“This little art: the each time uniquely relational, lived-out practice of it.”—Kate Briggs

(Translator 1) Q: “If translation is a relationship, what kind of relationship is it?”

(Translator 2) A: “If translation is a relationship, I’d rather be single.”

***

I started writing about translation and my place within it as an attempt to answer a question (a complaint, perhaps): why, despite the many and varied aspects of it I find enjoyable—joyful, even—was I also finding it increasingly challenging to engage with? And what was it about this industry, with its low pay, its unpredictable working conditions, that drew me to it, and kept me there? Did it have something to do with my personality, my character, my upbringing?

Other translators have written well about the problematic aspects of the industry—its precarity, its shockingly low remuneration, its lack of racial and class diversity, its tendency to be self-congratulatory about its own progressiveness while not, in fact, being even half as progressive as it might be (see Jen Calleja and Sophie Collins, Nicholas Glastonbury, Kaiama L. Glover, Anton Hur, Mona Kareem, and Corine Tachtiris for more on these and other issues). The starting point for me, however, was not born solely of a structural analysis of the industry (although there are aspects that I strongly suspect are not unique to me and my circumstances), but rather a heavily personal approach. Structural analyses are of course crucial, and some of what I’m thinking through can, I hope, stand to be broadened out to ask questions about why, for example, literary translation (at least in the anglosphere) seems to be overwhelmingly performed by women. But originally, my exploration came out of a pandemic-triggered mode of questioning. I was alone, often lonely, and worried about money and health, and I started (over-)thinking about lots of things, including how I ended up and remained in a “job” (my therapist always tells me off whenever I make these scare quotes with my fingers in real life) that afforded me little to no protection or ability to save or plan for the future, and what felt, once I reached my late thirties, like very few obvious opportunities for career advancement.

Some of the concerns I was turning over in my mind to do with money and isolation were connected to the fact of being single—and thus largely physically and financially alone—during this terrifying global event. These two questions (How did I end up here, with no partner I could love, or who could provide me with emotional support in tough times, or simply help out with rent and bills? And how did I end up here, without a career that offered me much money to pay my rent, and which felt increasingly like it was providing only intermittent emotional rewards?) began to seem less and less separate, and more like two sides of the same conundrum. (It’s probably not a coincidence that, at around this time, I began reading a lot about psychotherapy, listening to podcasts about Jungian psychoanalysis, and generally attempting to turn inward.)

Was I drawn to literary translation in the same way I had been drawn to emotionally unavailable partners, partners who at first seemed to tap into something passionate and life-affirming within me, but who ended up withdrawing, or revealing hitherto unseen sides of themselves that were anathema to what I thought I was looking for? Was the roller-coaster ride of literary translation—the seductive literary language! The glitzy events! The trips abroad! The lovely fellow translators, many of whom are firm friends as well as colleagues, and without whom I cannot now imagine my life! Followed by the frequently bad faith negotiations, the unpaid invoices, the “beauty contests” and prize ceremonies that highlight who has temporarily won the tastiest, most fat-laden crumbs from an increasingly small cake—was this ride somehow mirroring a certain kind of relational history, in which I seesawed giddily between intense, ill-advised pair-bonding and then scales-from-the-eyes crashes into dark realizations about who I had gotten involved with?

Clearly, I was also in a questioning mode about something far more personal than my choice of career, and these two questions—why me and translation? why me and (certain) romantic partners? —were merged almost from the very beginning of this inquiry, in the form of the multiple green and pink Post-it notes that started to fill the large corkboard in my study sometime before the first lockdown in the UK. More and more, in certain areas of my professional life—and in others’, too, I started to sense, in tidbits gleaned from other translators, either in private conversations or in very public statements about their disenchantment with the industry—I was recognizing a particular feeling of being denigrated or disrespected or treated badly or placed in a position of submission (or choosing to place myself there), a feeling that arose in a professional context, yet reminded me of a personal situation.

A question therapists often ask is, “Is that a familiar feeling?” In other words, does that difficult relationship with your boss take you back on a visceral level to the relationship you had with your father, or to some other early, influential intimate relationship? If we can pinpoint this connection, the idea goes, then we’re halfway toward understanding ourselves, toward understanding how early models of relational dynamics can often come to predict how we will (re-)enact other key relationships later in life, and thus perhaps (if we want, if we are able) to change our behavior.

In her book Fifty Sounds, the translator and writer Polly Barton talks of finding in attachment theory a singularly helpful lens for viewing life and her relationship to Japan. Barton uses the term “ambivalent attachment,” an alternative to “anxious,” and describes, referencing John Bowlby, the so-called father of attachment theory, how “the two insecure archetypes are drawn magnetically to each other” and can “play out the endless dance of explosion and recoil along the brink of terror.” After reading further into attachment theory, she details a thought that has occurred to her before but which is now more clearly visible through this new lens: the idea that, “if Japan was a person, it would be male, and it would be avoidant,” with hidden feelings “imbued with a smoldering inner richness [ . . . ] My default assumption [ . . . ] was that he was waiting for someone to come along and draw out those bright insides, and that I was the person who had been born for that task.” Although, as she points out, Japan is a nation and so has neither sex nor attachment style, Barton nevertheless seems to find this lens both revealing and comforting.

What if translation were a person? If it were, then for me it would be male, and it would most definitely be avoidant.  

Attachment theory was formulated by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby and the developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, and initially looked at how children need to develop a relationship with a primary caregiver (often a mother) in order to survive and develop normally. According to Bowlby and Ainsworth, children also require a so-called “secure base,” provided by this caregiver, to explore from and return to, which is what leads to them becoming secure. The theory was developed in part from the results of a study called the “strange situation” experiment, developed by Ainsworth and involving a mother (it was always mothers in these early experiments) leaving her child to play with toys for a short while, first in the presence of a stranger, then on their own, and then again in the mother’s presence. The theory holds that, if a caregiver cannot provide a secure base because they are, for instance, emotionally or physically abusive, or neurotic, absent, or chaotic in some way, then the child risks becoming either anxious, clinging to the mother and refusing to leave her side and play on their own; or avoidant, ignoring the mother because they have learned that their needs will not be met, and perhaps becoming worryingly self-sufficient at an early age. If the caregiver, meanwhile, is able to provide this secure base, then the child is likely to become a secure child: happy to go off and play (and thus learn and develop) on their own, while also being comfortable returning to the secure base of the mother when necessary. Attachment researchers later expanded the theory to explore how people formed romantic and other bonds as adults.

Finding it as revealing as Barton does, I returned to the lens of attachment again and again over the pandemic and beyond, as a way to make sense of certain romantic and professional life events. I am interested in seeing how far it can be taken as a way to ask or to frame questions about translation: both about the practice itself, but also about my (our?) place within the industry. Two questions, or moods, that seem to come up a lot when I teach translation or speak with practitioners at the start of their careers, are those of permission and movement: Has this translation moved too far away from the original? Is this choice too close to the Spanish? How far am I allowed to go? Such questions speak to fixed ideas and worries many of us have about translation as a practice or a field, about translations themselves, about so-called original writing, and about our roles and responsibilities as translators. If you happen to be inclined to read any translation theory at all, you might feel that these are the same age-old questions that scholars of translation have been posing forever: domestication or foreignization? Dynamic or functional equivalence? I am less interested in whether these ideas of permission and movement might mirror previously outlined theories and more in how, by wording them that way and examining them through the psychotherapeutic lens of attachment theory, we might learn something about our practice, or at least learn to ask different questions of it.

What if we were to think about permission and movement as reflecting the idea that the translator is in some kind of relationship with the text(s), or, relatedly, a relationship with the industry of literary translation, and that the eventual quality or nature of the translation tells us something about that relationship—whether it is positive or negative, or, in the terms used by psychologists who study attachment theory, secure or insecure?

My proposition, my provocation, is that translations, or translators, can be secure or insecure.

I propose that, if we are anxious as translators, then we are keen to play up the importance of the source text; we cleave too closely to it, maybe because we have not yet developed the confidence, the sense of security, that allows us to move away from the Spanish, the Croatian, the Urdu, and play in our own language. We hold it in higher regard, perhaps, than our own abilities, than the ability of the not-yet-created translation. We find dictionary definitions comforting, if a little restrictive, like the overprotective arms of a mother or a father, and we want to ensure that our work clearly demonstrates to any potential readers that we have understood the original, that we are not frauds, that we know what we are doing.

I propose that, if we are avoidant, we might pay too little heed to the source text: such is our extreme self-reliance (overconfidence? Hubris? See: celebrity poets or playwrights who are commissioned to “translate” a classic text written in a language they do not speak, as Calleja and Collins describe) that we make choices almost entirely to do with the translating language and our own poetics, not allowing the source text to bend and shape our translation, as, conversely, in a secure partnership, each lover would allow the other to affect them—to translate them—profoundly.

And meanwhile, if we are secure as translators, I propose that we are able to read and understand the source text, to see and appreciate what it is doing, and then to take a few steps away, like the child in Ainsworth’s experiment, and play on our own in a corner: we pick up a few toys (or tools) from the English language and begin to mess around with them, perhaps stack up a few building blocks in a new configuration not accessible in the original text; maybe we pull the head off a Barbie and add on the head from a dinosaur toy, or maybe we just cut her hair into a brand-new style, turning her into a punk (my uncle, who in the eighties had an enormous orange mohawk, did this with a set of Barbies once, and I maintain that it was an early source of creative inspiration for me). The point is, we make it our own, all while throwing the occasional loving, respectful glance back at our mother-text, to make sure she is still there, to remind both her and ourselves that this is a relationship built on trust and the belief that the other can cope on their own, even as the bond between the two remains healthy and reciprocal.

***

I felt myself to be keenly in the grip of this feeling, this fear, this worry about permission and movement, when I was working on what would be my first ever commission, the first book I translated “on my own,” Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Fiesta en la madriguera. It is about a young boy who lives with his father, a dangerous, violent drug lord, in a claustrophobic hideout they refer to as “The Palace.” The title literally translates as “Party [or perhaps “feast” or “celebration”] in the warren, or lair, or some kind of hole where an animal lives.” To make things more complicated, madriguera is also slang for a criminal hideout.

In my draft translations, the book was entitled very literally: “Party in the Rabbit Warren,” which I was vaguely unhappy with—not only do we lose the double meaning of madriguera, but the English “party” seems so limited compared to the Spanish “fiesta”, which can mean a house party but can also encompass a religious festival or feast day, and which, to my mind, coupled with the clunky two-word “rabbit warren,” simply didn’t work, and risked sounding like a terrible children’s TV program.

I was nervous and unsure (insecure!) about making a significant change to the title, but luckily I didn’t have to make that decision on my own. It was a solution we came up with as a committee: me; the author; the editor, Sophie Lewis; and the publisher, Stefan Tobler. After much thinking about how the main character’s name, Tochtli, means “rabbit” in Nahuatl, one of Mexico’s indigenous languages (the rabbit also being an animal that reflects the boy’s vulnerable position in relation to his father, Yolcaut, whose name means “rattlesnake”), and about how he lives in a kind of alternative universe that is similar to but far darker and more confusing than the world we know, we ended up calling the book Down the Rabbit Hole in English. Like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tochtli exists in a strange space where the rules aren’t quite what they seem, and where words often don’t mean quite what we—or Tochtli—think they should.

Juan Pablo later told us that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was one of his favorite books and had been on his mind as he wrote;  it was also, I felt, a title that would allow anglophone readers to have an immediate sense of connection with the book: most English-language readers will be aware of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and this new title makes a literary allusion that fits in its new cultural landscape. Juan Pablo, Sophie, and Stefan gave me permission to feel that this was the right kind of movement away from the Spanish, resulting in a secure and playful translation. Crucially, my sense of security came out of a positive relational dynamic; it wasn’t just me figuring something out on my own.

In a more recent example, I have been playing around on my own with a dictionary, with the confidence that those early, positive editing experiences gave me to make bold, secure choices. The phrase below is the opening line of a story from a new collection by another Mexican, Guadalupe Nettel, whose novel La hija única I translated for Fitzcarraldo Editions as Still Born, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.

La infancia no acaba de una vez, como nosotros queríamos cuando éramos niños.

A gloss or literal translation might read: “Childhood does not end as we wanted [it to] when we were children.” De una vez literally means “of one time,” but of course it’s a set phrase and we rarely translate these word-for-word. I look on Wordreference.com for some more definitions and put down a few options; my first draft reads: “Childhood does not end suddenly/all at once/once and for all/suddenly/definitively as we wished it would when we were children.”

There’s nothing wrong with any of these possible translations: they all work, more or less, I think.

But when I explore the Wordreference page for the entry on “de una vez” a little more, I see this: “in one fell swoop.”

Aside from the fact that I’m a sucker for an idiomatic phrase with a nice visual element, I think that maybe I can use this because it speaks to a central element in this piece of writing. The sentence starting “Childhood does not end . . . ” is the opening line of a story that involves an albatross: the narrator witnesses one of these giant birds with the world’s largest wingspan crash-land onto a boat she is on, before eventually taking flight, at first clumsily, then full of grace, leaving everyone on board in awestruck silence. In the rest of the story, she laments that her longtime childhood friend and recent lover has decided to move back to Uruguay after having spent his entire adult life in Mexico, struggling to understand how he can feel his home is elsewhere. Uruguay, which he left as a child during the dictatorship, retains a pull on him, just as the albatross is pulled by its instincts to make astonishingly lengthy migrations, and his choice to leave is a painful reminder for the narrator that the connection she felt to him in childhood is not as strong as the imagined connection he has with his homeland.

So, this phrase, “one fell swoop”—it is suggestive of broad wings grazing the surface of the boat’s deck, or an ice-cream-white gull swooping down to steal your fries. It is birdlike. It could be a description of the albatross in the story suddenly being lifted up by the currents of wind above the boat and soaring over the heads of the protagonists. It fits, to my mind, entirely with the context. The continuation of that opening paragraph also contains brilliant imagery in which childhood itself is personified, made extremely creepy, given human characteristics:

“Childhood does not end in one fell swoop, as we wished it would when we were children. It remains there, crouching silently in our mature, then later wizened bodies, until one fine day, after many years, when we believe that the heavy burden of bitterness and despair we carry has turned us irredeemably into adults, it reappears with the force and speed of a lightning bolt, wounding us with its freshness, its innocence, its unerring dose of naivete, but mostly with the certainty that this really and truly is the last glimpse we will have of it.”

This imagery leads me to feel that if I have the possibility—that I have been given permission—to translate this rather pedestrian phrase, de una vez, by way of a phrase in English that has movement, that suggests a creature, a living thing with agency—one fell swoop—and so this is the right choice: it fits with the tone of the passage, with the sense that it is not only people, but also objects and concepts, that can have an agency of their own. Nettel often creates this sense—I have the advantage here of knowing her work pretty well by this point, and so I know something of the kinds of stylistic tricks she employs. While as translators we often work with—must be comfortable with—un-knowing, it is this kind of knowing that can lead us to make secure choices.

Looking around a little further on my online dictionary, I see some possible alternative translations into Spanish of “in one fell swoop”:

De un golpe [golpe = blow, hit, bang, strike; pang (if emotion)] = something like “in one hard blow”?

De un solo tajo [tajo = cut, slash] = something like “in one sharp cut”?

Perhaps Guadalupe would have chosen to use one of these slightly more violent phrases if there were an overall tone of violence in her text. Perhaps someone back-translating my “in one fell swoop” into Spanish might choose to use “de un golpe” or “de un tajo” in their version. Perhaps.

This is the occasionally aimless exploring, the playing around, the moving away from the (m)other-text, the creative “what-if-ing” that is crucial for making a translation sing and for making it secure (secure as in confident, not as in rigid or held fast), although perhaps it is a mild example. We can move through our dictionaries, looking at all the definitions they give, looking at back-translations to see if they offer potential ideas; we can look at translations into other languages we speak in case they offer a jumping-off point; we can ask our friends, families, colleagues, or random people on social media for suggestions; we can pilfer vocabulary from our favorite books, or we can choose to use a phrase we have just learned and are still savoring, moving it around in our mouths with gleeful pleasure. I recently learned the phrase “cop on” from an Irish friend (it means to get a grip, or pull your socks up), and now am eager to use it in a translation.

How to make this move, though? Or rather, how to feel we have permission to make it? In my and many other translators’ cases, some of the seeds were already there: I have always loved puns, double entendres, and wordplay of all kinds. But I also needed that early-career support and encouragement from the editors and publishers I was lucky enough to work with when I started out: their trust in my abilities, and the relational aspect of the process, even when it looks like you are translating “on your own,” are what gave me permission to trust myself when making certain translation choices. (A parent helps their child to play, sometimes assisting, sometimes stepping back, and knows the child will ultimately be all right, will trust themselves as they move away, toward a new piece of equipment in the playground, toward other children, toward the unknown).

As well as self-trust in our abilities (professional self-esteem?), perhaps we also need, to a certain degree, esteem from society; this might come in the form of financial support. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, if humans want to achieve their highest potential, one aspect of which is engaging in creative activities, they must first have their more basic needs, such as food and shelter, satisfied. I am very fortunate; I have never wanted for food. I do know what rental insecurity feels like, though (another insecure kind of attachment!). Around eighteen months ago, on the first day of a six-day residency in an arts center near my home to focus on writing part of the longer work from which this piece is excerpted, I received the unexpected news that my landlord was selling the house I lived in and that I would have to move out at some unspecified date in the near future. Panicky and unable to focus, I wrote for most of those days about the strange feeling of being lucky enough to have been given a short-term space to write, while having what I had thought of as my more permanent space pulled like a rug from beneath me. Perhaps that shock produced a few good lines of writing; perhaps all it did was make me anxious, unable to play. I found myself in a highly strange situation.

***

This essay is an excerpt from a book for which I received an Arts Council England grant. Although I am yet to develop as structured a writing practice as I would like (it is hard to get used to not having another book to start from, to hold my hand; does writing perhaps require—or engender, even—a more secure attachment style?), the money did something very clear: it signaled esteem from society, and it gave me the ability to set aside clear blocks of time to write without worrying about open-ended speculative work (a surefire way to increase anxiety). It gave me permission to think more carefully about how far I am allowed to go and why, where that permission might come from for me and how it is denied, and whether others, perhaps, aren’t always given that same permission for systemic, structural reasons. It has given me the time to ask questions about the many relational aspects of translation and how they intersect with our own relational behaviors. It has allowed me, for a period of time, to move away and play like a secure child on my own.

“It feels nice,” I tell my therapist when I receive the grant, “to have been entrusted with this money. It feels like recognition, like responsibility, like being seen.”

“Is that a familiar feeling?” she asks.

I think for a minute.