Vasilis Papageorgiou

Good evening, Mr. Papageorgiou. We’re glad to have you with us today for this interview. First, we would like to ask you some questions about your personal relationship with translation. For example, how did literary translation come into your life?

It emerged as and still is a secondary occupation, but of primary importance. Yet, I would say it is secondary to my livelihood. I’m an academic, I teach literature theory, I’m a writer and I write essays and prose and theater, and at some point I thought I wanted to do something else as well, I wanted to fill up my time, so I gradually began translating. The truth is that I was collaborating with Dimitris Kalokyris, who had the Hartis journal –no, back then it was the Tram journal– and then the initial version of Hartis came out, for Hartis is now coming out again, as you know, electronically. And he asked me to translate, to send him something besides my own texts. And so I started translating, and I mainly translate poetry. I prefer translating poetry. It is a kind of respite from writing theoretical and literary texts, which are more demanding. Translation is also a demanding craft, but of a different kind, which, in contrast to literary and theoretical texts, relaxed me. In addition, there were not many Swedish writers translated into Greek and I live in Sweden, I translate from there. I translate from Swedish and English into Greek and from Greek into Swedish.

Very interesting. So, do you choose the texts that you will translate yourself?

Yes, I have this luxury, because I earn a living from the university, so I make the choices myself, and in fact I choose poets who subscribe to my theoretical ideas. That is, I would not translate poets who I consider to be dogmatic, for example. I want them to play the same role in thought or have the same impact or give the same inspiration for my own thought as the theoretical writers I read, and whose texts I teach and I myself write about, in other words, the writers who inspire me. That is, if I express it theoretically, a thought that has its roots in deconstructivism, in poststructuralism, in French thought, which dates back to the 1960s, with philosophers like Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and is an extension of that thought, it is an ideology criticism, let’s say a criticism of all arbitrary morals or theories. And I choose poets, like John Ashbery for example, who I have translated a lot into both Swedish and Greek. He is that kind of a poet. He liberates the thought, he liberates our relationship with ourselves, with nature, with the individual, etc. His thought goes beyond the limits of the individual, beyond the limits of dichotomies, etc. It is an affirmative poetry, I choose poets who affirm.

Very interesting. Now, about the difficulties you encounter, the translation problems, of what kind are they and how do you deal with them? Can you think of an example?

Do you mean a practical problem?

Yes.

The truth is that the internet has helped us translators a lot, because we find a lot of things there, information, expressions. Sometimes I face a very simple problem, but at that moment it is very significant, e.g. a verb that requires the genitive or the accusative case for example, and it doesn’t come to mind at that moment, either out of fatigue or out of ignorance maybe. So I go online, I visit a website that I consider trustworthy and has valid texts, to see if they use the expression somewhere and I find parallel texts. This helps. I remember translating a poem in the past – from Swedish, or from English, I can’t remember now – and I wanted to translate the “rescue sheet” as it is actually called in Greek. It’s the life net that firefighters use for people who cannot go down the stairs or cannot be reached by the fire brigade ladder. Firefighters hold this jumping sheet for these people to jump and be rescued. I didn’t know what it was called in Greek, I had no idea that it was called “rescue sheet”. So I made a phone call, through the Swedish call center I was put through to the Greek call center, I then asked to be put through to the First Fire Station of Athens. I asked them and they told me what it was called.

Very interesting!

Nowadays, we use the internet for such things, do you understand the difference?

Yes.

That’s a great convenience. And I have to tell you, many translators may not say that, but Google Translate helps a lot. This is also a tool today, because the internet has evolved and Google works by drawing data from texts that are already on the internet. And now there are also many Greek texts on the internet, especially through the European Union, and translation has improved a lot. I happened to choose the translation of a sentence in a poem, that is just like on Google. It was so good that it made no sense to me to change it, because that’s how I would have done it too, it was a natural rendering. So, I think, it is a tool. As in the past, when all the translators I know, myself included, did not have only the good dictionaries, the ones we call valid or …, we also collected all other kinds of dictionaries. You cannot imagine, well, you certainly can, one is looking for a word and it doesn’t appear in good dictionaries, because it may be an idiomatic expression, and you open a small dictionary that has numerous mistakes, it is poorly written, badly printed, and, yet, it has this expression and offers you an opinion about it. And you say, “Well, if someone thinks that this is a dimension of reality, that is, it has been uttered and it is part of our existing life, so why shouldn’t I use it too? Even if this is the source”. In such cases, of course, the translator must take the initiative and have the courage to say, “I will do it that way, because I like it”.

Wonderful! Now, let’s talk about translation as a profession. What are the professional conditions like? And what are the most common major difficulties that a translator encounters?

The most significant difficulty is finding a publisher who wants to publish the book you want to translate. That goes for me, because I don’t receive translation assignments from publishers. Of course, I now have the good fortune to work with Giorgos Alisanoglou, who has the publishing house Saixpirikon [Shakespearean], and who publishes all the translations I suggest to him. But not all translators enjoy such good circumstances and such cooperation; perhaps it is a kind of luxury in our field. If one takes out this aspect, another major difficulty translators face is the matter of financial survival. If one translates poetry, the financial rewards are negligible, almost non-existent. The same almost goes for the publisher’s profit. Publishers who love poetry, publish poetry, it adds prestige to their work and they hope that some copies will be sold in the long run to cover at least the book’s publishing costs. Since I myself do not have an immediate problem – one never knows in the future – of financially surviving as a translator, I don’t have this kind of… This is an aspect I don’t think about. Of course, I translate to the extent that my academic profession and my work for the university allow me, which is not always easy. I think that all the translators I know, myself included, we all work a lot, that is, incessantly, on weekdays, on holiday, late at night… Some do it because they also have to earn their living, others because they love the job, but I think those who do it to earn a living, deep down, also love what they do very much.

Very nice. I guess you will agree that editing is necessary. What is your relationship with text editors?

There is a misunderstanding here and I’m glad that you ask this question, because I have discussed this thoroughly in the past. A text editor is one thing, a proofreader is another. We have come to the conclusion that maybe they do it euphemistically, maybe it is a kind of snobbery. Being a proofreader is not a bad thing at all. There must definitely be a proofreader, but I personally don’t accept any editor. What does “editor” mean? I am the editor, I do the job. Otherwise, the publisher should not trust the translator or the author. Well, the author is another matter, “I admire him, I want him” etc., etc. but if you don’t trust the translator, if they don’t know the language well, it’s quite difficult, unless one translates from a language… – which is another matter, and a very interesting one actually – e.g., if I translated from… let’s say, I know and admire a poet who writes in Chinese and I don’t speak Chinese or I have taken some lessons, but I definitely do not know it so well. This translation requires editing. And why doesn’t it then also require a co-translation? Whatever I translate into Swedish, I do with collaborators and I do not consider them editors. Even now that I know Swedish so well, I write that we are co-translators. An old colleague of mine doesn’t want that, when the text is perfect. She says, “I don’t want my name on it, since it is already perfect”. I say, I will put an asterisk (*), which between us means that you’ve read it and you’ve approved it, regardless of whether you have fully accepted my translation, it is more honest for me to know that you have also read it. But an editor, no. And in fact, I had a conflict with a publisher. They had made changes without my permission and he told me, “We didn’t change much” –that happened during my second or third revision– and he said, “Only three or four changes”. It was a book of about three hundred pages of poetry. I had to re-read it all and there were many more changes, around twenty. And I changed everything back to what I had written before, because these changes didn’t offer anything new. Another thing has happened to me, though, and that was really a text correction. All the translators and authors I know, who appreciate working with publishers and proofreaders, are grateful to a good proofreader, because proofreaders come up with suggestions; they make text corrections. Let me give you an example: I had translated a prose piece… I have translated Tomas Tranströmer’s Collected Poems into Greek, but then I separately translated a small book on his memoirs, probably an autobiographical one. And I had translated –how did it slip my attention?– but there was pressure, it is true, maybe this is just an excuse or it just slipped my attention, I had written “bank subsidiary” [parartima], that someone was working in a “bank subsidiary”. And it is a “bank branch” [ipokatastima] in Greek. The proofreader picked up on it, and I was grateful and I thanked him. I can reveal that he was the proofreader of the Nea Estia journal, which published the text for the first time. Well, things like that, or a comma, etc. are what a proofreader does. We had a proofreader who corrected John Asbury’s poems, manuscripts, Asbury’s translations in Swedish, and my co-translator and I always sent him a letter, thanking him very much, because proofreaders then use such a thing, they have something as proof of the good work they do. And good proofreaders write, comment in the margin of the manuscript, or on the Word document now. They don’t say, “It must be written like this”, they make suggestions. One can make ninety suggestions in a manuscript of a hundred pages, and maybe out of those ninety you keep only five, but these five are extremely useful – and they are usually many more –, because they are very nice remarks, but this is not editing, it’s proofreading. Editing is another thing. It is a bigger intervention, it is an aesthetic intervention, not a practical one.

Very interesting. How do you imagine the translation profession in twenty years?

In twenty years I will be eighty-four years old. I’ll tell you how I imagine translation in my case, since I can’t imagine how it will be for others. I would very much like it to be so, as I will describe it to you now. I’d like to be able, as a translator, to show my personal distinction, that is, to leave my mark. However, the technical evolution may be such that the machine acquires subjectivity and translation comes out in various shades. Like now, when we do photo editing and use various shades and we change the feeling of the photo, not just the black and the white. There may be such software, which will surely exist in twenty years. Such software that will add what a machine, a robot isn’t able to do now, that is, to think subjectively and use various tones; or I, as a translator, could make such use of it, as I do now when I configure a photo, even the one that I take with an iPhone and afterwards I change the light or some shades a little, I don’t need to cut it, only mild things, but these things also change the photo’s aesthetics, and so will the computer in the future. It will not be strange to me at all. Then maybe my own subjectivity, as a translator, is analogous to that of the photo editor. I will add details through the machines, which are not only linguistic but also stylistic, emotional, and this will not only concern translation, it will also concern literature and many other things.

And a closing interview question, what advice would you give to a student, who intends and wants to work in translation professionally?

The first thing I would say is to love what they do; to love the language, even before they start translating, and then to love the text they are translating, to respect it, to love it, to take care of it, to speak with the text and to treat it as something personal, alive. I personally wouldn’t feel good translating a text I don’t love, even if it is wonderful poetry. If I don’t love it, and yet I translate it for some reason, I will not be satisfied, it will not work out. And if one is to become a translator and do this thing on a regular basis or at least quite often, imagine doing it coldheartedly, it’s not possible.

Yes, it’s understandable. Mr. Papageorgiou, thank you very much for being with us for this interview today. So long!

And I thank you as well.