a wonder and delight.
SS: Kadare remains one of the only Albanian writers to ever experience the level of international fame that he has. Why do you think Kadare’s work has had such global success, despite its geographical and cultural specificity?
JH: Kadare’s imagination has a global geopolitical and historical reach. He writes about the Soviet Union, China, and the rise and fall of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. When Albania was isolated under communism, Kadare tried to help his readers travel in their imagination, to let in fresh air. His books are just the thing for lockdown.
SS: The Paris Review once called Kadare a writer “deeply rooted in his own soil.” Indeed, his work often explores Albania’s history, politics, and folklore. In translating that work, then, you have to not only know the Albanian language but also know Albanian culture. How well-versed must translators be about the countries from which their authors hail, particularly if the work they are translating is as nation-specific as Kadare’s often is?
JH: I don’t know how anybody can learn a language without absorbing the culture too. Translating a language without a love for the culture sounds an impossible task, a horrible idea.
John Hodgson studied at Cambridge and Newcastle and has taught at the universities of Prishtina and Tirana. The Doll is the sixth book by Ismail Kadare that he has translated.
Sophia Stewart is the assistant interviews editor at Asymptote Journal. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and other venues. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
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