Talking with Ian Giles
Kate McNamara
Good morning, Ian! It’s lovely to be able to do this interview in person, seeing as we’re all based in Edinburgh at the moment. I'll start with a more general question about literary translation: it often feels like quite a hard career to enter into. What was your route into translating books as a job?
Ian Giles
My anglophile Swedish mother came to the UK in 1982, and she didn't leave. We spoke Swedish at home when I was a child, and most of that stuck. I came here to Edinburgh for university, and I discovered that German made me very unhappy and that I could switch into Scandinavian Studies. One thing led to another, and I did a Master’s in Translation Studies where I focused on Swedish. After that, I did a PhD where my interest was in Scandinavian books being translated to English. Who reads them, and why? Zeitgeists and literary currents and that kind of thing. Alongside that Master’s and PhD, I was freelancing as a jack of all trades, translator of all three Scandinavian languages into English, doing your standard, boring, everything work, and that sustained me. After I wrapped up my PhD, it became my full time living, sort of. I now do a lot less of my jack of all trades stuff, partly by choice but also quite a lot of it not by choice. There's a lot less of that work around now.
So that was my route into translation. I first studied translation with Kari Dickson, translator of Norwegian, and then later with Peter Graves, translator of Swedish. Neither of them did enough to dissuade me from carrying on! [laughter]
You said that it's a hard career to get into. And you know, I've just described a route that sounds quite fluid. I simplify it in the telling, and it was really quite a slow burn start to it all. I'd say on the literary translation side, it's worth saying that I apprenticed by doing many hundreds of thousands of words of standard commercial translation. And these did not necessarily help me to translate a book like Bloody Awful with its style and voice, but they have helped me in terms of being a good translator. But that is not necessarily a route that’s as easily open to people now though.
In terms of my ‘foot in the door’ moments: I've been very fortunate to be working with what are relatively small language pairings which are quite in demand. From Swedish there are about 40-50 books a year coming into English, and there's not actually millions of translators working with it, so there's a little bit of opportunity to get in. And I've been lucky with the people that I met early on who've been able to make introductions for me and so lucky, all along. I mean, you make some of your luck, but also I think luck is extremely important. I'm very fortunate to have a career in literary translation, but it's not just through my own “God given talent” that I've got here. There’s the standard class stuff too, of course. I came to university to study languages. I could have done something useful…
My own pragmatic sense has remained: that this is a job that I love doing, but I do see it as a job. If it stopped being sustainable for me to make my living this way, then I would gracefully, or possibly angrily, make my exit and I would go do something else. This is how I pay the bills. I really like it. But I could also occasionally doodle the margins for free while having a different job if necessary.
Kate McNamara
You say there that your route was quite fluid, but it's still a little bit intimidating because you've done a Masters degree and a PhD to reach where you are.
Ian Giles
Well, I think the Masters for me was your classic: Well, what do I do, having finished a first degree, just hang around and do another one. And it was a really good degree, but actually what it did, in my case, was that it introduced me to thinking about whether I could do academic work to a higher standard than sort of half-assing my way through my undergraduate degree. And it led me to realise that research could be kind of fun. Spoiler alert, obviously, research is mostly rubbish and not fun at all. But when you're in the really exciting highs where you know it's going great, you've just figured something out… then it's amazing. The rest is not to be recommended.
I'd say the PhD was interesting because what I was working on meant that I came into a reasonable degree of contact with the world of real people, publishing other translators. When I then came to cross paths with people like that later on in my professional life, I was a safe figure because we already knew each other. That can sound very chummy, but it says more about human nature. People often ask how you cold pitch publishers. The answer is available to you on a dozen blogs and you can have a go. But really the answer is: if someone cold pitches you, you go, No, I don't want that. I don't know you. So there's a huge benefit to having done this other work adjacently. It meant that I met some of these people and could talk the talk and walk the walk.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Before I worked at Tills, I worked at Waterstones, and one of the things that I felt I was letting go of when leaving there was the ability to make connections with publishers because it was so readily available. The value of those connections...
Ian Giles
Yeah, it’s an industry in which people move around. Bookselling is a good example: people might move on from bookselling to other book-related things, or they might move from other parts of publishing and books into bookselling. I worked in several bookshops in my youth, including a year spent at Blackwells here in Edinburgh and there are still several people that I can bump into on the Edinburgh book scene that I first met there. It’s about getting to know people.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
So the most recent work that you have translated is Andrev Walden’s Bloody Awful in Different Ways. How did you come to translate this work? And is this representative of how you normally get commissioned to do translations?
Ian Giles
Well, there was nothing strange about this process, as far as I'm concerned, but it was probably the sort of trajectory that people won't necessarily think of. In July and August of 2023, I had a few emails exchanged with the foreign rights agent of Andrev’s publisher in Sweden who said we've got this book that's just out and being celebrated in the press, so we'll need a sample translation because we think there’s going to be considerable interest from foreign buyers. A sample translation is something where, typically, a literary agent or foreign rights agent will commission a translation of part of the original work into English with a view to then publishing it. And if you are trying to hawk the foreign rights around the world, you do it in English because it has obviously become the lingua franca of publishing. If you want to sell to Japan, the Japanese acquiring editor does not read Swedish, but odds are they can read English. Sample translations have been pretty common in Scandinavia as a whole for the last 20 years or so. So doing a sample translation is not unusual for me. I have done dozens.
For this book, the first sample I was asked to do was part one, and we had a bit of an exchange about how we need to land the language right in this book. The Swedish is kind of quirky, so I went away and… I was gonna say I cracked on with the job. I suspect I prevaricated and I was doing something else. But eventually I got around to cracking on with the job. I was sent some of these press quotes that were extremely favourable which makes you realise that this book is working for critics and for readers. And at this point, I had a follow up from the agent saying it’d be super good if that sample was ready now; we’ve got a lot of interest. It was put on the shortlist for the August prize, which is one of Sweden's pre-eminent literary awards, think the Booker or something like that. So now I can see that critics and readers are enjoying it. The jury has probably enjoyed it. And I thought It's fun. It's quirky. I’m not saying I don't like it, but it was introduced to me not as a passion project but through an existing business relationship. I was a little bit blasé. The hint that maybe there was a bit more to this book, other than the really big hints that I've just told you, was when the agent said we think it would be good if we had the second dad in part two as well. Could you do that? [Bloody Awful in Different Ways is divided into 7 sections, each focusing on a different dad. ‘The second dad’ refers to the second part of the novel.] And the dead giveaway was when I was told there's tonnes of interest, this is going well, and actually, we'd like part three too, so that we can show that to people as well. Without spoiling it for anybody, part three is, not when things turn dark, but it is one of the instances in which the author describes a sequence of events happening to the protagonist and those around him that is really quite shocking. I don't think it's spoiling it to say that the book is very often light in tone, and the flip of a switch into that scene really made me see why this book was working so well.
By the turn of 2023 into 2024, I had worked my way through three dads, and the three dads were out in the wild with literary professionals who were trying to get it under the noses of acquiring editors. Happily, it found a home here in the UK with Fig Tree [an imprint of Penguin Random House] and the very wonderful Ella Harold. I've never asked Ella how much she paid, but clearly she thought it was good enough that she pre-empted it rather than hanging around to wait for an auction, which is exciting. But more exciting – she had liked my translation with the first three dads, so she wanted me to do the rest of them and turn it into the whole book.
Is that in the normal way that work would come about? It's not the first time that I've done a sample that has led to me being commissioned to do more later. But as I said, I've also worked on dozens of samples over the years. Many of them don't sell into English, or they don't sell at all to anywhere, sadly. And very occasionally – it has not happened to me, but it's not completely out of the blue – a meaty sample like that will have been the basis for the acquisition, and a publisher will go, Yeah, but we want to work with someone else. Which is obviously a bummer if you've been invested from the start. But when you take on the task of translating a sample in that initial context, do I hope for great things? Yes. But also it's a job now. And I've taken a lot of pleasure in doing samples. I remember doing a sample years ago where the original work in a Scandinavian language was really quite poor – I shan’t reveal which one or who wrote it – but I remember how pleased the agent was when they said to me, like, we sold it to Germany because of your sample. And, you know, it's not word-washing, but there is a certain skill to giving – not for Britain or America, but giving anybody else who works on the trade – this idea of what they’ll acquire, a kind of a vignette of what they’ll get. Then they’ll then commission a translator to French or Japanese who will do something with the original. It's only subtle differences between how I would work in that context and how I would work for a publisher. But one of them, the easy one, is that I don't have the benefit of a hands-on UK publishing editor on a sample; it’s on me to land it. If I knew it was getting published, I’d have both a covering note with three pages of bullet points of problems or things to think about. And then me and the editor would have a fairly lengthy back and forth. Whereas you just don't have that in the sample stage so it's all on me. And also the person who is reading the English sample for work isn't necessarily going to be impressed by all the subtle nuances that you’d put in for a British reader who reads 25 novels a year. So you're working for a totally different audience.
Anyway, once Bloody Awful was acquired, and was going to be published for real – yay! It’s still exciting when it happens – then there was time to go back. I didn't go with a red pen through the first three dads, but I was like, okay, in light of this, let's have another look and see what I think. So, how did the book come about? Sheer raw capitalism and market power. The business case is obvious, isn't it, because it sold 170,000 copies in its year of release in Sweden. This is a land of 10 million people, which means it's an easy argument to make with your publisher.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Yes, both my pairs of parents in Sweden have read it independently of each other. And for Christmas, they gave it to me. So it was clearly something that caught people’s attention back home.
Ian Giles
I'm dead curious to know what you both think of the book because I find when I work on translations, my approach psychologically is mostly one of grumpy fury that the universe has made me have to do my homework and eat my vegetables, and it's all rubbish, and I hate it. It's only after I'm done, and preferably after I’ve been paid, at that point I get a little bit of distance, and I begin to feel more honestly what I thought about the book, and how it was written. With this book, actually, translating it was a relatively pleasant and enjoyable experience at the time, which is quite unusual for me. And pretty quickly, after I was done, I was like, I quite like it, it's kind of fun. But I wonder what speaks to different readers – and you'll have had very different experiences – because I think it's a really cool piece of autofiction, sort-of-autofiction. He plays inside those genre conventions quite cleverly and neatly. But also this book is an amazing nostalgia trip. I think for a lot of Swedes reading it, they're not going, Oh, it's very earnest and worthy; I think a lot of people are thinking Ha! The 80s! I gave it to my mother to read, and she said that all the secondary and tertiary characters? She has met them. This protagonist's life is very remarkable, but many of the people around him are either very ordinary or they're funny, weird, crooked, and from all walks of life. And my mum felt like she had met all of these characters. She knows them. But for a reader who doesn't have the Swedish cultural background I think there should still be that appeal: it's funny, the protagonist is having this weird life that's being described in quite taut terms.
Kate McNamara
When you said that it’s a nostalgia trip, my instinct was that you were talking not about it being set in Sweden in the 1980s, but about how it portrays the perspective of a child. This book is so good at presenting the strangeness and darkness of the world through the eyes of a child; you follow his interpretations of adult violence and anger, or what the purchase of a new (old) car means, or what it means to have a TV in the house, or how this boy interprets all his new and weird living situations with unknown men tripping into his life as the next ‘dad’.
Ian Giles
Yes, there's a great universality to the writing, and I think—I hope—that that is something that's going to appeal to English readers. I think it's something it's very easy to get on board with.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
I think the book is on par with someone like Jonas Gardell, whom I love a lot. When I was reading Walden it was very reminiscent of Gardell’s work in terms of the very peculiar characters and focalisation in the prose, as well as that aspect of childhood naivety. The impact of reading Walden as an adult, getting the child’s perspective and its playfulness—like the aliases he uses for people—I feel arises in having the adult knowledge and perspective of the events he’s describing, like, Oh, this is what this actually means, this is what is actually happening in this given moment. It’s very interesting to have that happen simultaneously. It’s impactful.
Ian Giles
Yes, I like that. It's one of the challenges of finding the right tone when you have this protagonist who's normally telling us about what's happening right now in that Swedish present tense, except it's a retrospective being told by this middle-aged, quite knowing man who occasionally intervenes in the narrative. I think it's a fun technique, but you also have to somehow try and find these two different voices that should conspicuously still belong to the same person.
The biggest issue here – and I talked about it quite a bit with my editor regarding very specific words – was the question of whether kids use words like that? You probably will have noticed at least twice in the book, the word ‘dramaturgy’ appears, and my editor’s hackles were up about this because it’s quite a big and unusual word for a kid. But I said Yeah, but the Swedish says ‘dramaturgi’. Maybe it’s a notch more common to use that term in Swedish than it is in English, but it’s not a normal word; there aren’t many conversations in which you would slide that in. So it’s like: number one, if he’s put it there, he’s probably done it on purpose. But I also thought that we don’t need to think about whether the kid would use it, because this is a very clear use of that word and where we are right now [in the book], this is commentary from the author, not the protagonist.
There were other examples like that where you kind of go, Huh, grown up? Weird on purpose? Or weird by fluke? The protagonist, for instance, is very obsessed with what we’d call ‘the haves and the have nots’. In many respects, as a child, he's a have not, and he's surrounded by many haves, and he often refers to these fellow travellers in life as ‘children with attributes’. And ‘attributes’ was another loaded term. We spent a long time wondering what else could work in its place.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Is the word in the Swedish ‘egenskaper’?
Ian Giles
Yes, which is a little smoother and it's a little more normal. But I wanted the translation to be one word, and I felt like so many of the workarounds were basically heading down the realm of ‘stealth translation’, where sometimes you can get away with explaining a term in a sentence without the reader noticing. But no, I couldn't do that here. And this is not a footnote book. So I thought that it has to be a one word solution. So I checked how the dictionary says this, and actually, I think it nails the one word solution we're looking for. Most kids don't spend their lives categorising their peers by whether or not they have ‘egenskaper’ and they certainly don't use the word ‘egenskaper’ if they do. And so I felt like ‘attributes’ signals an authorial choice. Yes reader, it is a bit peculiar.
He’s obviously a writer who likes his categories, isn't he, because he's got this gently unacknowledged obsession with mushrooms and everything is a mushroom colour. That was a challenge in a different sense in that Sweden has a fine tradition of mushrooms and often has had the decency to give colloquial names to mushrooms that are kind of snappy. And the names aren't always quite as satisfying in English. During the edit, both my editor and the copy editor flagged word choices as questionable and my response was It's a mushroom, it’s a mushroom.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
I was going through the book this morning, and I found in Swedish the term ‘fingersvampsgul’. And I wondered how this would be translated. Directly translated into English it’d be ‘finger mushroom yellow’.
Ian Giles
I wonder how I did translate it… [looks through the book and then quotes] ‘It's clavaria yellow, with planes of rust around the wheel arches shaped a lot like a fish.’
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
This is something I have just experienced with my degree. I write something, then when I look back at it I'm like, Oh, what an interesting word choice. Or have I written this? Do you have that experience sometimes where you look back and you’re surprised by what you have written?
Ian Giles
Yes absolutely I've had the same experience with my own writing. When I look at the translations that I’ve published, I'm occasionally taken by surprise by some of the stuff in the mid-back list that I did them at all, not just what the contents are. I remember very little, and that's partly my work style. Any small complications are for me to fix, but sometimes it’s more of a big headline, oh shit, we're gonna have to fix this and this is a team effort moment. And when somebody three months after I did the translation asks what I think about an issue? Yeah, I don't remember. So I try to keep notes of anything that's problematic so that I can know what I think. Once a translation is in book form and about to hit the bookshelves, I very rarely will reread my own work unless there's a sequel that I need to work on. I do listen to some of the books I've translated as audio books. But that's partly because it's a reading and I like to see how somebody else has taken it.
Kate McNamara
Did you have any relationship with Andrev Walden whilst translating Bloody Awful?
Ian Giles
It was limited. When translating books, I tend to either drop a note to introduce myself to authors, or ask for something like that to be passed along the chain. But I'm not particularly pushy beyond that. I've translated a couple of dead authors, so I’m not going to be talking to them. I translate Camilla Läckberg, and Camilla has been translated into about 45 languages. She's not in touch with her translators. If you have a question, you can put it to her agent.
I've worked with some authors who are very hands on and want to be involved and want to be consulted. There’s the odd control freak out there, but mostly it's, I think, wanting to make sure your work is looking its best in the big, wide world. And also it's really exciting to be translated, because it's very unusual for anybody else to spend a proper degree of time with your work and to think about your work like you have. And so some people are more hands on: they want some dialogue, they want questions. And I’m a bit of a people pleaser, so if someone is giving that kind of vibe, then I'll make sure that there are some questions for them. But my preferred approach, most of the time, is to save up a shopping list of problems and questions. I'm not someone who does loads of drafts. I like there to be a draft that’s a readable copy. I want to be close enough so that in round two, we're fixing and finishing. I keep my questions to myself for a while because sometimes the answer comes to you 25 pages later, or when you're standing in the shower in a week's time, or when you describe it to anybody else and they're like oh well, just do this. So you don't want to bother the author too much. Then my preference at the end is to whittle that list down so there are just a few things left where you need the author's involvement. I will tend to send a nice document with a table in it with the passage of text and a page reference to the original, a pencilled working solution in the English, an explanation of what the problem is, and most authors then tend to take that pretty well and come back and be like, Yeah, I love option B.
In Andrev's case, we were not in contact while I worked on dads one through three. That was in the hands of his agents. That's not unusual; I wouldn’t typically expect to be involved with an author at the sample stage, unless there was good cause to be. When preparing the manuscript for Fig Tree, we agreed to take a similar approach that I would normally do – we would bring anything left over to the author at the end, which he had made known that he felt comfortable with. I once worked with a different author who effectively felt that the book was finished and the author was done with it, and basically doesn't really want to hear any more about it. Nothing so strong was ever said in this case. The author still likes his book and is proud of it, but also I don't get the impression that he's a micromanager of his translators. We just had a handful of things that we needed his input on at the end. So, we've been in touch, but I'd say we were at the untalky end of the scale.
I think some of my colleagues would find that more unsettling than I do. I think some translators like to have ongoing dialogue and close relationships. In my case, I'm happy to be in touch – it can be very rewarding – so I'm happy to do it if it works for the author. But I don't think Andrev needs that kind of relationship with his translators. And I think to some extent, this is his novel, his debut novel. It is fantastic. And my job is to make him look as shit hot in English as he has done in Swedish. And – this sounds sort of dumb – but I feel like I shouldn't confer too much. There's almost a sense that if I fail, it should be my fault.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
I have a follow up question here. His lack of involvement is interesting because it's a semi-autobiographical work. In the preface he says that this writing is fictional in the way that all told memories are fictional. Maybe because it is a fictionalised account, he feels like the translated version also doesn’t need to be true to word in every situation.
Ian Giles
Yeah, I think that's a very nice reading of it. I hadn't thought of it like that, but I think you are right. What did I say before? It’s sort-of-autofiction. It's not that I'm disbelieving, or think that this stuff didn't happen, but I take his cover note quite seriously. It's a novel.
Our translators’ group, SELTA (Swedish-English Literary Translators’ Association) had a workshop six years ago where one of our authors had written a novel in the style of autofiction that was about child from Columbia, adopted by middle class parents in Stockholm. It told the story from the perspective of the adoptee in Sweden after he had been forsaken by his parents. And this author said you should never tell people that it's just a novel. He was due to be on a big magazine show on one of the terrestrial TV stations but it got cancelled after the researcher had rung up and had been like, so like, you don't talk to your parents. And he replied that his parents are great, this is a novel, this is not true. And so they weren't interested. I like Andrev’s cover note and the way it says this might be true, or it might not be. The details could be made up, or they might not.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
I like that aspect. He gains my trust by acknowledging this in a way.
Ian Giles
I like your reading that this gives us licence to be a little bit apart. And then there's the self-conscious element. I am not going to write a novel of this quality on my own. It's my pleasure to translate one. But I'm very conscious that both from the novel itself and from coverage around the book and of Andrev that he had a very unconventional childhood, regardless of what’s true or not. He had a very unconventional childhood; I did not. And that's not to say that you can only talk to the author if you're samesies, but sometimes there’s a feeling of what would I have to say.
As I said too, if I fail, I fail. But hopefully I've not failed. And in that case, we'll have more to talk about, because we've succeeded together.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Well, then my next question continues on this aspect of your relationship with authors as a translator. You translate from Swedish and other Scandinavian languages, and people in those countries are all, generally, quite fluent in English. Do you find that that really impacts the relationship that you are able to have with an author? Because it’s likely that they can read and understand your translation of their work.
Ian Giles
Yes, you're right. It'd be extremely unusual to work with an author from Scandinavia who couldn’t either potentially fix a problem for you, or at the very least offer an opinion on your translation problems. And that's presumably not true for say, most Swedish authors being translated into Italian, or Farsi. I think it leads to a different relationship. I was talking to a translator a few months ago who was saying their experience had been that they ended up being the designated figure representing the author in their target language. And when the author came for a Book Festival, this translator had to fight the author's corner and chaperone them around. Which comes with ups and downs, doesn't it? That's a lot of pressure. It's kind of stressful; but it's also kind of fun. Whereas that would never really happen in the same way here in the UK and in the English context.
I'm occasionally jealous of colleagues who translate into other languages. Any proper screw-ups are very unlikely to find their way back to the author. But you are definitely on show in English. There is a wide readership.
Kate McNamara
As you were translating this novel from Swedish into English, was there anything in particular that you felt you had to sacrifice of the original? And on the other hand, is there anything that you think the book gained in its translation?
Ian Giles
Well, I had an email from the translator to Italian, Laura Cangemi, a few months ago with her half dozen sticking points. She wanted to know what I did, and what the German translator had done. And the general answer to the question: do you have to sacrifice anything, or does anything get lost? Yeah, tonnes! Of course it does. If you want the original, go read it in Swedish. Basically, it's always going to be like that, you know? But specifically for this book, the obvious thing that just got lost was the song lyrics. They're all gone because we're not paying Poison for clearance to quote from ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’. We looked into it, and we're not doing it. So, there's some obvious stuff that just goes. Laura asked what I had done about this tertiary character – Selma Schlamp. I did not have a good solution. What about the kid who's called ‘Musen’ in his friendship circle? What have you done about that? In English, we just called him ‘Mouse.’ But then we introduced some extra text making it somehow seem euphemistic, text that hadn't quite been there in the original. Because it's supposed to be a giggle-titter, children think it's a rude word.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
To explain, ‘mus’ is a slangy kids’ word for vagina.
Ian Giles
Yeah. It’s maybe at ‘fanny’ levels, tops. But the kids in the novel would know that, and that's why they titter. The character, Mouse, had brought in a computer too, so the pun in the Swedish is that he is known as Mouse, and he brought in a computer to share it to the class, and he describes the mouse as the fanny instead. It's funny in the way memories are funny. It’s true to life. In English though, how would you get a nickname like that and combine it in a joke with him bringing in the computer to show to the class..? But we can work with it and basically, rather than playing into the straight euphemism, we can lampoon him a little more for having been really silly while he was waving this mouse around. Because it would have been remarkable at the time anyway. But you lose that kind of nuance.
And then there’s the ‘sportlov utan sport’, which in Sweden is the February half term which is called the ‘sports holiday’ or ‘sports half term’ because you go off to do winter sports or whatever, but it's a clear denoter of class.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
The pun made in the book is that it’s a sports half term, but you're not going skiing, you’re not doing sports due to lack of funds.
Ian Giles
And my Italian colleague had all sorts of workarounds. In English I think we called it ‘the sports holiday without sport’, or something like that. I think we were totally upfront about expecting the reader to do the lifting and get it.
And then there was another example: the ‘stockmästare’; there’s a game where you have to balance on these poles in the playground but in Swedish, the champion is the ‘stockmästare’, or the pole master. And my Italian colleague pointed out that that would have been a type of warden or prison officer in old gaols. So she asked how did you get this allusion into the English? Well… we didn’t.
Then there was this wonderful one that posed a problem. There's this scene where the protagonist wants to stroke the hair of the girl on the bus sitting in front of him, and when he does it, it's a very visceral experience for him; he feels like her hair is electric. And he says in Swedish that her hair is ‘strömförande’ – it is ‘bearing current’. Now everybody in the book is known by a nickname, not by their real name, so my Italian colleague wanted to know what to do with her name. There was this connection between ‘strömförande’ and that the girl comes from Strömsfors [a town in southern Sweden]. Yeah… I missed that! It’s not that we've not done it, we just didn’t notice. But I had a chat with one of Andrev’s agents, and pointed this one out. And he said, that's totally dead on purpose. If it's in the book, it's there on purpose. But there's no way you could translate it.
I think the challenge with the book in general is that it's quite short. I mean, that sounds glib, but the book is relatively short by the standards of a novel. The sentences are short, the chapters are short. He doesn't say a lot of words. It's very irritating, because English always gains 10% on Swedish, whatever you're doing. I mean, I tend to go on a bit, maybe you're noticing that! But it challenged me on concision levels that I wouldn't normally feel. I had to communicate all these meaningful or witty things, and in as few words as possible. So sometimes nuances like that just can't be done concisely in English and they have to go. I'm sure there were other examples like that that I've missed. I'm sure there are examples where I caught it, where colleagues struggle. In other languages they will have gone can't do it, or they've missed it. And I make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. I make fewer mistakes than I used to, and I'm way, way better at knowing how to find mistakes I might have made in my own work when revising, but that's part of the fun. It's my reading, ultimately.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Well, on that note of choices for translation. Obviously, Jävla karlar, the Swedish title, is quite peculiar. And in an early press release from Fig Tree, they call the book Bloody Men, or Fucking Men.
Ian Giles
Yeah, it was originally being offered around under the working title of Bloody Men.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
How did the title change when you took on the English translation?
Ian Giles
I can come clean and say that I was never particularly sold on the idea of Bloody Men as a working title, even at an early stage. The Swedish title – Jävla karlar – is the refrain of women saying men are useless. There's a conversational tone to that that I find much more credible in Swedish in that context than in the English translation. Which isn't to say that women wouldn't talk about men being terrible and wouldn't have a refrain. But I don't think that this is it, however you try to translate it. My publisher made it clear that her marketing department had said that Bloody Men wouldn’t work for them in the UK market.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Are there issues with profanity in titles within British publishing?
Ian Giles
Not necessarily. I think to call it Fucking Men would have caused issues. That means you might not be going on prominent display in a bookshop. ‘Bloody’ is not a problem, clearly, given the title we've ended up with. But it's not for me to question how publishing and marketing works. They do their job, and I don't ask their advice about my translation. But they drew a hard line in the sand and said We're not going to use that. So let's think about the new title. I had a running list with my editor after the book was done but we hadn't made a decision. Just some of the suggestions we had were: The Seven Fathers; My Seven Fathers – that's what the Dutch used, for what it's worth – Seven Fathers; Seven Men I Called My Father; Men I called My Father; The Men I Called Dad; Names for Fathers. Bloody Awful in Different Ways was also on that longlist. We probably talked about another dozen by email. I think Andrev was very attached to the original Swedish, and he particularly likes that in Sweden and in Norway, it has come out with the same title. The Germans are about to publish it with the title Scheißkerle, which actually is a really neat way of getting it done. But the Dutch went for something completely different. I have no doubt that in other languages, they’ll go other ways. My editor and I both felt that a more direct translation wouldn't really work, and we recently had the backing of the marketing too, so we thought let's try and unlock what a good title is. I think Bloody Awful in Different Ways ended up being a compromise that we reached in negotiation. Some were struck out by Andrev as a hard no; certain things were struck out on our side, with the thought that that's not the novel you think it is here. I'm gently flattered because it's a quotation from the translation: the narrator-Andrev says of men that he had been gradually discovering that they could be bloody awful in different ways. It's very British. This doesn't yet have a publisher in the United States; if it gets one, the title will change again. It is probably not sellable in the States with this title, but it is translated to British, so maybe a lot might change if it's published in the US.
Kate McNamara
How much do books change for an American market? And do you get asked to do it?
Ian Giles
In the rights world, there's nothing to stop a US publisher from deciding to take rights and to commission someone else to do it. In this particular case, Fig Tree have got World English rights, so anybody who wants to publish in English elsewhere will be licensing off them. It's very, very, very unusual that you'd have competing editions by different translators. But it has happened. In terms of my involvement, it varies. Very occasionally, stuff will just go out unchanged. And you obviously find the same here with American manuscripts: they get published unchanged. Sometimes it's a gentle copy edit, lightly updated, in which case it barely involves me. Sometimes there's a heavier edit, and I'll be involved in a bit of back and forth. I've had a few experiences working stuff into British where I've been engaged with the American editorial process later, but it's all lighter because it has already had an edit. So it’s just a tweak here and there. Then two or three things I've translated for the United States have come into Britain unchanged at all even when I essentially have a British manuscript that has been turned into the American.
The title… I wouldn't get too hung up on it. That's not me being defensive. I think it's just a title.
Kate McNamara
Other translators that we’ve spoken to have said that they didn't even have a say in what the title of the work was. It seems quite mindblowing to me that you can spend all that time translating the book, and then for the translation of the title, you’re not even consulted.
Ian Giles
No, it’s very rare! In this instance, I didn't have a casting note, but I was consulted. But yeah, it's very rare. But titling books is hard, it's not really a skill that I'm particularly good at. And I think there is a wider issue. If we are to make the argument that as translators, we're experts at what we do, we have to be pretty cautious about belittling the skills of other experts in the book-o-sphere. So if there's somebody at a publisher who says that’s a terrible title from a marketing point of view, then it's for them to say. I've had the pleasure of doing two, three books for MacLehose Press where the titles have borne no relationship with the original Swedish whatsoever. And they've all been great titles, and they’ve been related to what happens in the book. And in that sense, there's a translation element as well, isn't there? Not that it should say the same thing on the cover, but the title should attract the same kinds of readers to spend their money, to buy the book, to dig into it. And I think that this title will. It has been interesting to see people's takes on it. I think on Swedish Instagram, there's been a little bit of talk like not so sure about the title, where I'd say that the response from here, as the publisher has been dishing out the galley proofs, is that it’s an amazing title, like, so funny! Yeah, it's just a title.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
It's definitely different when you see the English title after knowing the original. But I think it is a good title. I was discussing with Kate the nuance of the word ‘karlar’, which would be translated as ‘men’, but the Swedish has very different connotations.
Ian Giles
Yeah, we felt like ‘karl’ does something different in Swedish to what anything you might pick in English would do. It's class-based as well in the Swedish. It’s a bit like ‘bloke’, but it does it differently. And here I suppose that the backing I had was that my editor is a British native speaker and speaks German, but is a very, very passionate, enthusiastic learner of Swedish. I should commend her at this stage for not having been tempted to heavily dive into the original and ask Why have you done this throughout the translation. But here I could say to her What should we do with the word ‘karl’? And she agreed that we couldn’t translate it directly like that.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
The first time I saw the English proof, I didn't realise it was the same book. But I wouldn't know how to translate this either, not in a way that does justice to the nuance of the original.
Speaking of the difficulty to translate, I’d like to ask you next about the specificities of translating from Swedish. I think, having lived in the UK for a while now, reading Swedish literature is so joyous to me because of the language. When you’re translating, I suppose Swedish grammar and sentence structure can often be quite similar to English. However, the use of eye dialect or older Swedish can produce a more colloquial feeling. Whenever I read works in Swedish like Walden’s, or someone like Jonas Gardell, I automatically try to figure out what the translations are going to be in English. How do you find the work of translating dialects or older Swedish? Do you retain the original Swedish grammar and have an unusual sentence structure? Or do you try to put it into proper English while keeping the same vibe and sentiment?
Ian Giles
Mmm. A translation philosophy question! It's more the latter than the former in your question, but what I react to is the idea of ‘proper’ English grammar. I'm useless at grammar, so I expect a lot of my grammar is not proper in the slightest. But also, from a translation point of view, I think there are certain types of works in which maybe it isn't inappropriate to retain the Swedishness, to add an oddity factor for a reader. There are texts for which that's the right approach, and there are translators who can do that with style. I would be not opposed to doing it myself, but I would be cautious, partly because of how I've come to Swedish from the very start of my life, which means that I'm very conscious that the way it sits in my head is a little different to the way it might sit in the head of a lot of translators. When you're working with translation, you suffer from the eternal issue wondering Is this normal in this language? Where have I got this idea and this structure from? So to consciously and deliberately retain that original sense, to deliver an oddity dose in the translation, I think requires a degree of skill, and perhaps a slightly different How did you get to be in this position as the translator trajectory than I have had. So, yes, you talk about the feeling and the impression of the original; I always feel that for a book in translation, you are trying to turn out the novel you already have. You already have the answer. You're trying to turn that out in English. How the author would have done it in English if they'd had their equivalent authorial training in, say, the UK instead. Which means that it's not word-for-word is it? The important questions are: What is the impression? What is the effect?
In Translation Studies theory, they like to talk about dynamic equivalence. And I'm hesitant because maybe some scholar will read this and shoot me down, and say that's old hat. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it stems from the idea, originally in Bible translation, that when you translate the Bible, what you want is cause and effect. Which is that you should read the Bible, it should ideally have some sort of connection to the original, and it should cause you to convert to following God and Jesus Christ. And that if it's not having that impact, then maybe you haven't done a great translation. I think similarly for something like this… read it in the Swedish! Read it in the Swedish if you want to know what it's like in the Swedish. But we can hold it up to the mirror and see what it might be like in English. It's retaining that feeling of impression. I always struggle with things like speech: speech-like prose and dialogue can be tricky because what's normal or not normal in Sweden is different to what's normal or not normal here. Registers work very differently. For example, working with any historical fiction in Sweden: until the mid-1960s it was very common in Swedish to use the formal and informal ‘you’, but now it's very, very unusual to use that. Well, no, the formal one is having a bit of a resurgence because people think it's polite, but it's actually the height of passive aggressiveness to use it. In the mid-1960s, the Swedish civil service effectively moved from we will use the formal you to we will use the informal you in all contexts. And society followed. Before that, Swedish was quite a formal language. Like in many Germanic languages, you would often refer to people by title. You might refer to them by their jobs. If someone was an engineer, you would call them Engineer Smith, even to their face. If you work with historic writing, there are all these markers in Swedish that put you into, say, the 1940s. And often you just have to ditch all of that. You've got some workarounds: so all the women at the office become ‘Miss’ and need to be belittled a bit more to get the language nuances across. And all the men have to be called ‘Sir’. So I would like to think that you get the same effect at the end, but it's completely different linguistically. It's tricks of the trade.
Sometimes it's a sleight of hand where you think I can't give you this, so I'll give you that instead. I always like the idea of translation by substitution: I mostly only apply this for jokes and puns, that if something is just not going to come across as funny, or you can't get a pun to do what you need it to in translation, I'm quite open to the possibility of introducing a pun somewhere else to even scales. Not always, it's thin ice sometimes. You can't add your own take that makes the death scene hilariously funny. But if there's a side-splitting part, you might have a look around in the chapter for whether there's somewhere else that could do something else instead. Because how would they have written it in English?
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Was there a particular part of translating this book that stands out to you as something that you struggled with?
Ian Giles
On a very practical level, I found some of the stuff from the past was just difficult to work out what it was: how does it work, what was that like? There was a scene with a mechanic trying to start the car, and there's a conversation about starting the car and the car needs more choke. I've not lived in the past with cars that need more choke. It took a lot of digging and talking to people to work out what a realistic conversation about a car that won’t start would have sounded like. Something I always find difficult with Scandinavian languages is reader expectation about landscape and geography. The easy example: I worked on this Norwegian crime fiction novel last year which is set in the city of Bodø. And you have to remind yourself constantly how hilly Norway is because the protagonist gets out of his car and he walks 200 metres off the road to where the police tape is and he arrives pouring with sweat and out breath. I have to keep reminding myself that, oh, right, it's just height, it's not flat. And I find that there's the same sort of expectations of what Sweden looks like in the area in question. Like the ‘köpingar’ [boroughs], around Eastern Sweden, south of Stockholm, which I have got a very clear picture in my head of what it looks like, and most Swedes would have a grasp of it. But it's not familiar in the English. So your geographical features can be toughies to translate.
In Bloody Awful, there's this rock in the park during a lot of the protagonist’s phases of life. And while translating, I looked at pictures on the internet, I scanned social media, looking at pictures, and still wasn’t sure how to translate it. Like a big, cliffy sort of rock. Whatever was used in the Swedish was just a simple one word solution [‘bumling’]. But I was like, I wonder what the hell this is. I talked to lots of people about it!
Unfortunately, with translation, very rarely is the problem that you don't understand all of it. The great thing is that most of it's really easy. It's all the hard stuff in the 1% that makes it difficult. Not to unromanticise it, but even with a wonderful book like this, a lot of the work is just the grind of getting through it. But the bits that are difficult, are really difficult. And to Andrev’s credit, the bits that were difficult in his book were really bloody difficult, and took quite a lot of figuring out, which was exciting for me. I got to stretch my legs in a slightly different way, because often, if I'm working on more commercial fiction or on crime fiction, then the real focus will be on the plot and plot holes in particular and making sure that this translation holds up.
Kate McNamara
You once said in an interview that you prefer to translate fiction that is gripping and that encourages you to turn the page. How do you select which translations to work on? And/or could you talk to us a little bit about the politics of translation, both in how you perceive the state of translation currently and how you see your role as a translator more widely?
Ian Giles
Well to answer the first half: how do I select which translations to work on? I operate a fairly strict cab rank principle, which is that the first job that turns up where the pay surpasses my floor in terms of what I'm willing to accept for money is a job that I will take. I've been very, very lucky in the last five, six years that work continues to find me and arrive. So how do I pick it? It finds me and I do it. And consequently, I've had the pleasure of appearing a couple of years ago in a panel to talk about working on (I’m sure we had a better title), but it was on ‘books we don't like’. It has been quite a great honour to work on quite a lot of books that I don't love, precisely because this is my living and so if it comes along and I feel I'm able to do it, then I do. Very occasionally, I have attempted to dangle things that I like personally in front of people. I think pitching is a very difficult, bordering on thankless task, and I'm sort of conscious that, with one exception, no one has ever done anything in publishing in acquisition terms, because I told them to. And the only time that I did was when I asked a nonfiction editor if they were aware that our author in common had just published a new book in Sweden, and sent over the Instagram post. So the response was, No, I'm going to get onto them to acquire that. Which is not really a pitch.
For other translators working in Swedish, there are people who are much more involved in pitching or even matchmaking the right author with the right work, and the right publisher. My colleague, Kathy Saranpa, has just had her translation of Gun-Britt Sundström’s Engagement published by Penguin Classics. It came out in 1976 in Sweden, it's just come out now here in the UK, and that was a passion project for her. She read it 40 years ago, and she pitched it successfully. It can be done. In other language combinations, it's much more common but there is this really mature ecosystem in Swedish publishing with rights departments and agents and ultimately, however tasteful or distasteful you find that apparatus, it's really, really effective. Swedish is punching well above its weight on the global literary scene. They are doing a good job of selling the stuff. Is it the right stuff? Yeah, it must be, if people are buying it.
As for the politics of translation, I suspect that when you've talked to some of my colleagues, they have said things that are much more impressive and earnest and grand and meaningful. I think that I can offer my policy view, which is that I think human translators are the best version of translation you're going to get. Most people want to engage with people through their narratives, and that one of the pleasures of reading human translated work is just that: that you're engaging with someone's reading. In terms of the book-sphere, and the translator-sphere, my guiding principle is that I think diversity is important. More translated books in English is a good thing to have, from more source languages. More translators than very few translators is a good thing, albeit, I would then caution that experienced translators is a good thing. I also think bibliodiversity applies to things like genre and I'd say, as an unapologetic translator of commercial fiction, there's a demand for that. People read it, people relax by reading commercial fiction. People enjoy reading nonfiction. Children enjoy reading books written for children. I'm unlikely to be translating an International Booker winner, partly because I've ended up quite typecast as a professional, and I have colleagues who are much better placed to work on really highly stylised literary fiction. But on the other hand, I think there is as much skill or difficulty involved in a crime fiction novel or in nonfiction. I saw a panel with David McKay and David Colmer, who translate from Dutch, and they co-translated this book, Revolusi, which was on the Baillie Gifford shortlist last year. It was a history of Indonesia of many hundreds of pages. And on the one hand, I thought that sounds furiously difficult, but really cool to work on at the same time. My point being, what is the difference between working on that and working on a very slim, very cool novel by a really cool thirty-four year old author? They're difficult and easy in their own ways. I think my plea would be: take me seriously? [laughter]. I think translating books isn't all about the really cool little novels, just as it's not all the same in Swedish: Stieg Larsson and all the other big crime writers you've heard of. There’s loads of other stuff going on. One of the reasons that Andrev’s book has appealed to me as a reader has been that it does exactly that: it pushes some different buttons at once. It's a novel, it's a proper novel, but it's not hard. I can read hard, proper fiction, but attention spans get shorter with time.
If we think that there's worth in books, in writing them and reading them, there's worth in other bits that go on around that. And translation is an important other bit that goes on around the writing, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. More books done in more ways. It’s a positive.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
I like the bibliodiversity aspect.
Kate McNamara
Yes, but then I have a little voice in the back of my head asking about the wastefulness of the publishing industry. So much paper and ink and money and people's time are all used in publishing to churn out such an excess of books, so many of which are just destined to be pulped. But we quickly shy away from discussing those ideas because of the reverence we have for books. If you’re looking at ways that the world is wasteful, there are so many other things to go after, there’s a sense that we shouldn’t attack the publishing industry: don’t go for the books, of all things! But the publishing industry is so intensely wasteful, so this idea of more books across all genres is also problematic.
Ian Giles
It's difficult, isn't it? We arguably over-publish. But then I agree with the democracy of publishing. I think publishers should be allowed to publish anything they want. That's how it works. And if an author wants to self-publish, then they're in a position to do so. We also can't stop them. But it's a good point, isn't it? I think there are 200,000 books that come out a year in English? It's some big number. There was that great column a couple of years ago in The Guardian by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett who opposed herself to the fetishization of books as objects and artefacts. I'm aware here that maybe I'm on thin ice talking to people from a second hand book shop! [laughter] But she engages with this idea that books as objects are holier than anything, and having them is a kind of proof of your worth, and you can't get rid of them. I operate quite a strict, not quite, one-book-in-one-book-out policy at home. For someone working in the trade, I have a surprisingly low number of books at home. There's one big bookcase, but that's it. If you really think that something's great and you love it, keep it. And if you've given something away and you suddenly regret it, you can always buy another one.
Kate McNamara
Mmm, but there's something about the specific copy that you have read. Often I'll be writing in books or folding pages over and marking them as I read. There’s a history of your engagement with the writing contained in that copy.
Ian Giles
Some of it's a memory thing. I still have my now very sun-faded paperback copy of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, because I like that that’s the copy of it that I first read, and I enjoyed my first reading of it. So it's nice to cling on to. I don’t think I’ve actually read that one again, and I have a much nicer, cleaner copy from when there was some nice special edition released. But plenty of stuff comes and goes. And by being in the trade, I get things from colleagues and friends, or sometimes I’ll buy work by colleagues and friends. It's sort of like a pyramid scheme: the deal is you have to buy some of their works, and they’ll buy yours. Sometimes they'll get read, or sometimes they'll be kept for a while. But if someone comes around, is having a look and thinks that looks good, then take it. Go, and try it. There's nothing like the surprise discovery of a book that you weren't expecting to discover, which is so satisfying when you find it. That's why secondhand bookselling is so good. I only buy my secondhand books from Tills in Edinburgh.
[laughter from all]
Kate McNamara
[Owner of Tills Bookshop] Ha! Thanks Ian. Much appreciated.
We're going to move on to the questions that we tend to ask each translator. Our first one is about soundtracks and music. Is there any music that you feel relates to this book for you, either from the process of translation or from the book itself?
Ian Giles
In terms of the soundtrack of the book, there are quite a few musical references in it. I confess I can't remember what most of them are. ‘The Final Countdown’ is in there, Poison is in there. Some of it is place-setting to draw you into the ‘80s. I've worked on multiple books for different authors, and music has been very important. I like music, and I like that music is an important literary device, but the way that I'm wired means that I don't have to find the music to listen to it to get what the work is talking about. It can be a silent framing device, which sounds ridiculous. But it's like scenery on the stage.
Music more generally: I listen to music a lot while I work. It's not really inspired by what I'm working on, it’s more about what I want to listen to and the mood I'm in. There are two blogs that translator Kari Dickson wrote for the BCLT during her residency there last year, where she was very interested in sound and music and its relationship with translating. And there was a really good workshop that she had at the end of that residency where we talked about this. It made me, as an attendee, think more about how I use music in my professional practice. I pick stuff I want to listen to, that I like. When I find myself more elbows deep translating, the music will often be lyric-less, what my partner would call electronic, plinky plonk type music. Something like The Album Leaf. It works as a sort of metronome for me. I tend to work wearing noise-cancelling headphones to get rid of background noise, and then music is there as a backdrop, and it's a metronome that keeps me working with the pace.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Another question we ask of translators is whether there is a piece of writing that guides you during your translation work, or something that you keep returning to?
Ian Giles
I liked Damion Searls’ keynote that he gave recently at the Bristol Translates Summer School. I thought that was very good. He talked about how his translations are his reading at a certain moment in time of a certain text. Just his reading. There's no right or wrong, they’re his reading. And I thought he made a good argument for that. He has recently released his own book on his philosophy of translation, which is probably way heavier and more impressive. But I thought in passing, verbally, that he made a really good case for understanding that this is my take, and I think that’s quite a healthy way to think about it. I'm a relatively highly-strung, stressed out person. I do try to remember, with this kind of work, no one dies. Publishers, if you're reading, it's not that I always deliver late, but ultimately, it can be very useful to remember that a week late is probably fine. No one dies. We are just publishing books
The other piece of writing that I’d like to name drop is by Theo Hermans, who's a now retired professor of Dutch at UCL and a translation theorist. He had a book in 2007 called The Conference of Tongues, and his first chapter – which is called The End – has always stuck with me. It's a fixture on all the reading lists in Translation Studies departments, but it's an excellent piece of writing that thinks about equivalence. Its first case study is the visit of the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith in upstate New York in the 1820s who led him to the gold tablets on which, in a script unfamiliar to everyone, were all the tenets of Mormonism. And the angel provided Joseph Smith with these seared stones that he wore to produce a translation of said gold tablets, which he did through dictation, fluidly, without mistakes or error. And it was written down in long form. It’s a great piece of academic writing. The first four or five pages of that are always something that I've really, really enjoyed, precisely because it tackles the idea of how Mormonism got off the ground from a translation point of view, and whether that approach to translation is reasonable. But the key point that he makes in this chapter in general is that, if we're aiming for equivalence, you're never going to have an equivalence of status between the original and a translation. In the case of Mormonism and Joseph Smith's translation, people felt that maybe the translation wasn't right. People had gripes in early Mormonism because they were worried about the translation, because the translation was not equivalent to status to the original, even though an angel told him how to translate it, I find it's quite a nice way of thinking about translation; it relieves a bit of the pressure. It’s back to what I’ve said a couple of times today: if you want to read the original, you're going to have to read the original. So put Theo Hermans’ book on the shelf!
Kate McNamara
Will do! And finally, is there a book that has been translated into English that you would recommend for people, or perhaps a book that has not yet been translated into English that you feel should be?
Ian Giles
In terms of things that I have read in translation have stuck with me, I thought two titles from childhood particularly stand out: I am David by Anne Holm, translated from Danish by L.W. Kingsland, and Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner translated from German by Eileen Hall. We only discovered recently that Kästner had been potentially up for the Nobel Prize in the 1940s. That's only once the papers became available 50 years later that we found out that he was a serious consideration.
In adulthood, I'm possibly showing my hand here as a reader, I like An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie, translated from French by James Kirkup, which is a proper old nonfiction book. I really engaged with Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists translated from Dutch by Elizabeth Manton.
And I have a real soft spot for Arnaldur Indriðason’s Tainted Blood, translated from Icelandic by Bernard Scudder. It's not his first novel in that series, but it's the first one that was in English, and it's the one that he won the Golden Dagger for, which led the Crime Writers Association to angrily decide to stop taking foreign submissions in translation to the main prize and to set up the In Translation Dagger instead. Speaking as a shortlistee of that Dagger at some point, I wholeheartedly approve of this new award. But I've always liked the story that this book pissed everybody off, that a foreigner came in and stole our prize. But it's a great, proper stomach ulcer, morbid detective story. It's done really well.
And then what should be translated? Someone should translate Ingrid Carlberg’s Swedish book The Marionettes which traces the history of disinformation and explores the world as political theatre. Very much not a biography of Willi Münzenberg, of the communist publishing world. The whole book is framed around him and his life and his involvement but Ingrid is very insistent that it’s not a biography of him. It's like a selective biography and a world history of disinformation. Another one to translate would be Mats Strandberg’s The Muse which just came out in Sweden. It's like a slice of delicious horror fiction. Oh and an honourable mention for Magnus Montelius’ Eight Days which won best translated thriller in Denmark about six years ago, and I've always liked it in the Swedish. In it, a new prime minister gets appointed in Sweden, and it turns out that they missed the background checks and he had a gap year where he can't really account for eight months of his young manhood, and that he might, in fact, be a Russian agent. There's lots of formulaic stuff, but it's just strung together in a nice way.
On my ‘to read’ pile, I've got Engagement, which I mentioned earlier, by Gun-Britt Sundström, translated from the Swedish by Kathy Saranpa. And On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis, translated from Arabic by Katherine Halls. It’s a newish book from Peirene Press, and it’s written by an Arab writer in London, about an Arab protagonist working in bureaucracy in London.
Sofia Blomqvist Rytters
Amazing! That will fill up our shelves. Thank you so much.
Kate McNamara
Yes, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us, Ian.
Ian Giles
Thank you.
