Mistakes. Missteps. The dirty secrets, the errors burned into a translator’s brain. Like typos, often so tiny they barely register — which is the point — and yet in reviews they are seized on by critics as nuggets of proof that flag up the translator’s unworthiness for this undertaking, a kind of textual “Gotcha!” This […]
Translation
Translating Trauma
A few days into my residency at the BCLT, I submitted my first full-length non-fiction project: What Have You Left Behind – Voices From a Forgotten War, a collection of forty-three accounts of war from Yemen, recorded by the author and activist Bushra Al-Maqtari. It was my first encounter with translating a veritably traumatic piece […]
How to Emerge?
(An Extract from My BCLT 30th Anniversary Edition) It seemed implausible only a year ago, but I’m writing this shortly after celebrating the publication of my first full-length literary translation, and completing the first draft of what will be my fourth. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the BCLT. I stumbled into literary […]
Cannonballs and Rockets
(An Extract from My BCLT 30th Anniversary Edition) My involvement with the BCLT began, as it did for many others, with the Literary Translation Summer School. Unlike most other contributors to this collection, however, for me it has only been a year since that first encounter. In fact, chances are that I’m one of the few whose […]
BCLT and PETRA-E
(An Extract from My BCLT 30th Anniversary Edition) July 2015, a short flight from Amsterdam to Norwich, the day after a violent summer storm that has left the ground below littered with torn-off branches. The woman sitting next to me is typing away on a laptop, and I accidentally catch a glimpse of what she’s working on: […]
BCLT, Buenos Aires-Style
(An Extract from My BCLT 30th Anniversary Edition) My first encounter with the BCLT was in 2004. Peter Bush had come to Buenos Aires as one of the guest speakers in a Symposium on Cortázar, and he gave a small talk on Literary Translation at the Colegio de Traductores de Buenos Aires in which he […]
Excitement and Possibility
Excitement and Possibility by Bill Swainson (An extract from My BCLT 30th Anniversary Edition) I first went to the British Centre for Literary Translation in 1991. It had recently won support from the Arts Council and been encouraged to establish a pool of outside advice, so it was as a literary advisor that I first met […]
