Ask a Translator - Live Event with Daniel Hahn
London - Jul 20, 2016
featuring Daniel Hahn in conversation with Megan Bradshaw. View photos here.
Summary
On July 20, the Asymptote team was once again back at Waterstones Piccadilly in the bustling heart of London to welcome readers, writers and translators to our very first salon with the star of our wildly-popular Ask A Translator feature, Daniel Hahn. Since the column was launched last December, Daniel has lent his award-winning translation skills and knowledge to provide Asymptote readers around the globe with a helping hand. In another first for the journal, the salon marked Asymptote’s first live-streamed event, broadcast to our Facebook followers watching at home or on their mobiles around the world. With such a fantastic turnout on the night, the only real concern for the team proved to be the summer heat—with at least one recording device taken out of commission due to overheating.
Things got underway with opening remarks from Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large and host for the evening, Megan Bradshaw, who provided an introduction to the journal for those audience members who may have been unfamiliar with our work, before rattling off Daniel’s enviable resume and accolades (with particular emphasis upon his Man Booker International Prize-shortlisted translation of José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion). Armed with a series of her own questions alongside those tweeted by Asymptote readers with our hashtag #AskATranslator, Megan began proceedings by grilling Daniel on the aspects he struggles with in translation: poetry. The former, he explained, comes down to a lack of aptitude for poetry and a subsequent difficulty in being able to do the form justice. Elaborating on a point raised in his column, he remarked that effective translation is about playing to your strengths and not simply translating for its own sake—if you don’t understand how to write good poetry, its rhythms and cadences, you’ll always struggle to translate.
Switching gears, Megan asked Daniel to discuss another of his passions—children’s literature—and the dearth of translated children’s literature available to an English audience (a point made more prescient by the immediate surroundings of the venue). The main problem, in his estimation, is that a lot of adult fiction writers and translators are not very good children’s writers for the same reason that he struggles with poetry. Megan then moved the discussion on to his translation of Agualusa’s novel, and how he so successfully managed to capture the slang and demotic elements of the character’s speech in a way that seemed authentic without lapsing into parody. “The very difficult part of translating slang”, Daniel explained,” is not wanting to make something location specific”; to resist the temptation to simply substitute in accents and localities for analogues familiar to an Anglophone audience. The audience laughed as he gave the example of transposing a southern Brazilian accent to a cockney one, or a northern Angolan accent to a Leith accent (“suddenly the audience is ripped from being absorbed in the text to suddenly asking themselves “why do these Angolan soldiers sound like they’re in an Irvine Welsh novel?”).
Rounding out her questions for Daniel, Megan asked on behalf of a reader who wanted to know how an aspiring translator could break into the industry, especially when competing with other translators. Fortunately, replied Daniel, there is an “enormous amount of support in the industry” and sense of community among translators; translators are very unlikely to knowingly poach projects and pitches from their peers. However, he was quick to point out, this doesn’t make it easier for new faces to get their break—publishers go with who they know, so the trick is polishing your craft and getting sample translations out to them.
The floor was then opened to questions from the audience. One attendee asked how to deal with the sense of imperfection that comes from working to a strict publisher’s deadline, to which Daniel replied that he still hadn’t—that there are a number of translations that he authored and still feels are awful and unfinished. Imperfection is a part of the process; echoing the protagonist of A General Theory of Oblivion (‘Our mistakes correct us’).
The final question of the night afforded Daniel space to broach a topic that was weighing heavily on the minds of the audience: the Brexit referendum result and the looming prospect of cutting ties with Europe. As Daniel humorously quipped, the preceding hour of discussion had marked the longest period he had gotten by without talking about Brexit since the result was announced on June 24th (though he also admitted that he knew the questioner). After being asked why translation matters—or even why it should be taking seriously—Daniel offered a pensive and inspiring response that reiterated the noble ambitions behind the translator’s art: bridging cultures, fostering dialogue and promoting understanding. These are, in his estimation, all the things that translation should stand for, but they are hampered by a prevailing malaise in our culture and the literary establishment that has “ghettoised” literature-in-translation; reifying the idea that reading foreign literature is “as if we were reading it in a different way.” However, his closing comments provided a bright spark of optimism for the audience: reiterating that the result, for all of its negativity, was equally a reminder of the good that literature and translation can do—and the scale of the task that now lays before it
Both Daniel and the team were ecstatic with the turnout and how well the event was received (and an extra special thank you should go out to Waterstones Piccadilly for their support and the generous provision of free wine for our guests). If you weren’t able to make it on the night or to catch the event as it was broadcast live, Daniel is still open to your translation-related questions. Simply send them to Daniel via askatranslator@asymptotejournal.com and subscribe to our newsletter to get his ‘Ask a Translator’ columns delivered straight to your inbox!
—David Maclean
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