Back in September, I had the joy of interviewing author and translator Roy Kesey as part of our Annual Translation Symposium. We discussed Dark Constellations, translation, travel, the Norman Invasion of England, colonialism, poetry, Dr, Seuss, and our shared hatred of Ayn Rand’s books. Here you will find a (lightly) abridged transcript of our talk that I hope you will find as enlightening as I did.
LM: Have you found anything uniquely challenging about working in translation, perhaps specifically in the languages you work in? For example, is there anything unique about translating Spanish to English that makes your job particularly challenging?
RK: Wow, I mean translation presents a different set of problems from writing my own stuff. But that is also part of what draws me to it, part of what makes it worthwhile for me. It’s really useful; there are days where the blank page is just too much. It’s nice to be able to just give up and shift to something that is done, that I have to rebuild. I have to take it apart and rebuild it with new parts, and I have to machine those parts, but I’m not starting from nothing. That’s really psychologically useful to be able to do that shift – and in the other direction as well! There are times when I’ve been working on the same paragraph three or four times and there is a particular problem, a particular translation problem, and I’m not breaking it and so I’m like: “You know what? No. I’m gonna go back to making stuff up on my own.” I’ve found the ability to switch back and forth between those two modes to be useful in a lot of ways.
About the language question: every language obviously has its own set of parameters, its own music, and its own challenges. I lived in Peru for twelve years, so I know one register of Peruvian Spanish really well. The novels I’ve translated are all by Argentinian authors. So I have new geography to learn, new slang to sort out, and a new set of registers to organize myself in. So that’s one of the challenges, but I don’t think that’s something particular to Spanish – it’s the same in French or German or whatever.
LM: Awesome – you’ve already started to touch on my next question, but have you found any unique joys in translation as opposed to other creative forms?
RK: The biggest joy is breaking a problem. One of the things that is interesting the more you do it is that you’ll be reading something in Spanish for the first time and you’re not thinking necessarily about translating it—but maybe if you like the book enough and know no one has bought the rights yet—and so you’re reading it for the pleasure of reading it but also potentially with the view towards translating it, you get this sort-of dual-track going on in your brain where half is just reading it and enjoying it and the other half is already starting a translation, already doing little bits. And you’ll fall into a really fortunate bit of phrasing for something that could have been really hard and maybe you’ll make a note of that.
Then you’ll come to other bits and you’ll just know that’s just a knot of language. Maybe it’s because it’s dealing with slang or puns, which are really hard to translate. Humor generally is hard to do—it’s hard to do well in the first language, let alone get the same kind of humor, the same register of humor in a translation. So breaking one of those open and finally find something that feels just as natural as the original if that’s the sort-of key that’s it’s working in, or that does the same kind of joke—it’s never the same but it’s some kind of clean parallel. Oh yeah, I just knock off after that, I’m done for the day!
LM: I completely understand that feeling. I’ve taken some classes dealing with Medieval Literature and there will be jokes that you simply don’t get because—even though it’s written in English, or an earlier form of English, some much just doesn’t translate (especially humor) but we just can’t fully understand the culture.
RK: And when you have to access a joke through a footnote it’s not funny anymore! No matter how funny it was in the original.
LM: Right! Can you tell me more about one of those tricky passage? One where you finally untied the knot, and everything was wonderful?
RK: Hmm… There are a couple. I remember at the beginning of Dark Constellations, there’s a set of explorers, scientists—it’s set in the world of the naturalistic exploration that’s happening in the 19th Century, which is also something I enjoy reading about and learning about. This is a new form of colonialism in a certain sense; both in the world of the book and in the characters’ minds, the idea is that that they are adding to the sum of knowledge of the world and that’s a purely good thing—except it’s not. You’re dealing with individuals, successfully or unsuccessfully, new flora and fauna and all the rest of it.
Sorting out exactly how to play a really complicated and frankly transgressive passage dealing with their first meeting with the people who lived in the area originally was complicated. You have the Europeans, and I’m working both on the passages where they are actually there in the cave and then the passage where one of them is writing up a diary of it later on. So I’m having to find language for their inability to understand and their inability to understand is subtext, it’s never text—they’re scientists, they always think they understand. So I have to come up for a register for these passages where they are showing no uncertainty and being wrong and that’s hard. That early bit—I skipped it, moved on to the other stuff where they are just walking around looking at stuff. That’s easy. And then came back to the first encounter a couple times. But when it broke, when I found the voice for that: all the sudden it was possible, and I was able to quit for the day.
LM: How did you find that voice?
RK: Just trial and error. Just working it, knowing that it felt wrong, taking those paragraphs completely apart, rebuilding them entirely. Paying a little bit more attention maybe to questions of the music, reading the passages to myself out loud, finding the deeper heartbeats in the prose and using that as an anchor rather than literal meaning or symbolism or something else. I don’t know that that’s the answer, but it felt like the answer.
LM: I really love that metaphor of the deeper heartbeats in the text, that’s not something I had considered in texts before. Now—obviously you’ve traveled and lived in a whole bunch of different places. What is the biggest lesson about writing or translation that you have learned from all of the traveling you’ve done?
RK: I think travelling teaches you to travel, living teaches you to live, and writing teaches you to write. I’m not totally sure that the skills are necessarily transferrable even though they feel like they are.
I’ll frame it another way: I have access to certain resources that I wouldn’t otherwise have. I think of them more often in terms of my writing – that I can bring to bear the sort of comparative strangeness of grammatical structures in another language that don’t exist in English. I can bring them in and just see what it does when you force English into these new patterns.
I like what happens when you mess with language, and I like that it feels a little bit like a really compressed version of linguistic history. Taking structures from other languages and seeing what happens when you run English through that machine interests me, and feels useful sometimes – sometimes it feels like a distraction as well, not every story needs to do that. But it’s a thing that I enjoy doing and it’s something I have access to more due to travel and less to formal language study which I actually have very little of. It’s been more a question of going places, paying taxes, and bitching about the traffic—doing the things that people do to live there and gaining access to their language that way. It feels like those historical pressures are happening much more quickly because I just decide that it’s a thing that sounds fun.
LM: Everything you just said, I really resonated with. I’m predominantly a poet and we talk a lot in poetry, at least in my poetry classes, about finding ways to make language strange. It’s really interesting to see those same sorts of techniques being used here too.
Last, but not least, my favorite question to ask writers: What is your least favorite book that you have read/encountered? What about it do you dislike? How (if at all) has it influenced your writing?
RK: [Laughs] Oh wow, so I have to call somebody out!
LM: Oh, I completely understand! If it helps, my answer to this is The Old Man and The Sea. I had to read it in my senior year of high school and it was just… so draining. For me, though, it taught me a lot about how I don’t like short, choppy sentences like in Hemingway’s journalistic style.
RK: For you it was a rhythmic thing?
LM: Yes, exactly!
RK: Interesting… This is a good question and a hard question, and not a question I think about a lot because I tend to stop thinking immediately about a book when I set it down unhappy or unsatisfied. And I think a lot of the time the problem is me, that I’m reading it in the wrong place in my life, or the wrong time of day – I’m not receptive to what it’s laying down. But that’s not how I phrase it in my brain, I phrase it: “This is a terrible book, and no one should read it!” But then sometimes I’ll come back to the book later and find all kinds of things that I like a lot.
I think—like how the line is the base unit in poetry—the sentence is the base unit in prose; I think in sentences and I really delight in sentences and what they can be asked to do and the weights they can be asked to bear. This sounds obvious (and it’s not), but I write a sentence at a time. When I set down a book – and by that, I mean stop reading, never think about again, and assume it’s terrible – I will never do that with a book with good sentences because I’m getting something from music even if I’m bored by the content or offended by choices that the characters are making. I will very rarely pass on a book with great sentences because there aren’t that many. Sentences are hard – who knew? So out of respect for that, I’ll stick with those books.
I’m not necessarily sure what these books have taught me. I think most about what I’ve learned about reading and writing were from children’s books. You’re understanding all of a sudden that there are these little machines built out of words that can go places and they will take you – that’s extraordinary, mythical almost! So I know for a fact that my two biggest influences are the Bible and Dr. Seuss, and I think there are people who wouldn’t argue with that having read some of my stories.
For the worst book I’ve encountered, I am going to choose between two of Any Rand’s books—either Atlas Shruged or The Fountainhead. And I guess I’ll pick The Fountainhead, not because it’s message is any dumber or more destructive because they are equally dumb and destructive, and not because it’s sentences are worse because they might actually be slightly better even though they’re still terrible, but because more people have read it and so its preposterous, asinine, childish message has reached more people and caused more damage. Yeah, the architect standing alone on the cliff that no one understands – the world needs a whole lot less of that.
Lauren Miles