Translator, Indeed

"She spends evenings reading her favorite book, the Latvian-English dictionary."

This is how my host father, Edgars, once introduced me to a visitor as we sat around the tidy kitchen table in the apartment in Riga. He was referring to a habit I had of pulling out the dictionary after dinner while my host sister Ilze watched "Santa Barbara." I'd leaf through the thin pages, wiping apple tart from the corners of my mouth, and search for different expressions using the word gan, "indeed."

Viņš nāks gan. He is sure to come.
Es gan nezinu... I really don't know...
Gan tu redzēsi. You'll see.

I'm sure that they thought I was the most boring American teenager ever to set foot in Latvia. Apart from the time I stayed out all night, watching boys drink in a house on stilts, boys who threw old kopeks at my Doc Martens and tried to burn holes in my stockings. But that's a side they never saw. They knew me as the girl who was studious and cordial, the girl who learned Latvian so fast, the girl whose favorite book was the Latvian-English Dictionary.

My host mother Esmeralda understood my love for words, and on subsequent visits back to Riga, she gave me books, first of poetry, then of short fiction. "Read this," she would say. And I would read it, slowly savoring the words that were first foreign, then became more familiar.

Then I started to write out these words, these sentences in English. Pull them from one side to the other, roughly jostle them into place in their new language, putting all that time spent reading the dictionary to good use.

I never thought I'd become a translator. I'm still not a translator. But I've tried.

Translation is an odd kettle of fish - a hybrid of poetry and problem-solving. I loved both when I was little - assembling radios from kits in order to hear public radio broadcasts of plays - so it should make sense to me that I would have that drive in me. But I still wish I were better at it, more adept at stringing together someone else's words, swapping a style in one tongue for something approximate in another. I want to be better at it, if only so that I might champion the cause of getting more Latvian fiction published in English.

A list recently appeared in New York Magazine, a list of untranslated works that deserve to be translated. Latvian fiction never appears on these lists (apart from this one), but I'd like it to.

If I had my druthers (an expression I'd like to bring back into common usage), I'd add these to the list:

Andra Neiburga - Stum Stum (Push Push)
This is the writer every Latvian translator wants to translate, because her language is so pliable and natural. Her stories are a bit dark, but aggressively evocative. I've grown to love her more and more, and I wish I were good enough already to fight to translate some of her stories. Here's one that someone else did: Push Push

Inga Ābele - Sniega Laika Piezimes (Notes on Snowy Weather)
I cut my teeth on her work. I still don't quite have the strength as a translator I need to start publishing these, but I've translated about five of her stories, and every word I translated, every sentence, every thought, was such an education. I'm convinced that there's a wide audience for Ābele's brand of magical realism, and so I polish furiously to make these worth handing out to someone. Again, someone else did a translation of The Loving Years, and it's well worth sharing.

Nora Ikstena - Dzīves Svinēšana (Celebration of Life)
This is one I'm afraid to touch because it's just so good. Someone else has done an excerpt, and you can see the poetry in motion. Ikstena writes dreams to life.

Pauls Bankovskis - Eiroremonts (Eurorenovation)
His writing is all about young Latvia. This is what I'd translate to give to my friends to show them what it's like to live there. Real, honest-to-goodness human beings living and breathing and dancing to rock music. Here's an excerpt from this, his most recent novel.

Dace Rukšāne - Romāniņš (Novella)
I've always wondered why no one has translated any of the foreign chicklit that is sure to exist out there. I would completely fall in love with foreign chicklit the same way I have with foreign detective fiction (Henning Mankell) and thrillers (Natsuo Kirino). This is nearly chicklit, and I think it would be a great place to start such a trend.

Gundega Repše - Ikstīte (Thumbelina)
A friend of mine, Līga, suggested that she and I try our hands at co-translating this novel, but we both got too busy to get past the first chapter. Repše is such a strong writer, though; her work reminds me of Dubravka Ugresic's writing, and I'd like to see what we could do with it in English. Another project to add to the ever-growing list.

Transcript's Issue no.23 featured some of these great writers, a few have been published in Germany and France, and I'm just waiting for the rest of the world to snap them up.

That time is sure to come.

(I really don't know...)

You'll see.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.