Searls actually has three translations coming up (I mistakenly said two yesterday!):
On Reading, a collection of Proust’s thoughts on our favorite subject here at Omnivoracious. (September)
Comedy in a Minor Key, a lost Holocaust novella by German-Jewish resistance hero Hans Keilson. (November)
The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, a Rilke collection that won Searls a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2007. (David R. Godine, October)
He also edited The Journals of Henry David Thoreau: 1837-1861 for NYRB Classics, which comes out in September, as well as a special edition from The Review of Contemporary Fiction on Melville.
Now, here’s a bit from Searls on the art of translation, on paring down Thoreau’s massive journal, and on the apparent lack of American fiction writers who translate:
Amazon.com: You’ve translated from a number of languages–most recently French, German, Dutch, Norwegian. Do you speak all of these languages?
Damion Searls: I know German best and have translated it the most; I speak it pretty comfortably, although no one would mistake me for a native speaker. French I read better than I speak, and Dutch I picked up because it’s halfway between English and German, and because I lived in Amsterdam for a year.
Luckily for me, the Germans translate and publish a much, much wider selection of world literature than we get in the U.S. (or UK), which has helped me to branch out. A publisher asked me to read Jon Fosse’s Norwegian novel Melancholy in a German translation, because they didn’t have anyone who read Norwegian. I told them it was a masterpiece and they should translate and publish it; they decided not to; and I tracked down an old friend, native Norwegian and fluent in English, so we could co-translate it. In the process I picked up enough Norwegian to tackle another Fosse novel on my own. Similarly, the Dutch writer I translate, Nescio, was recommended by a Dutch writer friend, and I could check it out in German before tackling the original.
In general I think poets understand better than prose writers (and editors and readers of prose) that it’s much more important to be a good writer in the language you translate into than fluent in the source language. It’s easy to work with native speakers and consult about difficult words or sentences; it’s hard to write a good sentence, and you can’t get much help with that. What matters is whether the result, the book in English, is as powerful as the original.
Amazon.com: So, in that sense, your work and practice as a writer is crucial to your success as a translator?
DS: Absolutely. If you write an interesting sentence people will want to read it, if not then not, that is the truth.
Amazon.com: Do you find it more intimidating to translate Proust and Rilke or to translate contemporary writers who will be aware of the translation and maybe even be able to read it?
DS: If I was the type to get intimidated I probably wouldn’t be doing any of this, but then I would be missing out on one of my life’s great pleasures. What a joy to be able to write Rilke poems, or Proust sentences! It’s thrilling, not scary, to spend such intense time with great writers.
In any case, I think scholars of dead writers are way more defensive, proprietary, and critical than writers themselves: a Rilke scholar or a Thoreau scholar is much more likely to give me a hard time than Fosse or Handke. I’ve really enjoyed corresponding or talking with the living writers I’ve translated–they have been, without exception, inspiring, generous, and kind.
Amazon.com: Can you give an example of a sentence or scene that you translated recently that you found really exciting, either because it was a challenging puzzle, or because you were able to really capture the feeling, or you just liked the way the words turned out in English?
DS: There are so many! I translate everything I translate because I love it. Half of the Rilke book was a thrill to see turn out so well in English; the tone of the Fosse novel Melancholy came out perfect.
Two specific examples that come to mind are, first, Ingeborg Bachmann’s autobiographical story “Youth in an Austrian Town,” which I retranslated as the appendix to Uwe Johnson’s book about Bachmann, A Trip to Klagenfurt. It literally brings tears to my eyes, the German is so beautiful and the English, I think, gives access to it:
	“Where the city comes to an end, where the excavations are, where the sieves are full of debris and the sand has ceased to sing, you can sit down for a moment and take your head in your hands. That’s when you know that everything was as it was, that everything is as it is, and you give up trying to find a reason for everything. For there is no wand to touch you, no transformation….”
The second piece that comes to mind is Raoul Hausmann’s memoir “Kurt Schwitters and I Write an Opera at the Movies” (which came out in Brick magazine), with lots of Dadaist wordplay that was a blast to get into English. When Schwitters agrees to accompany Hausmann and his wives to the movie, “So ist es beschlossen und schliesst die Türe, durch die sie fortgehen, wie ein Schlüssel das Schloss.” My translation: “So it is decided and sided and shuts the doors they go out through like a shut-in shutting the shutters.”
Amazon.com: The Hans Keilson project seems fascinating. And he’s still alive? Did you get to talk to him?
DS: Yes, Keilson turns 100 this December! I’m really looking forward to writing to him, but I haven’t gotten in touch with him yet. He is still winning and accepting prizes so as far as I know he’s in good health. And he really is a hero: the last Jewish writer published by Fischer in Germany before the new race laws, a resistance doctor in The Netherlands during WWII, he founded the first organization for post-traumatic Jewish children after the war, and worked as a psychologist for it for decades, etc. Comedy in a Minor Key is like a tight thriller version of Anne Frank, and it’s never been translated before.
Amazon.com: Thoreau’s journal was a huge project–from the description it sounds like you took 7,000 pages down to a more digestible 700. How did that process work? How does editing fit into your mix of literary projects?
DS: It did turn out to be massive, but wonderful. Thoreau is a great writer, and I read about 250 pages a day for five weeks in Lisbon in the summer of 2006, under the jacarandas, overlooking the Tagus, a noble river.
It fits into my other projects, I think, by being readerly. I wanted to share this book with a wider audience (like when I translate), and the process was basically just reading, attentive to the parts I liked, and putting check marks, question marks, or Xs in the margin, then repeating until it was short enough.
Amazon.com: You mentioned earlier [in Part I, answer to third question] that many great writers outside of the English-speaking world have also been translators. Why do you think so few writers in the English-speaking world translate? (Poets do, but the only fiction writer/translator I can think of is Auster. There must be others.)
DS: There are a handful of others in English–Lydia Davis; Jonathan Franzen; Anne Carson, who’s a poet but so is Paul Auster; I’m sure there are others I’m not thinking of–but not many. I’m not sure why. It must somehow go together with the MFA phenomenon, which is largely American.
Amazon.com: Why do you say it goes together with the MFA phenomenon–that MFA programs are too focused on self-expression or too strictly on poetry, fiction, etc.?
DS: Something like that. My last story in What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going is sort of about this, right?, the leonine instructor and his emphasis on everyone’s unique special voice, vs. J, the character who wants to study, copy, and rewrite. But I don’t really want to get into the debate about MFA programs. They’re fine for some people but I always felt they were wrong for me, that I needed to read more and translate and try to learn to write on my own.
Thanks again, Damion!
To read more about Damion Searls and his literary projects, you can visit his website.–Heidi
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