Talking with Ayça Türkoğlu about ‘All Dogs Die’

Claudia Marzollo: Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us. We wanted to start with something a bit general: how did you come to translate All Dogs Die?

Ayça Türkoğlu: It's a bit of a rubbish story really. I was just asked to. I had read the book already. And I definitely knew that the book was coming out and I was intrigued by it. I got an email from Ricardo at MTO Press. It was not more complicated than that, really, but it worked out for the best.

Kate McNamara: It wouldn't have just come out of nowhere either, he would have known your past translations.

Ayça Türkoğlu: I hope so!

Kate McNamara: I’d like to ask about the actual process of the translation of this novel. What was your relationship like with the author, Cemile Sahin? Was she involved at all?

Ayça Türkoğlu: We definitely talked quite a lot, particularly towards the end when I was editing the translation. I had a lot of questions for her because there were some sections where I didn't understand what was going on. Particularly the section that's all in capital letters, I found that incredibly challenging to translate because a lot of the time I was like What's going on? What does this mean? And talking to her about it cast a lot of light on it. She's also just lovely so that was very helpful, and she is also extremely cool, and she's got very nice nails, which is not the most important thing, but I did an event with her a couple of weeks ago and while I was talking I would just be staring at her nails thinking, Wow, those are luminous. 

Kate McNamara: Was she not very opinionated then about how you translated certain elements of the book? Or did you only talk about the questions you had for her?

Ayça Türkoğlu: Sometimes I wanted to be sure of what she was trying to achieve so that I could try to do that as well. But I don't feel that there are any areas like where she said No it must be this. She was generally very supportive. I can't remember us disagreeing on anything. I think generally when I'm translating, I'm trying to facilitate to some extent what the author wants the book to be. It's really difficult. It's a kind of toss up because sometimes I want to impose myself on the translation. I think I'm writing, these are my words, and you can't get a translation that's just devoid of any evidence of the translator. And why would you? Because then I wouldn't get any airtime and I'm a narcissist. So I'm torn, as sometimes I want to impose myself on the text a little. But particularly with this book, I didn't feel confident and I wanted to make sure that I was facilitating what she wanted to achieve, partly because I'm Turkish and she's Kurdish. I came into it knowing that my politics basically align with hers, but I'm not anywhere near as knowledgeable as I would like to be, and I feel slightly ashamed about that. I probably should still be educating myself about this. And so I don't want to impose myself any more than is necessary. I don't know whether I managed that very well, but I wanted to take the lead from her, and I think it worked out okay. 

Kate McNamara: It was interesting to hear about your struggle with the chapter all in capitals. When I came across that section, it felt quite jarring at first, so I stopped. It was also late at night, and I have two little kids so I'm often really tired when I'm reading. When I came back to it fresh the next day, it felt easy to read. I think maybe what I found tricky was just the difference between the stories, and how much the narrating voice changed between sections there. But when I was in the world of that particular story it read really nicely.  

Ayça Türkoğlu: Thank you. When I first translated that chapter I was like This is crap, what have I written? This sounds terrible. I don't know what I'm trying to achieve here. But I think as I went back to it several times, and also once I spoke to Cemile about it, I started to be able to pick out some of the rhythm. I also looked up an audio book of the German, and that really helped. Beforehand I didn’t know how this was supposed to sound. And Cemile and I had a  very mild disagreement about it at an event we did a couple of weeks ago because I asked: “How do you read this? I want to read it like I'm shouting. Am I supposed to be shouting?”. And Cemile said, “No it's not shouting. It's just urgency”. And I think I kind of got that. Initially when I was reading in my head all I was hearing was shouting, and then as you get into it you start to get this sort of odd urgent rhythm, which was easier to translate. But that was the hardest chapter, easily. 

Claudia Marzollo: I'm really interested in what you said about you not being able to completely erase yourself from the translation because it is you translating this, and you are writing these words. You mentioned that there are a lot of parts of the book where it’s really sometimes hard to grasp what is happening. There's ambiguity, there are not a lot of details about the context and the situation. So I was wondering, was it hard to keep this ambiguity? Did you feel like you wanted to add some extra explanation or something to make it clearer in English?

Ayça Türkoğlu: I think if I'd been less ignorant as an individual maybe I would have. But because sometimes I didn't know, I felt I was in the dark until I spoke to Cemile about it, and I was okay in a way with leaving it devoid of details. One interesting thing is that if you read the sample of the book – which I think is still available on the New Books in German website, and it’s not translated by me, it’s translated by Katie Darbyshire – it's from an earlier version of the text. So, there's way more detail about places and names of places and things that really make it more specifically and obviously Kurdish. Which I kind of missed when I started translating it, because I thought that would have helped me and it would have made it more obvious what I was trying to do. But also I think being devoid of details as it is – and I don't know whether Cemile would agree with this – but to me it feels like it could be transposed to a lot of situations where people are experiencing state terror. That's not to say that it's not also a very specific situation, and again I also don't know whether Cemile would agree with this, but the whole time I was translating it I was thinking about Palestine because I was translating it not long after October the 7th. And I remember seeing a picture of a bombed out village where someone, a soldier, had planted the Israeli flag and I saw the same thing where someone had planted the Turkish flag and I was just like This is exactly the same. So to answer your question, I do feel the lack of detail was fine for me, and I do think that makes it applicable to lots of situations, but also I feel like anyone who knows about the 90s in Turkey will recognize it, even if this is a smaller group of people among English readers, although probably still quite a lot. But the fundamental things like the humiliation of people and the erosion of their humanity, you can see that in a lot of places. One thing I find really obviously disgusting is the rat scene at the beginning, but that didn't trouble me and distress me in the way that things later on did, for example when they're having a funeral, but they have to dress like they're at a wedding in case the police storm the funeral. It's not visceral in the same way, but it's so humiliating and common to a lot of situations of state terror. Those things really stuck with me. 

Kate McNamara: I think it’d be hard to read this book at the moment and not be thinking about Palestine because the situation there is so much at the forefront of our collective discussions. In All Dogs Die, I found the chapter with the man who lost his child so hard to read in the context of seeing so many photographs of dead children in Palestine. I did a research paper a while ago on the literature that came after the Rwandan genocide, and often the writing was really focused on the genocide, on the specificities of it. 

And the work that I found most affecting was the one that isn't so clearly based on the Rwandan genocide. It feels more universal and paradoxically less removed in its lack of specificity. When you say a story is about those people over there, it can take you away from the feeling of intimacy and immediacy. So I liked that All Dogs Die was more ambiguous in its setting. If we're talking about the politics of the novel, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the politics of translation, on the value of translating a book like this, or perhaps how you view your work as a translator more widely.

Ayça Türkoğlu: I don't really know, because I would really like to think that my work is politically meaningful, but I don't know if it's just me having fun. I feel very torn because on the one hand I want to think that what I'm doing is important, but is it? Translation is such a middle class sort of vocation. I don’t think someone as feckless as me would be able to do it if it weren’t for the fact that my husband makes much more of our income than I do. I don’t make much money. I was speaking to the translator Rosalind Harvey once and she said, Yeah, sometimes you feel a bit like you're just a lady in the drawing room playing with words. It feels profoundly unimportant. I feel like I'm fairly politically engaged as a person, and I think if I wasn't doing this, I would like to be doing something that I think is genuinely useful to society. I also think books are important, but not really. I mean they are, but not really, but they definitely are… I feel like there are some people reading translated fiction and feeling like Well done me. I read a non-English book, wowee. But then at the same time, bread and roses. You need art. It's not as if these conversations aren't important. I hate the suggestion that the arts don't matter. I think a lot these days about what's important about being a person, I think I want to be an authentic human being. And I think it’s really important to be doing things that aren't productive and that aren't valuable to capitalism. So it's difficult because on the one hand I think art is supremely important, because we should be expressing ourselves with authenticity as human beings, and art is a way of doing that. Of being not just a worker, not just a consumer. So basically to sum up, art doesn't matter and also art matters very much. But ultimately the main reason I translate is because it’s fun. And the thing is, hedge fund managers exist. Their job doesn't benefit anyone. Their job doesn't matter. So many of the lucrative jobs are jobs we don’t need. Care workers get paid a pittance and they're some of the most needed people in society. Translation matters and it doesn't. One thing I think is important is that human beings should be translating and human beings should be reading writing by other human beings, but that's all part of a greater effort towards being an authentic human being. 

Claudia Marzollo: I loved what you said about the fact that you do it because it's fun. And this is not a fun book, but I was wondering: was there any part of it, maybe linguistically rather than something about the story, that you thought was fun and that you really enjoyed figuring out?

Ayça Türkoğlu: It's very hard to remember, but there was one thing that I found very challenging to translate more than other texts where the language is more complicated. For example, I translated a book called Slime, and when I first went to translate it I thought that it was in really complicated German. But I quickly came to understand what the voice of the text was, and I'm quite good at doing jaunty non-fiction. Whereas with All Dogs Die, all the accounts are slightly different and you don't want them to all sound exactly like the same voice, but also the text is so stripped back that it's very hard to get a handle on it. I really really struggled with creating a voice that sounded right and working out what the voice was in any of the sections. But there are a couple of times when something would click. I was talking to Cemile about the guy that keeps talking about the plastic zip-up laundry bag and I think that phrase in translation has the same number of syllables as the phrase in German. I can't remember what the German is, but there were things like that where I thought, I've got that. I think I'm getting it. That is a really nice thing about translation. I like the first stage because I'm just writing anything, and I always think I won't like the second stage as much, but there’s something very satisfying about just tweaking things and everything falling into place. I don't know whether I successfully did that, but there were a couple of times where I thought Yes, I have got it. 

Kate McNamara: That must be really satisfying. Especially with a book like this where you've got so many different voices: it must have been hard to keep trying to create the right voice.

Ayça Türkoğlu: On this topic, Cemile told me they're all true stories, they're not made up. She said that she interviewed a lot of people, but she also said that even if she hadn't, these are the stories that she grew up with, everyone in the Kurdish community knows these kinds of stories. I don't know loads of Kurdish people, but I know of quite a lot of Turkish leftists through my dad, and there are so many stories like The guy who collects the bins was imprisoned at university and spent 14 years inside for doing nothing and he was tortured. There are a lot of stories like that. But Cemile has grown up in a community where these stories are just everywhere and everyone has them. So when I was trying to get the voice, I wanted it to be as if you're talking to an auntie, and I use this in the ethnic sense of talking to basically a middle-aged woman. I wanted it to be as if you're talking to a middle-aged woman, and she's got you some nice food, you're sitting, having a chat, and she'll maybe drop this absolutely harrowing detail like And then my husband died on a mountain and I was trapped in a doghouse and…. I wanted the voice of some of the characters to come across as very matter-of-fact, because that’s how they live with it.

Kate McNamara: You mentioned before about translating from both German and Turkish. We had Slime in our bookshop when it came out. I was just wondering how it is to translate from two different languages, and whether they ever interact or influence each other as you're working, especially in a work like this written in German, but about Turkish/Kurdish history.

Ayça Türkoğlu: I much prefer translating from German, which I probably shouldn't say. German doesn't have any emotional resonance for me. And also it's just much easier because I use German a lot more. I speak Turkish a lot more. I mean, not in this country, but when I go to Turkey I speak a lot of Turkish. I never speak German because Germans all speak amazing English. But translating between German and English is easier because the structure of the sentence is more similar, except with the verb at the end, while with Turkish, they're completely the opposite way around. I think when you're translating you get into the habit of knowing where the word that you need next is going to be in the sentence, and because I translate from German more frequently I'm much sharper on that with German. But I also like translating stuff in German about Turkish stuff. Maybe not this book, because it's about Turkish state terror. I do feel that it's important to distinguish Turkishness and Kurdishness. My husband was asking me the other day, Why are you making such a point of saying that someone is Kurdish, not Turkish? Isn't that discriminatory?. But the Kurds get erased all the time. Everything Turkey does to the Kurds is about erasing their Kurdishness: not letting them speak their language, not letting them be educated in their language, not letting them give their children Kurdish names. Everything is about ignoring their Kurdishness and that's ethnic cleansing, isn't it? Going back to the topic of Turkish, I do like translating German writing about Turkish things because it's less alien to me than it is to translate something about someone in Turkey doing Turkish stuff, because I have a migrant experience, even if it's completely unlike the experience of German Turks. There are loads of Turks in Germany, and in London as well, but I didn't grow up in London, I grew up in West Berkshire, so I'm intrigued by that kind of experience. But one way in which Turkish came in useful in this text is that the last character in the book is called Devrim, which means revolution. I mean, it's also a name, but I asked Cemile if she did that deliberately and she said yes. 

Claudia Marzollo: This is a book where each story is so individual, but they're also interconnected. So when you read the last story, you find connections to the first and so on and so forth. It made me want to ask what your process of translation is, if you have one? And in this particular case, how did you manage to keep track of these connections between stories? Was that an issue?

Ayça Türkoğlu: I just do it in a very non-methodical way. With this book I had actually read it before I translated it but a lot of the time I don't read the book first, because I just don't want to, I would rather be translating it. I also find it really tedious when I'm trying to read a book to be thinking about the translation, it just makes it so much harder to actually read the book. So, it's easier to just translate the book straight away. I do a first draft and then I just go over that again and again and again and again, and I make notes as I go through. When I'm doing a first draft, if something comes up I will make a note to make sure I come back to that.  But also I definitely pick up on a lot more through just going through it again, and I think that's why translation suits me: it's just one big long task to fixate on. It's also why I don't know if I'd be able to write a book because you’d have to work out how to structure the book and that's my nightmare, whereas with translation I'm finding out about the book the same as the reader is. 

Kate McNamara: You mentioned Katy Derbyshire and the process of co-translation with her. I was wondering how you feel about the process of co-translation versus working on your own, and whether working with somebody else changed the way that you work on your own at all?

Ayça Türkoğlu: I do like working on my own. Usually, with most things, I would choose to work on my own rather than with other people. I like working on my own because I can do stuff according to my own schedule and energy level. But co-translating with Katy was just such an enjoyable experience, it was just lovely. We did quite short sections of translation, we would translate about a thousand words at a time and send them back and forth to each other. Usually if I'm translating on my own I will do maybe 2,000 words in a day, but I won't go back to it until a couple of months later, whereas we would be tweaking it as we went along. It was just so fun. You just don't get that level of fun when you work on your own. I definitely like the sense of control and the fact that I'm going to become completely immersed in the translation and that I get to do whatever I want. What I liked about working together was that you could still do what you wanted, but you'd get a bit of recognition, and you could chat about what you liked. It's definitely not the lucrative way to do translation, but then neither is doing translation at all. I also remember so much about the process, I remember the books I translated with Katy so much better than I do this book, for example, because we talked about it as we went along. Whereas with this, who am I going to refer to? I don't have anyone else's memory to access about this. I learned a lot working with Katy. I definitely gained a lot of confidence working with her, and I became more relaxed about putting myself into the text and just doing what I wanted because it was fun. So that's definitely something I took away. 

Kate McNamara: It's so nice to hear. We interviewed Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer about their co-translation experience and that also just seemed so joyful as well. I'm sure it's not always the way, and sometimes it's hard work, but it must also be nice to have somebody else excited by the same work and bouncing off each other.

Ayça Türkoğlu: That is the fun, I am essentially a nerd and I enjoy talking about why I make certain choices. When I've got to justify myself to an editor for example, I will present them with a long paragraph on why this is the correct choice or this is the ideal choice in this situation and I get a lot of pleasure out of that. So, getting to do that with someone else with less of a defensive attitude is very nice. Also Katy is vastly more experienced than me but I didn't feel at any point that I was her junior. She made it a partnership of equals, and I felt like she was very generous. 

Kate McNamara: Continuing on this focus on the practicalities of translation for a moment, for people reading, how did you get into translation and how did you start translating novels?  

Ayça Türkoğlu: I did a lot of translation at university, because my university course had lots of translation in it, which I don't think is necessarily the case for all university courses. Then I did the MA in translation at UEA which was really good at introducing you to the things that you need to know about how to get into translation - about the National Centre for Writing, the BCLT, going to the London Book Fair or other various events, and meeting other translators. And then I did a week-long residential program at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire with translators, and I met a lot of translators that way. I am really bad at pitching, I don't think I've ever pitched. I worked with a scout for a while, so I knew some publishers, and when I did the Lumb Bank residency I got to know people at Words Without Borders. You start to get opportunities from the people that you meet through other things, which is awful, and not meritocratic, but I'm in it now.

Kate McNamara: This answer is helpful, for people who are starting out, because it shows that there isn’t really an obvious set path you need to go for. But rather, it’s important to keep putting yourself out there and to be in the right places.

Ayça Türkoğlu: I do think so much of it is about networking and meeting people, which is horrifying sometimes, particularly for people who've chosen to work on their own like translators. I quite like the opportunity to show off, within limits, but then I'll need to be alone for five days. So I do think that the MA is a really good way to get into it, but also it's not essential.

Claudia Marzollo: We have a question for you about music: do you listen to music while you translate? Or if not while you are in the process of translating, is there music you listen to in the period of that translation that you associate with that work? Is music something that helps you, or that influences your work? 

Ayça Türkoğlu: It's really annoying. I can't listen to any music when I translate, I have to listen to white noise to block out the sounds of my husband's meetings. And also because white noise seems to jam a certain frequency in my brain and it makes it easier to concentrate. I feel that if I can hear anything else I can't hear the text, which sounds really pretentious but it's a hundred percent how it feels. There's no music in my mind connected to this specific book, which is strange because there certainly is for other things I've translated. Obviously there is with the Anatolian Blues trilogy, as there's a lot of music in those books, and we came up with playlists, and I would listen to old Turkish music. I think music is really important to me, but with this text I don't feel like there is space for it. Sometimes it feels quite sterile, and it feels hard to get close to some of the characters. There's something about music that's intimate and this book just didn't really allow for that. I don’t see the stories as intimate interactions with the characters, I feel like they're not genuine interactions, they represent an experience and for some reason music doesn't fit with that in my mind.

Kate McNamara: It makes total sense to me. As you were speaking I was thinking that it's a funny question for us to ask, because this book doesn't suggest music, and you're right – these feel like a kind of witness report almost, there’s no human interaction around it, there's no other history really behind it, although you do get to see snippets of relationships between people. It is interesting though to know that you've got soundtracks for other ones though. 

As you saw, we always finish our interviews with the same two questions. We're building a translator's library of recommended books so firstly, is there a piece of writing that has guided you during your processes of translation or a text you keep returning to. It doesn’t necessarily be about translation, even. 

Ayça Türkoğlu: I don't think there's any text. I think it’s because I see translation a lot of the time as something that really suits my temperament, being able to go at a task full throttle until it's finished. I don't want to have to do any sort of contemplation. I want to just be responding to the text in the moment just constantly over and over again until it's done. I do my thinking when I'm at my desk, and then I don't think about it the rest of the time. I mean, I do think about it a little bit, but not very much. I feel that, because for me it's like a craft rather than an art, I do it in the same way that I do my other crafts, that is with absolute focus in developing my skills, but I don't feel like I take as much on board as I would like to from other translators. 

Claudia Marzollo: Are there any books that you've read either in German or in Turkish that have not been translated and that you think should be translated that you'd like to translate?

Ayça Türkoğlu: The main book that I'm interested in at the moment is Birobidschan by Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus. It’s by an Israeli German author who's lived in Berlin for 10 years. It’s about this autonomous state that was set up by Stalin in Siberia, as a Jewish homeland with Yiddish as its official language. The author imagines the goings on in this autonomous region throughout the ages. It's got a kind of magical realism vibe, and this patchwork of almost folklorish characters, it’s just delightful. Also, I will straight up want to work with someone whenever I admire their politics and the author is extremely politically sound.. I also think it's an interesting thing to be looking at, at a time when we're looking at how and why states come to be, and whether that's good. I think I've become a sort of vague anarchist over the past few years. I’m not sure I think states work anymore.

Kate McNamara: Is there anything else that you wanted to share before we come to a close on the interview?

Ayça Türkoğlu: Not really. I am just very frightened about the rise of fascism worldwide. Maybe we should do something about that.