I was asked one time to read one of my short stories at a literary evening. Nothing unusual, except that the organizers wanted me to read a Spanish translation of the story, which was about a magazine photographer working in Central America.

The event was held in Santiago, Chile. I was living in Latin America and my Spanish was as good as it would ever be, but I was doing a reading to a very long room of very serious-looking native Spanish speakers. I remember all of them as wearing dark grey and black suits, men and women, which can’t be true.

After being introduced by one of the translators, poet and academic Lake Sagaris,^[i] I remember smiling lamely. Afterward I read the title—“Guatemala”—and the unfamiliar opening of the story, which was both mine and not mine. Then I girded myself and read on. 

Lake told me later I did all right, enunciating clearly in my not-terrible Canadian-accented Spanish, only stumbling over some words in Chilean Spanish when I’d learned different terms in Mexico. Yet I felt weirdly unmoored as I read the translation, floating, not quite inside my body, reading a story that I had written but also hadn’t. I think the state is called dissociation.

A decade later, I had that same feeling at film school, where I was a screenwriting resident. We all had to take an acting class—writers, directors, producers. In the main exercise, I was paired with a director. Unlike me, she’d done some acting and had no problems with the scene.

I was awful. Mumble-mouthed. Self-conscious. At least until it was time to act the piece in front of a roomful of classmates, which we did sitting on the edge of a small stage. Perhaps another bout of terror fueled my sudden ability to perform, along with a renewed case of dissociation. 

As we said our opening lines, my sense of self expanded beyond my body, taking on the new and invisible shape of my fictional character. The words came out naturally, as if the not-director and I were having an unscripted conversation. I was playing a woman unlike me, but I became her, while simultaneously remaining myself. I wondered even during the scene if this was what real actors feel.

I’ve been thinking about these experiences after reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s new short story collection, the excellent Roman Stories.^[ii] Lahiri’s life has been a little unmoored. She was born in London to Bengali parents and moved to the U.S. when she was three years old. Lahiri grew up and went to college in the U.S., but moved to Rome in 2012 with her husband and children and began to write in Italian. She now teaches at Barnard College in New York, but wrote Roman Stories in Italian, and translated it into English herself with help from Todd Portnowitz. 

What’s striking about Lahiri’s stories are their shared tone of dissociation, something she accentuates through her stylistic choices. Most of the stories are all set in Rome among foreigners who don’t or can’t fit in, no matter how long they’ve lived there. She calls some characters only by their initials. P throws the parties central to one story. F is a father. Others don’t have names at all, or are called “the screenwriter” or “the ex-pat wife.” And while we usually learn if they’re brown-skinned or American or both, Lahiri doesn’t explicitly state where most of her foreign characters were born, only that they’re not from Rome, and that they’re not wanted in the city by native Romans.

In the story, “Notes,” an immigrant woman takes a job as a playground supervisor, filling in for someone on leave. This is the school her twin sons had attended years earlier and she’s happy to be back. Nostalgic. But little pieces of paper start appearing in her pockets with messages in childish handwriting. “We don’t like you.” “We don’t want you to stay here.”

In the story where P hosts parties, the male narrator develops feelings for an ex-pat woman he meets at one of P’s soirees. The woman is so little interested in him she becomes great friends with his wife. Things don’t happen as anticipated in Lahiri’s stories, and her characters fall into the gap between the world they think they’re living in, and the one that really exists. Dissociation once again.

Lahiri tells her stories in stripped-down prose, and I can’t help wondering if her repeated rounds of writing and translating allowed her to refine the initial drafts of her stories down to an skeletal level of simplicity and impact. Also whether publishing a translation into English when her native language is English helped her create the feeling that permeates the collection of things being slightly off. 

It’s exactly right. 

As someone who has lived in several countries, I know very what it feels like to be an outsider; to be someone who is simplified by local people into a bit of a cliché. Not even the right cliché: I’m usually seen as an American. In other words, I’ve often felt that local people have treated me as someone I’m not. Also as a bit of a nuisance: unneeded, unwanted and slightly exasperating in my ignorance of things everybody knows.

At the same time, I haven’t behaved exactly like myself in other countries, either. It’s famous among ex-pats: you’re a slightly different person in different languages. As you try to adapt to a new situation, different parts of your personality come out. When we lived in Brazil, I was louder and more emphatic than I am at home, throwing my arms around and crying, “Puxa vida!”^[iii] In Mexico, I grew even taller and rather haughty, since Mexicans can be very haughty. I never felt any more ebullient or imperious inside, but I often found myself acting that way, and sometimes quietly laughed at myself while local people laughed at me more openly.

Acting that way. I’m thinking of my acting class as well as Lahiri’s characters. Her characters act differently than they used to at home, meanwhile living in a society where no one sees their true complexity. Everybody gets everyone wrong, including themselves.

This subtle dissociation also makes me think of translation in general. Reading Lahiri, I started to wonder if a book can ever be accurately translated from one language to another, even by the author. Are there so many slight but unbridgeable differences between languages that translations are always a little wrong?

And here’s something else I’ve always wondered. How can someone who doesn’t speak the original language judge the quality of a translation? This thought came to me rather forcefully when I recently read and reviewed Italian writer Giaime Alonge’s new novel, The Feeling of Iron. I didn’t like it,^[iv] but a question nagged: Was the wooden prose the fault of the writer or his translator, Clarissa Botsford? 

Luckily I have a friend I can ask. 

Amela Marin is a writer and translator who was born in Dubrovnik, where she is currently spending the winter. Amela has also lived in Sarajevo, where she survived three years under siege during the Balkan wars. At the time, she worked as a translator and journalist, and as Susan Sontag’s assistant on Sontag’s production of Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot. 

Amela moved to Toronto with her family in 1996. She has translated a great many works from English into Bosnian, including writing by Sylvia Plath, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Amela’s translations of Bosnian poetry into English have also been widely published, and she is the author of a novella, The Sea, a beautiful story about a woman who puts her children in her pockets and walks away from war. Her Substack newsletter also focuses on food and war. It’s called Imaginary Recipes, and it’s excellent. I’ll link to it below. ^[v]

I emailed Amela three questions:

• How can a reader who doesn’t speak the original language tell if a book is poorly written or poorly translated? 
• How does a translator approach a poorly written book? Do you adhere to the author’s style or try to improve it? How does it feel to work on such a project?
• Is there a temptation for a translator to subtly alter a manuscript to better align it culturally with the target audience? In other words, to translate the book in a way that addresses an audience the author didn’t originally set out to address? When Jhumpa Lahiri translated her book into English, would she and should she have sought ways to appeal to an American audience?

Amela very kindly emailed back a series of answers—and I’ll turn the rest of this post this over to her. 

Let me begin with a firm statement: There are only good translations and bad translations, nothing in between. This view is the result of years of reading, translating, and discussing the art and craft with colleagues at conferences. In many countries, including Canada, the translator is legally recognized as a creator. This status carries the expectation that the translator is crafting a new work of art in another language. A skilled and conscientious translator does not “improve” the author’s work but recreates it as faithfully as possible in the target language.

A truly skilled translator possesses deep knowledge of both languages, a keen understanding of cultural nuances, and extensive experience with literature in both the original and translated forms. Their job is not to translate word-for-word but to write a book in the target language that balances fidelity to the original with the natural flow and impact required in the new context. The best translations are those where the translator’s interventions are so subtle that even bilingual readers do not notice them.

For example: I once translated lyrics of an old Bosnian song for a film. In the original, a young man declares his love by saying he will throw a hyacinth, a flower symbolizing love and longing in Bosnia, at his beloved’s window. However, in English, hyacinths symbolize jealousy and envy. I could have left it as is, but that would have distorted the poem’s emotional core. After careful research, I chose “jasmine,” a flower that fits the Bosnian setting and carries the right connotations in English. Both words are two syllables, preserving the poem’s rhythm. This kind of decision—what to sacrifice or change to preserve the essence—is at the heart of translation.

The Myth of Literal Translation

The term “literal translation” is largely an Anglo-Saxon concept. In my experience, renowned literary translators from around the world agree that the Anglo-Saxon approach, where a translator produces a literal draft and a publisher hires a writer to “adapt” it for the audience, is misguided. This process protects readers from the original voice, which is not the role of translation. Editors and copy-editors should ensure fidelity to the original, not have someone else rewrite it. I’ve also encountered this in theatres in the UK & North America. (A longer story based on my experience promoting Canadian plays.)

A Controversial Case (Briefly)

Years ago, I translated a series of poems characterized by stark, unadorned language, deliberately stripped of poetic flourishes, like a newspaper report. The style was the poet’s choice, and I followed it faithfully. However, a UK publisher deemed my translation “literal” and hired a poet to “improve” it for British readers. The result was not a translation but an interpretation by someone unfamiliar with the original language, culture, or even the subject matter. The new version softened the stark imagery, added unnecessary explanations, and altered the poems’ essence.

Fortunately, a Canadian publisher recognized the issue and chose to publish my original translation, defending its fidelity to the poet’s intent.

The Role of the Translator

There are writers who translate other writers. Haruki Murakami comes to mind. They do it without rewriting the work, because they respect the writing and understand both languages and cultures deeply. In this case, they are simply a good translator, not a writer rewriting another writer.

There is a recent trend, even more controversial and personally disturbing trend than what I described above, where publishers use AI-generated translation drafts, then hire literary translators or writers to “correct” or rewrite them to save money. A good translator cannot work this way; they must start from scratch.

Bad Writing and Translation

If a text is poorly written, the translator must ask: Is there a justification? For example, if a character is meant to be boring or poorly educated, the translator should preserve that effect. If not, the translator may need to adjust the language to avoid unintended flaws. In my translation of Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, I questioned whether the protagonist’s repetitive, tedious speech was intentional or just bad writing. (I was in my late twenties and had no patience for bad writing. Not that anything changed.) After careful consideration, I concluded it was a stylistic choice to make the character, who was an academic, boring and annoying, and I preserved it.

When I translate a book I don’t like, I don’t have the urge to change it. I will express my opinion in conversation with the editor and find out why they made the choice. Sometimes, a publishing house will want to publish a whole opus of a renowned writer, which will include books that aren’t great. But there has to be an open communication about it.

Trust Your Instincts

If you, as a lifelong reader, sense that a translation is bad, trust your gut. You can often tell if the issue lies with the original writing by considering whether the problematic elements serve a purpose, e.g. characterizing a person or creating a specific effect. If not, the problem lies in the translation.

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My great thanks to Amela Marin for her help.

And great respect to Jhumpa Lahiri for writing Roman Stories, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ve started reading short story collections with a group of women writers in my part of Toronto, and this was the latest book chosen for our monthly get-together. I couldn’t make the meeting, but I’m told everyone loved it, and I suspect many of you would, too. 

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^[i] My short story was translated by Lake Sagaris, a friend of mine originally from Canada, and by musician and filmmaker Patricio Lanfranco, a native Chilean. My husband, Paul Knox, also gave notes, and I made a few comments myself. The story, “Guatemala,” was published in English in my first collection, Hard Travel, which you can buy here. 

^[ii] Roman Stories can be ordered here, or from your local library. 

^[iii]“Puxa vida” means roughly “Holy shit!” in Brazilian Portuguese, with a heavy level of amusement and no small amount of disbelief rolled in. There’s irony, too. (Translation is hard.)

^[iv]You can read why I didn’t like Giaime Alonge’s novel in this review—which, by the way, tells the story of the time my husband was kidnapped in Nicaragua. The Feeling of Iron is set partly in Europe during the Second World War, and partly in Central America among U.S.-backed Contra guerrillas who are fighting the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. My husband was forced at gunpoint from a riverboat in Central Nicaragua by men who might have been ex-Contras, and might have simply been thieves. They stole his wedding ring, for which I’m still angry at them, even though he got a replacement.

^[v] Imaginary Recipes is a Substack newsletter that Amela Marin writes about food and war. This link will take you to Amela’s moving tribute to her friend Susan Sontag, published this past January on the day Sontag would have turned 92.