Jon Fosse’s A Shining is both a luminous entryway for newcomers to the Norwegian author, and a fine distillation of Fosse’s long-running themes for familiar fans. We are proud to feature this latest English offering of the Nobel laureate as our October Book Club selection, and in this monthly interview with the translator, Damion Searls talks to Georgina Fooks about following rhythms, the translator as reader, and making his own rules.
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Georgina Fooks: To begin, congratulations on the Nobel Prize! I know the Swedish Academy likely would have been reading Fosse in Norwegian, but there’s no doubt that your translations of Fosse into English have been so important for the increased critical reception of his work.
Damion Searls: Thank you! Something that’s worth telling people who aren’t in the book business – I know Asymptote is well aware of this – is that for better or for worse (mainly for worse), English is the language that matters professionally for world literature. A German publisher told me a couple of years ago that if they have a book, they can get it translated into five or six languages, but it’s not until it gets a review in the Guardian UK or in the New Yorker that they can sell it to twenty or thirty languages—and they also told me that this is increasingly the case. English really is the gateway to bigger success for every other language; it’s not going to be a worldwide, translated-everywhere success unless it goes through English first.
The thing about Fosse—which Americans and English audiences don’t really know—is that he’s incredibly famous worldwide as a playwright. He is, from what I’ve read, the most produced playwright alive today. There have been productions of his plays in fifty languages all over the world, and it’s just never taken off in England or America. And there is a question asked about Fosse’s work: is it inaccessible? Well, if he’s the most produced playwright in the world, then by definition, it’s accessible. He was honoured with many prizes in Europe and in Norway before the English translations.
It’s not the case that the English publication raised him from obscurity, but it does seem to be a kind of stepping stone to things like the Nobel or to more translations. I know that now, Septology is being sold to dozens more languages than it had been before.
GF: I heard that you first read Fosse in German translation, and that you started to learn Norwegian to translate the book.
DS: English-language publishers hear about some book from some agent or some publisher in Europe, and then they have to decide whether to acquire it, because they have to buy the rights from the original publisher or author before the book then gets translated. So how do they make their decision? Well, they get some friend of theirs or someone who’s starting out, an emerging translator or grad student, to write a reader’s report, which is also what I, as the like junior person, did. And I guess this publisher didn’t have anyone to read Norwegian, but the book had been translated into German, so they sent me the German translation, which is a very good translation. His German translator is excellent, and has worked with him for decades. I read the book, and I wrote my report stating: ‘The book is total genius. You absolutely must do it. It’s incredible.’ And the publisher said: ‘Thank you very much. Here’s your hundred bucks, and we’re not, in fact, going to do it.’
At that point I said: ‘Well, I really do think it’s a great book. If you’re not doing it, do you mind if I take the project somewhere else?’ They didn’t mind, so that was when I found a US publisher, found a co-translator, and learned Norwegian in the process of doing this book together. The co-translator, who is a native speaker of Fosse’s version of Norwegian, did a first draft of Norwegian to English, and I sat there with the English and the Norwegian. I knew what the Norwegian said, because I had the English, and when I couldn’t figure out how they went together, I could triangulate with German, because as Norwegian is a Germanic language, there are a lot of similarities.
I was initially afraid that I wouldn’t have anything to do besides editing it a little bit, and I didn’t want to claim to be a co-translator if all I’m doing is touching it up. But actually, I ended up making hundreds of changes on every page in terms of getting the rhythm, and we went through seven or eight rounds together. I do think it’s fair to call it a co-translation, and that’s how I learned Fosse’s Norwegian.
The thing about being a translator is you don’t have to pass an exam in that language. You have to read in that language, and then you have to write in English. So the fact that I couldn’t interpret for the UN, or have a dinner party conversation spoken in Norwegian, is something which makes many people think—how can you possibly translate it? Well, that’s not what the translator is actually doing. Fosse even outed me when we had a bookstore event over Zoom during the pandemic, and at one point he said: ‘I don’t understand how Damien produces such great translations. He doesn’t even know Norwegian.’ So, that information is out there in public.
But the disclaimer is it’s not entirely true; I do know Norwegian, but I don’t speak it. I read it. If this was a very subtle social novel with nuanced cues, wherein the way a person speaks defines their social position, I probably wouldn’t translate it, but A Shining isn’t exactly like that. It’s: ‘I sat on the stone. I looked at the sky.’ Those aren’t difficult clauses to understand. You just have to figure out how to express it.
GF: To talk about A Shining, it is delightfully brief, which is a big contrast to Septology, a work famous for being a seven-volume, three-book single sentence. Some people might think it’s a very complex reading experience.
DS: I spoke to Fosse’s agent recently, and she was very funny. She said: ‘I’m now telling reporters that you have to stop saying that! It’s not true, get over it – it’s not a difficult book. Nobody experiences it that way.’ And it’s true. I hear from people who say they were scared off by a seven hundred-page sentence, but then, once they read it, they just totally fell in. Septology has sentences; they’re just separated by commas. And there’s also dialogue. It’s more about a rhythm of writing. It’s not a huge puzzle of decoding a seven hundred-page sentence, so the agent was telling these journalists off for lazily summarising the book and scaring people away. And I think that’s true—sure, there are some people who might not like it, but it’s not difficult, it’s the opposite. It’s very immersive, very hypnotic. You get right into it, and you attune yourself differently to these commas and ‘and’s, instead of periods.
But A Shining is not like that. It’s in one paragraph, from one person’s perspective, but there are sentences of normal length. Translating it after Septology, I thought, oh, it’s so flimsy! It’s so slight—it’s nice, but so short. And I go back and forth about whether this is a major work of Fosse’s. In some ways, it seems minor; in other ways, it seems very distilled, and a lot of the reviews, especially from England, have been incredibly glowing and positive about how magnificent and beautiful it is! And the fact that it’s short is so great, and it’s coming at a good moment for people who have unfortunately been scared by the length of Septology.
I used to say the longer the better for Fosse, because the more time he has to layer on these things and immerse you in the experience, the more I liked it. I liked the shorter novels better than the plays, and I liked Septology better in some ways than the shorter novels, because he had this bigger scope. And then A Shining came along, and now I’m not sure!
GF: The style of A Shining, as you say, is fairly similar to Septology—it’s just marked with full stops rather than commas. What was the process like translating something much shorter by Fosse? What were the different kinds of economies of language that you were working with?
DS: As a translator, I’m not making decisions about the structure, but I do work with the style. It’s on the sentence level that you have to make it flow, and not get interrupted by words that are too intellectual in English. An example from Septology is that the word for ‘metaphorical’ in Norwegian is basically the word for an image. It’s not a long, polysyllabic word based in Greek. When you’re translating it, even though the dictionary says this word means metaphorical, I couldn’t use that translation, because so much of the style is keeping this very placid, low, simple vocabulary, so I spent time figuring out some way to rewrite it as without calling using the word ‘metaphorical’. There were lots of local decisions with Septology. Certain kinds of rules developed. For example, do you put a comma before the ‘and’ or not? There are rules for that in English, although they’re rules for normal sentences, not for Fosse’s prose style. I had to figure out my own rules for it, and then, when copyeditors would suggest a comma somewhere, I would say no, because it wasn’t in keeping with the rules of the book.
But you know, I have one example from A Shining where Fosse weighed in. Fosse, in the early years, didn’t read the translations, but he would answer my questions. It was a great relationship over email. He’s super friendly, and as supportive as you would hope and imagine he might be. But then, with Septology and then A Shining, he had more time and read the whole thing.
In A Shining, the word in Norwegian for this white thing, the titular shining, is the word that’s related to the verb ‘to create’, so it’s like a creature—but in English, a creature is definitely more of an animal. The word I was looking for was more like a created thing, like a form or Gestalt, to use another non-English word. And so, what do you call it in English? And I really spent a long time figuring it out, and I ended up with ‘apparition’ in the draft. I didn’t love the solution, because it has a lot of syllables to be repeating it a lot, but it seemed to kind of check all the boxes and solve the problem. I showed Fosse the draft, and he answered my questions and made his comments. And then he said: ‘You know, the word ‘apparition’ sticks out when I read it’.
I was impressed, realizing that Fosse has a good ear in English, which is not his language. I hadn’t run across his fine antenna for English word choices before, but he proved that he had it. And so I went back to the drawing board, and I came up with a ‘presence’, which is not the dictionary definition, but I thought it really worked; it’s there, but you don’t know what it is, and it’s a shorter, simpler word that can be repeated. So that’s the kind of translation decision that you have to make with a book like this. It’s not just what does the word mean, it’s a question of: how do you cast the spell in English, how do you make it work? And you have to think about things like the length of the word, not just what it means.
GF: Did the title pose a similar translation problem?
DS: The title in Norwegian is Kvitleik, which means whiteness; in the book, it’s this shining whiteness, and a figure in its presence, in its whiteness. And kvit is white. It comes from the same root as the word ‘white’, and leik makes it a noun: whiteness. But you can’t call a book whiteness in 2023 in English without it meaning something different—meaning racial privilege. So from the beginning, I needed something new, and the shining wasn’t even called a shining in the book. It could have been called A Presence, it could have been called An Apparition, it could have been called In the Dark Wood, which is a Dante reference. It would have been a great title for the book, but unfortunately Fosse wrote a play version of the novella that was called In the Dark Wood, and while the play hasn’t been translated, I didn’t want to confuse things.
A Shining, of course, has connotations in English that are not in the original, with Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick. But I don’t feel like I did anything wrong by adding connotations to the title that weren’t there in the original—I’m not breaking my translator’s oath. And it ends up being pretty close to what the Norwegian title is conveying in the context of this book: the glowiness, the brightness.
GF: I like how A Shining invites us as readers to focus on the presence, rather than the darkness of the wood. And you are moving into the light as a reader, following the trajectory of the text.
How does the editing process work for your translations? You mentioned Fosse reads over your translations. How are the publishers involved?
DS: I’ve been working with the same publishers now for several books in a row, and they obviously like his style. They trust me, but of course I get a document back with tracked changes and questions, and the editing process for the first sentences of A Shining was interesting: ‘I was taking a drive. It was nice. It felt good to be moving.’
The Norwegian is along the lines of: ‘I was driving’, and then there’s an adverb that basically means ‘onwards’, ‘Westward ho!’. Moving not with any direction in mind, but just plunging ahead. In the draft, the first sentence was ‘I was driving along’ because that expressed this sense of not having any specific destination, just driving. The American publisher, Transit, is a small operation, and the editor told me he thought that didn’t work, that it was a little weird; it seemed like the driver was interrupted in the middle of something. At first, I thought it was fine, but I kept thinking about it, and I ended up changing it to: ‘I was taking a drive.’ And actually at least two reviews—including Asymptote’s – have mentioned the first two sentences as this great set-up for the book, that it’s so casual: ‘I was taking a drive. It was nice.’ In a way, that’s not exactly what the Norwegian says, but in another way, English works with the verbs. ‘Taking a drive’ is the English way of giving you that feeling of just going.
GF: I really like how the opening is a very recognisable scenario, narrated with short everyday sentences. But it gives us a sense that the character is already a little stuck—if something as basic as a drive is nice, what was so bad that the drive is nice in comparison? Even these micro-decisions paint a very vivid psychological picture.
DS: And that is mostly Fosse’s decision, I’m just translating it: I’m not deciding what is psychologically insightful. But given that it’s there, I have to make it work in a way that feels powerful to me. So even if I don’t fully have the insight into why he felt these simple sentences was good for his narrative structure, I work with what’s there and make it speak in English. And until I read your review, I hadn’t thought about how the first sentences paint a psychological portrait, or already do the work of casting the protagonist as being in trouble or adrift. I didn’t have to know that in order to translate it, but I had to do something, to capture the ineffable thing reading the text was giving me.
GF: It’s interesting that you mention the ineffable, because in the Nobel citation, they praise Fosse for his ability to ‘give voice to the unsayable’.
DS: I don’t know if you saw this, but on one of the message boards that often speculates about the Nobel Prize, they basically gathered together the entire top fifty authors who are often mentioned for the Nobel and had ChatGPT write a Nobel Prize citation for it, and they really came out sounding identical to the last few years of Nobel Prize citations! They always talk about giving voice to the unsayable, even ChatGPT can come up with that.
GF: Although when I read that, it made me think about how Fosse is often talking about very profound divine experiences, which are hard to speak about.
DS: It actually is pretty hard to talk about his writing, and a lot of the reviews (positive as they are) just gesture more or less like vividly and dramatically to the experience—it’s the first time I experience the divine, it’s like meditation, it’s like prayer—in a way that isn’t saying very much, although it is conveying some sense of enjoyment. But it’s also good to remember that Septology, for example, is not just one long intellectual essay about God. There are people cooking dinner, you know. There’s frying up the onions, because you’re going to have bacon and eggs and a nice cup of black coffee—that’s in the books, too.
GF: And that’s related to what we said about the opening sentences—Fosse’s characters are not unimaginable to us. They’re posited as very ordinary people who eat the same kind of things, do the same kind of things, get stuck in the same kind of ways that we do. But then he has this ability to introduce this supernatural or divine element to proceedings, and the encounter in A Shining is a very real human response to something that escapes the normal realm of knowledge.
DS: Fosse commits to his bit, as they say in other contexts. If what happens in A Shining happened to you, you would be confused! But then what would you do? It’s one of my favorite parts of the book, when the narrator’s car is stuck and he decides to get out of the car and walk into the forest because he has to find someone, and there’s a road, and roads have to go somewhere. But the second he gets out of the car, he thinks: ‘What is wrong with me? That is the worst possible idea anyone could have to walk into a dark forest when you’re alone and lost.’ He does it, and then immediately thinks: ‘I am so stupid!’ It’s very funny.
GF: And as you mentioned, people are perhaps intimidated by Fosse, but his work is very accessible at the level of language, the dialogue, the kind of the people we meet. They have recurrent everyday dilemmas, but they are also grappling with bigger questions, which I think we all do anyway.
DS: And in Septology, there are multiple characters, so there is dialogue, and that’s where it’s important to remember that he’s maybe the most successful playwright in the world, that he knows how to do dialogue. The dialogue in Septology, I think, is really incredible. For example, there’s this neighbor that the main character has, and they’re friends—but in the Scandinavian, kind of distanced way—and he’s the only one he ever talks to. They have the same conversations over and over again, and sometimes he loves his neighbor, and sometimes he hates him. And in these conversations you really feel yourself switching allegiances and wondering where the characters are coming from. The dialogue is really great, and leads to some of the great humour and subtlety of Fosse’s work. One of my favorite jokes from Septology is when they’re mid-conversation, the neighbor and Asle, and the neighbor says: ‘Can I ask you something?’ And Asle starts thinking: ‘Oh my God, what’s he going to say?’ And there’s this big build up as they’ve been having this deep conversation, and the narrator is thinking about God. Then finally, he says: ‘Okay, you can ask me.’ And the neighbor says: ‘Why do you wear a ponytail like at your age? It’s just ridiculous!’ It’s very funny, the way that Fosse plays with dialogue to disrupt this big contemplative vibe that the rest of the book has.
GF: Your book, The Philosophy of Translation, is coming out next year. Could you share some insights about how you approach translation that is related to your experience of translating Fosse?
DS: The book has a lot of examples that are drawn from my experience, not because I’m a better translator than everyone else, but because I’ve had the experience of doing a number of translations. It’s not a ‘how-to’ book, so it neither traces out my process, nor is it much of a sort of checklist for other translators. It really is more of a philosophy text on the level of thinking about what this process is, and what’s going on as we translate.
There was a book called After Babel by George Steiner that came out in 1975, a very sweeping book stating that all of human interaction is a translation process, and George Steiner has this very Olympian voice of proclaiming from on high the way the world is. I didn’t want that voice, but I did think that it was a good time to do another sort of primary text about translation. There’s been an explosion of translation studies in academia, and there have been several introductions to the key issues from translators like David Bellos, for example, and Edith Grossman, who in 2010 wrote a book called Why Translation Matters. I felt like I didn’t have to start at zero and introduce the topic, so I try and sidestep the academic translation theory, to have it be more philosophy than theory. It’s trying to be a primary text, and that’s part of calling it The Philosophy of Translation, which is very bold and I agonised over it a lot. But it is what I think the philosophy of translation is, and then you, the reader, can do whatever you want. You can take it or leave it, or disagree with it. I’m not coming to it from a spirit of imperial arrogance, like I am mandating to all of you what the philosophy is. I’m doing it in a personal spirit of humility and generosity: here’s my thing, and I will put it out there, but now it’s up to you.
Damion Searls has translated several books and a libretto by Jon Fosse—Septology, Melancholy (co-translated with Grethe Kvernes), Aliss at the Fire, Morning and Evening (novel and libretto), and Scenes from a Childhood—and books by many other classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Bachmann, Jelinek, Modiano, and Uwe Johnson. His own books include What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, The Inkblots, and The Philosophy of Translation.
Georgina Fooks is a writer and translator based in England. She is the Director of Outreach at Asymptote, and her writing and translations have been published in Asymptote, The Oxonian Review, and Viceversa Magazine. She is currently completing a doctorate in Latin American literature at Oxford, specialising in Argentine poetry.
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