Liza St. James Interview
[GS-INT-018]
Liza St. James is a contributing editor at BOMB, a senior editor at the literary annual NOON, and a writing fellow in the School of Art at Cooper Union. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction. If you have a text that you are wanting to translate, what are the main factors to take into consideration when comparing the language of origin and the language of translation before starting? And how do you even begin? Are there drafts?
I begin by trying out what it feels like to translate it into English. Lately I’ve been working on poems, and there are lots of drafts. The first one is a get-it-down draft. Then in the next draft I start trying to solve any puzzles that that first draft illuminated for me.
Speaking of anthologies and collections, The Bible (aka the most workshopped book in the world). I heard that when St. Jerome was translating the Bible from Greek, he took the word "metanoia", which means "change your mind", and translated it to "repent". That simple creative choice completely altered the text towards an entirely new meaning. There must be some internal argument you have when choosing one word for another, no?
I like to change my mind, yes! I often place the front-running possibilities for a word or phrase side by side, separated by slashes (which can apparently also be called virgules, obliques, strokes, or solidi, among other names) so that I can see various possibilities at once. I’ll choose the one that feels closest and put it first so as to keep moving forward, but since changing one word can shift everything, I tend to keep possibilities in play for as long as possible. This also helps if the text has an internal pattern and I want to see how a choice carries out later on. Words themselves, of course, also shift in meaning, and Merriam-Webster’s current definition of “metanoia” is “a transformative change of heart, especially a spiritual conversion.” So then we have to think about context—this shift from mind to heart, and what these mean in a given moment, in a given text, culturally, connotatively.
This is fascinating. It feels like a whole art form within itself. You are a writer, I know that. But it seems like a form of channeling. It makes me think of how many different types of Hamlet you can watch. Where the choice of location, period, and language can reflect the text differently. You stage the play in rural Texas using Scouse English accents during the 1940s and you'd get a wild performance, and perhaps uncover something in that work you wouldn't have been able to with any other combination of elements. So is it a creative choice of how much historical context you bring into your decision-making? I'm also wondering how strictly you adhere to "current definitions" of things.
Yes, definitely a creative choice. So many writers I love also translate, and there’s a great reading series in NYC called Us&Them that features writers reading their own writing alongside work they’re translating. I became interested in translation while studying literary theory (and thanks to an amazing high school Spanish teacher who introduced me to Borges and Cortázar and García Márquez). I mostly translate from Spanish, but I also love the feeling of studying languages and learning more about how they work by dabbling and translating just for myself.
For the last years she taught, I was a TA for Edie Grossman—legendary translator of Gabriel García Márquez, of Don Quixote—and hearing her explain reasons for every choice she made in a sentence was thrilling. We talked about her translation of Augusto Monterroso’s “The Dinosaur,” for probably an hour one class, and could have kept going.
I had a chance to go to Helsinki on an exchange grant, where I translated an artist’s text into English, and she translated one of my stories into Finnish, and it was such a cool opportunity to learn about how Finnish sentences are composed. I even got to take a workshop with the Finnish translator of Heidegger, where we learned about Finnish grammar by considering possibilities for the translation of Dasein into Finnish. I appreciate how these creative decisions—that we also make in writing and in editing—are more exposed in translation. I like reading translator’s notes for this reason. At best, I think they can feel like a master class in that you’re getting a detailed, line-level glimpse into writerly choices otherwise typically not made public. My friend Katrine Øgaard Jensen describes the reasoning behind neologisms she comes up with in her translator’s notes, for instance. (She’s also bringing more attention to creative (mis)translation as an art form, through her BOMB series and her forthcoming book of collaborative poems, Ancient Algorithms.)
Can you expand on what creative (mis)translation is? That sounds fascinating.
What I love about your Hamlet example is that it’s less about a switch in language than in context, style, register, tone, etc. This is something that’s often lost in conversations around “originals” in translation, and which we don’t seem to worry about as much when discussing interpretation. Cover songs in music, inventive staging choices in performances, etc. Exercises in Style is a text I love using when teaching, because like your Hamlet example, it models translating or interpreting within a single language (in this case, initially French) through shifts in register, dialect, idiom, form, tone, and of course, style, among others. I was lucky to be introduced to it by the poet Charles Bernstein, who also introduced me to the way Robert Grenier translated birdsong. The OuLiPo used formulas and procedures, such as N+7 (substituting all nouns with those seven words later in the dictionary), to create new versions of a text. I think using constraint-based practices to create a new text inspired by an existing one constitutes a kind of creative mistranslation. Erasure poems, for instance. Here’s another example from Katrine, in which she retranslates a poem using runes.
Have you ever encountered concepts or words in the original language that don’t exist in the target language? How did you handle those moments?
All the time! I think this is the most exciting part of translating.
In 2013, thanks to a collaborative event hosted by the Center for the Art of Translation and Quiet Lightning, I had the chance to translate an “untranslatable” text by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. At the event, held at San Francisco’s The Lab, a handful of translators shared their translations of “Pornografismos.” We introduced our approaches and choices, and then our texts were projected behind us as we read. I have always loved seeing different versions of a work side-by-side, and it was particularly exciting to share something with which we had all, by necessity, taken some creative liberties. The recent anthology Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono—inspired by Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei—plays with this model, offering nineteen translations from the French of the same poem by Cameroonian writer Jean-Claude Awono, all from different translators into different Englishes.
The Finnish artist I translated, Fanny Ehnvall, used a long series of idioms and puns throughout her work, which was itself a kind of language game in the form of an encyclopedia entry. This more or less required rewriting it in English. I was lucky to be able to talk with her throughout the process. Similarly, a poet I’ve been translating, Lucía Carvalho—her first poetry book in English is forthcoming from Dulzorada—references a Bolivian legend in her most recent book that I’m working to stealth gloss for readers in English. It’s nice to be working with living writers who I can talk with about these moments!
If you could translate any book or author, past or present, who would it be and why?
I think for now I’m more drawn to languages themselves. Growing up in San Francisco, I became interested in Boontling when I first learned of it at around ten years old. I managed to convince my parents to take me to Boonville to interview one of the last speakers of the dialect. I’d love to spend more time with Boontling. I had a chance to study in San Sebastián years ago, and I would love to spend time with Euskera. I’m also interested in border languages like Portuñol, and in writers like Wilson Bueno, who wrote in a mix of Spanish, Portuguese, and Guaraní.
What advice would you give to someone aspiring to become a literary translator?
Find a copy of Roget’s International Thesaurus. Read literary translations and translator’s notes. Join ELTNA (or ETN). Follow ALTA and check out blog posts and events at Translationista. Start!