Sought and Found in Translation

My book became someone else’s book this week. A big round of applause, please, for Michaela Pschierer-Barnfather, who has produced Der Infinity-Pool and added a subtitle for good measure – Urlaub im Jetzt. No, I’m not sure what it means either, but it was approved by committee: this British novel was translated by an Austrian, with German and Swiss citizens to moderate. Meanwhile Isabelle Rouault-Röhlich, my French translator, has moved to Barcelona where she’s busy adding Catalan to her already fluent Spanish. If I wasn’t ashamed to be British, I’d have researched European funding for this project. They’re a great team and I’m so grateful to them all. 

When The Infinity Pool (henceforth TIP) was first launched, an Amazon representative got in touch raving about its prospects, and suggesting translations.  As a linguist myself I was intrigued and contacted translator friends who posted the project on bulletin boards. That’s not really the right way to do it, without a budget or any guarantee of the starry authorial universe Amazon implied. All I offered was a very small payment and the uncertain promise of a share of royalties. We committed to try and sell to mainstream publishers first, paying the translators an exit fee if their work wasn’t accepted, and to self publish if that didn’t work. The pluses for the translator were therefore very few, apart from adding 82,000 words of literary work to their CVs. It also gave them a break from the bank statements, tenders, medical records and insurance claims that form the normal daily fare of these talented, creative people (though Michaela was commended for the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation in 2015, and Isabelle has translated a children’s book, so these translators, should you need one, are versatile and come highly recommended).

I was surprised and touched by how many people were keen! I set them the task of translating the first paragraph and a sample page of their own choosing, and ran the  results past German and French mother tongue friends, who voted unanimously for Michaela and Isabelle. The Society of Authors, with much justifiable harrumphing about exploiting translators, helped draw up a contract which improved matters slightly for them. I was chastened, remembering having to put my own day job first when writing the book, and we all became more flexible about dates.

The experience of being translated is a strange one. I speak fluent French, and have a  translation diploma myself, but it’s not my mother tongue. In French I could read and discuss how Isabelle conveyed my meaning. In German I was at Michaela’s mercy, and we had long phone calls and facetime sessions as she meticulously tried to make sense of what I was on about. If there’s one thing this experience has cured me of, it’s multi-claused sentences that dribble on forever – sorry, Michaela and Isabelle! I now have two articulate, sensitive women speaking on my behalf to other communities – it’s a generous and humbling experience. They’ve probably given my naive first novel much more sureness of touch, and I’ve discovered the pleasure of putting my trust in strangers (now friends, I hope).

It’s been quite a journey. German commercial publishers didn’t offer on Der Infinity-Pool (henceforth DIP), though they commented favourably on the translation quality, so we’ve taken the Amazon route. Now Michaela is faced with marketing, the bane of all authors, self published or not. As she began to take that in, she commented she felt “stunned”, but was still generous enough to thank me for “taking her on board for this adventure!” – in her shoes, I’d want to drown me in TIP. As a non German speaker, it’s tricky to help her as much as I’d like. So, Bitte, any of you with German, Austrian, Swiss contacts or who know German speakers anywhere in the world – DIP is available worldwide! Please recommend it, buy it, review it, talk about it, especially to any Hollywood moguls passing through. I can provide electronic copies for review, and paperbacks (probably UK only but try your luck). I honestly feel it’s now more her book than mine, and she has worked so hard. I would love it to at least pay for her to have a holiday!

(Feel free to skip the next paragraph if you don’t read French!)

Et un appel aux amis français! Si vous avez même quelques minutes de liberté cet été vous pourriez aider Isabelle! Nous voudrions des lecteurs pour son texte (une partie ou tout, au choix) pour commenter et pour identifier les diablotins qui s’imposent pour dérouter même les plus professionnels des écrivains et des traducteurs. Je serais éternellement reconnaissante. Vous recevrez des citations dans l’édition finale et éventuellement une copie complémentaire. Je regrette que le budget ne permet pas de paiement supplémentaire, mais vous aurez l’honneur de participer dans mon projet européen. (Constatez-vous mon côté déplorable britannique? – je voudrais un service européen, mais je ne veux pas payer. Mais si un jour le version français devienne bestseller, je vous récompenserai. Enfin, prière de commenter en-dessous si vous pouvez nous assister.)

Now you see why I didn’t translate TIP myself. However in writing that paragraph I learnt a new word I like very much: diablotins! I imagine diablotins as similar to the gnomes in Mrs Weasley’s garden, returning when the translator’s back is turned to play havoc with her prose. One especially persistent diablotin or possibly Maschinenteufel  has been messing with our DIP title page and delaying the paperback, but we have him beat now. They’re Brexit supporters one and all, I’m sure. Do help us chase them away together.

©Jessica Norrie 2018

 

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Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – The Literary Column – Blast Off! -Opening Lines by Jessica Norrie

First lines are the main theme in my Smorgasbord post this week, along with rockets and endings. Let me know your thoughts!

The end is the beginning

In keeping with my new snappy style, I’m allowing myself 999 words max for this post. Most bloggers manage with much less; my problem is, I like wordy writers (Dickens, Balzac, Woolf) and my models have made me wordy myself. I’ve learnt that to write well in a spare elegant style, much as I admire it (Stoner, My name is Lucy Barton), you have to write better than I can. I bury infelicities in my forest of verbiage, but would be rumbled if every word stood out clear from the page. A writer with six hundred plus pages to fill can explore their own meaning aloud. It must be nailed first time in a novella.

What I produce currently is somewhere in between. My beginnings are strongish and longish but not defined enough; they show just enough promise to keep readers on board. My middles are saggy, pushed upright by occasional props (I’m still referring to my books, not my body). My endings just happen, like a learner parking. I’m aware of my writing shortcomings: hence taking a course named “Beginnings and Endings” at Jane Austen‘s house last week, run by Rebecca Smith.

Gentle reader, you may feel I could have chosen a less wordy writer than Austen, but she was a model of economy compared to her predecessors. She packed a universe of meaning into a paragraph or sentence where they had taken pages. She might start with back story (Persuasion) but she was through it in a few pages where other writers of the time needed many chapters. Or she’d start with apologies (for forefronting such poor heroine material, in Northanger Abbey). Other books leap straight into the drama of the situation: money’s tight, so a daughter must be offloaded onto richer relatives (Mansfield Park); five daughters need husbands, two imminently (Pride and Prejudice). Her beginnings are dynamic; reader is faced with situation, situation develops. Characters encounter drawbacks, relief, more drawbacks. The situation of the main characters is resolved and secondary characters illustrate other possibilities. It’s very neat, very satisfying, very tongue in cheek, and produced almost clandestinely. After the breakfast dishes were cleared, and if she didn’t have to entertain younger relations or attend to her mother, Austen would settle in a cramped corner at a tiny table to write her morning pages until the room was needed for lunch.

 

The writing room for us

Austen’s tiny writing corner in the dining room

We had rather more space and time for our writing, in the learning centre or wherever we liked in the flowering garden. We were greeted morning and afternoon with the most hospitable refreshments I’ve known a course provide (RIBA take note, with your measly coffee coupon on your otherwise excellent writing day). We spent the morning considering Austen’s and our beginnings, and our ticket included a entry to the house. If you can’t get there yourself, take a guided tour with my Smorgasbord colleague’s Jane Austen on a Motorbike, and my own slideshow below. Our purpose, though, was to write.

 

A hospitable welcome laid on by volunteers. Thank you!

When I ran teacher training, the session after lunch was known as “the graveyard”. I had to hit the whiteboard running, with my most invigorating material to avoid participants’ yawns and snores. Whether or not Rebecca had that in mind herself, her proposal for the afternoon was dynamite. Simple, but an eye opener for me. “Start with your ending,” she said. “If you know where you’re heading, it’s easier to get there.” And so we wrote our endings. Then we wrote our very final pages, the mood we wanted to leave the reader in. I hadn’t been listening, and wrote the final ending before the main ending (do keep up at the back). But even doing that the wrong way round proved her point: to plod along writing your narrative according to its chronological order may well be what makes it sag. Like dragging your feet on a long walk, when the pub you were hoping to reach for lunch is always beyond the next hill and when you do get there, they’ve finished serving food.

I’ve been having a blip about blogging. Writing a weekly post, however enjoyable and stimulating, threatens to scupper Novel 4 as it did Novel 3 . I mentioned this and Rebecca commented: “Yes, blogging uses a lot of psychic energy.” Psychic energy! That’s why I’m limiting the length of these posts henceforth. Psychic energy is just what Novel 4 needs. That was her first tip. Her second, about endings, unleashed mine.

I hadn’t known how Novel 4 would finish, until then. Ultimately I may make the end that revealed itself to me on the course a late climactic point and dream up an even more spectacular ending, but for now it gives me a destination. For an author daunted by planning, this was such a supportive gift. Thank you, Rebecca and volunteer hosts; thank you, other course participants, for your comments and thank you to those who read your  work – images of waves at sea stay with me in particular. I wish you all good luck, and many gentle readers.

(Here originally endeth this post. But by pure coincidence I’ve see the daughter of an ex teaching colleague has just published a Graphic Revision guide to Pride and Prejudice. So now it endeth with a plug for that. Who knew you could graphically revise JA?)

 

 

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©Jessica Norrie 2018

Hay ho, Hay ho, it’s off to words we go…

Follow the hay…

…to the best book festival ever!

Despite not being all that bloggered about posting at the moment, I couldn’t miss the chance for the puns Hay Festival makes possible. Friends nearby had often said: Hay, why don’t you come along? I only went for Tuesday, not the full ten days, and my introduction is more pictures than words, but I hope you catch my Hay fever. This year I was checking out how it all worked, and could only get tickets for one of the three writers I’d have liked to see. Rose Tremain obliged, but Philip Pullman and Margaret Atwood were sold out long before I got my act together. So we only went to one formal activity, but there was much else to entertain us.

The programme for tomorrow

Hay map shop

Hay-on-Wye itself, permanent population only 1500, has over two dozen bookshops, down from its Hayday but still impressive. Some are now antique shops, and I also diverted into several stylish new and secondhand clothes shops, a  café for Hereford apple cake and an outdoor food market for falafel salad washed down by (strong!) local cider. All accompanied by the classiest of classical guitar buskers…

Sustainable cutlery at the food stalls

I want that coat!

A town with a bookshop for every 62.5 people is my kind of town. We especially enjoyed  Rose’s Books, where we pounced with delight on affectionately remembered – and long forgotten – gems from our childhoods and giggled over what our grandparents used to read. Remember the Chalet School Girls? Rose has them, along with every Ladybird book you could think of, Rupert and Tin-Tin, William and Jennings, Victorian morality tales, sixties psychedelic picture books and Puffins flying everywhere. Murder and Mayhem, a branch of Addyman‘s, offers a sleuth’s day out, and Richard Booth‘s famous shop includes a cinema.

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After browsing, tasting and trying we walked the half mile to the Festival site. There’s a shuttle bus, but then you’d miss the haphazard, inventive enterprise of people who live along the route. Almost every front garden had been turned into a miniature car boot sale, a home-made food stall, a face painter, portrait artist, vintage clothing pop up rail or a purveyor of free range eggs complete with clucking hens to prove the provenance. It was (or seemed) anarchic and I can’t imagine the authorities allowing it in London, but good for these citizens. I hope they made Hay.

The festival site, guarded by two jovial armed police (in honour of Chelsea Clinton perhaps? Surely not still for Salman Rushdie?)  was crowded with all ages but fewer races than I’d have liked to see. First things first: the portaloos, with real wooden doors, were the best I’ve seen at an outdoor festival. The bookshop and signing centre, in a vast tent, was humid and uncomfortable with criss-crossing queues, so I left and found more clothes shops selling natural fabrics and one-off designs. There’s also jewellery, cider, wine, cheese…it’s fair to say this is not exclusively a book festival. The best tent was a gallery of book illustrators’ prints, with Jackie Morris painting away to demonstrate her technique while discussing her work, including her collaboration with Robert Macfarlane on The Lost Words. I didn’t explore the scribblers’ tent, the Oxfam tent or the many activities for children – I’m sure I missed a lot.

The book illustrators’ gallery

But one can only digest so much and we had come for Rose Tremain. She was talking in the vast, impersonal Tata area about her memoir of damaged childhood, Scenes from a Vanished Life. Goodness, this was brave. Obviously, she’s a professional, clearly she knew what she’d written and the questions she would be asked. Nonetheless, this must have been like having therapy in front of thousands of people. She was clear, succinct, careful to say exactly what she meant, and the cold calmness of her delivery made the content all the more moving. As she said, her book started as a personal memoir for family and friends only. But when she perceived how emotionally they reacted, she realised she’d stepped into a novelist’s dream. “It’s every writer’s ambition to move people, and I’d moved them so much I had to widen the book out.” I’d been regretting not also booking to see Maggie O’Farrell earlier that day, talking about the seventeen ways she’s escaped death, but I’m not sure I could have coped with the intensity of both. A little goes a long Hay…

Anyway, here are the holiday snaps. I suspect Hay is a very personal experience which affects everyone a different way. I’ll certainly go back for more next year – and perhaps also when the festival is not on, just to enjoy the town and and the beautiful country around it. Because even the car park was scenic and I could harvest the most multicoloured silk scarf in the world, from the shop opposite the alleyway from the castle…

©Jessica Norrie 2018