As a young person, I thought of writing as something that came from the wellspring within, material that rose sui generis from the creative reserves of the individual, spilling onto the blank page in a river of words already perfectly placed. Obviously, I had a lot to learn about process and editing. I often carried notebooks around in case inspiration struck and sometimes I scribbled a few lines in them, but then I would be overcome by a feeling that my messy words had sullied the pristine notebook, that it was somehow spoiled by these marks and as a result no longer held the promise of something clean and new. A blank notebook, like the habit of procrastination, allows us to dwell in the realm of possibility, to dream idly about what we might produce without ever facing the reality that our first clumsy attempts at writing will inevitably fall short of what we dream they could be.
Instead of writing in my spare time, I practiced calligraphy, a visual activity that nevertheless allowed me to spend time with words. Calligraphy is a form of writing with a clear set of constraints, where each letter comes with the guidelines of the particular script – round hand, italic, gothic blackletter – you are practising, broken down into a set of strokes – oval strokes, upstrokes, downstrokes, overturns, underturns, ascending and descending loops. You know the word, the sentence, the poem, or the fragment you have chosen to write, and this frees you to concentrate on its visual construction. I didn’t realise at the time that I was looking for structure, for ways to work with a text that didn’t feel like leaping into the void.
I wanted to be a writer before I wanted to be a translator, but when I began to translate, I felt like my writing had found a home. Again, I felt like I’d found another way of working with words that allowed me to sidestep my fear of the blank page. Here was a way to deepen my knowledge of my adopted language, Spanish, and bring books I cared about to a new audience, while luxuriating in language and experiencing the satisfaction of creation without hovering above the blank page, mired in anxiety about whether there would be value in anything I might say.
The American poet Mary Oliver compares training in the art of writing to training in other arts such as painting and music. While the painting student might be asked to do a still life, copying a pile of fruit or a vase of flowers, and the musician instructed to practice scales or a piece written by a composer, the aspiring writer is often simply encouraged to write. Viewed through the lens of translation as metaphor, the visual artist and the musician can avail themselves of a source text, while the writer begins from a blank. The result of this in poetry, she notes, is that new poets can fall into a manner of writing that, once established, is unlikely to change or be invigorated by fresh input. Offered the freedom to write anything at all, we will often default to writing in a way that feels familiar and safe. In his recent book Inside the Box, David Epstein explains that humans evolved to default to familiar patterns of behaviour: ‘When anything is possible, it becomes nearly impossible to do anything new… Complete freedom paradoxically leads to conformity.’
This operation of the brain can be seen not just in how we begin to write but in our approach to living and to all kinds of creative practices, and a great many artists and writers have sought or devised constraints that act as containers for living and for their creative practice. Monet set himself the challenge of never using black in a painting. Doris Lessing said of the writing process, ‘Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it.’ Filmmaker David Lynch famously embraced limitations and disciplines to foster creativity, whether this meant working with the effects of flawed technology or adhering to a strict routine and eating the same salad every day for lunch. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, advocates for the value of routine for artists with her famous axiom, ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’ For Dillard, a structured schedule is an antidote to ‘chaos and whim,’ like a life raft carrying the writer across the decades, a ‘scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.’ The image suggests a kind of freedom enabled by structure: scaffolding holds the labourer in place, while their hands are left free to engage in creation.
Lately, I’ve been exploring how translators talk about writing. In a recent article, translator Rahul Bery writes ‘To be honest, I have always struggled with too much freedom, which may be why I am a literary translator and not a writer, still traumatized from the time when, at thirteen, I got my lowest mark for English composition when my teacher told us that, for that week’s homework, we could write about anything we liked.’ For many, the blank page leads to this kind of paralysis. This leads me to wonder whether the thing we call writer’s block occurs due to a lack of a structure, a framework, or a container for the language we want to create.
Bery goes on to describe how working with a set of Oulipian constraints in his translation of Vicente Luis Mora’s novel Centroeuropa gave him the liberty to be more experimental in his choices, and helped lead him back to working on his own writing. Clearly, restrictions can lead to greater creativity, and translation itself is perhaps the ultimate method of writing with constraints. So how can a translator take this approach with them when writing? What might it mean to write like a translator? Can writing in a way that feels close to translation help? Jen Calleja offers a glimpse of how one might proceed in her memoir Fair: ‘I’ve always had a reactive, generative writing practice, always writing after something else in the wake of it fascinating and exciting me, and giving me a strange confidence to do it myself.’ Stylistic imitation, adaptation, and ludic approaches can all depart from a metaphorical source text, the writing responding, like in a translation, to something that’s already there.
I returned to writing after years of translating professionally, but sometimes I still struggled with the blank page. My practice improved substantially when I realized there was one circumstance in my translation work that was inhibiting me: when we translate, our source texts are usually already published and tend to arrive on our desks in a polished state; perhaps, since I was never exposed to my authors’ texts before they were finished, my contact with these texts was reinforcing the idea that my own work ought to emerge perfectly polished, too. There wasn’t anything rational about this: I would never share my first draft of a translation with a reader; the first draft looks nothing like the polished version I eventually send to the editor’s desk, so why would I expect something so different of my writing? Without being exposed to the messiness of the process behind the texts I was translating, I’d allowed myself again to slip into believing that Romantic myth: that in a rush of inspiration, the solitary writer’s text emerges perfectly onto the page. What I needed, a novelist friend suggested, was to allow myself to gain more comfort and familiarity with the inevitably disorganized and fragmentary state of my own unfinished text. I dedicated a separate notebook to this and called it ‘Process’: here, I physically pasted in strips of my printed drafts, scrapbook style, trying them out in different orders and writing all over them. Arrows, stars, exclamation marks, and all manner of visual interventions that wouldn’t make it into the final text were welcome. This was an invitation to dive into mess and chaos, to revel in spilling ink all over the place, to accept dwelling in a place of uncertainty and friction before a legible product could begin to emerge. I realised in this way that by producing what Anne Lamott memorably calls a ‘shitty first draft’ and what Laia Jufresa elegantly calls ‘clay’ to be shaped into sculptures, I was creating something akin to a source text to which I could react, over which I could write successive layers of text.
But what about a source text for the ‘shitty first draft’? In addition to getting friendly with process, I’ve tried to treat writing like translation by using or inventing another source text for myself. Perhaps the most obvious way to do this is to find a textual or a physical source: to write about or in response to a story or a poem, or to a sculpture or a painting. Some of my favourite texts have begun as exercises in ekphrasis. And without a text or an object in front of us, what can we do? Perhaps begin with a visualization: practise picturing that visual source in your mind, returning to it whenever you feel like your pen is slowing down.
In a writing workshop for translators at the BCLT, I’ve encouraged translators to view themselves as writers through multi-stage, structured exercises based on short source texts: first we analyse a text which itself is written according to a set of constraints – brief poems in verse or prose are ideal – and then we move through new iterations of the text with increasing numbers of words or lines removed, so that the translators must make the text their own. We begin with a generous amount of scaffolding, which is then removed little by little, until the translators have internalized a structure that frees them to write on their own.
Teaching creative writing to translators has many benefits: translators in training can gain insight into the process behind the texts they translate and become more aware of their own personal style and how it might affect their translations, in addition to fostering greater confidence in their own stylistic abilities. And for many translators, this learning is not a question of acquiring skills but of activating and practicing those they already possess.
Idra Novey reminds us that as translators we are uniquely well positioned to dive into the writing process. For this writer-translator, there is a ‘renegade stylistic training inherent in the act of translation’: ‘To turn to one’s own writing after translating is to cross there with one’s mind already in motion, and emboldened from the verbal leaps and linguistic freefall that translation demands.’ The relationship between the two practices, then, can be symbiotic, and there’s much to be gained from moving back and forth between them, airborne. By writing like translators and translating like writers, perhaps we can move away from the writer-translator dichotomy and into a more capacious sense of what we do.
