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Translating and Writing

It’s a bitterly cold January day, and I’m housesitting in south London. On the sofa, my knees pulled up in front of me, I stare out over a garden laced with frost. There’s a notebook balanced on my thighs, a pen in my hand, nib hovering over the thick, cream-coloured paper. My memory of this moment is visceral. Heart thumping, skin prickling, I’m about to do something that feels momentous. For the first time since childhood, at the age of thirty-seven, I’m giving myself permission to try – and, if it comes to it, fail at – writing.

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For the fifteen years before that moment, I’d been working as a literary translator, from German and Portuguese into English: fiction, nonfiction and occasionally poetry. For most of those years, my answer to the question: ‘Do you write too?’ was always ‘No’. I remember bristling at the implication, whether intended or not, that translation wasn’t enough, or that it wasn’t, in fact, writing. Sometimes I went into more detail. ‘I’ve never felt the urge’, or: ‘It’s a relief not having to contend with writer’s block.’ I loved grappling all day long with words, their meaning and cadence, without the pressure of constructing a plot.

My source text, in book form beside my elbow, or on the left-hand side of my screen, functioned as a roadmap, ensuring I wouldn’t get lost. Now the analogy feels restrictive rather than comforting — it suggests a tethering of my mind to well-beaten paths, an out-of-character aversion to adventure. It shows me the fear behind my emphatic No. It makes me wonder whether, at least initially, I fell in love with literary translation because it allowed me to do something I enjoyed in a way that felt safe.

Before I go on, let me say: I don’t believe all literary translators have a desire to do their own writing. Translation is a challenging and rewarding craft that is not a secondary activity, or something that’s less than. I’ve always believed this, and I haven’t changed my mind. But at a certain point, I did change my mind about my own personal relationship with writing. This is merely a story about the interweaving of literary translation and creative writing in one life.

When I was a child, if I wasn’t reading a book, or reconstructing a scene from it in my bedroom or garden, I was creating something: a painting, a short story. There’s one I remember in detail, called ‘The Underground Swimming Pool’. I wrote it one afternoon, bound it together with woollen thread, and painted a picture for the cover. Beyond that, my main memory of writing is the sensation of sitting with a pen in my hand, and what I would now describe as an expansiveness. At some stage in my early teens, writing slipped away from my life in such a way that I didn’t even notice. I still read, voraciously, but I’d discovered languages, and dedicated most of my time to learning them and planning the journeys around the world I would take.

For most of the two decades that followed, I worked with books in myriad ways: selling them, reviewing them, editing them, translating them. In my late twenties, I moved to London, found my tribe of fellow literary translators, and was settling into my life. The capital felt more like home than anywhere I’d never known, but the wanderlust I’d found through languages and books was always there. A few days after my thirty-first birthday, on a trip to Argentina, I met and fell in love with a Brazilian man. We married – swiftly, recklessly, after just a few months – and moved to the fictional-sounding island of Florianopolis. The deep cultural shifts that defined those years pulled me apart thread by thread, making me question everything I’d thought certain about who I was. I began journalling, spilling my fears and frustrations onto the page. I also recorded the sights and sounds of my not-quite-home in an attempt to make sense of them. It helped. Over time, descriptive fragments began to creep into my journalling. I can see now that I was tiptoeing towards new, fictional worlds.

Our marriage lasted five years, until we accepted that we hadn’t known each other well enough, or, crucially, that we hadn’t known ourselves well enough. One day, some months after my return to the UK, a few lines of prose came to me while I was out walking; they felt so fleeting I ran home to capture them. This began to happen more and more. I started to sense I needed to push myself, to make a decision to sit down and write, rather than just waiting for those moments. This excited and terrified me all at once. What if I sat down and found absolutely nothing there? I put it off again and again, until eventually I tired of my own excuses. Life is short. What if I reached the end of mine without ever trying?

Not long after came that January day on the south London sofa. The pages I wrote that afternoon were about a young woman driving on a summer’s evening in the American Midwest, longing to break free of the constraints and comfort of home. I looked back at it the other day, and my editing pen would be all over those lines now. But what hooked me was the intoxicating feeling of creating my own fictional world — the very thing I’d thought I didn’t want to do.

I started to make more time for writing. A few weeks later, I attended an event where I met a Creative Writing lecturer. I asked if we could do a couple of mentoring sessions. We met for coffee, and she gave me what I needed most: a deadline. For the next couple of weeks, I worked on a short story that I’d been drafting in my mind. The fear that nothing would come was still there, each day, but it was outweighed by those moments where the story seemed to write itself, where dialogue or description flowed as if from nowhere. It felt exhilarating, like walking through a door into a wide-open space whose existence I’d forgotten. A couple of weeks later, I emailed my new mentor a 3000-word draft, dizzy with nerves as I pressed Send.

The sense of achievement I felt after writing that story was incredible. It was the first time I’d shared my writing, so I felt elated when she praised the sense of place and encouraged me to continue. There was constructive criticism too, of course, making me realise how much there was to learn. She pointed out, though, that by translating I’d learnt subconsciously about narrative structure and characterisation, that I perhaps now knew instinctively what worked and what didn’t.

It wasn’t long before I realised the writing life is defined by ups and downs, much like the translating life. The moments of exhilaration are joined by hours of frustration, when I start paragraphs and abandon them, gaze out of the window, make one procrastinatory coffee after the other. Surprisingly though, I don’t miss the anchor of the translation source text like I thought I would. I’ve realised that many of the tricks I use when translating help me here too. If I’m really struggling, to get the creativity flowing again — I can skip ahead. It had never occurred to me that you could do this as a writer — how could you run ahead on a path that wasn’t yet constructed? The realisation that it’s mine, that I can do anything I want with it, was empowering.

I love my translating and writing practices in their similarities and their differences. When I translate, it’s like studying a tree in minute detail, then painting it, attempting to capture the intricate detail of the leaves, sometimes rearranging them on a bough. In my own writing, I graft branches onto the trees or strip them off, maybe even uproot the entire tree and plant a new one.  Now I’ve had a writing practice for almost three years, I can see how it’s informing my literary translations too. I’ve become more daring as I translate, more confident. I believe this comes from more time spent playing with my native language, stretching it, testing it, making sure every word in a sentence is working as hard as it can.

When it comes to balancing writing with my translating, this is a work-in-progress and probably always will be. Most of us need to continually edit our approach to the writing life as our lives shift; to accommodate changes in our families, our health. I would love to say I sit down and write every day without fail, but this isn’t the case. During particularly demanding translation projects, my hours become filled with the author’s voice in a way that seems to drown out my own. At those times, I seldom have creative energy left for my own writing. I’m okay with this, providing I carve out moments that are creative and not project-linked; by reading and writing poetry and flash fiction, for example; these short bursts of distilling language.

Curiously, I’ve also learnt that having too much open-ended time to write is overwhelming to me. This is very different from my approach to translating; for that, I often do residencies where I hide myself away for a week or two. I need to live and breathe the author’s voice, have it inhabit me. But perhaps that’s because it isn’t mine, so the act of climbing inside it is more intentional. My own voice I find in the in between, and for that I need life’s other layers to be there. I need the snippets of strangers’ conversations overheard in the street; the thrill of grabbing a moment to write a poem or a paragraph on a busy day; the rootedness of being around those who know me.

When I wrote that first story, I didn’t realise I would go on to redraft and restructure it countless times. The urge to tweak never stops, even once something is in print. And that’s okay, because it means we’re growing. If deadlines didn’t exist, there would be no final versions; just works-in-progress that writers carry around with them, polishing them in their minds and notebooks for eternity. I’m grateful that, through working closely with authors as a translator, I’ve learnt that nothing is ever really finished. Hearing about the multiple versions that could have existed, helped demystify the writing process for me. I realised that perfection doesn’t exist, and the relief of this chipped away some of my fear.

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When I first started this writing journey, and heard other writers say they’d begun as a child and never stopped, I felt a little envious; how did they know to hold onto it, when I hadn’t? But now I know those twenty years in between were never lost. The shift that brought me back from not-writing to writing felt surprising and unexpected; it’s only when I look back that I can see its beautiful inevitability. I needed to throw myself into the rest of life first. Instead of regretting anything, I’m celebrating having found my writing practice now.

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