The Translator’s Voice is a new column from Ian J. Battaglia here at the Chicago Review of Books, dedicated to global literature and the translators who work tirelessly and too often thanklessly to bring these books to the English-reading audience. Subscribe to his newsletter to get notified of new editions as well as other notes on writing, art, and more.
It’s common advice for writers to get specific. Saying “the sofa” is fine: saying “the cracked, tobacco-colored sofa” is better. While this is great on a sentence-level, I find this works less and less the broader scale you go. When a novel has space to breathe, it opens up the space for things to bloom.
You can see this in full effect in Pol Guasch’s debut novel, Napalm in the Heart, translated into English from the original Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem. Napalm may be Guash’s first novel, but he writes with a confident hand. The novel describes the journey undertaken by the unnamed narrator and his capricious lover, Boris, after an eruption of violence upsets their tenuous-yet-comfortable existence into a struggle for survival.
I spoke with Mara Faye Lethem via Zoom about the things you learn while translating, the politics of language, and broadening language.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian J. Battaglia
Napalm in the Heart is Pol Guasch’s debut novel; can you talk about how you got connected with Pol?
Mara Faye Lethem
One thing that I’ve been doing for maybe 12 or 15 years is I write a catalog for the Instituto Ramón Llull, which is the Catalan government branch that promotes Catalan culture abroad. And so I work fairly closely with the literature department. They choose 10 books each year that they want to kind of give an extra push to promoting; they create this small catalog that they distribute at book fairs and send to editors and agents, to put a little more light on certain titles. Napalm was one of those. So that was when I first read it.
I was at the London book fair in 2022 or 2021, and I learned that Faber had bought it. I was actually hired by Faber. You usually work only with one editor [American or European], and then they just give your translation to the other one. Usually, I work with the American one, just because I’m American, I guess. But in this case, I worked with Faber.
They asked me to be part of what we translators sometimes call a beauty parade, which is where they ask a few translators to translate a short sample. And then they compare those samples when they can’t read the original. Sometimes books get bought in English because they’ve read a translation in French or some other language that they [understand], but a lot of Anglophone editors don’t have a lot of languages.
So they like to do beauty parades—and translators like them less; some refuse to do them. But if you’re interested in a book, and that’s the only way to possibly get the job, you do it.
Ian J. Battaglia
So you were selected out of that group then?
Mara Faye Lethem
Yeah.
Ian J. Battaglia
Could you talk about your process for translating novels?
Mara Faye Lethem
When I do my first draft, I try to stay pretty close to the original text; obviously [it’s] not a completely literal translation, but I try not to take too many liberties at that point, because I feel like that’s how the text reveals itself to me: the author’s intentions become clearer as I’m trying to kind of step by step reproduce them in English.
And now I often will ask questions of the author. Usually just by email, but sometimes I’ll get together with them. It depends. Since I live in Barcelona, a lot of my authors live here as well. I find that that is a very interesting part of the process because I feel I learn a lot about the author’s style from their answers, even if it’s not directly related to the question that I’m asking.
First of all, I learn how precise they are. Some authors will have a very precise answer to your question. And then others will be like, “Mara, this is your problem now. Just do what you need to do.” They don’t feel that they have the answer. Then other authors fall somewhere in between.
Ian J. Battaglia
So do you read the book first and then go through and start a translation, or do you start translating right away?
Mara Faye Lethem
It depends. Translators are always pressed for time; except for the ones with trust funds. They’re either trying to make a living as freelancers, which is hard, or they’re teaching. But if you work in commercial publishing, you have deadlines. So that can affect how you approach a book. For some books, I’ve already read them for other reasons. Sometimes I read them when I’m considering [them], or if I’m offered a book and I have time to read it.
I was just revising a book that I had translated; I delivered it last year, last fall. It still could surprise me; some people say they don’t read the book first cause they want to be surprised, but I find reading a book and translating it are so different that I don’t really worry about that.
There are some things, of course, when you know how it turns out so you’re going to change in the beginning—or things that become apparent, whether you’ve read it before or not, how to translate them. Through the process, you learn things. Then you’re always revising the beginning more than any other part of the book.
Right now I’m translating a book that I agreed to deliver it in chunks. So when I have a chunk deadline, I’m revising because it has to be in better shape than I would normally do [for sections]. Normally I would work all the way to the end before I’m really taking asterisks; I use asterisks for things I need to come back to. And then I’m working on other things in between.
So it depends, but I don’t think that’s the ideal way to do it. I mean, in the end, you’re going to be reading it again; you try to have fresh eyes once you’ve delivered it, and then you get feedback, which is always very helpful, especially if you have a good editor. That’s always helpful. They make you look so good. I even have some authors who read my translations and give comments on them too. So that’s an amazing relationship to have.
Ian J. Battaglia
With this book in particular, there’s almost a journal-like quality to it, with these very short titled chapters, if you want to call them that.
It also feels like a novel where there’s a lot that’s left unsaid: we never are directly told the cause of the disaster, or the ongoing war, or the exact nature of the facility in the forest; there’s so many little things like that. Did anything particular about this book affect the way you translated it or the way you approached it?
Mara Faye Lethem
Something I often say when I’m talking about my job is that one of the best things about it is that you’re always learning things. This has become one of my stock lines. It’s definitely true, but I would have to say with this book, I learned something different from what I usually [learn]. I feel like the process was revelatory to me in a very different way than any other book that I’ve translated before. There are always things that you’re researching and learning about as you go along. This book was so challenging in that there are very few signposts to cling to as you’re trying to translate it. So it’s like, Wait, where are we, what happened, what time period are we in?
I have a fair amount of experience now with translating novels by poets, and this is Pol’s first novel. But there were a lot of things that were confounding about this book, and when you’re translating, you like to feel like you know what’s going on and you’re in control, and this book was very elusive in that way.
So in the end what I think I learned was, and this is going to make me sound old, but sort of about Pol’s generation. I feel his narrative style is very different from anything I’d ever worked with. There were moments where that was very challenging, but I would ask him questions.
There’s a part of a translation where you’re just kind of dealing with the building blocks, and you’re trying to swap them out for other ones. And then you’re looking at the big picture. So with this, there was a lot of like, What is going on here? What is this image? Because there are no cliches in this book. And Pol is—you know, he could be my son. So that was very different. I mean, he’s also a very unique person. It’s not just about his age, and the poetry background.
Ian J. Battaglia
To me, this felt like a book with a lot of breathing room in it; a lot of space, and something about that felt very evocative to me as a reader. It’s just one of these books that takes up more space in your mind after you finish than you would expect it to; there’s something lingering about it and the quality of the writing. I love books like that.
I was curious if you felt the same way or thought that there’s something unique to you about this work, too.
Mara Faye Lethem
They’ve done a theatrical version of it, and it was sort of funny because I was sitting next to Pol at the premiere of the play, and we were both sort of taking it in because it’s another kind of a translation, really. And I realized at the end They didn’t put in the scene! I think perhaps because it’s one of the more narrative scenes, something that I could sort of understand in a way, or feel that I was conveying without any hesitations or insecurities: when the father takes him to plant the money and tells him the money tree is going to grow. And then I didn’t realize until I saw the play, they didn’t put the money tree scene in there; I was kind of attached to [that scene].
[I’m glad] it’s been getting very enthusiastic responses. Publishing is a weird world: you can translate a book that is great and it still doesn’t find its readers. And as we all know, some books can do very well, but there’s no way to really know for sure. I sort of felt with this book that I wasn’t really its intended reader—that I was just a medium to bring it to its readers
Ian J. Battaglia
Language is really important in this book. I’m thinking about the narrator’s letters to Boris, the letter left from the mother, both of which contain the discussion of the other language, the little language. The mother writes:
The language that I’ve always spoken to you isn’t mine. The language I’m writing to you in now isn’t mine.
This could be a misconception of mine, but I found it hard not to think about the connection to the suppression and now sort of revitalization of Catalan compared to Spanish and other nearby languages. Did that resonate with you?
Mara Faye Lethem
My research is mostly in 20th century Catalan literature. I find it a very epic story. I’m from Brooklyn, New York, which is a place where they speak a lot of languages. They say [it’s] like 800 languages, and some are quite endangered, but at the same time, it seemed pretty clear that within a generation and a half, most languages were lost.
So the way that Catalan has survived, particularly in the 20th century, because it’s suffered a lot of suppression for centuries… Particularly in the 20th century where people that decided to keep writing in Catalan when they didn’t know where they would be able to publish are kind of heroes. For a young person like Pol to write in Catalan—I mean, that’s just his language—but it’s still quite a small language in its way.
He feels very strongly about [it]. He loves Catalan. But at the same time it is the 21st century and languages are dying out every few weeks. Those are mostly spoken languages. I always say that Catalan is sort of the opposite of an only spoken language, because it has such a long publishing history.
It’s a little bit complicated, the politics of language here. I think Pol explores that a little bit in his work; what it means to be in a very bilingual society when basically, according to most theorists, bilingual societies are just a path to extinction for the smaller language. All Catalan writers think about that. It’s a political act to write in Catalan, in a way; whether you want it to be or not. You probably would rather you could just write in your own language and for it not be a political act, but it is.
Ian J. Battaglia
I think especially as Americans, we tend to think of these things having very rigid bounds, and being such a monolingual country—obviously there are a ton of languages spoken in the United States, but native English speakers tend to be monolingual—we just have a very specific view of how these things go, where it’s hard to imagine simply using a language as having political connotations, but of course it can.
That situation is so fascinating and obviously, not unique to the region; there are tons of places with languages like that…
Mara Faye Lethem
Most places around the world. Most people are bilingual; at least. Right. It’s just in America—I mean, there’s a lot of bilingual people in America as well, but we don’t even say that we speak American; our identity and our language are not tied in the same way.
There’s this quote—I’m paraphrasing, of course—by a former minister of linguistic politics (we have a minister of linguistic politics here!) And he said, “all countries have linguistic policies.” Some of them are overt and a lot of them are just tacit, but they exist.
If you look at France, a large part of Catalonia is in France. However, it’s not taught as much. It’s not as much the vehicular language of instruction and schools and things like that, which are all important and still contested aspects of the linguistic revival, if you will, of Catalan.
Ian J. Battaglia
Of course, Catalan is its own language with its own rich history, but I think a lot about this in regards to dialect as well. I have a few younger Chinese friends who speak Mandarin, and one of them was recently telling me that when she goes to Chinatown here, a lot of the people there speak Cantonese and not Mandarin.
There’s a huge range of connotations about what that means and what part of the country you’d be from and what sort of educational background you might have. That sort of language barrier, even among a close region, I think is really fascinating, and leads to a lot of depth and nuance.
Mara Faye Lethem
Well, it’s also political what is deemed a dialect and what is deemed a language, because if you look at Italy, they have a lot of different languages there and they’re just like, Oh, those are all dialects. Each country deals with these things differently. France would just say, Oh, just speak French—shut up and speak French.
In Spain, we have four official languages, one of which is not even a romance language. However, there’s not always an easy coexistence. So as I said, what’s considered a dialect is really a political decision.
Ian J. Battaglia
Could you talk a little bit about the process of translating from Catalan to English?
Mara Faye Lethem
I like to kind of sneak things in sometimes, like contraband expressions or things like that. I have an interesting friendship with a Hungarian translator from Catalan who reads my translations and asks me questions and writes articles about them. And she’ll say, “Is this actually a thing in English? Or you just made this up?” And I’ll say, “Well, I just like that expression.” In Catalan, it’s a fairly common expression to say something is “as dark as a wolf’s throat”; like the inside of a wolf’s throat. It’s perfectly understandable. It comes across as very poetic in English, but now I’ve made it exist in English—probably more than once, actually. And so it goes.
There’s a lot of lost metaphors in our language that we don’t really think about. I’m interested in how things lose their metaphorical meaning and become something like, “pitch black.” We don’t think about that as a metaphor, right? Because we don’t actually talk about pitch anymore.
In Catalan, for example, when you say up or you say down, you say: up is literally—this is all one word put together—“towards the mountain.” And down is “towards the valley.”
Ian J. Battaglia
Wow. That’s incredible.
Mara Faye Lethem
But you know, basically it’s just up and down, right? These are lost metaphors. So sometimes I’ll try to kind of smuggle something out, and expand English in that way if I can.
Sometimes people do that without realizing it; you’re just translating and you don’t realize, Oh, this is like something that people say. That’s actually a question that I have sometimes: is this something that people say, or is this something only that my author has invented?
I also try to do that with style. Something that’s kind of more normal in Catalan is a serial comma. So I try to just reproduce that in English. Sometimes I’ll add em-dashes or something or break things up if need be. In English it can come across as sort of Faulknerian or something; not the case with Pol, he’s more staccato.
So yeah, there are things about punctuation that I try to preserve to a certain point. Now, you don’t want it to overshadow the writing, so then you just smooth things out, or “domesticate them,” as Larry Venuti would say.
Ian J. Battaglia
Is there anything else you want people to know about this book?
Mara Faye Lethem
I’m just so excited to see how readers kind of go on this journey with Pol and where it takes them, because it’s so open ended. I’m glad that I was able to convey that, even when sometimes it was a little difficult, to have faith. Sometimes when you’re translating, you’ll ask a question of the author and they’ll send you a photograph, something where you’re like, “Okay, I have the answer.” With this book, [I’d ask a question, and] sometimes he would say, “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. That just came out of my head. But that’s what it means.” I was like, “Really? Okay.” I’m excited to see readers’ responses to this book.
FICTION
Napalm in the Heart
By Pol Guasch
Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published August 13th, 2024
