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Why are you so cold-hearted?
19 April 2023
published in Issue Three
published in Issue Three
〖 Found in translation 〗
Found in translation
We asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader of yours has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
My first novel, Finna sig, starts in a hospital with a new mother. The protagonist Anna and her husband Jens sort of ironically describe a little Swedish flag on the tray they receive with their hospital food. Their annoyance is focused on this banal symbol. At a literary festival in Germany, a moderator asked me why, in that idyllic space of the hospital, my main character couldn’t find any joy. When I traveled with my books to Serbia, readers responded with, « I can’t believe this is the way you bring children into the world in Sweden. It’s so luxurious! » They came up to me and told me they had been in a ward with fourteen or fifteen other people, and showed me pictures of their hospital food on their phones.
A question I get asked a lot in all the countries I’ve been translated in is: Why are you so cold-hearted? I’m not cold-hearted. I believe that the only way to feel real empathy for another human being is to accept their flaws. In one of my books I tried to make the reader feel very, very close to a father who ends up being abusive to his children.
In Sweden, I’m often read as quite a political writer, whether it’s as a feminist or a Marxist. But what I try to do is paint these very detailed portraits of people, like oil paintings. I would love for a translation to be received by an audience that exactly understands that. I think maybe all writers want someone to read them and be like « Ah, I see what you did here, paraphrasing Histoire d’O. — the influence of that French classic sadomasochistic masterpiece in your writing is quite obvious! » But so far I haven’t had anyone say that to me. Maybe if I was translated into French?
Agnes Lidbeck is a Swedish novelist and poet. Her work has been translated into Polish, Serbian, Danish, and Norwegian. In the fall of 2023, she’ll publish a dystopian thriller-slash-relationship novel set in a post-fascist Sweden.
Found in translation
The reader will find, seeded throughout Issue Three, some translation tales from writers in Arabic, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish, finding their way into German, Greek, Italian, Serbian, English and more. These tales can be filed with (also in this issue) Oksana Forostyna’s parsing of « untranslatable » Ukrainian humor and with Alexander Wells’s defense of Denglisch (and Berlinglisch, and Globish).
Translation, as a topic, tends to invite polemic or lamentation. Does the ERB have a stance? Not really. Our premise is that translation finds as much as it loses. The ERB’s editorial assistants, Nienke Groskamp and Job Wester, asked nine writers not what was lost but what was found in translation, as a text is given new surfaces and new depths. What’s the rightest or wrongest or closest or strangest thing that a reader has found in a new language? What’s something you wish would be found?
An inquiry into varieties of translational experience became a series of reflections on artful error and unexpected intimacy
☞ Mona Kareem: « Bidoon » ➞ « Bedouin »
☞ Carlos Fonseca: « Para Ati » ➞ « Para ti »
☞ Agnes Lidbeck: Why are you so cold-hearted?
☞ Defne Suman: Borrowed time is borrowed money
☞ Hans von Trotha: Judge a book by its covers
☞ Iman Mersal: Panties of the people
☞ Krisztina Tóth: « droid » ➞ « druid »
☞ Lavinia Braniște: Overalls & eyeglasses
☞ Lydia Sandgren: Read between the stripes
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