From 2015–2017, I was Translator in Residence at the Austrian Cultural Forum London. As part of this residency, I organized a series of public events, including a reading and conversation evening in February 2016 on the theme of poetic prose with British author Joanna Walsh and the Austrian writer Carolina Schutti, whose work I admired. I translated a chapter of Carolina’s novella Eulen fliegen lautlos (Owls fly silently) to be read at the event and chaired the discussion between Joanna and Carolina—who had both flown through a snowstorm to get to London. We stayed in touch over the years, and then in April 2021, Carolina invited me to be part of a two-way translation and writing project. The project resulted in the book Dust Sucker: a long poem I had written alongside Carolina’s German translation, published by Makina Books in the UK in January 2023 (soon to have a second printing!). Excerpts from both our translations were also featured in Modern Poetry in Translation and manuskripte. Here we talk about the project and poetry translation, among other things. –Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja (JC): It was a lovely surprise to receive your email—a couple of years ago now!—inviting me to be part of a writing and translating partnership with you. What made you want to do this project initially?

Carolina Schutti (SC): The project was a stroke of luck: there was a call for proposals in Austria looking for international literary tandems (“literary dialogues”). I wanted to take the opportunity to realize a somewhat different kind of translation project that I had been dreaming of for a long time: two writers first write individually on the same topic, then translate each other’s texts and finally create a link between the texts by writing bilingual poems together . . .

And I came across you because I was impressed by our meeting in London, when you translated part of my poetic novella Owls Fly Silently. You’re also a musician, translator, and poet, and you also write prose—an ideal mix, I’d say!

Was it the first time you were part of such an international project?

JC: I was really moved when you invited me to be part of the dialogue, both by how you had remembered the event at the Austrian Cultural Forum and my translation, and by the kind of project you were proposing: what could be more of a meaningful and collaborative literary exchange than translating and merging writing with another writer-translator?

I had previously taken part in a different but not unrelated kind of project: the European Poetry Festival in the UK, organized by the British poet S. J. Fowler, who has been running cross-cultural poetry events for years under the moniker “The Enemies Project.” For four years, S. J. “Steven” Fowler had invited me to be part of the European Poetry Festival, where each year, I was asked to collaborate with another writer from abroad (Ulrike Ulrich, Bas Kwakman, Daniel Falb, Michelle Steinbeck). And in most cases, the poets who were paired had not met each other before. I have to thank Steven for preparing me and making me excited for this kind of collaboration.

If I’m right, you hadn’t translated poetry before? Did you feel confident, nervous, curious, or something else at the prospect? And were there any surprises for you?

CS: I wasn’t nervous, but more curious. I don’t work as a professional translator, but I am often abroad with my books and am naturally in close contact with the—mostly female—translators of my books. In a way, that also gave me courage, because even professionals ask for clarifications from their authors if they don’t understand very specific expressions.

The curiosity about how I could make your texts sound in my mother tongue, coupled with the knowledge that there was an almost one hundred percent probability that there would be one or two misunderstandings during the translation process, has influenced my relationship to language(s). Poetry, in particular, thrives on ambiguity, on interpretation and (mis)interpretation; that is its very essence and distinguishes it from everyday language. With this project, I have learned that imperfection can be a motor for creativity. And, of course, the whole thing was supported by the knowledge that we could exchange ideas, that we could ask questions, revise, and change—translation is not brain surgery after all.

Another thing that struck me was our shared experience in terms of existing between cultures and between languages—you often address your Maltese background in your poems. Do you think that your biography influences your writing or your translating?

JC: What I like about mistranslations, and which some people might not consider, is that often they come about through caring too much about a text—overthinking something or seeing a connection with another part of the text where there isn’t one. I’m teaching a poetry workshop at the moment, and it still amazes me how many interpretations and connections come out of eight different people reading the same small poem and the connections that are made that I or the rest of the group hadn’t found.

This is why my biography and all translators’ biographies affect their translations: because we’re individuals with different experiences, who have read and watched and listened to a range of things, which result in wildly or subtly different interpretations of the texts we then translate with the personal chest of words we reach for almost without thinking, or particular words we research and find often by chance and get excited about.

Yes, for me personally, my biography, including everything I’ve read and translated and all the people I’ve ever known and my background and upbringing, is in my writing. It’s material I translate into my fiction, poetry, essays, hybrid life writing. If I’m writing nonfiction, I also try and sound like myself and not adopt an elevated register.

CS: I think that language is the key to our identity, and it might be a key to our emotions. It is more than just vocabulary and grammar, language is always also a composition of sounds. Translating literature, on the other hand, is and remains magical. It is well-known that in good literary works, it is not necessarily the words that make the magic and the art, but the space between them. This space is filled with images and feelings, which is the only reason why we read. Reading itself is already a form of translation, simple written characters are translated into spoken words, which in turn are translated into an image or a movie that runs in front of our inner eye and allows us to immerse ourselves and participate in the narrative. The more the story “touches” us, the longer we will remember it.

JC: I often paraphrase John Berger’s idea that we have to go behind words when translating, go to the place where the words came from—the image, the impulse, the message—and then come forward with the translation. Words as placeholders for meaning. Jeremy Tiang has also said we as translators translate “vibes,” and reading, as you say, can be ultimately understood as a dynamic sequence of impressions. Reading requires interpretation, and you can often tell when reading something if the author is entrusting you with some space to interpret their work, or if they don’t want to leave anything to chance.

Translation is magical, but it’s also a trust exercise. Between translator and author, publisher and translator, reader and translator. Some people are suspicious about translation even today, like it’s a deceptive magic trick. Even knowing a foreign language in the UK, for instance, is seen as something suspicious, even unpatriotic. It was recently reported—though it’s a long-known practice—that the UK government asks for a suspect’s “main language” when investigating people under their shapeshifting definition of extremism, denying bi- or multilingual identity and placing a trap to declare someone unBritish and Other.

CS: In a world where more people than ever are forced to leave their homelands, language and memories are often the only things they can take with them. But the mother tongue is usually not desired in the destination countries: these people are told to adapt, to speak the language of the destination country as quickly as possible, to make themselves “useful.” A productive body is expected, but the fact that a person is more than just a worker is all too often pushed into the background and leads to conflict.

Globalization, as we know today, leads to isolation. We humans are social beings who need our biotope in order to flourish. Voluntary, and even more so forced, changes of location and culture tear us away from our roots. In my opinion and experience, a rootstock can recover well if it is carefully dug up and transplanted. If, on the other hand, the plant is forcibly uprooted, it never grows properly again elsewhere and withers away.

Apart from migration, the core issue of the twenty-first century, alongside climate change, is the fact that even people who remain in their place of birth are not per se spared the threat to their (linguistic and cultural) identity. Language bans, the degradation of individual languages and dialects, and the displacement of languages through imposed “educational languages” are marginal issues in our collective consciousness, displaced by wars, natural disasters, and inhumane repression. But the suppression of languages is a serious warning that societies and cultures—and therefore people—are unwanted and under threat.

JC: My brother and I were brought up only with English, though our dad is Maltese and our mum was Anglo-Irish. I know hardly anything about my Irish grandmother apart from the fact that she moved from Ireland to England as a teenager to become a maid. When my dad moved to the UK from Malta in the mid-1970s to find work, he spoke Maltese and Italian and already spoke English due to Malta having been a British colony (the British made a concerted effort to replace Italian with English). My dad wanted to assimilate and considered himself British from day one, and he rarely spoke Maltese unless he was with our immediate relatives—he thought it would be “confusing” for us to speak Maltese as a family.

The language was lost, but this absence is why I started being interested in languages, French and then German, with German being the one I grew most passionate about. I’m often asked—even last week—why I don’t just learn and translate from Maltese. I’ve tried, but it’s most akin to Arabic, very different from German, and I’ve realized there’s also a kind of emotional block there. Instead, I’ve put my energy into publishing Maltese literature with Kat Storace through Praspar Press, and mentoring Kat to play a small part in helping her become a leading translator of Maltese literature. What you say speaks to how much it feels like a choice that no one else has endeavored to publish Maltese literature, it’s a passive/active erasure and indeed connected to climate crisis, which I speculate on in my novel Vehicle.

Where there’s no translation, there’s exclusion, presumption, narrative dominance from without, a speaking for others.

CS: Language influences our thoughts and therefore also our actions, and this richness must be preserved at all costs. Translation is the key to this: by taking on a work, translators are paying homage to a foreign language and culture. Translation is therefore not only about magic, but also about respect and appreciation.

JC: Writing and translating poetry together with someone else is a great reminder that language can be used to inform, bring clarity, or go toward the definition or legacy of a culture or even a person, but also, and more vitally, to transfer emotion, inklings, visions, and an imprint of someone else’s cloistered consciousness. I appreciate your translation of my poem Dust Sucker into German, and the chance to translate your poem into English, so much, Carolina.

Read an excerpt from Schutti and Calleja’s joint project:
From “your eyes might be open, they might be closed” by Carolina Schutti, translated by Jen Calleja

if not the future then the memory
twins (evidently) so tell me (finally)
            what do you see
            when you close your eyes: –
            – it was warm, maybe it was raining too, if it was, then we were huddling under the narrow eaves, if it wasn’t, we were spread out over the asphalt forecourt while we listened. One person always did the talking. How to distinguish stars from planets, from satellites, because some flicker and others never do and still others move, but not like a meteorite would, because it burns up after a short time, and if what is moving in the sky is a comet, then it has a tail or a greenish tinge to it or it just looks less technical, then you soon realise, a very special feeling grips you, a huge feeling, a very fulfilling one, you feel at one with the cosmos, you suddenly know that there’s something there and you mustn’t fear misfortune, no, on the contrary, the comet as a symbol was snatched from the forces of darkness a long time ago, and then someone laughs and the speaker is offended and asks if he can get anyone pizza, and then people rummage in their trouser pockets and put together what they find in solidarity, those whose pockets are full will empty them and anyone that has nothing will also get something, of course, and while you wait, someone else takes over and reminds you that you shouldn’t forget why you are there, why you are here. Keep watch in front of this building, day and night, at least until winter, but then the situation will absolutely have changed, he measured again, the main crack is now 123 millimeters and he telephones the central office, the maximum strength today was 2.3 on the Richter scale, so we were right, all of us!, our observations were correct, and while he is talking, the pizza comes and we tell whoever went to get it that he didn’t miss anything, and when he looks skeptical, we repeat the number, 123 millimeters, and then he says it was 123 millimeters yesterday and then we say, you see, you haven’t missed anything, nothing at all, but he doesn’t seem to believe us, you’ve got something! There was something! And he says that he doesn’t think that’s fair, and we try to talk him down and thank him for the pizza and eat and while we eat we connect our tailbones to the earth’s interior and nobody admits it, but everyone wants to be the first to feel when the earth finally shakes and the crack grows and the earth keeps shaking and does what needs to be done