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I’ve talked before about literary translation, in a sense: In my post about translating poetry. But today there’s something more unique to talk about, having to do with what translating a novel can teach you about yourself and your writing craft.

You might remember that some time ago I wrote a novel called The Storytelling Cat. Indeed, I started writing it about a month after saying “I won’t write another novel”. Never trust a writer, huh? What you might have noticed is that there’s also a Greek version available for download on Home for Fiction.

The vast majority of my readers don’t speak Greek. Still, I decided to translate The Storytelling Cat into Greek – on a whim, almost – for two reasons: i) it completes the third part of my quasi-Greek-trilogyIf you suspect I might translate the other two novels too at some point, you might be right! (supplemented by Apognosis and The Other Side of Dreams); ii) it’s set on the island of Lemnos, and I wanted to experiment with the local idiom in literary form.

What I didn’t expect was that this literary translation – written in less than two weeks – would reveal a ton of things about my creativity, my writing, and who I am as a writer.

Literary Translation: The Peculiarities of “Native” Language

I’ve very briefly talked about being multilingual before. Here’s the gist of it:

I don’t have a clear answer to the question, What’s your native language?

I mean, I was born in Greece, where I spent the first 18 or so years of my life. Yet I also began to attend English classes before I removed the training wheels from my bike. And after I left Greece (and for a longer time; I’m ancient), my family and working language has always been English, 95% of the time.

English became my emotional language, the language I can express myself fully and affectively. If you heard me speak in English, you could tell I don’t have a native accent, whereas in Greek, I can’t imagine anyone confusing me for a foreigner – though it has happened once!

However, I nowadays simply lack the vocabulary and mode of expression in “my native language”. If you asked me to translate into Greek the preceding sentence, I would need to actively think about it in my head for a second or two.

These shortcomings revealed themselves in intriguing ways during the literary translation process of The Storytelling Cat

The Problems of Expression

Pretty soon in the literary translation process, I discovered I had trouble expressing myself in Greek. Supposedly that was my native language, but for the reasons I explained above, it’s not as clear as you might imagine.

For instance, take this excerpt:

The village population has increased, as a good number of American- and Australian-Greeks have come to spend a few weeks on the island they or their ancestors were born. It’s the former group, the older chaps, who are particularly entertaining and amusing to examine. They are outsiders, both spatially and temporally, relics of worlds that have vanished. They come expecting to find the idyllic, romanticized dreamland they left decades ago, and become upset when they realize it no longer exists. The joke’s on them: This world they remember didn’t even exist back then.

Writing something like this in English feels like something I can do with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back; in seconds.

It was quite a shock when I realized it felt hard to translate (let alone come up with) it into Greek. It wasn’t just the lack of vocabulary – this can be fixed easily with online dictionaries and such tools – but the lack of motivational gravitation. Put simply, typing the words in Greek simply didn’t feel natural to me; it didn’t feel affective, human, authentic.

What could I do? Back to basics…

Literary Translation: Affect and Focus

I quickly discovered that I had to (re)consider what the book was about. This might sound funny – I was the author, after all – and I do confess I had an intimate knowledge of what the book was about. Hence the little parenthesis in “(re)consider”.

But there was a meta- element here. My trouble with expressing myself in GreekBeing a smart reader, you might have even detected yet another layer of metatextuality in the excerpt I quoted earlier, talking about American-Greeks! as effortlessly as I did in English made me (re)appreciate some of the central themes in the novel: miscommunication, misunderstandings, (being a) misfit.

Or, in the words of Tux, the protagonist:

But I was also a pragmatic cat; I knew that I wouldn’t even have the chance to try to pose the question. It was at that point, reflecting on the complexities of communication, that it dawned on me:

I was a foreigner.

Somewhere along the way in the literary translation process, I realized I started paying more attention to these themes. The entire process was highly subconscious, at first. Probably this being literary fiction (tinted with magical realism and heavy self-referential aspects) enhanced this even further.

Different Language, Different Story?

Well, not quite. I mean, the story is the same. If you’re an English as well as a Greek speaker, reading either version takes you to the same end result, following the same trajectory. The same checkpoints, if you will.

And yet, this isn’t quite the same story either. To the extent, the metadata at the beginning of the Greek version mention “Translation/Transcreation by [yours truly]”.

The very element of this book being offered in a different language altered some of its dynamics. Perhaps the most crucial element here was my decision to render the speech of Lemnos residents using the local idiom.

This of course makes interpretation far harder – even for Greek speakers, that is; if you’ve read any Irvine Welsh, such as his…magnum opus Trainspotting, you know what I mean). However, at the same time it added immense authenticity to the narrative, that was simply a click below in the English version.

It’s All about Authenticity

Recall what I said in that post on authenticity:

Ultimately, knowledge is power. Understand what you do and why you do it. Realize the implications. And respect this idea, sticking with its core dynamics.

I feel that this literary translation process precisely made me follow my own advice, in a manner more direct compared to the original English version. Of course, the fact this translation project began almost as a joke, on a whim, in a sense emphasized its artistic qualities.

More art and less matter, with apologies to Shakespeare!