The Untranslatable Moment
During a recent conversation with Estonian novelist Andrus Kivirähk, I asked about the English translation of his darkly comic The Man Who Spoke Snakish. His response caught me off guard. “The translator had to invent new swear words,” he said, laughing. “Estonian has very specific profanity tied to our pagan past. Matthew Hyde couldn’t just use ‘damn’ or ‘hell’—he had to create curses that would feel ancient and earthy to English readers.”
This exchange made me realize something about literary translation that most readers never think about. It’s not just converting words from one language to another. It’s recreating an entire emotional and cultural world in a completely different language.
Authors who’ve had their work translated often describe it as watching their book transform into something new and strange. Korean author Han Kang told me that reading The Vegetarian in Deborah Smith’s English translation felt like “meeting a sister I’d never known I had.” The book was unmistakably hers, yet transformed by Smith’s interpretation of her deliberately spare, almost clinical prose style.
The Collaborative Dance
What surprises me most about author interviews is how they destroy the myth of translation as a solitary, mechanical process. French novelist Michel Houellebecq describes his relationship with his various translators as “intellectual marriages.” When discussing the English version of Submission, he mentioned spending hours on video calls with translator Lorin Stein, debating whether a particular French idiom should stay literal or get replaced with an English equivalent that captured the same sardonic tone.
Japanese author Haruki Murakami is perhaps the most fascinating case study. Having translated American literature into Japanese himself, he approaches his own translators with unusual empathy. “I write knowing my work will be translated,” he explains. “Sometimes I choose simpler constructions not because they’re better in Japanese, but because they’ll survive the journey to other languages intact.”
This collaborative dimension goes beyond author-translator relationships. Italian author Elena Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein has become almost as celebrated as her enigmatic subject. Their partnership—conducted entirely through editorial intermediaries—is translation as pure textual dialogue, stripped of personality and ego.
Lost and Found in Translation
The question of what survives translation fascinates authors in unexpected ways. Amos Oz once told an interviewer that he was amazed to discover his Hebrew wordplay had somehow regenerated itself in German, taking completely different forms while maintaining the same playful spirit. The translator had performed linguistic alchemy, turning puns that couldn’t possibly work in German into entirely new wordplay that did the same narrative job.
Other authors mourn specific losses. José Saramago frequently discussed how his distinctive punctuation style—those endless, comma-spliced sentences that mirror Portuguese speech patterns—inevitably suffered in translation. English grammar demands periods where Portuguese flows naturally with commas. The rhythm changes, even when the meaning stays clear.
What’s remarkable is how these supposed “losses” often become discoveries. Margaret Jull Costa, who translated Saramago’s work, found ways to preserve his hypnotic flow through strategic paragraph breaks and careful conjunction placement. The result wasn’t identical to the Portuguese, but it achieved something equivalent: that sense of being carried along by an unstoppable narrative current.
The Art of Equivalence
Authors consistently emphasize that great translation isn’t about literal accuracy—it’s about emotional equivalence. When I spoke with Turkish author Elif Shafak about her novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, she described watching translator Brendan Freely navigate the book’s mixture of Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic phrases. Rather than simply providing English substitutes, Freely created a linguistic texture that suggested multilingualism without confusing monolingual readers.
This concept of equivalence extends to cultural references that simply don’t exist in the target language. Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle series is packed with specifically Norwegian cultural markers—television shows, political figures, social conventions that mean nothing to American readers. Translator Don Bartlett’s genius was knowing when to preserve these foreign elements for their alienating effect and when to find American equivalents that did the same emotional job.
The most sophisticated authors understand translation as an art form parallel to their own. They recognize that translators like Gregory Rabassa, who rendered Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realism into English, or Anthea Bell, who captured the wit of Asterix comics, are creative artists in their own right, not merely linguistic technicians.
When Authors Become Translators
Some of the most illuminating insights come from authors who translate others’ work. Vladimir Nabokov’s translations of Pushkin sparked decades of scholarly debate precisely because he prioritized literal accuracy over poetic beauty—a choice that revealed his theories about what translation should accomplish. His approach was deliberately anti-musical, preserving every semantic detail while sacrificing rhythm and flow.
Contemporary author Jennifer Croft, who won the International Booker Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, brings a translator’s perspective to her own fiction. She writes with an acute awareness of how syntax and sentence structure will behave in other languages, crafting prose that she describes as “translation-friendly” without sacrificing complexity.
This dual perspective creates authors who think globally from the start. They understand that their work will live multiple lives in multiple languages. They embrace rather than fear this multiplication of meaning.
The conversations I’ve had with authors about translation consistently reveal it as a creative collaboration that extends far beyond the mechanical substitution of words. It’s about finding new ways for stories to breathe in different linguistic atmospheres. What other aspects of literary craft do you think get transformed—rather than simply transferred—when stories cross cultural boundaries?