Proust Questionnaires

Proust Questionnaire: Tim Wilkinson

...a "Lydia Davis" questionnaire for Hungarian-language translator Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson (b. 1947) grew up in Sheffield, S. Yorks., but has lived most his adult life in London. He is the primary English translator of Hungarian writer Imre Kertész (titles including Fatelessness, Fiasco, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, Detective Story, The Pathseeker and Dossier K) and, more recently, Miklós Szentkuthy (Marginalia on Casanova, Towards the One and Only Metaphor), among others, as well as shorter works by a wide range of other contemporary Hungarian-­language authors. Fatelessness was awarded the PEN Club/Book of the Month Translation Prize for 2005.

Q: How did you learn your foreign language, and how did you begin working as a literary translator?

A: I learned Hungarian “on the hoof,” mainly by moving to Budapest around Easter 1970 and marrying the girl with whom I had by then fallen in love, having made several trips there since 1964. I might add that I sort of picked up German in much the same way (minus the love complications), by taking up a job in Switzerland, 20 years later. Contact with speakers of a language is, for me, the important feature, just as it is with small children… The strictly “literary” translation work only really came about ten years ago, after I had been translating a fairly wide range of non-fiction (mostly with a pronounced historical flavor) as an add-on to my main job (which was in an altogether different field and had little or nothing to do with translation). READ MORE…

Proust Questionnaire: Damiano Abeni

A "Lydia Davis" Questionnaire

Who is your favorite fictional character of all time?

In this exact moment it is a three-way tie: Achilles, Omar Little (The Wire), and Sherlock Holmes.

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Sean Cotter answers our Proust Questionnaire

"Translators should pay better attention than any other reader, and the translator should be at least as creative as the original author."

What is your favorite word in any language? Which word do you find most difficult to translate?

mda.

I don’t translate words, but works, authors, “the whole surround.”

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Mahmoud Hosseini Zad answers our Proust Questionnaire

A "Lydia Davis" Questionnaire

If you could have been born in a culture other than your own, which would you have chosen? Why?

By no means can I think about it! Never! READ MORE…

Allison M. Charette answers our Proust Questionnaire

A "Lydia Davis" Questionnaire

Who is your favorite fictional character of all time?

Seriously? That’s not fair, is it? This questionnaire is hard. Although now that I think about it: Death. I’ve never met a portrayal of Death that wasn’t incredible.

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Matt Reeck answers our Proust Questionnaire

A "Lydia Davis" Questionnaire

 

Who is your favorite fictional character of all time?

Too hard a question as it would require me to remember all the books I’ve read.

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Arunava Sinha answers our Proust Questionnaire

A "Lydia Davis" Questionnaire

Who is your favorite fictional character of all time?

Arthur from The Once and Future King by T H White.

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Edward Gauvin answers our Proust Questionnaire

A "Lydia Davis" questionnaire

Ladies and gents, let us introduce Asymptote Blog’s newest regular feature: a Proust (or should we say Lydia Davis?) questionnaire for translators! First up, French translator extraordinaire Edward Gauvin, whose newest translation, The Conductor and Other Tales by Jean Ferry– French Pataphysician, Surrealist, fantasist, and “borderline” Oulipian–is just out from Wakefield Press.

Who is your favorite fictional character of all time?

Borges.

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