Below is a short excerpt from a work-in-progress, Fair: a literary translator memoir. ___ Your eyes are drawn to flashing coloured lights in the far corner of the fair. It’s a shiny black retro arcade console with the name The Translation Game in gold lettering running across the top. There are cartoonish caricatures of various […]
Literary Translation
A Close Relation
Have you got German family? This question comes up and will maybe always come up when I say I translate from German. It would be the only thing that would make sense, the question seems to say, if it was part of me from birth, part of my heritage. At school, I just felt like […]
Telling Stories for Children
During this residency, I have been translating a children’s book, Hortusukalude Chomi (tentatively titled, Chomi: Princess of Gardens) by Gafoor Arakkal. The book, set partly in the seventeenth century and partly in the present, has several passages that depict the violence perpetrated by colonialism and caste hierarchies against humans as well as nature. All the […]
When Translating is Not Translating / When Translating is a Break from Translating
During this residency, I have been translating a new hybrid non-fiction book by the German author and translator Gregor Hens. I translated Hens’ essay-memoir Nicotine for Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015, my second ever book translation and first for adults, which explored how his long-term addiction to smoking was intertwined with his memories, his sense of […]
Against Italicising the ‘Exotic’
A question I often get asked is who my imagined reader is when I translate from Malayalam to English. My answer is that I don’t have an intended or ideal reader, only a reader of English who could be based anywhere in the world, speaking any of the many Englishes (yes, plural). This often generates […]
Resident Shapeshifter
What is a Translation Residency? Well, it depends on whose house you’re in and what kind of guest you are. In 2015, I was doing the first of two year-long stints as acting editor of New Books in German magazine. On the committee of the magazine was Theodora Danek, the Project Manager for Culture at […]
Searching for a Community of Practice
When applying for the BCLT Translator in Residence programme, we were asked to talk about what inspired us to apply for the programme in the first place. My answer was quite simple – I was looking for a community of practice. I think of myself as an accidental translator. I published my first translation – […]
The Three Christmas Eve Masses
A translation, with slight adaptation, of ‘Les Trois Messes Basses’, a short story from Contes du Lundi by Alphonse Daudet, published in 1873. ‘Two stuffed turkeys, Garrigou?’ ‘Yes, Reverend, two magnificent turkeys crammed full of truffles. And I should know; I helped stuff them. They looked as though their skin might burst while roasting, […]
The End of a Residency
Towards the end of my residency at the BCLT, I had just started editing The Djinn’s Apple, a pacey YA murder mystery set in the Abbasid era, due to be published with Neem Tree Press. For the duration of my residency I have been translating this novel, and used it as a foundation for a […]
A Chapter Ends
My time as Translator in Residency at the BCLT has ended. I don’t know that a single blog will sufficiently encapsulate all of my feelings about this epoch in my life as a translator, but I’ll make a worthy attempt. When describing the residency to others I’ve often called it a ‘revelation’. An apt choice […]
