With an intriguing and original start, author and translator Jen Calleja, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019, invites her reader to join her on an idiosyncratic whistlestop tour of her life, her career as a translator and her raison d’être. This she has laid out between the pages as if it were a Translation Fair, a giant art or book expo – a Midsummer Night’s Dream metaphor for Calleja’s life packed with make-believe immersive spaces, reminiscences and reflections on art and the importance of ‘making’.
“These places aren’t serious, spacious pantheons of trade; they’re circus tops,” she says.
Half memoir, written in a life-writing hybrid style that’s very much millennial, Fair draws throughout on art and literature from Kafka’s Metamorphosis to Tracey Emin’s My Bed, and Calleja’s Mattress of Epiphany (“you can sit on it if you want.” It begins with an exhibit of Jen’s desk: “If everyone’s tried out the desk chair and looked at the photos, we can really get started.”
And so Fair is a paper sculpture of layers of the past, casually tripping between anecdotes with, at times, the surreal flavour of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the first book Calleja used when learning German. She now works translating literary works from German into English.
Translation is a skill that requires a deep knowledge of a language, an understanding of cultural and linguistic sensitivity, and – for literary works –creative story-telling. It’s also a hidden profession: whilst the original author is widely-advertised, the translator’s name is quietly tucked away, like that of a ghostwriter; whilst vital to a work’s appearance in a different tongue they’re hidden in the shadows like a puppeteer. Who normally gives a thought to the translator, or their relationship to the text and the original author?
“I unpick sentences and rethread them; I untangle them like ropes, wires, nets,” explains Calleja, and in several short but fascinating excerpts she delves into the detail line by line, elucidating words, their literal definitions, and the possible options in a mysterious hinterland that lies unseen between two languages, to best choose “how I would translate it, how only I would translate it.”
For example, Calleja continues, “a hangover in German is a Kater, which literally means ‘tomcat’ but actually means hangover. How would I translate it? Just as ‘hangover’? Or the poetic ‘a tomcat of a hangover’ to keep the effect?”
And neither the original author, the publisher nor the reader will fully comprehend the minutiae of these decisions.
“The difference between a good translation and a compelling translation is choosing the words that convey the message while making them sing.”
Calleja is also a singer, a drummer and a performer in a punk band, and just as a writer or singer has to find their own voice, so does a translator. Language, Fair makes clear, is like a musical instrument, from which the story is teased out with harmony – or perhaps deliberate dissonance – and rhythm and cadence through mindful, responsive word choices. These are picked in response to the literary history and context of the book, the author’s subtext, and to the world around today.
“Translating for me is intuitive, instinctual,” Calleja continues, a process in which she has “to sink into a space of being open, allowing associations to flicker before my mind’s eye.”
This process, she adds, is similar to that of Lyra in Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights (translated onto screen The Golden Compass) who, for the answers to her questions, turns to a device called the ‘alethiometer’. As its hands land on three symbols at a time she instinctively feels how to interpret these pictures to form her answer.
The life of a literary translator and the art of translation therefore “can’t be separated, much like a word or phrase removed from the neutrality of the dictionary can’t be placed unthinkingly into a sentence.”
Whilst Fair is an invite into “a lucky dip” of Calleja’s life laid out in fairground attractions, on this roller coaster there are bumps and spills. And as in any fairy tale, there’s a dark side. Calleja is no golden-haired princess: she’s is more of a travelling bard, a literary performer unwrapping her makeshift trunk of props and costumes at multiple and often difficult stops along the road.
“Stories used to roam free and ride in storytellers’ minds, worn smooth like a well-sucked lozenge in a mouth.”
We find her in the deep dark wood of literary translation, at a crossroads in life with an axe to grind.
Calleja’s dad is Maltese. Her mum, who was Anglo-Irish, struggled with mental health issues throughout Calleja’s childhood as a “weird and solitary kid” in a working-class family, “mentally hyperactive”, and perhaps working with the challenges of ADHD or being on the autistic spectrum in keeping with her fervour and focus. Without the proverbial silver spoon, there have been trials and tribulations along the way, including many jobs simply to make ends meet.
There’s a simmering frustration throughout about money woes and a rage against the system. Translators, who are generally freelancers, are overworked and underpaid. Few get royalties even when the works they have translated are a huge success. The culture industry, says Calleja, “exploits artists, and institutions and governments that teach people to undervalue them as skilled, expert workers.” Fair thereforeincludes both pragmatic advice, a reality check for wannabe translators and an ambition for a manifesto for fair translation.
A book on translation could have been dry. Fair isn’t. It’s skittish, innovative and unapologetically wacky. Whilst an introvert, Calleja wonders if she appears rather self-obsessed, and certainly she’s open, self-aware with a sense of fun, a Scrappy-Doo in a haunted house. With a flavour of a young Caitlin Moran, she’s sassy, perhaps brash yet likeable, and – importantly – vocal about the work of translators and their added value. It’s a message that all readers should understand and the publishing industry should promote, and Fair is a great first base on this important quest.
Fair: The Life-Art of Translation by Jen Calleja – Prototype
