ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER: Beth Fowler on winning the 2010 Harvill Secker Young Translator's Prize
When I decided to start translating full-time towards the end of 2009, I would never have imagined that within a year I would win a prestigious translation prize, and that within 18 months I would be translating my first novel.
Literary translation is a notoriously hard business to get into. Particularly for a young(ish!) translator with little experience. So when I saw the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize advertised on the ITI (Institute of Translation and Interpreting) website last April, I jumped at the opportunity. The prize focuses on a different language every year and, by happy coincidence, the language selected for its inaugural year was one with which I work: Spanish. Having hit the milestone of 30 earlier in the year, I was particularly pleased to still be included in the ‘Young’ category: the prize is open to translators aged between 18 and 34. I didn’t think for a second that I would win, but I had nothing to lose by entering.
The competition text was a short story by Argentinean author Matías Néspolo. El hachazo (The Axe Falls) tells the chilling (in more ways than one) tale of old Moretti, who lives alone in a wintry, rural setting. As he is chopping wood one day in the midst of a blizzard, his mind strays and the axe slips, catching him on the foot. Moretti manages to stagger back to the house, leaving a red trail in the snow behind him, and endeavours to keep himself warm and relatively comfortable until the arrival of his son, Sergio, who works in the big city and who should be showing up at any moment. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, still bleeding, with only his dog for company, he hallucinates that his wife is alive again and chatting to him from the kitchen. As the hours slip by, old Moretti grows weaker and weaker, unable to get up to stoke the fire or fetch food or water, and Sergio still doesn’t arrive. As the story draws to a close, dawn breaks over Moretti’s dead body, his bloodied foot licked clean by the dog. The tale ends with the unsettling revelation that Sergio hasn’t been home for thirty years.
El hachazo presented various challenges for the novice translator. Néspolo uses very short sentences, sometimes just one word long. While I tried to maintain the structure of the Spanish text as best I could, on occasion these short sentences sounded unnatural and stilted in English and I had to work two sentences together for a better flow. As ever with translation, it was a case of striking a balance between being faithful and readable. Another stumbling block was certain words or usages with which I wasn’t familiar and which were beyond the realms of my usual dictionaries. It took me hours to find out that ‘torniquete’ can refer to a wire tensioner as well as a tourniquet or turnstile. It’s not the sort of thing that comes up often, but I certainly won’t forget it now.
I have to confess that I take after my father (not something I admit to willingly) in that I’m pretty squeamish when it comes to sanguine matters. Just reading the story was one thing, but to have to sit and ponder every single word, well, needless to say I felt a bit light-headed when labouring over phrases such as ‘His boot is swimming in a pool of blood’. Should the blood gush or spurt? Does the pain sear or burn? Probably best to move swiftly on...
Another issue was what to do with items of food and drink such as quesillos or mate which have no direct translation. Should they be left in Spanish with an explanation in parenthesis? But that would almost certainly upset the flow of the narrative. Or could I anglicise the whole story and turn them into a cheese sarnie and a cuppa? But then we lose the Argentinean flavour (and the integrity) of the story. In the end, I decided to leave certain terms in Spanish and to try to make their meaning clear from the context. Again, a matter of striking a balance.
Despite the challenges (or perhaps because of them) I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. My day-to-day work is in commercial translation and it was a treat to work on something more creative. Having submitted my version of the story by the July deadline, I got back to work and forgot about the competition until one day in August, when I received a phone call from Briony Everroad at Harvill Secker, one of the three judges and founder of the prize, who told me the exciting news that I’d won. The presentation took place at the end of September at the Free Word Centre in London, where I met all three judges, Briony, award-winning translator Margaret Jull Costa and author Nicholas Shakespeare, whose own work has been translated into several languages.
As I made my way home to Glasgow, weighed down with a tantalising bagful of new reading material from Harvill Secker, I hoped that all this would lead somewhere. And lead me somewhere it did. To tie in with the publication of their Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists edition, Granta published my translation of El hachazo on their website. And it was through this connection with Granta that I came into contact with And Other Stories, a new grassroots, not-for-profit publisher, who earlier this year commissioned me to translate my first novel. Open Door by another Argentinean author, Iosi Havilio, is the story of a young woman who, after the disappearance of her partner, drifts from the big city to the countryside where she has various odd encounters and love affairs with the locals, eventually discovering that contentment can be found in the most unexpected places. Open Door is due to be published in November.
Old Moretti’s severed and bleeding appendage has allowed me to get my own foot in the door. Much more than just something to put on my CV, the Young Translators’ Prize has given me a fantastic opportunity to gain a toehold in the world of literary translation.