{"id":22404,"date":"2025-07-25T06:12:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T06:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/22404\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T06:12:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T06:12:07","slug":"fair-by-jen-calleja-review-on-the-magic-of-translation-fiction-in-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/22404\/","title":{"rendered":"Fair by Jen Calleja review \u2013 on the magic of translation | Fiction in translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jen Calleja is used to making things happen for herself, by herself, despite the fact that collaboration is vital to all her endeavours: her work as a literary translator, rendering German prose and poetry into English; her life as a\u00a0publisher, and co-founder with her friend Kat Storace of Praspar Press<\/a>, which aims to bring Maltese literature\u00a0to a wider audience; her\u00a0own\u00a0writing, which includes the\u00a0novel Vehicle and the essay collection Goblinhood; and her other incarnation, as a member of the post-punk band Sauna Youth.<\/p>\n

All of this takes a significant amount of energy and determination, but one of Fair\u2019s central contentions is\u00a0that it is all made far harder than it ought to be by, in effect, the covert acceptance of inequality and exclusion in the arts and literature. She\u00a0recalls, for example, finally feeling\u00a0that she has made it as a translator when she is invited to speak\u00a0at the London Book Fair; years later, she returns to tell the audience that she has plenty of work, but only \u00a330 in her bank account because so many of the organisations in the room are behind on paying her. \u201cOut of the frying pan of grifting,\u201d as\u00a0she acidly notes, \u201cinto the fire of\u00a0contempt\u201d.<\/p>\n

But it is not simply a question of spiralling workload, dwindling rates of\u00a0pay, insecure employment or even the spectre of AI. Translators are additionally required to go along with\u00a0their own erasure: to sign up to\u00a0the idea that invisibility is hard-wired into their value, and that a truly\u00a0great translation is the one that the reader fails to notice. Maintaining this fiction might take obvious forms \u2013 neglecting to give a translator their rightful billing on the text itself \u2013 or it\u00a0might be subtle and insidious, as in\u00a0the insistence that translators suppress their regional identity by\u00a0rendering everything in homogeneous southern English. Departing from such strictures has not\u00a0hindered translators such as the inestimable Deborah Smith, who introduced Yorkshire dialect into her\u00a0versions of the novels of Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang.<\/p>\n

In fact, as Calleja demonstrates through several fascinating and detailed translations in progress, shepherding a piece of writing from one language into another requires so\u00a0many minute responses, thought processes and decisions that the translator would find it impossible to\u00a0suppress their own voice and experiences; and that if they managed it, the result would probably be worse, inert and undynamic. Her relationship with the manuscripts on her desk,\u00a0for\u00a0example, is informed by her\u00a0life-changing encounter with Bernhard Schlink\u2019s Der Vorleser (The Reader), a novel that she selected at random in a Munich bookshop when she was a teenager, over time allowing the chasms in her understanding and appreciation of the prose to slowly fill\u00a0in and resolve. \u201cLooking at this first\u00a0page now, it feels so strange to know how I would translate it, how only I would translate it,\u201d she writes. \u201cEven stranger to think that now I pick\u00a0up novels in German, open them, read them, and know how to translate them\u00a0into books you buy in shops. That people trust me to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fair is so titled in part to reflect its qualities as a manifesto \u2013 not only an improvement in pay and working conditions, but a demand that literary translation as a practice and profession should be a viable aspiration for a far greater number and type of people. It\u00a0also describes the book\u2019s puckish structure, in which we wander the stands, stalls and hallways of a notional trade fair, and where the illusion of\u00a0cosy\u00a0intimacy and friendliness \u2013 the\u00a0decorated cubicles for meetings, the\u00a0drinks receptions, the musical performances \u2013 are at odds with the corporate reality of such gatherings, which are essentially transactional rather than poetic. It can be a\u00a0somewhat distracting and disorientating mechanism, which is perhaps the point. Stripping away the industrial structures of creating art is far easier said than done, but as she repeatedly tells us, you\u00a0have to start somewhere.<\/p>\n

Fair: The Life-Art of Translation by Jen Calleja is published by Prototype (\u00a312.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jen Calleja is used to making things happen for herself, by herself, despite the fact that collaboration is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-22404","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}