Editor Briony Everroad talks about her visit to Crossing Border Festival in the Netherlands
November, The Hague. Gradually six young translators emerge from the fog into the beautiful Pulchri Studio set in a tree-lined avenue. My job for the day? To be a fly on the wall. What a lovely location for a fly.
In a breathtakingly elegant space that which I decide must have been a ballroom, I sit with Nick Caistor and Beth Fowler at a table that takes up a surprisingly large portion of the room. Beth won our Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize in 2010, and participation in The Chronicles programme at the Crossing Border festival is part of the award. She and Nick, who has won many awards for his translations, are going through her translation of Pola Oloixarac’s prologue to the festival. Pola is a young Argentinean writer, and the prologue offers her a chance to express her thoughts about the festival before she arrives.
It’s a challenging piece. Pola has some tricky turns of phrase, and they don’t have the chance to ask her what she means. Nick suggests a few alternative phrases and encourages Beth to step further away from the text in order to communicate Pola’s ideas in English. Then we head downstairs to an equally grand salon for a group discussion with all six translators and their mentors. The session is chaired by renowned Dutch translator Peter Bergsma, who runs the Translators’ House and translates J.M. Coetzee among others.
At this point the mechanics of The Chronicles project become clear to me. Each day four young authors, this year from Argentina, Holland, France and the UK, write columns about the Crossing Border Festival. They have a strict deadline of noon, when they must pass their pieces to their translators, who have four hours to produce a text. Two young translators are translating through a third language, i.e. the Dutch translator is working from the English translation of a Spanish text. This sparks a debate in the salon as it’s generally frowned upon in translation circles.
We spend quite some time discussing Pola’s use of the word ‘dominatrix’ in the context of an Amsterdam red light district. It is part of a rather puzzling metaphor involving Argentinean meat. These phrases are troubling the Dutch participants in particular. The English to Dutch translator is also confused by Ben Brooks’s phrase ‘words are stupid’. Is it slang? Does it mean silly or unintelligent? The pieces are already online and can’t be adapted, and many of the authors are still circling a very foggy Schipol airport. Is it the translator’s job to elucidate or reproduce?
The discussion continues on a variety of topics: keeping foreign words in a text, whether translators and authors need to be the same age in order to create an authentic voice, the new Dutch slang from Morocco and Suriname, how to translate dialect, the nuances between Flemish and Dutch. We even discuss the contribution of editors. (Thankfully we appear in a positive light.) We could have gone on for days, but it’s time to meet the authors for a meal. Translation queries are cleared up, experiences swapped and much Indonesian food consumed.
Thursday and Friday evenings are a wonderful blend of literature and music. We go to see Laura Marling, Adam Levin, and many others. A hirsute Dutch poet booms out his pieces to the stillness of a darkened church. It’s an impressive show, and he has a devoted following. It’s a real shame I can’t understand what he is saying. Cake’s gig is a great way to end the Saturday night festival, even if seeing the stage presents something of a challenge in a land of giants.
The big highlight is watching the authors and translators present their pieces on stage. These readings take place in short slots, often between bands. They offer the audience a chance to sample new art, and there is a big bookshop downstairs. During a special event on Saturday evening all of the translators and authors read from their work and discuss their experiences of the festival, of translating and of being translated. It’s a truly international event, and it’s encouraging to see so much emphasis placed on the process of translation.
On an appropriately foggy Sunday morning it’s time to part company. The rest of the group is crossing the border to Antwerp, and I am heading to Amsterdam, where I am due to meet publishers and booksellers and learn all about Dutch literary life. The whole trip is an unforgettable experience. I’m thrilled at the thought that our winners will continue this partnership far into the future.
Visit The Chronicles website to see what the participants produced this year. There is a wonderful video overview of the 2009 project here.