1. First off, congratulations on your recent win of the Best Translated Book Award with Robin Patterson for translation of Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle of the Murdered House. Was this your first co-translation?
MJC: Thank you! This was my first proper co-translation (I’ve edited other people’s translations in the past, but that’s a different matter), and I was thrilled that this book won the prize.
2. How did this co-translation come about, and how is the process different from being the sole translator for a work? Which do you prefer?
MJC: Robin was a student on a literary translation summer school I taught in London a couple of years ago, and I then mentored him for 6-8 months, so I knew him and his work well. I was feeling particularly overburdened with work at the time, and Chronicle of the Murdered House divides nicely into different voices, so I suggested the project to Robin and to Chad, and both were more than happy with the proposal. Robin did all the male voices, apart from André, and I did the female voices, although since we each read and edited each other’s work, the finished product is very much our translation. (We are following the same process with our current project.) I had always thought I would never want to do a co-translation, but it’s been a real delight working with Robin, who, of course, knows the book as well as I do. It’s just very companionable. I will still translate certain authors on my own, but I’m looking forward to doing more co-translations in the future.
3. We understand that you are in the middle of another joint translation effort with Robin Patterson for a second book. Can you share any details on this project and what we’ll have to look forward to?
MJC: Yes, we’re currently translating all the short stories of the nineteenth-century Brazilian writer, Machado de Assis. I say all, but really it’s all the stories that were published in book form during his lifetime, 76 altogether. He wrote far more than that, but 76 are enough to be going on with! Norton will be publishing these collected stories in 2018. Machado is better known to English readers as a novelist, and he is, quite simply, one of Brazil’s finest writers, if not the finest writer, and these stories, which span his whole career, are wonderfully quirky and various.
4. You have recently worked on three translations for Spanish authors Rafael Chirbes, Javier Marias, and Enrique Vila-Matas. Can you share your experience translating these three writers, and compare similarities and differences?
MJC: They could not really be more different, except that all of them are consummate stylists. I’ve been translating Javier Marías since 1992, and so I’m very familiar with his long, looping sentences and thought processes, and it’s always a pleasure to translate him. The Chirbes novel was a one-off for me and quite different from Javier’s style. Heuses a lot of semi-stream-of-consciousness monologues, which were a challenge, but enjoyable too; and the raw, despairing world he so vividly describes in En la orilla/On the Edge, is a million miles from Marías and from Vila-Matas. I had translated a few stories by Vila-Matas years ago, and it was a real treat to translate more. I love his dark, off-the-wall sense of humor (I do think humor is so important in novels) and, later this year, I’m going to be translating his most recent novel – Mac y su contratiempo – for New Directions.
5. How have you seen the field of translation evolve since you began your career?
MJC: There are far more books being translated, which is very gratifying, as well as more small independent publishers committed to fiction in translation. And although translations are still only a tiny percentage of all the books published in the States and in Britain, it does feel like there’s far more interest in translation than there was thirty years ago when I started translating, and more appreciation, too, of the work of the translator.
6. Would you say that the “market” for translations in the U.K. is more receptive than that of the U.S.? And if so, to what would you attribute this difference?
MJC: I think there is still a lot of resistance to translated fiction in both countries, but this is breaking down a bit, possibly thanks to surprise best-sellers like Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgard. Another hurdle is the fact there are so many books published in English in the US and in the UK, which means there’s a huge amount of competition for readers of home-grown fiction alone.
7. What do you think are the secrets to your success as a translator?
MJC: As with any profession, the main secret to success is hard work, but I have also been tremendously fortunate in the authors I’ve been given to translate, and that is mainly down to luck. I always set out to create a text that is a fine English text in its own right, and I’m as passionately committed to my own language and to becoming a fine writer in that language as I am to bringing wonderful writers in Spanish and Portuguese to an English-speaking audience.
8. Are there any established or up-and-coming authors in Spain that you would like to translate?
MJC: I hope to continue with the contemporary Spanish writers I already translate, but in my “declining years”, I’m keen to concentrate on translating or re-translating classic authors from the nineteenth century like Galdós and Alas and possibly some twentieth-century classics like Carmen Martín Gaite, a writer I translated earlier in my career, and to whom I would love to return.
9. What was the most challenging translation of your career and how did you succeed?
MJC: I find every translation I do a challenge! But probably The Book of Disquiet by the great Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, was the most difficult book I’ve translated. I’ve recently completed a “complete” edition for New Directions and, having to translate a lot of new texts made me realize all over again how complex and ambiguous and playful and inventive his prose is. I succeeded, if I did succeed, by trying to be equally complex, ambiguous, playful and inventive in rendering his Portuguese into my English, but hopefully without producing something that reads like a bad, undigested translation. I first translated Book of Disquiet in 1992, very early in my career, and what that experience taught me, I think, was that sometimes you have to be very free in order to be faithful.
10. When you are translating a book do you generally know when it is “finished”, or do you always have the sense that you need to give it one more review?
MJC: I revise any translation about ten times (repeatedly re-reading, looking for infelicities of tone or rhythm, making tiny changes, checking back with the original, reading out loud), and by the tenth draft, I’m really not changing anything. But there is a point when you do need someone with fresh eyes to read it through. That’s where husbands (although I only have one!), co-translators, copy-editors and proofreaders come in!
11. In your opinion, what would need to happen for more translations to be published in the U.S. market?
MJC: I think the translation-oriented publishers in the US are already doing a wonderful job. Funding is crucial, because translation is the most expensive part for publishers. I’m fortunate in that both Spain and Portugal do still fund translations, as do many other countries. In the UK, the PEN Translates project has done a lot to fund books that might not otherwise get funding. So, yes, money is key. Translation prizes, of which there are now many in the UK, do also have a role in encouraging publishers to take on more foreign fiction.
12. What advice would you give Spanish publishers and authors in their quest to distribute their books in the UK and US?MJC: Promotions like New Spanish Books in the US and the UK are very helpful indeed, introducing publishers to books and authors they would not necessarily have heard of otherwise. Sample translations are very helpful too, and a lot of literary agents do now provide those.
13. What has been your biggest frustration as a translator?
MJC: I do sometimes get irritated at people’s ignorance of what’s involved in the process of translation, about the level of skill required. If one more person says: “Couldn’t a machine do what you do?” I’ll scream. And it can be frustrating to have spent months honing the translation of a really wonderful Spanish or Portuguese or Brazilian book only for it to receive hardly any reviews and/or achieve only tiny sales. On the other hand, I’ve had the immense pleasure of translating that particular writer, so it does also feels churlish to complain!
14. What do you have yet to do?
The poetry and prose of Pessoa’s three main heteronyms, a volume of poems by Ana Luísa Amaral; possibly more Machado de Assis, the latest Javier Marias novel, and, hopefully, more Galdós and Gaite.
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