Efi Kallifatidi

First of all, we’d like to ask you if it was a lifelong dream to be involved in translation.

Who has a lifelong dream when starting something? I mean, okay, I don’t know… No. I was just a kid who loved books very much. My studies weren’t in translation, not even in literature, they were in architecture. So translation came by chance and out of love for books.

What do you mean by chance? How did you start translating?

I started because I was bored. One summer, I was about to leave for Italy, and I had nothing to do. And I thought, why not translate a book that I had read and I liked it. Then, okay, one thing led to another and I became a translator.

What image of translation did you have before getting involved in it and after?

I didn’t have a specific image in mind. I mean, I started translating at a time when we were translating with a pencil on paper, right? No computer. I’ve written thousands of thousands of pages with a pencil. I liked the idea because I understood it was a lonely job and I liked the idea of a lonely job. I mean, I want to see people when I choose to see them, not when I have to see them. I also liked it because of the love for the book, the smell of the book, all of that, so to speak.

Great. Was there a translator that you had as an idol or held up as a role model?

What can I say? Kosmas Politis? No, I can’t say that, because I was very young and before me, there were, so to speak, only a few translators. There was… What was her name? She translated detective stories, she was a well-known actress… She had translated Agatha Christie, you know, all those little yellow books of the time. And there was also Kosmas Politis, who translated all the major ones, various authors.

And, since then, what do you feel translation has offered you? What have you loved about it?

The silence. It’s also an escape. Look, you suddenly go into another world and if you also like the book you’re translating, you don’t have to think about what might be on your mind at that moment, you’re in the book and you’re thinking only about the book.

Some of your colleagues told us, for example, “I felt the need to translate something to offer to the world”.

No, no. I don’t… I don’t think… It has to do with myself, of course, i.e. whether I like the book. But besides that – that’s what we were discussing today and yesterday when I gave a speech here – I feel that the challenge is the writer and not the readership. If I meet the challenge the author sets me, if I deal with it satisfactorily, then the readership will be pleased, too. That’s what I mean.

Wonderful. Apart from translation, are you involved in anything else?

No. I translate various texts, literature, cinema and opera. This sort of texts.

Wonderful. Are you also a member of a professional translators’ association?

No, I didn’t happen to get in touch with one and I’m not…

So you make your living from translation.

Yes, exclusively.

Are you satisfied with the financial rewards?

Look, up until eight years ago, I was obviously better off. Now the market has shrunk significantly, both in the number of titles and in financial, so to speak, compensation. But, okay, I can’t complain. Others are suffering much more.

You translate from Italian, right?

And English too. Mostly.

What is your relationship with these languages? Did you learn them in the course of your life?

Yes. I mean, I was in contact with English from a very young age. I started learning English as a child, I also attended the American College and, later on, I continued to read and stuff. I learned Italian on the street, by getting on buses in Italy and listening to people.

Is there a particular preference for either of these two languages that for some reason is more emotionally charged?

No, that would be Greek.

Greek?

Yes.

Οk, great. What is your relationship with the authors you translate? You’ve translated Umberto Eco, for example.

Yes. Well, with Umberto Eco we had quite a brief contact. Nevertheless – since I’ve translated most of his work – I had the sense that he was, in a way, my father. I think that Eco also shaped my thinking. I was 29 years old when I first started translating him, and until today, in these thirty or forty years, – no, it’s not forty, it’s thirty something, anyway – I’ve found that his logic matched mine. He solved problems without me having to sit down and think about them. He had a ready… He was wiser than I was, so to speak. Other than that, I’ve translated classic authors who have long been deceased.

Since you have dealt with so many authors, which literary genre interests you particularly? You’ve also mentioned opera, theater, cinema.

Certainly literature, books. I like crime fiction, I love it. I don’t like “women’s” literature. I like ironic, sarcastic, comic, humorous books, that sort of thing. A book I consider great and timeless – because it was written almost three centuries ago – is Tristram Shandy. It is the most postmodern book before modernism. And its humor is incredible, you read it and it makes your day.

Do you also like translating the literature you like to read, for example, crime fiction?

I’ve translated crime fiction books, just a dozen or so, not many. I like translating them and also being, you know, like the donkey with the carrot, not knowing the end, and translating it and finding out what happens along the way.

What difficulties have you encountered over the years while translating? Does an example of a cultural element come to mind?

Look, there was a very difficult book, but that’s because I didn’t have sufficient knowledge, so to speak, and I had to acquire it along the way. It was Eco’s academic texts, not his essays or his chronicles. They were two, one was Semiotics or Α Theory of Semiotics, I don’t remember exactly, it was a huge book, and the other one, which was also of such an academic level, was called From the Tree to the Labyrinth and I imagine it was only read by me and maybe three others in Greece.

Was there a particular word that kept you awake at night, so to speak?

Many. I won’t say a specific word, but I remember I translated a book that was full of puns. Puns are a great challenge for a translator. You can’t always translate them, and it’s awful, graceless to put a footnote. What you do is… If you can’t translate it, you let it flow smoothly, and you put another pun of your own somewhere else. I’ve translated books with many puns and I thought about them for hours, or an idea came to me at night or I went out for a drink and I thought of something and I wrote it down on a napkin. Things like that.

You have such extensive translation work. So there must have been some criticism.

By me or by others?

By others.

Yes, ok.

How do they review your work and how do you deal with criticism in general?

Criticism is welcome. Okay, I haven’t received very negative criticism. Once or twice I’ve received criticism for rushing, and I accept that, because the conditions were indeed pressing.

Speaking of that, what’s your opinion about translation editing? Do you think it would be useful in this case?

Not only useful, editing is necessary. And the editor has to be a good editor, not a proofreader. Α proofreader has other work to do, they’ll correct punctuation or typographical mistakes that I might have made. But a good editor is the one who’ll protect both you and the author from being exposed, so to speak. When you’re not sure about a certain point, the editor will look for a solution.

Great. What is your opinion about the copyright law regarding the situation in Greece?

Well, I had the luck to get the copyright percentage from a publishing house that went out of business. So things were very good back then. But this happened to me only with one publishing house. At one point, when another house asked me to collaborate with them, I told them, “Do you think it’s possible?”, but they said, “No, forget it.” Once a year, we receive something due to copyright from OSDEL [Greek Collecting Society For Literary Works]. Okay, it’s a small amount, but it’s something. But that has to do with photocopies, reprints and republications in journals.

When you translate a literary piece of work, you also certainly translate the title, which is an important part. Are you influenced by someone regarding the title?

It depends on the literary piece of the work. If it is what we call “women’s literature” there are titles like Wings of Love, The Woodcock of Oblivion, and who knows what. In such cases it is the publishing house that rather decides what’s a more catchy title. When it’s a classic literature book, you can’t do whatever you want with it, you follow the original title.

And one last question. Are you optimistic about the future of translation in Greece?

Yes, very.

Despite the financial situation?

Look, despite the limited number of texts that we translate now, because all publishing houses had to curtail their activities… I think that through a concerted effort, which I hope will be made one day… – how shall I put it – children will learn to love books from a young age, and that will mean an increase in readership, and an increase in translations and in sales and all that. However, Greece has a small reading audience, it is not an English-speaking country. We are ten million people, does one million read? Not even close. Around 200,000 people read. And of these 200,000 people, 5,000 will read 100 books a year. The others will all read one, two or three books. I mean there is a ceiling!