I wrote some of my first translations on a café balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas in Arequipa, Peru, where I lived for a year and was compelled to translate the authors I’d been reading. I used to like working on these texts in the late afternoon when the sinking sun would turn the city’s white volcanic stone pink. I wrote my translations of poems by César Vallejo and essays by Mario Vargas Llosa out by hand in cheap notebooks with a ballpoint pen. The translations were for me alone, because I wanted to know how they would sound. I remember the smell of exhaust fumes and papas rellenas wafting up from the street and I remember the thrill of dirtying my hands with those texts while I was seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling their authors’ home country for the first time.
A few years later, I translated the first pages of what would be my first novel translation – Norah Lange’s People in the Room – in a treehouse in California. I had a computer by now but was still writing translations by hand and had carried a large Spanish dictionary and a thesaurus with me into the treehouse. Lange’s novel takes place in Buenos Aires and my makeshift desk in that elevated shack at the top of a ladder looked out across a dry, rocky gully with madrones and oak trees spilling down the slope. Along with Lange’s enduring image of three women’s faces framed by a window on a suburban street, my memory of starting my first book translation is accompanied by the smell of pinnace and the graze of dry mountain air.
Since then, I’ve translated in numerous houses and apartments – my own homes and other people’s – in occasional hotels, on a rooftop terrace in Mexico City, in a shed, on a beach, and in some wonderful public libraries. I’ve translated in summer clothes and wrapped in blankets, lying down, and sitting at desks. I know translators who prefer to work standing up and others who like to sprawl out somewhere with their cats and dogs, though my preference is usually for a chair. I’ve translated in cars and sometimes on planes and trains, and I’ve wondered occasionally how this movement affected my translation process, what it meant to be carrying something across when the one being carried was me. I’m sure that where we translate from affects the translations we write, just as our translations are also the sum of the things we’ve read, the experiences we’ve had, the language we absorb in waves or shards throughout our lives, which itself is the effect of where we’ve been. ‘I am a lady translator in my turquoise lady trainers,’ writes Kate Briggs, reminding her reader that the translator is a person with a particular subjectivity, a sensibility that’s visual as well as linguistic, that exists in a physical body moving through space. How do the things we see around us make their way into our translations?
I spent January and much of February this year translating in my rented flat in the former Colman’s Mustard Factory in Norwich. I would get up early, throw on a woolly red poncho over my clothes, make coffee, turn on the therapy lamp that served as a substitute for the sun, and start working on a novel by Irene Vallejo, a retelling of Aeneas’s time in Carthage which in my version is called Song of Elissa. As I sounded out sentences or researched ancient seafaring terms, the thick darkness outside would begin to fade and reveal a glossy patch of the River Wensum and the silhouette of one of the Devil’s Towers, a pair of fourteenth-century flint defense towers that form part of Norwich’s remaining medieval city walls. In the novel, Aeneas was squinting in the blazing sun and glimpsing the walls of Carthage for the first time, or Aeneas and Queen Elissa were talking behind the battlements on a starry night under the spell of Eros, or Aeneas’s son Iulus was playing with the clairvoyant girl Anna at the foot of the walls under the sentries’ watchful gaze. I spent those months amid the sunbaked bricks and shimmering shores of the young city of Carthage, and when I took breaks the flint city walls of Norwich were there to remind me of those boundaries humans have always built to keep out the unknown.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been translating at a desk in the British Centre for Literary Translation, where I’m one of two Translators in Residence. As I work, I can hear the everyday operations of the centre and I’m surrounded by the BCLT Library collection, which I browse on my breaks. It’s the first time I’ve translated in a space dedicated to supporting the art of translation and it lends an unusual sense of coherence to life: translating here feels a bit like coming home.
While I’m here, I’m working on Caraway, a story collection by Spanish writer Irene Reyes-Noguerol. In the story, ‘Petit Rat,’ a girl comes home from her ballet rehearsals and performances to the dark dwelling she shares with her mother, a laundress. Life for the dancer and her mother is hard and the protagonist is haunted by the scuttling of rodents both at home and in the theatre where she works. We infer, though, that the title ‘Petit Rat’ refers not to the animals but to the dancer, for this was the moniker given to fleets of poorly paid young ballerinas who worked at the Paris Opéra Ballet in the late nineteenth century. The story invites us to imagine the experience of Marie Van Goethem, who worked as an artist’s model for Edgar Degas as he made his famous sculpture La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen).
One Sunday around the time I began translating the story, I walked into the Sainsbury Centre gallery at UEA and found myself face to face with the Little Dancer herself – one of the casts made from Degas’s original wax and clay sculpture after his death. The sculpture had been on tour for eighteen months, one of the guides told me, and had returned to the gallery in recent weeks. The next time I was on campus, I came back to the museum with my notebook. Sculptures are made to be seen from various angles, and where usually I would have researched the Little Dancer online or at the library, in this serendipitous case I’ve been walking in circles around her, sharing a space with a three-dimensional model of the protagonist of the story I’m translating, studying textures that would be flattened in a photograph.
The dancer stands in the fourth position. Her ballet slippers are visible, their ribbons laced around her ankles. Her legs are sheathed in stockings with wrinkles gathering at her knees. I imagine these as the stockings in Irene’s story, stockings the ballerina’s mother darns for her on Sundays when the two of them rest and the miseries of their lives recede. Her posture is elegant, right foot turned outward, calf muscular despite her small frame. Marie tilts her chin upward, lips neutral, facial features poised as if she’s working to arrange them too into stillness. Her hair lies flat against her forehead and I imagine it lank and dirty since I know Marie was a poor washerwoman’s daughter. I wondered as I contemplated her how long the drawings for the sculpture took, how many sessions, how many hours. A couple of days later in an exercise class at my local gym, the instructor asked us to get into a ‘dancer’s pose.’ I thought of Marie as I bent my limbs and felt my thighs tense, muscles burning as I tried to maintain my stance. How long must she have had to hold the fourth position, standing still as the sculptor studied her? The museum guide had told me we know from Degas’s drawings that part of Marie’s job was to pose nude. I thought of this, holding my balance and clothed in my leggings and t-shirt. How exposed Marie must have felt, having to bare herself to an artist three times her age. The guide also drew my attention to the flat slope of the model’s forehead and the way her hands – fingers interlaced behind her back – are enlarged. Degas’s shaping of the Petite Danseuse adheres to the pseudoscientific phrenology of his era that claimed moral character could be read in a person’s physical features. It’s shocking to observe these interventions up close, to think of the hardships of Marie’s life and notice the extent to which the artist has othered her, signalling that she belongs to the Parisian underworld, to a class associated with inferior intelligence and depravity.
Reyes-Noguerol doesn’t show her protagonist posing for the artist; she suggests it. We see our ballerina at home and at the theatre, grappling with the weight of what’s unspoken between her mother and her. With the repeated refrain, ‘after the rehearsals, after the performances, in the intervals,’ we’re invited to imagine what she endures elsewhere. I am sure that my time with the sculpture and my conversation with the guide has affected how I translate the story – my response to the emotional charge of the language is now more finely tuned. When the protagonist lies in bed at night, haunted by the patter of paws in her room, she is likened to the rats, ‘tan flaca, tan parda, tan a la intemperie.’ Before seeing the sculpture, I’d paused at ‘a la intemperie,’ an expression often invoked to describe outdoor weather conditions and translated as ‘under the stars,’ ‘out in the open,’ or ‘exposed to the elements.’ Marie is indoors, though she is probably cold. In my translation, will I emphasise this idea of exposure, describing her as ‘unprotected’ or perhaps ‘defenseless’? Or will thinking of Marie in her uncovered pose lead me to describe her as literally naked or bare? I’m mulling these options over as I revise the translation in my comfortable chair at the BCLT. Maybe I’ll go back to visit the sculpture and see what it tells me.
Walking home recently along Norwich’s medieval city wall, I thought about how it matters where we translate from, and that the where is never a single position. We might be sitting or standing at a desk or sprawled on a couch with our dogs or cats while we type, but it’s with movement and a roving gaze that we absorb the phenomena necessary for translation. A text isn’t static but dynamic: it’s more than a flat document covered in spidery marks. A translator is more than a brain and fingers that type: our brains and our fingers are attached to bodies that roam and meander, that traverse the world but also that use our senses, letting our surroundings seep into us wherever our turquoise trainers should happen to take us.
