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Amanda Hopkinson
When and how did you start learning Spanish?
At (my north London grammar) school. French and Latin was already taught at primary level – and had some German from home – and the choice of an additional language was introduced when I was about 14. I picked Russian, but the teacher left after a term, so I migrated to Spanish.
What attracted your attention about this language?
As you see, this was somewhat haphazard. What soon helped was that I fell hopelessly in love with the poems of Garcia Lorca and the films of Luis Buñuel, and wanted to understand what they were saying. I also went to Spain for the first time aged 9, long before cheap flights and package holidays. My mother drove my sister and I across Europe in a small sports car that kept breaking down – especially in the Pyrenees and at night – and we stayed not in hotels but in rooms we rented from local people. I found the country wild and mysterious and magical.
Since then, you have been linked to the Spanish language and now you are the director of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT). What kind of activities do you do in order to encourage literary translation in the UK?
We run a major programme that brings together the academic with the professional and public aspects of literary translation. Details of this can be found on the University of East Anglia website (follow links to School of Creative Writing/BCLT), and includes annual events such as the Summer School and the Translation Days, as well as one-off conferences and symposia. We also teach at both undergraduate and graduate level (literary translation/creative and critical writing/ comparative literature), and hold weekly evening study sessions alternatively on Reading and Writing Translations, open to the general public as well as staff and students.
As far as I know, we are the only Centre in the world who works in this way, although we collaborate closely with other universities, institutes and translation houses. We are also rolling out new projects with both Shanghai and Krakow, to facilitate student exchanges and export a model of what we do.
Tell us about the Sebald Conference and the translation prizes given at the event (Valle-Inclán, etc.).
The BCLT, together with colleagues from the School of Literature, is organising a Sebald Conference from 5-7th September 2008, here at the UEA. Keynote speakers are Dame Gillian Beer; Anthea Bell; Adam Phillips; and James Wood. It will be the occasion for a substantial reappraisal of the work of an author whose reputation has grown immensely since his untimely death in 2001. The BCLT is also involved in a one-day symposium to be held at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge from 1-3rd July 2008 on the theme of Image Place Story that will includes seminars on translation (as well as a number of others dear to WG Sebald’s heart, such as photography and walking).
This year’s Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation will be given by author and cultural historian, Professor Marina Warner, at the South Bank Centre at 19.45 on Thursday 8th November. The title is Stranger Magic: True Stories and Translated Selves.This will be preceded by the award of seven prizes for literary translation by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement. At 19.00, there will be readings from the translated texts by winners of the Valle-Inclan, Schlegel-Tieck, Scott Moncrieff, Vondel, and the Saif-Ghobash-Banipal prizes.
The percentage of books translated from Spanish into English is relatively low in the UK. In your opinion, what can be done to increase the number of books translated from Spanish into English?
Actually, the number translated from Spanish is not such a small proportion of the dismally low number of books in translation here. This is supposed to be around 3% of the total of some 120,000 books published in the UK each year. Add to that the similar quantity of imports from North America and the Caribbean; the Antipodes; even India and Africa, along with the rest of the Anglophone world, and you begin to understand why so many readers protest that they are not being insular but can “read the world in English” – without reading a word in translation. That said, it seems to me there is a current boom, firstly in “eurocrime” and European writing generally, and in contemporary Castillian and Catalan writing in particular. Certainly the work of the embassies; the Cervantes and the Ramon Llull Institutes; not to mention Arts Council, England, in awarding translation grants to publishers, is of fundamental assistance in persuading often reluctant publishers to be more innovative and cosmopolitan with their lists.
You have translated a lot of books from Spanish into English, including authors such as Ricardo Piglia and Claribel Alegría. Which work have you enjoyed the most? And who is the most difficult author you have ever translated?
There is a convention that every writer – whether author or translator – recommends their latest publication. In my case that would be Malvinas Requiem by the Argentine Rodolfo Fogwill, which I co-translated with Nick Caistor. It came out this year, on the 25th anniversary of the Malvinas Conflict and gives a vivid – at times hallucinatory – vision of the struggle through the eyes of the victims/losers. It is still a standpoint as hard for Argentine as British readers to fully accept, so all the more important for us to be sensitised to.
In terms of other writing, again it’s always said that poetry is the hardest. Yet I began with an anthology called Lovers and Comrades (1988), and have intermittently worked with poetry ever since. Most recently with translations of the lusophone African poet, Conceicao Lima, for the Bard University website Words without Borders. Also, from the Spanish, a translation of poems in a new collection called "Patagonia" by the Argentine author, Tomas Eloy Martinez (Blume, forthcoming November 2007).
If you had to recommend a book from a Spanish author to a friend, which one would it be?
Assuming we’re still talking translations, why not start at the creative apex? So, undoubtedly, the two English versions produced by John Rutherford and Edith Grossman on the 400th anniversary of the first publication of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. That affords a dramatic introduction to Spanish literature; to the first, seminal, European novel; and to two radically different methods of literary translation (a fascinating insight into the discipline and an education in itself). From there you really can go anywhere – back to Lazarillo de Tormes or forward to 100 Years of Solitude. The world is rich in exciting international literature available in a wealth of languages, with so much originating in the Spanish language.