Talking with Saskia Vogel about ‘Caesaria’
Kate McNamara
In a conversation with Jen Calleja, you talk about the interactions you have with writers as you translate their work, saying that some of the best moments of translation occur when you get the opportunity to delve into the precise nuances of words with authors, looking into the specifics of word usage when you talk to translators. So I was wondering as an opening question, just what was your working relationship with Hannah like whilst translating Caesaria?
Saskia Vogel
Our dialogue was really particular, because she's a translator, too. And I think a lot of my fellow Swedish translators – and probably anyone from any of the Nordic languages – our authors often speak almost flawless English. So there's a lot of dialogue that is available, which is really nice. And with Hanna, we were just really able to get into the nitty gritty of words.
Swedish does nominalization really easily, like “the small one”, in English it’s a lot of syllables. It lands in a particular way. Like in Balsam Karam’s The Singularity, there's “the missing one”. And in Sweden, it's neater than that. And “the missing one” has a certain ring to it that doesn't always carry in English. And the mum in Caesaria was also referred to as “the Scrawny One”. We went through just so many. I even found a colloquial, outdated Caribbean term that actually seems like it is related to the Swedish word for this thing: mager. It’s like ‘lean’, but also it's the doctor talking, so it's a little bit condescending. And then I think in a Caribbean dialect, there is the word mager used to refer to a certain kind of body type, kind of like the way that the doctor did. But then you're bringing in Caribbean references and so you just have to sit down and think: What are you bringing into the text and what's actually possible.
But Hannah and I, I felt like we could go on these like flights of fancy together and understand the wide dreaming that then gets narrowed down to something that ends up being “the scrawny one”. But my God, it was one of the last words that found its place in the text. Because I also had “the curlylock” for the Master Valdemar, which is now “the curly-locked man”.
Sometimes the body of the language is so particular that you can transfer a dialect over. Sometimes you can create a whole world. And then the question in the end is: does this whole world hold? Can I incorporate a little bit of this word. And can I use the word “curlylock”? And my Irish friend who lives out in California was like, ‘that's so funny. Where I come from, in Ireland, that's what they would call 'curly haired people’; it was like a pet name, or sweet way of referring to someone with curly hair. But I don't think we used that in the end.
I wanted to try to find nouns though, like nominalization, or something that could be a little leaner, because it has this certain effect than den magra… “the Scrawny One”… I think it's good; ‘scrawny’ does a lot of work. You can’t really refer to a person as ‘the scrawn’ just off the cuff in English, but sometimes, sometimes there are texts where you can find a way to make that happen.
Claudia Marzollo
“The Scrawny One” adds to the mythological aura of the book I found, and because Caesaria also refers to herself as “the Bandaged One’. And so I found that it worked as a name.
Saskia Vogel
I think ultimately we found something good, but it took a lot of playing to find it because these names carry so much, I think, they reveal a mythos and a sense of Caesaria’s personal cosmology, which is so particular because her bodies of knowledge are so limited, they're so specific. She knows only the doctor, nature, the house, and some vague sense of the outside world. She's a very odd narrator.
Claudia Marzollo
Which brings me to one of the questions that I had: Caesaria knows a lot of things that a kid her age wouldn't know, like what the doctor tells her about female anatomy and medical procedures. But she also knows very little, and as you said, her knowledge is so very specific. Seeing things through her eyes makes the book and the information that you get quite ambiguous. So I was wondering, was it hard to keep that ambiguity, and to translate from such a specific point of view, and did you feel like you had to lose some of that ambiguity and some of that strangeness?
Saskia Vogel
It's a really, really good question. I think one of my personal limitations and maybe a strength too, because these things can often be both, is if I'm hungry, I have no sense of humour. And so for instance I just won’t get your jokes because I'm just too hungry, you know? And I feel the same way when I read a text: it changes depending on how I feel in my body. or on what's happening today. We’re all readers here… that's why we love re-reading books, right? Because we meet them in different ways.
But I noticed that there's definitely a process in the way I work. There’s a part of the process where I'm very serious, very earnest, and I’ll be reading a text thinking this is what it means, and I will miss all the humour during one of these reads. And subtext is a funny one, because sometimes it could be to the benefit of the translation if I do miss something, because it will keep it kind of further in the background or in the shadows. But I think the number of times that I do reread the translation, some of those things do - of course you can't see, you notice everything - but I would say that during these later reads I feel like ‘Ohhh, right’. I noticed these things. Sometimes I think you can only notice chains of details when you’re at a very late stage, when all the big work is done, and then you realise that there are four instances of a certain word, or an echo of this image in the text. And then I need to go back and work on those little instances. So it's like big clay work, and then little work. And I feel like my brain is either zoomed out or zoomed in.
And so it's finding the translation somewhere in that tension of being zoomed out and being zoomed in, and dealing with your own interpretation of the text as well. I think with Caesaria, Hanna's voice is so particular, it's so rich. All I felt as I was translating it was, I'm not going to be able to do it justice because it's very particular in Swedish. And so it had to be really particular in English. And for this, I really want to give so much thanks to Anna Glendenning, who worked on the translation with me. She was the editor for this translation, and what I loved about Anna's approach was that she suggested that the translator is more akin to like an actor interpreting a dramatic text and so she sort of shifted that understanding of what the translator is doing: you are performing a role that's written in a certain way, but that many actors would interpret differently. I feel like the metaphor really gave me a different perspective to work with. And she's just so good. If you haven't read her book, it's extraordinary - the language! It really was such a good pairing to work with here. I learned so much from her.
Kate McNamara
There’s something you mentioned there about being a body that translates and translating with the body. You've said that when you translate, you often forget about your body, but also that as a reader, you've been mouth and lungs. And this made us think of one of our favourite passages from This Little Art, Kate Briggs’ book: ‘I read with my body. I read and move to translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours does.’
Do you have any feelings about this sentence with regards to your own experience of translation and writing?
Saskia Vogel
On the airplane over here, I was working on a text, and there's this little sentence that doesn't feel right in the translation, and it's like something like: ‘he raises his index finger in the air’, and I had cut out ‘in the air’, because if you raise your index finger, where else are you raising it? But then, as I reread the translation, I thought that it doesn't feel good. I feel like ‘in the air’ actually has a function. So I sat there in the airplane lifting my finger. And I find myself doing this quite a lot. There’s a lot about translation — and this is, I think, where writing and translation, for me, really overlap — that in just getting the things down on the page, you have to ask yourself what is your lived experience of the world? How are you moving and encountering the world with your body? I think it raises some interesting questions about how expression is determined by our physical conditions. And also when you talk about emotional landscapes: where do you feel emotions in your body? There are very specific places that, when I have tensions with particular people and I'm like, oh, that’s usually the place that gets tense, that specific part gets tense, not like a general tension.
Movement practice is really important to me, and so I do spend a lot of time thinking about how things are in and of the body.
Claudia Marzollo
Keeping on this topic of the body, both Caesaria and Strega have a lot to do with the body as the texts, in particular the female body and how it gets represented. And so we were wondering if you could talk to us about your experience of writing and translating the body in your work in general.
Saskia Vogel
Strega was really interesting, if I may just touch on translation for a second longer: because a particularity of Swedish is that ‘the’ gets tacked on to the end of the word. So ‘the book’ bok becomes a single word: ‘the book’ boken. And also personal pronouns are used differently in relation to objects. So often you'll read in Swedish (literally translated) ‘I pointed at the book’ but in English you might write ‘my book’. And with Strega, it was really interesting there, because I did so much work in that book with the definite article — when to use it and when not to use it —largely based on an essay that I read about Macbeth that analyses what makes Macbeth creepy. They did a big data project on Macbeth, and they argued it’s because of a particular usage of the word ‘the’. And I can’t remember which way the example went, but it was something like Shakespeare was writing about ‘the owl’ as if it's the one archetypal owl that is in this environment. So it makes the owl really creepy, because it's like ‘the owl’, the one. And so [with Strega] I was working with that with the hands in particular there, because I wanted to create a sort of verfremdungseffekt with the bodies that perform the labor, and a more essence quality of the individual humans that are dynamic human beings. That was really, really fun. I guess the short answer is that the two practices work so closely together.
And when writing feels impossible, the thing that I come back to is the one thing I know I can do: style. And it does bring me a lot of comfort that I've translated so many books now in so many different voices that I know I can find a voice for whatever it is that I want to do. So if this is a bad day for writing, at least I can do these things. And then some days are really great. And the translation plays into that as well. I just feel like every book is a lesson. It's so nice. I have a fond relationship between the two practices, and I feel like they're kind of inseparable by now.
Actually, years ago, when I took Permission on tour, a bookseller had laid out some copies of The White City, a Karolina Ramqvist novel that I translated. It must have been at least seven years ago, so one of my earliest translations. And I remember writing this dinner scene in Permission, and I thought: I can write this dinner scene because I just translated Karolina's dinner scene, and now I know how to write two people sitting at a table. And then I couldn't go back and look at The White City, because…did I just steal her dinner scene? Then I was feeling really bold about it, and the book was on the table, and I read the two passages back to back during the event because some of these translation questions came up. And it was really striking to note that, yes, there are two scenes with people sitting side by side at a table, or having a power dynamic happening over the table. But obviously, Karolina is not the first person to write one of those scenes either, and the scenes are really different. But for me, the reason they feel the same is, I guess, because my dinner scene wouldn't have been possible without me having translated her dinner scene and really having to understand what makes the power dynamics shift, how to get into the nitty gritty moments and feel the tension. David Mamet's Oleanna is a whole play of that, right? The power dynamic between teacher and student in a single room. But Ramqvist’s book taught me how to write that scene.
Kate McNamara
I love that each of your answers brings up something else that we've been thinking about and wanted to ask you about. In the same conversation with Jen Calleja that I mentioned earlier, you talk about the discussions of the details that you have with an author when you’re translating their work, and then you say a phrase that stood out to us: ‘I love the dialogue that happens in the margins’. This is something we've been thinking about recently, in part through our work on Ferrante’s writing. She sees her writing as the product of lots of different conversations and writers, and she absents herself from the afterlife of her books, and of course, she remains anonymous. Her work has raised questions about the celebration of the single author, which is so normalised in literature, in academia and in criticism. All of the dialogues that happen in the margins get absented from the discussion, in order to celebrate the single voice that writes.
In our translation reading groups, our discussions often focus in on ideas of authorship; translation forces us to question the very idea that there is a single author. So we were wondering whether, as a translator, you feel particularly sensitive to the way that authorship is discussed and portrayed, and how do you engage with or represent these dialogues that happen in the margins when you're presenting your work?
Saskia Vogel
Oh my gosh. A hard question, a good question. What translation has given me as a writer, for sure, is knowing how to let go of a book. And I think that's fantastic because… if you are thinking about getting married, for example, what are you actually doing? You're increasingly making public your commitment to this other person, you know? So you're increasingly making your relationship belong to a wider community. And it's a similar thing with writing, right? Or whenever anyone is making any art, you do the thing that's just for you. And you make your little decisions. You put the ‘curlylock’ and the ‘mager’ in this book, and in that solo space you’re like ‘this is fantastic’. And then you increasingly give it to more people you know. You talk about it with Hanna, and then you explain, and you come up with other ideas together. And then all of a sudden, you end up with ‘the scrawny one’ and ‘the curly-locked man’, and then the book just goes into the world. And similarly to what we were talking about earlier, it’s this private encounter with a text that is so unique to you as a reader, that's really exciting. But it’s this increasingly letting go of things.
And that's why book clubs are so fun because then you bring all your personal, your individual experience, your individual interpretations into a space where they can encounter each other and all their similarities and differences. I think the process is the same for anyone who's putting anything into the world, or anytime we meet in a space of ideas, right?
Claudia Marzollo
Absolutely. So this also takes us to another question that we had. Hanna wrote a background to a chapter for Caesaria, and she said that ‘(...) this girl seemed to have always existed inside me: her girlhood, deeply conditioned by patriarchal society, had things to tell me about my own, and I dare say to many women's, girlhood. So, during the writing process, I often found myself thinking that I was working on a strange type of memoir. That is, an excavation of an inner world of collective memory - shared to an extent, I think, by all women.’ And I was wondering if, by translating this book, you felt like you were sort of adding to this collective memory, or adding a layer of your own experience to this.
Saskia Vogel
Maybe in the sense of, it's the interpretation that's filtered through how I've experienced and perceived the world. But I don't think that. There's an element of that interpretation that will be unique to me, because where do bodies of language come from, right? Sometimes I really wish I hadn't left the UK, because I feel this like missing this chunk of linguistic flexibility that I feel like I would have retained had I not been living in Germany for the past 10 years.
I think more as a whole, I think I've been really lucky with the books that I've gotten to translate, and the books that I've really advocated for, or in the way that the way Swedish publishing and foreign rights sales are structured: the people matchmaking translators with projects, which happens when an agent who's dealing with foreign rights will find a translator who they think will be suited to a certain text. And I think those agents got a sense of me as being good for certain kind of books. If you look at my body of work, Caesaria and Strega, they fit right in. Karolina Ramqvist fits. Lina Wolff.. and then you see, I guess, what my concerns are in the world. And I feel really lucky that it's happened that way.
So in that sense, in my body of work as a whole, I feel that's really true. I feel like it's my job to be really flexible and to go beyond what's comfortable for me with texts. And I think that feeling of dread that I feel when I open a book and feel like I'll never be able to translate it is a really nice feeling. I like being pushed. But I picked up a Swedish book, a kind of book that I don't normally read, a big genre thriller. And there's something about this particular writer's language that I don't think I would be good for. I could translate it, but there's somebody who would have a more inherent understanding of the kind of energy for it. If I were a bigger political thriller reader or something, I'd know how to access it, but I'm not. Should I read political thrillers and expand my English in that in that way? Because I'm fairly confident I could do it. Not out of hubris, but just, that’s my job. It’s my job to figure out these things. But it does feel really good to work on a text like Hanna's.
Speaking of the margins, Anna, the editor that I worked with on the translation, there was this one scene where she left a note in the margin that said there's something about the way Hanna is writing about how these two men are looking at each other when Master Valdemar and the doctor interact. Anna wrote ‘I've been wanting to read this kind of description and I haven’t’. That made me feel really excited, also to be able to have carried it through. It’s Hanna’s scene, you know. But those were things we worked on.
In the Guardian review, they quoted this passage about clouds moving together in the sky. And I got this feeling of anxiety because we were working on that particular line at such a late stage. It just wasn’t coming together. There was this need to get the sense of this diffuse, foggy… like you said there are these dark shadows of her knowledge, and her own way of conceiving of things. Getting that right or getting that to actually work in some places… we were really still working on it quite late.
Kate McNamara
Just following up on something you said there, that you could, as part of your job, take on these other works, like these political thrillers. Your body of work feels like it has this thread running through it, and you've become known for a certain type of work. But it must be in part being chosen for these books by the publishing matchmakers, and also because you're specifically choosing these books to translate. So I wanted to ask you about the responsibility you feel being a translator, and what you choose to put out into the world?
Saskia Vogel
Well, it's a mix.
On a material level (and this is shifting because of cost of living, inflation and various other things), but I’ve been able to have a very low cost life, and so I have been able to focus exclusively on literary translation. But I’m realising how emotionally involved I get in my texts. And sometimes I think: oh, I'm going to invent a whole new syntax for this book. And now I think maybe I could just translate something where the language is more straightforward. And so I've been courting a few more of those projects, because I think I need some breathing room. Sometimes. Because I had a really great five years. At the start of my career I noticed that I was starting to get known for, or paired with certain projects from agents. But there were topics beyond contemporary Scandinavian feminist texts, and I do want to expand more. There were some things that I was noticing happening in Swedish culture that I wasn’t seeing represented in the translations in the Anglosphere. So in 2019, or I guess it started in 2017 or 2018, I started shifting my reading practices. I wanted to find works that were reflecting conversations I was hearing happening in Sweden, especially (and this is really germane to my writing as well): who is deemed worthy of care, and which lives are deemed disposable? It is a really, really central question for me. And I think Caesaria, is perfect example of that. Strega, absolutely.
But also, why wasn't I reading anything new that was dealing and contending with Sweden's settler colonial project in the north, which has a very long history. But if those books weren’t coming to me with that strange wave of luck that I had in my career, then I had to go out and find them.
When Aednan came out in 2018, I looked back at the start of the project, and found the email first email I sent. I realised that the book was not being represented by anyone, and thought I guess I have to email the only contact that's provided, which was the head of the publishing house, Sweden's biggest publishing house. So my email was like: Dear head of the publishing house, may I please? And they said, go ahead. And then I felt this obligation that I'd bothered this person at the head of a company to send me an almost 800 page book. And I really felt like I had to not be seen as someone who just wastes people's time, because that's my own shame working for me. And it's the book that I've put the most effort into getting into the world. And I guess you could call it my passion project for the last five or so years.
But there are other books that came from that shift in my reading practice as well: Balsam Karam’s book, for instance. The Johannes Anyuru was more of a coincidence. I don't really know how people make their decisions or why they email me, because Rachel Wilson-Broyles had been translating Johannes Anyuru, and Nichola Smalley translated Ixelles, which just came out now in the US with Two Lines Press. At that time, right around when I was putting together this portfolio for Words Without Borders on underrepresented Swedish language voices, sometime around there Two Lines got in touch with me to translate They Will Drown in Their Mother's Tears. I mean, this nitty gritty background stuff is really just me trying to make sense of things that I don't have answers to. But the point is, Johannes Anyuru was part of that portfolio. Kira Josefsson brought an essay to me by him called Alhambra, which is extraordinary, and it's available online, and it's just amazing. And that's just kind of how that one worked out, but that was part of that shift in my reading practices.
And so now I feel really happy with the body of work, and it feels really meaningful. There's nothing better that I could be doing with my time. And I need a little break. I need a break. And then I had a baby also, and motherhood does change you. Like Balsam Karam’s books — and she speaks about this in this video that she made for Book*hug, who's her Canadian publisher. — she talks about how her fiction does deal with the fact that she lost a child in utero. And I was translating her book and it was totally fine at first. And then, I don't know, my kid was almost three, and I was like, it's actually not fine. This book is devastating. I don't know how to handle moving through this text. Event Horizon another book of hers is coming out with Fitzcarraldo, part of a diptych with The Singularity. Or it's in the same cosmology, I guess. And I just had to stop and cry a lot. I think that's where maybe I should incorporate one or two easier projects, or not easier, just a different tone. So I started translating drama for one of the big theatres in Sweden as a subtitler.. One of the SELTA members is training me up to be able to do that work. And that's really nice, it’s so much fun.
Kate McNamara
I find the idea of subtitling so fascinating: the translation work is going to be so different because of the specificity of how many words you can fit in that space.
Saskia Vogel
And Aednan was fantastic training for that because it's minimalist poetry. So I can do short!
So it's little things like that. I guess if I started revising my translation practices and my reading practices in 2018, now is the time when I feel that I've accomplished kind of what I wanted to do with that shift. And now what this interview is making me realise is that that's what I'm doing now. I’m looking, and revisiting, and shifting…
Claudia Marzollo
We've got time for one last question that we ask everybody in this series. Is there a text about translation that you've read, or a piece of writing in translation, that you gravitate towards when you're translating or that guides your practice?
Saskia Vogel
That Macbeth essay was formative, and it's something that I carry with me constantly. But conceptually, I don't necessarily need to revisit the essay itself. I've reread it enough times for now, I guess, but it has stayed with me.
And Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words did something really big for me. You mentioned that essay that I wrote about Aednan on Words Without Borders, and Lahiri’s book inspired that thinking in a way, because I started to — am I just late to the game? — using metaphors as thinking tools. I'd never really thought through metaphors in this way. Sure, on the page: what's the metaphor for the text, for the story? But metaphor as an actual tool to test an idea. And so working through all these metaphors that she goes through made me ask what thought experiments I can do with different metaphors. So that was really formative.
