Achilleas Kyriakidis

Hello, Mr. Kyriakidis, it’s a pleasure to have you here with us.

Mine too.

We’ll start with a few questions about translation and your personal relationship with it. So how did translation come about in your life?

During the Junta I’d read a novel that I liked very much, Viva la Muerte, by Fernando Arrabal, and I decided to translate it thinking that as I spoke French fluently I’d be able to render any French text in Greek. I worked and worked on it and the final result was presentable, I think. I’d probably still sign it today. I looked for a publisher but none would dare publish it. It was an anarcho-burlesque grotesque thing, typical Arabal, which nobody wanted to publish. I think they did at some point. But anyway that was my first attempt which didn’t work out in terms of publication but got me into it. It was just as I’d started writing my own short stories and I realized when reading a book in the original how important knowledge of writing is in being able to translate someone else’s writings in another language. That’s why I think that ideally a translator should also be a writer or at least have a solid understanding of the art of writing to convey and detect what pained the author when writing it and what made him write the way he did. Then I got to know Borges, not personally, that happened many years later, and when I read his first texts in English and French I decided to learn Spanish so that I could read his original writing. I did learn Spanish aided by my French and the Latin that I’d studied at school, strange as that sounds. But I was very good at Latin and that helped me learn all the Romance languages easily. So I managed to learn Spanish solely to read Borges and translate his first two short stories. His first short stories I translated were Rosa y Azul, i.e. The Rose of Paracelsus and Blue Tigers, published by Ypsilon and that launched a series of translations that now number 120.

120 translations! With so much experience what would you say the term “translate” means to you?

Translate means… The only definition I can give is “reading creatively”. A translator is a creative reader. And if they can understand what they’re reading and carry it into their own language without altering it, without trying to improve it or modifying it in their own style – that is a crime, to alter or embellish an original text to your own liking. The translator serves the author. Absolutely.

As to the process of translation, since you are also a writer, how does that influence you in what you translate? And do you have a preference as to which literary genre you translate?

That goes without saying. Fortunately, in my life I had other means of making a living so translation was never my main source of income. Hence, I had the freedom and the blessing to be able to choose what I wanted to translate. Barring a couple of exceptions. But in 120 books two or three exceptions are… I mean, they were requests from editors or friends, “Please, you may not like it but do it because I want you to do it” and I would. But most of the books were purely my choice. After Borges, naturally, I gravitated towards South America and South American literature and I’d say that’s where my interest in translation largely focused on although at times various French names creeped in like Modiano or Echenoz, whom I love very much, and a recently emerged American writer, whom I adore, Anthony Marra. I translated two of his books and I’m about to translate his third.

In this process, what kind of translation problems do you encounter? What would you say is the most difficult thing?

The most difficult thing in a translation isn’t the substitution of words. That’s really easy although that’s what trips up most unskilled translators. They think they can just take the first entry in the dictionary and use that word in Greek. But here may be a second definition of the word. The problem is rhythm and style. Being able to channel the style and the rhythm of the original. It is a crime when the author chooses to use long paragraphs and you make them choppy. It’s like editing a film differently than what he’d envisioned. The director.

Do you remember a text that you found especially difficult or a cultural element or something in the style of the text?

Yes, I struggled with Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, a leading French writer, which is a “poly-novel”. He calls it “romans” with an ‘s’, novels, in the plural. I call it a “poly-novel”. It’s an amazing book; the peak of “OuLiPo”, the Workshop of Potential Literature, founded by Queneau and François Le Lionnais in France. That one was really hard, but translating it was one of the greatest joys of my life as well as the recent translation of Cortázar’s Hopscotch. I spent two wonderful years translating Hopscotch. Ιt was released a couple of months ago. But strangely enough, I struggle the most with shorter books. There’s this book La Raison by Pascal Quignard. It’s a very small novella which was very challenging. Unbelievably so. Because I had to render such a dense text in Greek, which doesn’t favor density. It’s a language with long words and so there’s a lot of stretch in the Greek text. The French text was so very dense. That’s why it’s extremely difficult to translate from English. I consider English the hardest language for a Greek to translate. English to French is easy for a Frenchman. But for a Greek, the difference in style, musicality and tone between English and Greek is enormous. Such terse words. It’s a very difficult language. There’s a… I’ve said many times that if I were asked to translate Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, I would probably agree as long as I could skip translating the first sentence of the book. That goes like this: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” However well you render it in Greek, this almost telegraphic, yet so succinct phrase says it all. In Hopscotch, I’ve left some things in the original Spanish because I’d spoil the music. I opted for footnotes with the Greek definitions. I would’ve spoilt the music, which I’ve tried to convey in Greek through context, but this particular sentence, it’s like two or three words that remained in Spanish. It’s an experiment not commonly done. It was a first for me, at least, and I think it worked.

Wonderful. And moving on to a few questions about translation as a profession, what does a translator’s typical day look like? What is the process that you follow, so to speak?

If I were a professional translator?

Or when you decide to take on a project.

What do I do?

Yes.

First of all, I read the book at least once, obviously, but possibly a second time, and then I attack it like the Germans did with their Blitzkriege, which is a rapid, an instant all-out battle. I start translating haphazardly. If you read one of my first drafts, you’d burst out laughing. I don’t worry about whether to translate something as ashtray, vase, or chair. I just scribble ashtray and move on. I just skip the words I don’t know or just write them in Spanish. Then I go over it a second time, a third, a fourth time. And when I’ve completed the Greek text, the big operation begins, which is the rhythm, the music, the tempo of the translation. That’s hugely important. And another thing about language and not rhythm is the jargon the author’s used. Let me give you an example. There is a collection of short stories by Fuentes called Burnt Water, Agua quemada. I translated it for Agra Publications and it’s three concentric short stories set in Mexico City in the same timeframe and towards the end, these three stories are somehow connected but each is written in a different dialect – how can I put it? – a different idiom. Because the first one is about a fallen aristocrat, there’s a nobility to the language. In the second one he’s a bully, a bum, so there’s a crudeness and I had to convey that, too. It’s really difficult. You can’t just translate mindlessly ignoring nuance and using common vocabulary. Translation is like microsurgery.

A perfect analogy. Purely about the profession, now, what would you say are the biggest difficulties a translator faces in terms of livelihood or earnings? Even though it’s not your main source of income, from your experience over the years, what are the biggest difficulties you have encountered?

I haven’t encountered any difficulties because, like I said, I have the capacity to refuse an offer if I’m not happy with the pay. I understand that it isn’t possible for someone just getting started, let alone one hoping to make a living from it, so at first at least they’ll have to accept any offer that comes their way even if the pay is bad. There is also an abundance of translators, at least in Greece they’re so many at the moment that I don’t know what they charge and to what extent this, i.e. agreeing to charge very little for their work because they need the cash, could hurt others who think they have a certain quality and therefore should negotiate a little more. It’s a very hard field.

It’s a delicate issue. Apart from the pay, are you satisfied with the status that translators have?

I think I am. In Greece, especially lately, translators are much more prestigious because the emerging translators are excellent. I’m talking about the last twenty or thirty years. They didn’t use to be. I remember in the old days they used to recite the mantra that the problem with Greek cinema is lack of good scripts; about books they’d say there are no good Greek translators. Even the ones who were considered good, weren’t, in reality. Like Kosmas Politis who used to translate a book a day, though an excellent writer, he translated with such frenzy… Maybe he needed to make money, I don’t know, even though he worked at a bank. But he literally butchered some of the books; he would just omit whole paragraphs. There have been such translation crimes. Of course there were many great translators. Especially Aris Alexandrou who’s translated from Russian. But in the last twenty or thirty years we’ve got excellent translators.

That’s encouraging for the future.

One thing that’s harmed translation as a whole is book critics. Literary critics will just jot down, “Achilleas Kyriakidis’ translation is excellent”, and so on, while it may not be excellent, and it’s their duty to point out its shortcomings or plainly say, “Kyriakidis’ translation is bad”. If they want to pay a compliment they could say something like, “Although he is a cadet translator or whatever, this point needs work”. They should actually critique. “Excellent translation” yeah, right. We just get things like, “You are very good”, and “Masterful use of language”. But there may be huge mistakes. Find them, you are obliged to.

It was one of the questions we also wanted to ask you about reviews because many translators tell us they keep hearing “Great translation”, but what does it actually mean?

About books in general. Have you read a bad book review in Greece? A bad review. For example, has Valtinos, such an established author ever written a book that’s bad for goodness’ sake? He’s entitled to one bad book. Either they’re going to gloss over it or they’re going to write a very conventional note like, “Valtinos regurgitates his motifs in his latest book”. But they won’t tell us why the book is bad.

That’s true. While we’re on the subject of various agents of the literary field, in the course of a translation have you worked with other translators or is it something you do on your own?

No, translation is solitary work. Unless it’s a scientific text or something where sometimes two or three people collaborate. I’ve translated a book with Dimitris Kalokyris, but not a novel. They were fifty… It was Extraordinary Tales by Borges and Casares, which precisely because it was written by two people… It’s basically a tale anthology of fantasy literature, short prose, so we split the stories. We didn’t actually work in the same space side by side bumping each other’s elbow. That isn’t possible. I think it’s too hard.

So it’s lonesome.

Well, yeah.

And regarding editing, what’s your relationship with the editors of the works you’ve translated?

Again, I have the capacity and the blessing of being able to refuse third-party editing. After so many years of fighting in the arena of translation and writing, I have at least managed to demand respect in my writing style, my punctuation, my ways. This is a sector that needs training in Greece. Some editors need to be educated. I’ve read modern Greek books that’ve been proofread and edited, and I see things that drive me crazy. Rarely will you find the past perfect in its rightful place. “I took Achilles to the doctor because he was hurt”, you read. When it’s, “I took Achilles to the doctor because he had been hurt”. The past perfect is past before the past. Good luck finding it three times in any modern Greek book. I go ape.

We understand. Speaking of editing, although you have the option of choosing, as you said, the editor, in your career over the years have you had instances of censorship, an editor or publisher changing something, and how did you handle it?

This incredible thing once happened. I’d translated a book by Truman Capote, called Other Voices, Other Rooms. A masterpiece. Of course, I translated the title word for word in Greek, because in the penultimate chapter of the book, the young hero goes to a haunted house in the American South and enters this house and gets scared, and thinks he’s hearing other voices from other rooms. The phrase is in the book, and Capote has taken it and used it as the title. I read an article saying it’s out by… – I won’t mention the publishers. Entitled Other Voices, Other Places. I was like, there must be some mistake. I called the publisher and said: “It’s not Other Voices, Other Places but Other Voices, Other Rooms.” “Oh,” he said, “don’t worry, we chose Other Voices, Other Places because there was a translation of the same book by another publisher thirty years ago and that’s the title they’d used”. “But how can you simply change the title without asking?”, I said to them. “Do you know that the phrase is in the book? Verbatim, it says ‘other voices, other rooms’.” “Oh”, he said, “don’t worry, we changed the phrase inside the book too”. I didn’t talk to that publisher for the next 20 years. I just did the day before yesterday.

I think you’ve covered editing thoroughly. And overall, what would you say makes a translation good and at the same time perhaps influences the translator’s career? What would be your advice?

Listen. I had said I don’t like teaching. I’ve been asked from time to time many times to give a seminar. I don’t like teaching from a pedestal. Sitting like this in a chair chatting, sure. Do you want me to come and chat with the students? Gladly. So I imagined my first day had I been a translation professor. I’d walk into the auditorium, which would be full of students, I would walk in and say, “Good morning. This is the first lecture, which will also be the last. The lecture is: Keep questioning. Goodbye.” That’s it. The translator has to always question whether they themselves understand what they’re putting down on paper. You can’t write just whatever. You can’t translate a French book that takes place in a coal mine, in a town built around a coal mine, and the hero goes to a café and has coffee with the “kids”. And the original is “les mineurs”. “Mineurs” is “minors” in French indeed, but it’s also “miners”. So you have to question it. What kids? Could “mineurs” mean something else? It’s what I said at the start about the second definition. You check the dictionary and see “mineurs” as “kids” but below that it’s also “miner”. Ask yourself if what you wrote makes sense to you. If it does, the reader will understand it, and it will be correct.

Excellent. Thank you very much. I think that was the best advice.

I thank you, too.