Mara Faye Lethem translates from Spanish and Catalan, including authors such as Albert Sánchez Piñol, Juan Marsé, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron and Pablo DeSantis. Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., she has lived in Barcelona since 2003. We spoke to her about the process of translation, an often unmentioned and unheralded art, but one that is vital to the reception of a book.
How are translators chosen?
By editors, sometimes at the suggestion of agents or authors.
Do you work closely with an author? Is it more like a collaboration than an isolated process?
No, not in my experience. If the author is living, I usually work up the nerve to ask a few questions at the tail end of the process, when I've exhausted every other possible venue. Even the most generous authors don't have the time to hold your hand through the process. In the end, a book, like a child, is its own entity and your relationship is with it, not with the author.
How does a translator keep up on current usage, idioms?
Well, I live in Spain so I mostly do it by osmosis but, of course, a lot of research goes into each translation. The worst is when you've come up with a great translation for a certain word and then check to find that the word didn't become popular until after the historical period the book takes place in, and you can't use it. I became a translator since the Internet became omnipresent, and I can't imagine not having it as a tool.
Why do you not translate certain words or phrases? We realize some things, or names, are simply untranslatable, and the reader either picks it up from inference or has to let it go. We're curious about the process of selection.
There is this idea that some language teachers impart that you should read a book in a foreign language with a dictionary by your side, but what that seems to lead to is you putting the book down the first chance you get and not picking it up again, because reading has a flow to it that transcends each individual word.
For example, I love Vladimir Nabokov's work, but my French is terrible, so in a book like Lolita I miss some things. In Learning to Lose there is friction between Latin American Spanish and peninsular Spanish that was tricky to convey in English, and I think that's mainly when I left things in the original.
I also will often leave things relating to food in the original because it gives a nice flavor (pardon the pun), and I do think it is important to remind the reader that they are in a foreign country once in a while, instead of trying to smooth over the unsmoothable. I'm sure a tiny fairy dies every time I translate "tortilla española" into "potato frittata" but that is an example of something that you can't leave in the source language because for American readers a "tortilla" strongly connotes a Mexican tortilla, which is a completely different thing.
But I'll take these examples, to give you an idea.
On page 282, Ariel and Sylvia are joking about the terrible life of a boy who grows up with the name Pololo. Why is that name is so terrible? What is the reason for not changing the name to something that Americans would "get?"
Pololo just sounds silly. I thought it sounded silly in English, too.
On page 466: "Meu anjo das pernas tortas."
This is in Portuguese in the original, so I left it that way. The author was showing the intimacy of a Brazilian couple, in their native language.
How do we know a translation is good or bad? How do we know, if a sentence is brilliant or boring, whether it's the author or the translator?
There is trust involved in reading translations, one that is not often acknowledged. When translating, I try to respect that trust by maintaining a good balance of humility and self-confidence, because I feel both are essential at different moments. The beginning of the book is always hardest, because after a certain point you kind of get into the writer's skin and you feel more comfortable "speaking with their voice," if you will. Like the clichéd image of a psychic channeling a dead person. But there are always compromises you have to make, because each language has things it expresses better than any other.
An editor once praised a translation of mine by saying that it was "a meeting of the minds," which I found very flattering. A brilliant sentence in a translation is most likely the result of good work on both the author's and the translator's parts. And, frankly, if it's boring, that's probably the author's fault. And if it's awkward, that is probably the fault of the translator.
What books do you want to translate next?
Corona de flores by my husband, Javier Calvo, a postmodern gothic thriller set in 19th-century Barcelona; El comienzo de la primavera by Patricio Pron, a cat-and-mouse game through Germany's recent past by an Argentine translator in search of a philosopher; and Las teorías salvajes by Pola Oloixarac, a brainy campus satire of the Facebook generation.
