Talking with Caroline Waight
Georgia Katakou and Claudia Marzollo talk with the translator, Caroline Waight, who translates from Danish, German and Norwegian.
In this interview, as well as talking more broadly about the state of literary translation, we focus on her translation of Woman, Idle by the Swiss writer, Laura Vogt. Our conversation explores the intimate, complex female friendships of the novel, and the societal roles that women play, as well as delving into the specifics of translating from German into English.
Georgia Katakou: Thank you so much for being here with us! Our first question is, how did you come to translate Woman, Idle?
Caroline Waight: So, this is the second book of Laura’s that I’ve translated, and I ended up working on it just because I had done her first one for Héloïse Press – What Concerns Us – which is another excellent book. We had such a good time translating that one and I had a great working relationship with Laura, so when Aina at Héloïse decided that she wanted to publish Laura’s second book, it just made sense. What Concerns Us is also just a really interesting novel. It explores similar topics to Woman, Idle and has these complex, interesting female characters. So when I was asked if I wanted to do the next one, I was like, absolutely yes. I will make time.
Claudia Marzollo: What was your relationship with Laura like whilst translating, and how did you work together? Did you talk a lot during the process of the translations?
Caroline Waight: We didn't talk, per se, we did all of our communication via email. It depends on the author, but the way I tend to work – and this is how I work with Laura – is that I go through the original text and pick it apart, work on it, work on my translation, and this is very much a phase of vulnerability. I won’t show it to anybody or share anything about it with anyone. I'm just protecting it. And then as the work continues, you just sense yourself reaching the point where you're like, This now needs to be discussed with other people, and specifically with the author. So I came up with loads of questions for her and sent them to her and asked her, What were you thinking when you wrote this part or what did you mean by this?. Her writing is full of these subtleties of meaning, so I had a lot of questions along the lines of This sentence could kind of be referring to this but also to this, and what is it that you were really thinking of? and the answer is usually somewhere in between, or I was thinking of both. Which is sort of not helpful for a translator because then you're like, Damn, now this is even more of a challenge for me to translate!
In What Concerns Us, there's a particular song that recurs in the book. And I was reading this and I thought, I don't know this song. I don't even know if this is a real song. And in some ways it wasn't strictly necessary to ask Laura about it, because I could translate it without knowing what it was. But I wanted to know. And she said, Yeah, I was listening to this on repeat, this was my soundtrack. It is a real song. She sent it to me. I listened to it. And so that was so nice, because even though it wasn't strictly a translation question, I actually did feel that it coloured my translation of the book. I think it put me in something closer to the headspace that Laura was in when she wrote it, and of course that the characters are in. So there was that nice layering effect going on. Laura's headspace, the characters’, and then mine – it felt like a nice sort of synchronicity. We didn't have quite the same soundtrack effect with Woman, Idle… I should have asked her, What were you listening to? We need to keep the theme going.
Claudia Marzollo: I love that! And I was actually really curious about the translation of the title: I don't speak German, but I saw online that it could be translated as “The Woman Lying Down”. Is that a more literal translation of the title? I was really curious about how you came to Woman, Idle in the end, and whether it was a more editorial decision?
Caroline Waight: That's a really great question, because you're absolutely right. The title in German is Die liegende Frau, which literally means – if you translate it the most direct way – the lying woman. But if you translate it as “the lying woman” in English, then I feel like most people's brains go first to a woman telling a lie. It’s confusing. So I initially went for ‘Woman, Lying’, because that keeps it fairly close to the German, but is a little clearer in English. Eventually this was a discussion that we had between the three of us [Laura, Caroline, and Aina], because I really didn't want people to misunderstand, and there was conversation about whether we should have a woman lying down on the cover, reclining, which I did like. We thought that might bring some clarity. But by this point we already had loads of different cover designs that we really liked – without a woman reclining – and we also thought it might look weird from a visual perspective, because someone lying down is positioned horizontally and the shape of the book is vertical. So then Laura suggested ‘Woman, Reclining’. But I felt like “reclining” just didn't have quite the right vibe to it somehow. It was just too complex a word, whereas ‘Woman, Lying’ is very factual, so that was very much a contender for a long time. And I think it was Aina that suggested ‘Woman, Idle’? Because obviously there's an irony to that. It is less matter-of-fact, but it brings this level of irony which is very much present in the book, through this idea of women's activity or inactivity as a form of protest. Historically, women have been depicted as idle in various ways, and framing Nora's form of protest as a sort of extreme idleness is a kind of ironic reclamation of it, right? She literally just will not do anything. She will only lie there. She won't even speak. So that was how we came to that. It was a complicated road to get there; there was a lot of back and forth.
Claudia Marzollo: I love ‘Woman, Idle’ as a title. It makes you want to read the book as well. I really like what you were saying about the irony.
Georgia Katakou: And I also felt that “idle” had such a richness of meaning. Throughout the book in some way all three friends end up being in a state of idleness because they have to take a break from their lives, even if they are not literally lying down, like Nora. So I really liked that as well and there's a simplicity to it too that I think really works.
Caroline Waight: That was the other thing, I didn't want too many words. ‘The woman who's lying down [not telling lies].’ She's literally lying on a sofa? It all starts to get a bit too explainy. And you're right, I think there's a richness and a kind of mystery to this short title. That is also something we discussed: idleness almost as this space for reinvention and change, which is really what the book is about. There’s this sense of all of the characters in their different ways reaching this pivotal point where they’re just not moving – they're stuck. Obviously you see that most literally with Nora, because she's literally lying down, not doing anything physical, but you see it in the other characters as well. Romi’s trying to decide what she wants to do about this pregnancy, about her relationship. Szibilla is the most mysterious character for me; I still don't think I fully understand her, but she too is in this space where you’re not sure she’s happy. You can never quite tell whether she feels comfortable in her stasis or if this is something that she's seeking to change. Whereas I feel like with Romi and Nora, it's much clearer what their thought processes are. That feeds back into the irony of it all: idleness is this space of change, despite seemingly being static.
Claudia Marzollo: That's a really great way to talk about the theme of the book.
Caroline Waight: I feel like one of the most defining ways in which Laura paces this book is through lists. Romi's sections have so many lists and sometimes they get hugely long, right? Towards the end, especially, there are pages and pages of lists, which I kind of love, because you witness this process of her trying to make herself orderly, trying to organize herself, and then you see her thoughts forcing their way out of that, growing like this strange tree in all these different directions. It's so powerful, the way she does that. And that, to me, is how it felt to translate the novel: at first it seems like this very matter-of-fact, orderly narrative, and then just more and more you get these layers of disruption folded in.
Georgia Katakou: That was really striking to me. There is an economy of language, at least in the English text. In one passage Romi describes her time:
I go around the flat with my cleaning supplies, stove on, stove off; I head out into the garden with my hoe and then I’m back off to the station, boarding a train into town for a supermarket shop, for an appointment at the gynaecologist, for a date with Dennis. Seven o’clock, nine o’clock, twelve o’clock, five o’clock, ten o’clock.
It’s so simple and yet it creates a sense of claustrophobia. I felt quite out of breath when I was reading, particularly Romi’s point of view, and I was wondering if this is something that you were aware of when you were translating? How did you go about recreating this economy of words?
Caroline Waight: I have a technical response to this, which is that Laura in German has this very clipped style, where she will leave out any word that is unnecessary in the sentence. To an extent that's more normal in German anyway, so this is often something you’re confronted with as a translator. When I first started working on the novel, I found I added words back in, because in English it would have felt overly curt to leave out some of the stuff that Laura leaves out. English often needs more breathing room. But it’s a balance, of course, because you need to identify what is part of an author's style versus what is a linguistic convention in that particular language, and then work out how you recreate that effect in English. I'm really glad that it came across, this economy of words, because that is so important to the whole metaphor she's trying to build up. But just as a technical question: how do you do that? What do you leave out? So in the passage you just read, ‘Herd an, Herd aus’ can easily be rendered as ‘stove on, stove off’ – it wouldn’t work if you started adding in extra words (‘I turn the stove on, turn it off’). That would destroy the rhythm of it, the economy of it. But ‘im Zug Richtung Stadt’ is what I translated as ‘boarding a train into town’, which has just slightly more room. There were places where I felt like if I didn’t make these changes, it would break the thread of coherence. They’re not needed in German, but in English they are. Or at least, that’s how I felt – other translators might disagree!
But then to the second part of your point, about claustrophobia – what that style builds up into is this feeling of circularity. There's a lot of circular movement in the book. People go to one place, go somewhere else, then come back, literally within one room. They search through a box. They take things out, put them back in. There's almost this iterative process by which self-knowledge is gained, right? I think that's what it's saying about how we get to know ourselves. It is partly through these circular, iterative processes of doing something, doing it again, but doing it a little different. There’s this slow build-up of self-knowledge, which I actually think is quite true to life, but it is claustrophobic, and I think that has to do with what Laura has to say about women and work and idleness. It goes back to the idleness question again: why that's so important, and why this seeming passivity or seeming inactivity is actually quite powerful. Women are so frequently identified with labour or identified with relationships that are also constructed through labour – often relationships with partners or children – so to step back from that into idleness is a very radical statement, and I think the claustrophobia that you're identifying has to do with that. It has to do with the claustrophobia of routine and the everyday, and how it can kind of go in two ways. It can either become this prison or it can become this thing where through those processes you gradually start to take a step back from them. I feel like she was getting to that type of structure, linguistic structure.
Claudia Marzollo: Speaking about idleness and taking a step back from the daily routines and work, there's something about the characters coming together, especially Szibilla and Romi getting together to help, but they're there also on a sort of holiday and they are not actually able to do much for Nora. Nora doesn't need much at that point, but the way that they come together and they poke each other, especially in these really uncomfortable conversations that they have, feels like the opposite of idleness. It might look like idleness from the outside, but they're doing a lot of emotional labor that is quite intense and I really love that. And I love that Nora might look idle from the outside, but what's happening inside, we don't know.
Caroline Waight: There are all sorts of hints dropped. It's almost like being a detective, because Romi's looking around her room and looking at pictures and you get all these little hints about things that might have happened in her past, but you're not told, right? It's never made explicit. And you get this sense that maybe it does have to do with the emotional labor she's doing while she's lying down. But you don't really know what that is.
Claudia Marzollo: The book is structured in a way that you can see the same scenes from different perspectives and every actor has a very distinct voice. So for example, Romi's parts had this sort of ineffability or this kind of confusion, but also the lists, this matter-of-factness. While Szibilla’s ones felt much more direct. How did you go about translating all these different voices while still making them work together?
Caroline Waight: It's interesting, because I ended up feeling like Romi was almost representing the reader in some ways, coming in and being confused about the situation. In a way her response was the most normal, I think, because she's the one who expresses surprise. Szibilla doesn't really express any surprise over what Nora has done, even though what Nora has done is very strange and radical. But Szibilla takes it in her stride, and she turns up feeling like she's on holiday, right? She's the one who's going for massages and texting Romi "do you want to go for dinner?" Whereas Romi is the one who's trying to do whatever she can to help, or thinks she is. She's the one who believes that help is required. Whereas Szibilla doesn't, really. She's just like, she'll wake up. We'll be there. She actually, I think, explicitly says, "We can't help. What do you think we're going to do?" So, for me, Romi represents some of the reader’s questions or confusions. Szibilla, what I really wanted to preserve about her, is that she does have this directness and certainty, or perhaps it only seems like certainty. This goes back to what I was saying about her earlier: I feel like I still don't fully understand her character. Whereas Romi is very introspective, using those lists to work through thoughts and to process things. She’s using words to process stuff, like a writer does, whereas Szibilla just seems to have this total certainty in everything she does. And I felt like that was probably the most important thing to get across in terms of their two voices, the fact that Szibilla doesn't express things with uncertainty. She might be wrong, but she's confident about it. Romi expresses everything with uncertainty – and as a kind of process – whereas I feel like with Szibilla, in some ways, there's not a lot of development in her character. I should ask Laura about it, because I was wondering, What does she really represent in the book? There is something almost mythical about her character, which I guess would make sense, given that myth is a theme in the book. There are these figures of myth who kind of midwife change in other women, and I was thinking that maybe Szibilla plays that sort of role a little bit, in which case that sort of implacability is actually quite appropriate.
Georgia Katakou: Szibilla’s character was the one that I struggled with the most but I also enjoyed the most reading! It was really interesting seeing that while Szibilla doesn't change, Romi's relationship to her changes so much. The development of the friendship between Romi and Szibilla was one of my favorite bits of the novel. To see how Szibilla changes in Romi's eyes. And to me also there's something so powerful about a woman, like Szibilla, that is so unapologetically certain about things and also pushing her friends towards certain directions by being steady herself. I really enjoyed reading her but it also felt really difficult at times reading her personal point of view.
Caroline Waight: She's frustrating because there's part of you that wants to push back against her a lot; that kind of certainty can be quite exasperating. But one of the things that is fascinating about this character is that she also has this very caring aspect. So in the final scene there's a long section about her cooking the chicken soup and it's very detailed and – talk about good pacing – it's this simple thing, but the way that Laura depicts it is almost meditative, although she does it in this way that is not sentimental. Szibilla cooks the way she does everything, with the certainty of this is what is needed, this is the catalyst that needs to happen in the situation. And she just puts it out there and it's kind of lovely! She's actually a caring character in many ways, a fascinating character, but also frustrating because she seems almost inhuman sometimes in the way that she responds to things.
Georgia Katakou: Is there anything in particular that you feel you had to sacrifice of the original in the translation process, or something that inevitably got lost? And on the other hand, is there anything that you think the book gained in its translation?
Caroline Waight: It's a good question. I mean, the hardest thing always is to think about how things are going to translate culturally. Laura is Swiss and Switzerland has quite a specific culture around motherhood and child-rearing. You would think it would be a very progressive country in that sense, but it's actually not really. It's got very traditional ideas about what kind of roles women should perform, how mothers should behave. I remember talking to Laura a little bit about this when we were doing the first book, What Concerns Us, which deals with some of these same issues. Maybe this speaks to the claustrophobia that we were discussing. There is this sense of very much being put into a particular role, in a way that you might not expect.
For most English-language readers, there is something that's inevitably always going to be missing from the translation of a Swiss-German book, which is the experience of reading the book as a Swiss person. I mean, obviously, it can speak to readers, and I hope it does, elsewhere as well. But when Laura is writing the books, she's writing them from the perspective of a Swiss woman, writing about her experience in Switzerland, and that is something that is always going to be lost in translation. It’s something I think about a lot. I feel like often there's nothing you can really do. You can't put an extra paragraph in there or whatever because it just doesn't work that way. But that's something I try to bear in mind when I translate, just in case there's any way that I can cue readers in to that sort of thing.
Claudia Marzollo: You translate from German, but you also translate from Danish and Norwegian. Do you have a preference for a language, or do you find certain aspects easier to translate in one language rather than the other?
Caroline Waight: That's such a big question! I don't think I have one that I prefer. I genuinely don't have a favorite child. I like all of the languages I translate from. I suppose in terms of what's easiest, I don't think that any language is necessarily easier than the other. Some authors write in a style with English in mind, a little bit. Maybe it’s more a question of genre than language, because I find it sometimes in thrillers, although obviously not always. All languages have aspects that you can kind of lean into more, or pull away from. So for instance, with Danish, I feel like it's a language that's very metaphorical. It is very very comfortable with metaphor, including mixed metaphors, which don’t always work in English, or not to the same extent. Ultimately, it always comes back to this: translation is almost never about literally translating the words, it is always about effect. What impact would this have on a Danish reader and then how can I recreate that impact on an English language reader? You have to be very sensitive to that, and turn the dial one way or the other when you're translating.
Georgia Katakou: In an interview with Ann Bjerragaard for Parthian, you said “The text is a living thing until you’ve sent it off”. I really love that image. Would you be able to talk a little bit more about your relationship with the text while you’re translating it? While the text is still a hybrid living thing, what are your feelings?
Caroline Waight: It’s related to this period of vulnerability I mentioned earlier. When you first start translating, there are so many options, and the way that I translate, I don't like to close off too many pathways too soon. Everything is subject to change, because what matters is the relationship between everything – so until you really have the whole text, none of it is fully settled. Especially if you haven't read the whole book before you start translating, of course, you realise I translated this the wrong way or this is the reason why this was written this way. More generally – in terms of voice and just the rhythm of the writing – you have to make sure that everything makes sense with every other part. And so that's what I meant about it being a living thing, in the sense that it's all potential, it's all subject to change; it's this thing with all these different parts and you haven't quite figured out how they go together. But then you do and it kind of locks in, and now it makes sense as a single object instead of all of these competing forces. Or they have in some way been held in balance by the time you finish.
Claudia Marzollo: Is that moment of everything being potential and everything being still undecided exciting for you? Is that terrifying?
Caroline Waight: It is in some ways the most fun part in translation. It’s this kind of choice, but then there is this terrible responsibility, because there are definitely moments where I've had two versions of a sentence and I'm looking at them and don't know which one to choose. I think, I should close off a door – even though I'd rather keep them both open. But unfortunately that's just what you have to do. You can't just translate the sentence twice. It is a lovely place to be, but it's also kind of frightening, because you do feel this responsibility weighing very heavily. And you realise the text does take on a life of its own a little bit. So you're editing a sentence, you like it, but you realise you’ve added something which wasn't there, or you’ve let the sentence take itself somewhere that it wasn't originally going, and sometimes that's not the right thing to do. So you have to be aware of harnessing this potential and this excitement but also reining it in when needs be. It's a bit of a balancing act.
Claudia Marzollo: I like that image. We're always very interested in the actual labor of translation and the work that you do. What are your thoughts on the state of translation at the moment? And how do you see your role as a translator?
Caroline Waight: Translation is kind of in a weird place at the moment. I think partly because of AI: it has revealed that a lot of people don't really understand why translation is important or what translators really do. There is this sense even among people who really should know better that translation is just substituting one word in the dictionary for another word in the dictionary and then maybe smoothing it out or making it pretty. I’ve heard that some publishers have even started asking translators to edit machine-translated text – and not just as a temporary measure, but for the final, published product. But that’s essentially saying that you don't think translators actually need to engage with the original to translate. Maybe if there's something slightly awkward about the phrasing you can fix that, but that's not what translation is at all. Translation is the opposite of that. Translation is about potentially abandoning any of the actual literal words in a sentence in order to create something that has the same effect. Translation is always bold, and that's the one thing that AI translations never are. They're always bland and average – by definition. Because that's how LLMs work. I think it has revealed a bit of a split in terms of how translation is viewed as a profession. Are we glorified machines who are currently a little bit better than the free machines out there, or are we actually doing something that's fundamentally different? Something that's qualitatively different from what AI could do. And obviously, I definitely think that what we're doing is different. It is an interesting period, because what preceded it was the increasing visibility of translators: things like getting your name put on the title page or even the cover happen now in a way that I think didn't fifteen years ago. So, it will be interesting to see whether those gains will continue to progress and whether it has actually really fundamentally changed the way that people view translation and the value of translation, or whether it's just all going to backslide now that ChatGPT will do the same thing for free – even though it's not remotely the same thing at all. I feel like we are at quite an interesting and pivotal point in the profession at the moment.
Georgia Katakou: I really like the way you put this. Translation is always bold! You described how there's been a lot of progress in translators’ visibility and recognition and I was wondering whether you can also talk to us a little bit more about things that you would like to see in the future? What are some of the expectations or hopes that you have for translation?
Caroline Waight: I would like to see translators paid a little bit more. And it's an awkward thing to talk about because I feel like often people either feel like translators aren't doing anything very difficult so they shouldn't be paid that much, or people feel like you should be doing it for the love of it. There's this old view of translation as a hobby which I think maybe derived from the fact that a lot of translators used to be academics, and they were doing it basically as a hobby in their free time, and it wasn't really that professionalized. So for those reasons, there's this sense that maybe translators shouldn't be asking for money – because it's too grubby, or because we don't deserve it. I think that is something that has changed very much for the better. I mean, when I first started out translating, sometimes people would offer ridiculously low amounts. Even now, translators often can't make a living doing it, even translators who win prizes, who are well-known, who translate extremely prestigious authors. So it would be nice to live in a world where translators didn't have to have another job or weren't constantly broke. And I guess just recognizing that translation is a form of writing. It is not the same as writing a novel, certainly, and I would never claim that, but it is a form of writing and it should be respected as such.
Georgia Katakou: Absolutely! And in a lot of the work we do with In Other Words, we think a lot about translation as almost a collaborative form of writing that is really a form of art, right? It is a practice that could come with the same rights that art workers have, established rates of pay, provisions for greater stability, sick pay…
Caroline Waight: I think that's a really good comparison!
Georgia Katakou: One question that we like to ask the translators that we interview, is whether they think about soundtracks to the works they translate, with music either from the language/culture that the book is steeped in, or with music suggested by the writing itself. Or if they perhaps had certain music playing on repeat while they were working on the text. What is the unheard sonic background to the translated work that we get to read?
Caroline Waight: There actually was a particular song for the previous book, because it was discussed so much in that novel. But in general I actually don't like to listen to music while I translate, because for me the sound of the words is so important. It's such a crucial aspect of translation, and I feel like music will influence me too much. Music is my background, really, that's actually my training. It's what I studied at university, and I still think of translation in a way as music-making. I mean, all writing is like music-making, because the aural aspect of the words is so important. Even when you're not reading something aloud, you're still hearing it in your head most of the time, and you're still either consciously or subconsciously aware of the rhythms of it. So, I just feel like if I had music playing – and I tried it because obviously I love music – but I just feel like it interferes in a way that is not helpful for the actual translation in the end. So while I did definitely listen to that one song many times during the previous book, I didn't do it while I was translating. I just wanted to see where she was at!
Claudia Marzollo: Yes other translators that we've interviewed have said that!
Caroline Waight: I was wondering if that's the usual answer. I think it would be difficult. I mean, I can't do anything while listening to music. I can't even read if there's music on. Unless it's just really bland music, like background music or something. I love to sew, I love to embroider, and I will listen to music while I'm doing that because for me, something about that actually meshes really, really well, like craft and music. Maybe it's something to do with how you're doing something with your hands, but because language is very, very aural, it doesn't mesh well for me.
Claudia Marzollo: There are two questions that we ask all the translators that we interview. The first question is: is there a piece of writing that guides you during your translation work, or a text or an idea that you keep returning to?
Caroline Waight: That is a really good question! I have a principle that I always try to work with, which is that it is the effect that matters. Sometimes, I find myself getting very hung up on asking myself questions of how far can I take this away from [the original], and I think that's the wrong approach. To get really hung up on trying to justify how much I've changed this sentence. I feel like that's the wrong way of thinking about it. So instead, I try to think, what effect is this going to have? Is it the effect it should have? But beyond that, the answer is no. I don't really have any kind of very coherent thought processes about translation. I just try to sit down and do my best!
Claudia Marzollo: Is there a book that has been translated into English that you would recommend from any language? And is there a book that has not yet been translated into English that you would like to see translated or even that you would like to translate yourself?
Caroline Waight: There are too many books that I could name! I don't know which one I would pick. If I had to pick just one book that I really love, it would be Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. It's probably one of my favorite translated books, and actually just one of my favorite books in general, but it's from a language which I don't speak at all. It is a translation from the Polish. Maybe it's kind of odd to use this as an answer to your question, because it may be a really bad translation. I can’t speak at all to the original text. The version I read may be completely different, but how can it be a bad translation if it's a good book? I am talking about Celina Wieniewska’s translation, which is not the most recent translation of it. I read her version. She did it in 1963 and that's the translation that I know. And so when I think of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, it's in her translation, and I am obsessed with that book. I've read it so many times. I love it! And it's a little controversial because I remember when it first came out it was really, really acclaimed and then I think her translation underwent a period where it wasn't very fashionable, and now I think it's coming back into fashion again. So it also has to do with these weird trends in translation. I definitely think everyone should read that book. It's so good!
If you want a second one, I always recommend The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas (Penguin, tr. Elizabeth Rokkan). It is originally in Norwegian and I've also read it in English, and I love it in both languages. It's just brilliant. So I would hugely recommend that. It’s this really strange fable about these two girls and one of them wanders off into a literal ice palace. It's essentially about grief, but the girl grieves in quite a strange way, and I love the fact that it's so focused on these children. There are adult characters in it, but they feature in the way that adults often do for children, as these sort of planets that orbit and affect you but aren't really the same as you. I think it is a wonderful book!
To answer the second part of the question, there are a lot of books that haven't been translated that definitely should! Sticking with the Swiss-German theme, I really like the work of Martina Clavadetscher. She's a Swiss writer who writes really interesting books. The first one I read by her is called Die Erfindung des Ungehorsams. The Invention of Disobedience, that’s maybe the title I would give it. She uses genre fiction but she takes it in a very literary high-concept direction. It is a sort of speculative fiction, I suppose, and it's written from the perspective of a couple of different characters, but one of them is this woman in New York who you suspect may or may not be a sex doll – but it’s set in the future, so she's very sophisticated, technology-wise. And then it's also partly written from the perspective of this woman who works at a sex doll factory. It's an interesting plot, but mostly I just love her writing. In that book she spaces things in quite a strange way, setting it out almost like poetry. A lot of line breaks. And she has really interesting metaphors and imagery and is just so good. I did a sample of it and a lot of publishers were interested, but it's not set in Switzerland and there's a kind of weird prejudice about that stuff. Like, if you're a Danish writer, you're expected to set all your novels in Denmark, and they're not interested if you set one in China. This makes sense, in a way, but then you think: that logic is not applied to writers in English at all! They're allowed to write a novel that's set in Venezuela, even if they've never been to Venezuela.
Georgia Katakou: I also think this ties into some of the conversations about the politics of translation: of texts being translated because they are representative of a national context in a very specific way. If your text is written in Swiss-German it has to also hint at Swissness in a particular way for it to be publishable.
Caroline Waight: And it's also about the politics of writing, right? Do people have to earn the right to write from a particular perspective? It is interesting, and sometimes I think: now that I've done more translation work, when I do read a novel by an English-language writer set in a different country, it does make me think differently about it a little bit. Part of me is always asking, Do you actually know anything about what you're writing about? And why are you using this backdrop? What function is it serving in your imagination? And sometimes it makes me uncomfortable. Other times I feel like it sort of works. It’s complicated.
Claudia Marzollo: It just reminds me of the first time I realized that Gothic writers sometimes would use Italy as this exotic setting for their novels. I was so shocked and surprised.
Caroline Waight: There's a long history of doing that though. The Gothic novels going back hundreds of years use Italy in that way. It's strange!
Georgia Katakou: These are all of the questions we had for you, thank you so much for joining us today! This has been so delightful.
Caroline Waight: Thank you. This has been really really fun. Sometimes I think I should have a coherent theory of translation and other times I feel like translation is a practice and I feel like my theory of translation changes with the practice of it and every time I translate a new book this nice process of discovery happens!
