When Techniques Don’t Travel: The Untranslatable Art of Style
Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Kairos” won the International Booker Prize, but something essential was lost between German and English. Not plot or character development. The real casualty was Erpenbeck’s complex use of temporal fragmentation through verb tenses that simply don’t exist in English. German’s ability to layer past, present, and subjunctive moods creates a linguistic archaeology that Michael Hofmann’s translation, brilliant as it is, cannot fully replicate.
This isn’t translator failure. It’s the fundamental challenge facing contemporary fiction’s most sophisticated techniques when they cross linguistic borders. Consider Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian,” where Deborah Smith’s controversial translation sparked fierce debates about accuracy versus accessibility. The original Korean text uses honorific systems and grammatical structures that embed power dynamics directly into sentence construction. These aren’t decorative elements but central to understanding the protagonist’s psychological dissolution.
What emerges is a thorny question: when literary techniques are language-specific, what exactly are we reading? The answer reveals translation as its own creative art form, one that must sometimes abandon literal fidelity to preserve emotional truth.
Rhythm and Breath: How Syntax Creates Meaning
Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights” demonstrates how contemporary authors deliberately exploit their native language’s rhythmic possibilities. Polish allows for extraordinarily long sentences that spiral and accumulate meaning through grammatical structures impossible in English. When Jennifer Croft translated the novel, she faced a fundamental choice: preserve the hypnotic, breath-defying syntax or adapt it for English readers’ linguistic expectations.
Croft chose adaptation, breaking some of Tokarczuk’s marathon sentences into digestible segments. The result reads beautifully in English but sacrifices the original’s meditative quality, where meaning emerges through sustained attention rather than quick comprehension. This decision shows how translation criticism must evaluate not just accuracy but aesthetic philosophy.
Compare this to László Krasznahorkai’s Hungarian prose, where single sentences can span entire chapters. George Szirtes’s English translations maintain this breathless quality, forcing readers into the same disorienting experience as Hungarian audiences. The technique becomes the content. When syntax shapes consciousness, translators must choose between readability and artistic integrity.
Cultural Code-Switching: When Context Becomes Content
Contemporary fiction increasingly uses code-switching and linguistic hybridity as deliberate techniques. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Italian works, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan dialect integration, or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multilingual fragmentation in “Dictee” all use language itself as character and plot device. These texts challenge translation’s fundamental premise: that meaning can be transferred intact between linguistic systems.
When Ann Goldstein translates Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, she must navigate not just Italian-to-English conversion but the original text’s complex relationship between standard Italian and regional dialect. Ferrante uses this linguistic tension to mirror class dynamics and identity formation. Goldstein’s solution involves creating register differences in English that approximate but cannot replicate the social implications of dialect choice in Naples.
This reveals how contemporary authors are writing increasingly “untranslatable” works, not from linguistic complexity but from cultural specificity. The technique isn’t separate from content, it is the content.
Experimental Forms in Translation: Preserving Innovation
Contemporary fiction’s experimental techniques present unique translation challenges. Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” includes a chapter written entirely in PowerPoint slides. Visual fiction techniques translate more easily than linguistic ones, but even here, cultural references and humor require creative adaptation.
More complex are authors like César Aira, whose micro-novels deliberately frustrate conventional narrative expectations. Chris Andrews’s translations of Aira maintain the Argentine author’s manic energy and logical impossibilities, but must navigate cultural references and wordplay that resist direct transfer. The challenge multiplies when experimental techniques rely on linguistic properties specific to Spanish.
Recent translations of Roberto Bolaño’s works reveal another dimension. Natasha Wimmer’s English versions of “2666” and “The Savage Detectives” preserve Bolaño’s paranoid energy and sprawling structure, but the original Spanish’s political undertones, embedded in specific historical contexts, require extensive cultural translation alongside linguistic conversion.
The Translator as Co-Author: Reimagining Literary Collaboration
Perhaps it’s time to reconceptualize translation not as reproduction but as collaboration. When Lydia Davis translates Flaubert, she’s not simply converting French to English but creating new literary works that exist in dialogue with their originals. Her translations of “Madame Bovary” read differently than previous English versions, not because they’re more accurate but because Davis brings her own experimental sensibilities to Flaubert’s precise observations.
This collaborative model acknowledges what translation scholars have long understood: perfect translation is impossible, but creative translation can produce literature that stands independently while honoring its source. Kate Briggs’s philosophical memoir “This Little Art” explores this tension beautifully, examining how translation creates rather than simply transfers meaning.
Contemporary fiction’s linguistic self-consciousness demands translators who are themselves literary artists. The best contemporary translations read not as foreign works made domestic but as new creations that maintain productive tension with their origins. This approach celebrates translation’s creative possibilities rather than lamenting its limitations.
These questions matter beyond academic circles. Every reader of translated contemporary fiction participates in this creative collaboration, experiencing not the original work but a new literary creation born from cross-linguistic dialogue. What techniques have you noticed disappearing or transforming in translation? The conversation continues in every book we choose to read across languages.