In our second blog on collaboration in translation, we reflect on our past experiences collaborating with authors we have translated and the various roles we’ve inhabited in doing so.
PRG: My sudden entrance into the world of literary translation meant I had few preconceptions about what my everyday activities might look like, but I never imagined I would be collaborating with authors to the extent I do now. Even after an excellent experience at BCLT Summer School early on, which opened my eyes to the possibilities of collaborating with authors, I did not think this would be the norm. Is this normal or was I just more open to collaboration?
AR: Collaborating with authors has always been central to my translation practice – I think poetry translation in particular encourages close collaboration. This is partly due to the challenge of translating poetry, which forces you to make choices about what to prioritise, but it’s also because poetry translation generally requires a translator to “adopt” and champion a poet. (Or for a poet to adopt a translator, of course, I’ve experienced both.)
Quite often I’ll work through a batch of poems and then meet up with the poet and talk through my translations with them. This can be pretty intense but is always really rewarding. I used to do this when the translations were very close to being finished, but recently I did it at a much earlier stage in the process, and it was great to be able to decide on my translation approach through the conversation with the poet.
Do you enjoy that kind of collaborative meet-up?
PRG: I really do and I’ve been fortunate to have some amazing experiences. My fondest experience is with Vivian, one of my most challenging translations. I travelled to Copenhagen to meet with Christina Hesselholdt for 4-5 hours every day for a fortnight, going through an early draft I had shared with her. She was thoughtful and generous and encouraged me to explore creative solutions that veered further away from the original.
AR: That was a novel, right? I’ve generally collaborated less closely with prose authors – I guess collaboration is probably more of a feature of theatre and poetry? What’s your experience there?
PRG: For a play I translated, the playwright was flown over to London to join me in the rehearsal room with the actors and creative team of Foreign Affairs theatre company. Not only was it great fun, it was wonderful to make decisions alongside the author instead of waiting for ‘permission’.
Another interesting experience I had was with Lars Mytting’s The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, my best-selling work to date. The author was a joy to work with, in fact, he had prepared a list of answers for translator queries in advance, pre-empting any potential questions, mostly because of the very particular dialect he writes in.
AR: Oh wow, that’s organised! My most memorable interaction with Isa, the lovely author of The Peacock, was sending her a question which uncovered a plot hole that hadn’t been picked up by the German editors, so there’s a small difference between the German and English texts as a result.
PRG: I love hearing those kinds of stories!
AR: Of course it’s worth noting that a lot of authors speak English – which is a double-edged sword. We get to solicit their opinions but sometimes they have strong opinions about how things ought to sound.
PRG: Definitely. In general, I love collaborating with authors, but Danes in particular pride themselves on their English. And their spoken English is excellent, but their written English isn’t always. I once translated a sample where the author sent it to a friend’s son who was doing A-level English, and he reviewed my translation and made numerous alterations. The Danish agent, extremely apologetic, asked me to review their suggestions so I did and gained a lot of good will. To be fair, there were one or two decent suggestions but some of them were complete non-glish.
AR: Ah, I’ve had an experience like that! I’d translated a really long poem on commission for a festival – I’d sent it with a couple of questions to the author, and she sent it back with track changes in every line… We had a call and talked through her edits – some of them were really helpful (it was a pretty experimental poem, so it had been a challenge to translate), but a lot of them weren’t especially, and it just made me feel really devalued as a translator.
PRG: I had a really awkward one with my one successful experience of pitching a book to a publisher. Everyone was very keen for the project to succeed but an issue came up, completely unrelated to my translation, and I was thrust into the position of mediator between the author and publisher. In hindsight, the author was well within their rights to be aggrieved, but by that stage I just wanted the book to be published!
AR: Oh, that sounds uncomfortable! I’ve also sometimes struggled with the role of de facto agent, which particularly comes up when working with poets – and can be quite awkward as we generally also become friends. This is really rewarding, but it can make it tricky when I need to put an as yet unpaid project on the backburner, or pause on pitching so as to prioritise paid work.
PRG: This can be a real challenge, I definitely have a lot of pent-up guilt over unrealised projects. Saying that, I still submit projects I worked on a decade ago and have a list of books and authors I continue to fight to have published in English.
AR: Ah, the wishlist of projects! Perhaps on a final note – how do you replace that collaboration when working on dead authors? I should admit, one of the reasons I’ve collaborated less on prose is that I’ve largely translated dead prose authors! I’ve been very lucky in translating Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in that I’ve had access to a few academics who specialise in her work.
PRG: My biggest poetry translation project to date has been with a dead poet (he sadly committed suicide at a young age after a few brilliant and hugely productive years). Unable to collaborate with or interrogate the poet, I got together with several different colleagues, reading, digesting and testing different strategies, styles and translations.
Annie Rutherford and Paul Russell Garrett are the BCLT Translators in Residence (February-May 2025). You can read more about their current projects on the BCLT website.
