Alexandra Ioannidou

Hello, Mrs. Ioannidou. It is a great pleasure to have you here with us today for this interview.

For me, too.

Let’s start with a few questions about how translation came into your life. How did you get involved in translation, among other things?

Well, I started translating very early on through foreign language learning. As a child, I liked translating. My first published translation was of a great poem by Yannis Ritsos from The Fourth Dimension. I translated it from Greek into German, which was not the right thing to do, but it was edited by a German fellow student and its publication was a great pleasure. One should, of course, translate from a foreign language into their native. This officially began with my translation of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics by Mikhail Bakhtin. I think this book was published in the early 2000s, I translated it in ’99. After that, I started translating for publishers who were friends and asked for a translation, then I suggested something else, and then a very fruitful collaboration with Antaios Chresostomides began, for whom I also was a kind of lecturer, i.e. I read books in German or Russian and told him which ones were worth translating, in my opinion, and I translated some of them myself. And that’s how it started, alongside my academic status.

Through this experience that you’ve had over the years, what does “to translate” mean to you?

It means changing voices, impersonating someone else, entering different ways of writing and different cultures and bringing them into your own. For me, it’s a great and long process of transferring culture and a possibility to bring together people and opinions and experiences, it’s a journey. Translation is so many things. I liked a description by Karl Dedecius very much – he was probably the greatest German-Polish translator of Polish into German – who used the German word for translation which is “übersetzen” and said that the translator is like a boatman, who takes the reader from one bank of the river, which separates some peoples, to the other bank, so the translator unites. I liked that sense of transfer very much, you’re transferring something from one side to the other, something like a porter of joy and experiences. That’s what I’d say.

Now let’s move on to the translation process. Do you choose the texts that you translate?

I do now, most of them, yes. Always in cooperation with publishers who are friends, but I’m at a slightly advanced… – also because of my academic status perhaps – I often discuss with publishers what would be worth translating and we decide together. Of course, there are very knowledgeable people in the field who ask for books to be translated and suggest them to you.

How is this combination, by the way, of an academic career and translation activity?

Given the incredible poverty in the academic field and the work pressure, the devaluation of the university, the commercialization of the university now, and the indifference that young people now show because they can’t stand this situation very much, they don’t find much inspiration in “going to university to get a degree in order to get a job” – they can’t even find a job anymore – translation is a breath of fresh air. You translate so that you can hold on to the other profession, as well. Academic life is not easy anymore, teaching is not easy, you don’t find many people among colleagues to communicate with. And this attempt that’s been going on for more than 15-20 years now to make the university a place of commerce and to blame the university and knowledge for the whole unemployment thing with this connection to the labor market, has very much devalued our work, has made it almost instrumental: “Attend the courses, get a grade, get your degree and go.” So translation is an important respite from all that and a sense that you’re doing something important after all.

Which of the texts you have translated so far would you say was the most difficult?

Each text has its own difficulty. I think the most difficult text is the one I am translating now. It’s a Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, with a… not difficult – I wouldn’t say difficult – but a very poetic language, it’s almost poetry in prose. It has an incredible iconography, describing life in the Jewish environment of the Polish countryside. It’s autobiographical prose. It really needs a lot of work. It’s like embroidery. That’s what I find the most difficult now. Another difficulty I once encountered and it troubled me for a long time – and the solution I found was very funny, I’ll tell you – was in a novel by a young Russian writer – well, contemporary, not young, he’s in his eighties now – named Vladimir Makanin. It was a novel describing life in the early ’90s, and for the first time I read Russian slang of Russian criminals. Russian dictionaries, Soviet dictionaries, “cleaned up” the language, so you couldn’t easily find in dictionaries that kind of prison or camp language. There were thirteen words that troubled me, those damn thirteen words, and I was between – and I don’t do it easily – calling him or writing to him to ask for help. I also tried to find out what the translator had done in the French translation. He had just cut these words and never translated them. That’s something I don’t like to do. In the end, I found some research posted on the internet, which had been funded by the European Union and which was a record of the language of prisons and penal camps. And they had uploaded this vocabulary on the internet. And there I found these thirteen words. When I later met with Makanin, I told him about it and he said, “But you were wrong not to call me”. Then, of course, I had to search for the corresponding terminology in Greek, which again was not easy, to find equivalents. That was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done.

Let’s now move on to translation as a profession. Are you satisfied with your financial rewards from translation? Of course you combine it with your academic career.

I don’t think anyone in Greece is satisfied with the financial rewards of translation. One should be able to make a living from it, but it is considered a sideline, nine times out of ten we do it as a sideline because it is impossible to live on the earnings of translation, while in other countries a book can provide for a family for a whole year. In Germany, in France…

Talking about the profession, are you satisfied with the status of translators in Greece?

It depends. Yes, you are acknowledged at some point. There are good readers who know you and that wasn’t the case before. Now they say, “Translation by Alexandra Ioannidou”. In the past, the translator’s status didn’t exist at all. They didn’t even write the name of the translator. So we have moved forward and there are discerning readers who want a good translation. So, yes, as time goes by, the status receives recognition e.g. you hear, “Congratulations, well done, we read it, your translation is great, this or that was interesting”. So, yes, I’d say I am satisfied.

You’ve mentioned earlier that you don’t usually talk to authors to solve a translation problem. Apart from the case with the Russian author and the French translator, have you ever communicated with an author?

Yes. It has happened with a young Russian my age, – well, “young” in quotes – who lives in Belgium. He had written an amazing little book, a little bit of a thriller, a little bit Dostoevskian, which I liked very much. And there was a sentence that I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I had asked Russian-speaking friends but nobody could give me an answer, so I had to call him in Belgium and say, “I’m your translator in Greece, please tell me what this is.” He laughed and said, “That was the purpose. It’s a sentence that was repeated by an inmate of a mental hospital when I went there for a visit and no one understood it and I put it in the novel”. I was like, “We finally solved it!”.

Mystery solved. Do you consider editing necessary?

Absolutely. Absolutely necessary. And the task of a good editor is very difficult. I’ve come across very good editors and others who do whatever they want and we argue, but that has happened less often.

That’s what we would ask next. Have you experienced any kind of censorship? Has an editor or a publisher ever changed something without your permission?

No, they have never changed anything without my permission, because I ask them to send me the text back with the changes marked. I have, however, happened to receive a text full of red editing marks, with corrections like “beautiful girl” instead of “pretty girl” that I had written. We had a big fight and I said, “Either she goes, or…” and they said, “Change whatever you think…”. In some places the editor had pivotal changes and comments, but, I don’t know, she thought maybe that she should write more literary than me, or maybe she liked the text and… I don’t know. I never understood it, but it was a huge shock. You see your text full of corrections in red and you say, “Is it possible that I’ve made so many mistakes?”. And they’re arbitrary literary interventions.

And while we’re on the subject of publishing houses and choices, is it you or the publisher who chooses the title?

Jointly. Ιn a book that has just been published, which is translated from Bulgarian, the title was discussed between me and the author, who had a Greek consultant next to him. We talked about it for about a month and a half. We had come up with six different titles and he chose the second best from the ones I had suggested. I had rejected his first suggestion because it wasn’t so appropriate in Greek. We finally made it. A title I didn’t like at all and couldn’t change was for the book by the Russian from Belgium. I still don’t like that title. Okay, there’s also the issue of commerciality that publishers very often put forward.

Have you ever received any criticism for your translation work?

No, the criticism I did receive once was that the publishing house and I chose the wrong book to translate by an author and it should have been something new. My translation work in terms of terminology, accuracy and so on has never been criticized. There was a little bit of grumbling about something else. I sometimes write introductions or addenda, because of my philological status. And my criticism of Stalin was commented on. Someone wrote in a newspaper, “Yes, but Stalin was a very good reader, and you’ve been unfair to him in this, in that…”. This is a Greek phenomenon; Stalin is still worshiped by many. 

Great. Are you optimistic about the future of translation and translators in Greece?

I am very optimistic about the publishing activity and the growing interest of the public, and also about the publishing quality. Maybe because of the crisis, the field has become more competitive, publishing houses are competing in quality so that they can hold on to the market and that’s a good thing. I’m not optimistic about the fees or the way people who really put their heart and soul into it are being asked to work. Something needs to be done about this. Maybe translators should form a collective and fight for their trade union rights. But translating is a solitary job, so this is not easily achieved. It can’t be checked and it gets destroyed very easily. The moment you say, “I won’t accept a price below this”, there will be, because of the crisis, someone in need who will say, “I’ll do the translation for less money”. So you can’t have a massive initiative like that of a strike in a factory, where the machines stop and nobody lifts the lever to start the machine, so the factory owner is pressed and gives the money. That doesn’t happen. There’s always somebody who destroys it.

What advice would you give to a student who wants to go into translation in the future?

To love it very much, to be patient, to read, read, read, because I think a translator is a reader first and foremost, and not to accept to do cheap things just for the money. I mean, they drop some proposals for literature that is rubbish, and that’s where you get a little lost, it’s not right. It’s better to do something else and say, “I’ll translate something really good and I’ll translate it well” than translate nonsense because they’re going to sell.

Thank you very much.

Me too. 

It’s been a great pleasure.