Blogging Translator

‘Free the Word’ festival

Last weekend I attended an event at International Pen’s ‘Free the Word’ festival at the Southbank Centre. This was the first of what I hope will become an annual event, celebrating literature in translation and literature published in languages other than English.

In the UK the literature market is dominated by English-language books, and only 2% of the books on our bookshops’ shelves are translations from another language. As a result, we are missing out on wider cultural insights beyond our own, and our view of the world is in ‘mono’ when it could be in ’stereo’. In turn, literary translation is not normally given as much esteem as it deserves, and from what I know this is usually expressed through low rates of pay for literary translators. Faced with this predicament, many experienced and skillful translators stay away from this area of work and in consequence the resulting translated novels suffer. We’ve all read books in translation which we found less satisfying than books originally written in English, and I firmly believe that this sad situation should change.

The event I attended was an interview between Icelandic author Sjón, who you may know for his musical collaborations with Bjork, but who recently won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (about equivalent to the Booker prize, so no small-fry) for his novel ‘The blue fox’ (Skugga-Baldur in Icelandic), and his translator Victoria Cribb. The book is unique in many ways, and Sjón’s writing style provides an incredibly insightful perspective on the world, a perspective perhaps only possible from a country such as Iceland.

I found the event uplifting and encouraging, from a translator’s point of view. I was in awe of Victoria Cribb as a translator and of the symbiotic relationship between her and Sjón, who seemed to have an astute appreciation of the role of translators, and of the importance of translation as a whole. In fact, one of his final comments was ‘translation is the greatest human project of our time’.

Amen Sjón. Keep up the good work, Pen!