For 18 years, Daniel Poliquin worked as an interpreter in the House of Commons. As politicians sparred in Canada’s two official languages, it was his job to ensure everyone understood one another, so that a conversation, however loud, could take place. Poliquin’s career as an interpreter, from which he retired in 2008, has much in common with his other job as one of the country’s foremost English-to-French translators. Just as unilingual politicians require an interpreter to understand one another, it is the job of literary translators to ensure that a conversation can occur between the country’s two literatures and their readers. That makes them important — if unheralded — stars in the publishing universe. Next Thursday is International Translation Day, but chances are it’s not marked on your calendar.
Translators are the mimics of the book world; they must pass for someone else. Just as editors strive for invisibility, translators should be inaudible. “If I have a voice of my own, it absolutely must not appear,” says Sheila Fischman, the country’s most celebrated translator. Polinquin echoes this: “Translating is like writing but with someone else’s hand.”
There are a flock of French-language books to be published in English-Canada this fall, including I Am A Japanese Writer, by Dany Laferrière (translated by David Homel); Apocalypse for Beginners, by Nicolas Dickner (translated by Lazer Lederhendler); Are You Married to a Psychopath, by Nadine Bismuth (translated by Donald Winkler); and On the Proper Use of Stars, by Dominique Fortier (translated by Fischman and reviewed elsewhere in these pages). Books making the opposite journey include Fall, by Colin McAdam (translated by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné) and Douglas Coupland’s biography of Marshall McLuhan, translated by Jean Paré). Clearly, Canadian readers are doubly blessed, with talented authors in two languages. And translators are the bridge. Yet in recent interviews with several translators, it became clear there are no hard and fast rules in the translation game.
“We’re not robots,” says Lederhendler, 59, who won the Governor General’s Literary Award for his translation of Dickner’s last novel, Nikolski. “We have a way of reading a book. We have a way of using the language. We have our own vocabulary, our likes and dislikes in terms of this phrase or that phrase. It’s a kind of balancing act between observing the fact that you’re at the service of someone else’s work, but at the same time it’s an artistic mission.”
Some won’t translate a book they don’t like. “You will not do a good job if you don’t believe in the author’s work,” Poliquin explains. To others, it’s simply a paycheque. Most avoid working closely with the author. Some read the book before beginning. Others translate it as they read it for the first time, like David Homel, who says, “the writer hadn’t read the book before he wrote it.” He insists he’s not being a smart aleck. “One of the problems with translation is that the story has already been told. But I don’t want to know how it’s going to turn out. I want to have that voyage of discovery as a translator, the same as I do as a writer.”
Some translators, like Fischman, work on only one book at a time (“When I’m translating a book or a novel, I get so deeply and thoroughly inside the head of the author that there’s no room for anything else,” says Fischman, who’s currently translating Kim Thuy’s memoir, Ru, to be published by Random House in 2012); others, like Lederhendler, can juggle multiple projects at once. Some read the author’s previous work (“You become the best reader that writer has ever had,” says Poliquin, 56. “We become scholars of these writers”) while others do not. Some attack the books using shelves of dictionaries, some rely on the Internet. (Poliquin has called on a Canadian Tire catalogue for help with names of tools.)
The time it takes to translate a book varies depending on the length and difficulty of the original text; Fischman says it took four to five months and four to five drafts to complete work on Fortier’s novel: “Each novel presents its own difficulties,” she says. “It’s not a technical process, it’s an aesthetic process,” argues Fischman. Instinctive, too. “I’m not following any theory of translation, or any quick guide to translating somebody’s novel. I just keep working at it until I’m satisfied that I’ve reproduced the voice.”
But even the subject of authorial voice is up for debate. While Poliquin says, “I don’t mind if my own voice is there,” Fischman maintains it’s “essential” that her own voice does not infiltrate the text. That’s not to say she wants to hide the fact you are reading a translation. “In my own translation, depending on what it is, I try to write it in such a way that the reader is aware that there is something not quite English about it, but not wrong. In other words, I try to hold on to a certain French-language flavour,” she explains. “Some people have interpreted me as meaning that I’ll have characters speaking with an accent. It’s not quite that simple.”
Homel questions the necessity of that: “A translated work, its foreignness is built right in. You don’t have to attract attention to the fact that it’s a foreign book. It just is by its very existence.” The goal, he argues, is to reproduce as much as possible the experience that readers in the original language enjoyed. That goal hasn’t changed much since Fischman translated her first book, Roch Carrier’s La Guerre, Yes Sir! in 1970, though she now approaches it differently: She knows more about the French language, she knows more about the métier of translating and, most importantly, she knows more about the English language.
Many translators are writers themselves; Homel has a novel, Midway, appearing this fall. Poliquin was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2007 for A Secret Between Us. Still, even though each man is fluent in both languages, they do not translate their own work (Poliquin did not translate his last nonfiction book, René Lévesque, from French to English; rather, he rewrote it).
“Being able to translate in one direction does not at all mean that the person is able to translate in the other direction,” Fischman cautions.
Poliquin has translated Homel’s work, while Donald Winkler translated Poliquin’s last novel. “My instinct is to trust the translator,” he says. Homel is more blunt: “I’ve written the book once, and that’s enough.”
The translation community is small. The Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, founded in 1975, lists 141 members on its website, but a Fischman anecdote illustrates the interconnectedness of Canadian translators better: Fortier and Bismuth, both of whom have translated books coming out this fall, are best friends; Fischman translated Fortier while her partner, Donald Winkler, translated Bismuth. Long-standing writer-translator partnerships “tend to be respected by other translators,” Fischman says, though this unwritten rule has been broken on occasion.
There’s a lot of evidence that it’s an ageing profession. “I do not see another wave, or another generation, of literary translators,” Homel says. “Translation is still done by old farts, and I’m the youngest of the old farts.” He is 58. “You kinda gotta wonder who’s going to keep doing this?”
One of the reasons may be that literary translation is not lucrative. In fact, says Lederhendler, “translation is essentially a subsidized area of publishing.” In 2009-2010, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded 109 international translation grants (to foreign publishers to translate Canadian books) totalling $354,200 and 102 translation grants to Canadian publishers to translate Canadian works in English, French or an Aboriginal language, totalling $1,129,800.
When Fischman, who is 72, was starting out, her pay was four cents a word; now the standard is 18 cents. A translator can earn double translating nonliterary documents, say, annual reports or court transcripts. “Literary translation is still the poor cousin of [the] industry,” says Poliquin. Adds Lederhendler: “It’s not an easy go. I do it because I love the work.”
Another reason there are few young translators is that, put bluntly, they get no respect. Fischman, who has translated approximately 150 books, has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation 14 times and is a Member of the Order of Canada. But mention her name outside publishing circles and you’ll likely be met with a blank stare.
“I wish we had better recognition,” she says. “I wish it were automatic that the name of the translator is known.”
Some publishers have made it even more difficult to achieve recognition. There was an uproar in 2003 when House of Anansi decided to remove the names of translators from the front cover, where they normally appear alongside the author, though in a smaller font. Says Fischman: “In other words, they were presenting their translated books as English-language originals. This was downright dishonest. It ruffled a lot of feathers. It was just awful. As one of the translators involved, I remember it with great pain.”
She also recalls the $5-bill flap. In 2002, the Bank of Canada added a passage from a work of Canadian literature on to the back of paper money. For the $5 bill, they chose Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater, which Fischman translated. They called and asked for her permission.
“Of course, as a good militant translator, I said, ‘And my name has to be on it.’ Oh, the poor people. They said no in about 85 different ways.”
So, does she even now have trouble holding a $5 bill?
“Oh no, I’m very happy to. And if there are people around, I’ll point to these 11 words or whatever it is [actually, it’s 31 words], and say ‘Those are my words.’” She laughs. “It has been said this is the best-selling translation in all of Canada.”
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