Kari Dickson is a literary translator from Norwegian. Her work includes crime fiction, literary fiction, children’s books, theatre and non-fiction. Her translation of Roslund & Hellström’s Three Seconds won the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) International Dagger in 2011. She is also an occasional tutor in Norwegian language, literature and translation at the University of Edinburgh, and has worked with BCLT, the National Centre for Writing and the TA committee.
During her residency, Kari will be working on Playing Translation (working title): using improvisation and music to explore the sound of a language, and the rhythm, melody and mood of an original text and translation. She will be working with Dr Haftor Medbøe, professor of music at Napier University Edinburgh.
I remember being thrilled by Adam Thirlwell’s Multiples (available in the BCLT library under ‘Various’), when it came out in 2013. The basic premise of the book is a kind of Chinese whispers: a story from one language is translated into English, then into another language, back to English, into a third language, back to English, etc. The translator was only given the iteration before, in up to six layers. The idea was to see how narrative and style, among other things, changed through the process. I could of course only read part of it, but the idea that possibly no one could read the whole book tickled me. It was clever, fun and thought-provoking.
At the BCLT summer school one or two years later, I attended a workshop with the poet and translator, Sasha Dugdale, where we were invited to translate birdsong. We laughed a lot as we tried to translate a kookaburra’s laugh into interpretative dance – ending with a wee shake of the toosh. There was also another summer school talk that played with the same sort of idea, about translation as a palimpsest.
These ideas of layering and music stuck with me. Then I went to a jazz gig with Haftor Medbøe, the musician I’ll be working with in an upcoming workshop as part of my residency. I saw how they built the music by recording riffs and rhythms, and layering them using a loop.
A seed started to germinate. When we talk about translation, we often talk about the rhythm, melody and mood of a text, over and above the semantics, and I wondered if it would be possible to use music to see how these qualities travel from original to translation, by looping and layering recordings of one over the other. Playing translation. Haftor and I met and discussed the idea and got quite excited, to the point where we decided to apply for a development grant from Creative Scotland, but were stymied by Covid.
So I am delighted to now have this opportunity to continue playing. The methodology is still evasive, but that’s part of the fun – I’m learning about sound, listening, audio-cognition, editing software, recording…And it’s got me thinking about audiobooks versus written text, oral traditions – in fact, there is so much going on in my brain, I’m having to park ideas for later. My focus is on shaping a workshop where music can help us, as translators, to identify why rhythm and melody are so important to the success of a translation, and help those who are not translators to understand more about what it is we do.
But also, to have fun.
More to come.
And I leave you with this clip, with the ornithologist Sean Ronayne talking about birdsong, which recently went viral – and which I think provides a great metaphor for translation: https://youtu.be/M_Ne-nIxLW0
Juan Giraldo says
I find this fascinating! Being a musician and a literary translator for many years have given me the opportunity to reflect and search for possible links between the two and transversal ideas and concepts that complement them. I see music as a form of translation even beyond being a metalanguage itself; and understand the music and rhythm within texts that shall never be dimmed when translated.