Dimitris Kalokyris

Good morning Mr. Kalokiris, it’s an honor to have you here.

Good morning, my pleasure.

Let’s start with a few questions about how literary translation came into your life.

Yes, that is a crucial question. For me it started… I used to translate trying to… I wanted to read certain authors, and thought it was the best way to do it. At a pretty young age, I hadn’t finished university, when a small-time publisher whom I knew showed me some manuscripts given to him for publication, by the French poet Jacques Prévert. He asked me to take a look, he didn’t speak French, while I did, a little. I looked at the translation he had, read through the original, and thought it was completely wrong. In order to explain why it was wrong and where the mistakes were, I started retranslating it to demonstrate how it should be. The publisher took a look and liked what he saw, and requested we publish those, instead. And so the book was published many years ago in bitext, i.e. with the original on the side. It was a good edition, for its time. So that’s how it started… This story of my approach to translation. It’s the best way to really delve into something. There’s no better way to pore over a foreign author, in a foreign language, than to translate them. For me, that extends to intralingual translation, as I’ve done… I’ve also translated – I’ve been told by purists not to use the word “translate”, to find another, but that’s the gist of it – just as we translate from ancient Greek, for example, into modern Greek, I think we should also translate more contemporary texts that aren’t in line with current idiom. I mean, Papadiamantis or Vizyinos, or Rhoides, they all have comprehension problems. And I’ll pose this simple example. My daughter once came to me, when she was a high school student, and said, “We’re doing Rhoides, I’ve got a page from The Papess Joanne but I don’t understand a thing”. Considering she was a good student who really put in an effort, she was attentive, I thought, “There’s an issue here”. So I translated that page for her and she liked it, though before she couldn’t understand it. So, little by little I ended up translating all of The Papess Joanne, which was published to relevant success. Of course it was met with opposition, “You can’t do that”, and so on, but on the other hand there were others, especially literature teachers who said that it was extremely helpful, because at least they could approach… I’m not judging whether the translation is better, I’m saying these texts need it, because it’s not just… I’m sure some things are lost, that definitely happens in translations. On the other hand, some things are gained. By that logic we’d never read Russian texts or the classic Chinese, for instance, nor contemporary ones. We’d have to learn their language to be able to read them. Translation is an intermediate stage which isn’t absolute, it isn’t the definition of perfection, it isn’t the original, anyway, but it comes close. That’s valid for anything translated. Intralingual, as well as from foreign languages and from ancient Greek, which I’ve done.

So…

Please, go ahead.

I’d like to take this opportunity to ask, what does ” to translate” mean to you?

To translate means to… I believe a translation is an original creation with a given topic. I mean, you’re given a topic, either you’ve chosen it to your preference, or on commission from a publisher for the funds, or for a theatrical stage, which has happened. I’ve been asked by a theater, the National Theater and others, to translate for them. That means that I’ll put myself, figuratively, in the author’s shoes, I try to identify with them purely as a transporter of the text. I’m not concerned with their psyche, it has no bearing in this case. I don’t need to know their mental state to translate an ancient author. There’s no point. I try to understand how they wrote it, and understand how it was received in those days, how they saw it, how they read it, or had it been written today, what language would they have used? That is a crucial point. As you know, many writers, especially foreign ones that are translated, acquire a style in our language even when they use colloquialisms and local idioms. When they use the colloquial vocabulary of a specific town, village, or province their voice changes. The usual solution in Greek is to give them kind of a hillbilly twang, or have them speak in the Cretan dialect to give them some sort of jargon, but that’s a completely different thing. It’s one thing to have someone from Alabama who speaks with an accent, and another altogether to have them speaking in Cretan or Cypriot, or something. There are things like that. And also an author’s character and style is defined by their choice of words. “Golden” is different to saying “aureate”, though they mean the same thing. A person who uses one word instead of the other, is different. They have a different culture. Will you say “cloudy”, or “overcast”? Not the same. In everyday conversations, we use “cloudy” to imply expected rain and “overcast” when it’s just gloomy. We differentiate. In literary discourse, however, “overcast” can mean either one. There are many words like that which have multiple definitions, and many words that determine the author’s style and the way we will perceive them. As someone who speaks in that way, which is completely different to someone who strings their words differently. And so it goes.

While on the subject of multiplicity of words, what other challenges does a translator face? What kind of problems?

The thing is, I haven’t dealt with translating a whole lot of authors. I’ve translated a couple of the ancients, I’ve translated, intermittently, here and there some of the French, and of the Spaniards I’ve done mainly Borges – his poetry, mainly, but also prose, but mostly poetry – and some plays by García Lorca, which just came about because I didn’t like García Lorca, I didn’t like him at first – and this might be an interesting point. I didn’t like him because I’d read him translated into Greek, and the style it was written in was Sarakatsani. You’d have Blood Wedding or his other poetry and plays, and they’d have a style… I’d picture the women wearing traditional folk costumes. That was the logic by which they brought them, conveyed them in Greek. To create an analogy, an equivalent. That didn’t sit right with me and it put me off. That’s why I didn’t like him. When I was made to… I was obligated to because of a commission, and I decided to do it as a challenge, I saw that it could very well be done differently. Personally, I’m not interested in routine translations, ones where the publisher just wants me to translate a current novel, or something. I’ve avoided it so far, at least. Whatever I’ve translated has an element of challenge. That’s what’s interesting about it. That’s why I took on what I did. Borges was obviously a huge challenge, on multiple levels. Linguistically, stylistically, conceptually, all of that. García Lorca was also a challenge, especially one of them, the first one I did, because it happened the wrong way around. I got a call from a director whom I knew, he’s no longer living, who told me he had a… He was going to stage a play by Lorca, an unknown one, but he couldn’t make sense of it, although there was a published translation. He said he couldn’t understand and asked me to help, since I did translations from Spanish, and I agreed. So I took a look at the text, which had been published and reviewed, and it was a monstrosity. We’re talking total misinterpretation. It was an uncompleted work that Lorca had left unfinished, he hadn’t managed to complete it, and it had been published as it is, untitled, uncompleted, probably the first act of a three-act play. In Greek it seemed like a comedy, which it wasn’t, at all. It was actually realistic. Not even surrealistic. It had no such elements, it was the definition of realism. And so I was compelled to do it, the whole thing, and it was performed like that. And… Then, later on I was commissioned to do another one of his works, but by then I was familiar with him. My point is, this approach allowed me to get to know another side of this author that I’d underestimated, solely due to translation. And I don’t know what’s hidden in the things we read, and we like or dislike about various authors. We don’t know what might be uncovered if we read it in a different way, even if we aren’t fluent in the language. As I’ve said many times, I’m of the belief that a translator needs to have a good grasp of their own language. That’s the point, because that’s where the material comes alive. The rest is a matter of vocabulary, you can just look it up. Nobody knows every word, you can use a dictionary. With everything online nowadays, it’s much easier. We used to have to search in books and dictionaries, and use encyclopedias to figure things out. Now it’s much simpler. That’s about it.

Regarding translation as a profession, and professional conditions in your view. What’s the biggest difficulty a translator might come across, and how would they go about dealing with it?

Now, about that… I’m not the typical professional translator, in that I never did it to make a living, as I told you previously. I didn’t get into… When I translated, I did it for my own pleasure, and answered to nobody, and then found someone to publish it, or they were commissions, which were specific, the specifications were clear-cut, the budget predetermined, and so on. I wasn’t a freelancer trying to cope. Honestly, I don’t know what the market’s like right now. Because it is a market. Supply and demand. I imagine the field is much more open, and the demand for translators is increasing. That’s how I see it from the outside, though I haven’t studied the issue. About 35 years ago, we did a feature in the literary journal Hartis – it used to be printed, now it’s in electronic form – we did a feature on Spanish literature as part of an intercultural exchange happening at the time, and some chose France, or Italy, and we did Spain. Spanish literature. We did a… We wanted to do a bibliography of any Spanish books that existed in Greek. Let me tell you, it was a sole page that we struggled to fill, and we had to include whatever dictionary was in circulation, language learning books, anything that pertained to Spanish. Some books that were about Greco, and even tourist guidebooks. They came down to about 30. They barely filled a small page. Today, 30 years or so later, the number is infinite. What that means is that back then there were a handful of us dealing with Spanish literature, and we stood out, we all knew one another. Now there’s a flurry of schools, tutors, study halls, researchers, translators, academic level schools, that teach Spanish literature and language, and all that. Things are completely different, which means that if there are so many Greek publications of Spanish-speaking authors, there must be a corresponding number of people translating them. The one thing I can say is to be weary as far as translation is concerned. Be weary, because there’s always something hidden behind words. What might seem simple, I’m talking about a text that isn’t technical, nor a detective story for example which is smoother, in that it’s not so much about wording as it is about plot. But in a text that is poetic, or by an author that is different, that’s where you need… You’ve got to… Like in order to translate a short story by Cortázar, for instance, you’ve got to have read a lot of his other work, to approach him, and other peculiar writers like him, because they’re riddled with pitfalls. That’s true in many cases. They’ve got pitfalls, words that are hidden, that lead elsewhere, or have been mentioned in their previous work, and that can be an issue. That’s what I could say to translators: Be cautious. Beyond that, it’s a matter of negotiating with publishers.

So what is the relationship with publishers like? You said you had the ability to…

I never had any particular problem with publishers. Like I said, it was either a specific commission, you’ll do this, earn this much, the deadline is this, simple as that, or, it was… The other option was to be on a percentage of the… But that’s rare any more. It used to happen. A percentage of the sales, nonsense. I didn’t really have a problem. But that was because it wasn’t something… It was different, sort of a luxury since I did it because I enjoyed it. If you’re living off it, things are different, your demands are different. Then it’s about how each publisher operates, how each translator operates, and of course who the translator is, the reputation they gradually build. It’s different when you’re unknown and when you’ve translated 20-30 books. They have more prestige, their work carries more weight, and the publisher is more assured that they aren’t going to need three editors to check the work, that it’s not far from perfect. Something like that.

Since you mentioned it, do you work with editors? Do you consider text editing important?

Not any more. I don’t really work with editors any more, but editors aren’t really dealing with translations. It hasn’t happened to me, perhaps by chance, to need text editing, beyond things like the proofreader remarking on something like a genitive case that should be used, or something to that effect. But pretty inconsequential things, nothing major. As in, we don’t have editors like we hear about in American culture today, who go in and make a lot of changes, and alter not only translations, but the original texts, as well. That’s not the case for us, at least not in my experience.

As for the future of translation, how do you picture translation as a profession twenty years from now?

If we’re not all English speakers in twenty years… Or it isn’t a given that we… I’m saying it lightheartedly, but we know that there are already countries where the second language, spoken at native level, is clearly English, or an equivalent language. I know in the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries, they speak English just as well. So they don’t need translators to read a text, or have a conversation. If this continues to spread, the profession will die out. For the basic languages, western ones. Ukrainian or Urdu speakers are obviously going to need a number of translators. But that just means that as the lingua franca spreads, which is English and Spanish at the moment, as they spread, the need for translators dwindles in major languages. And they open… You can see that… The need for English translations is diminishing, and French and Spanish ones, and it’s gearing towards languages like Chinese, Arabic, Russian. People are studying… I keep hearing and seeing ads about people learning those languages now. Because the future they seek is in that direction. Obviously to professionally…

…establish themselves.

Yes. But also because these are languages that are lesser known, – Japanese, also – For many reasons that’s where it’s headed. The wider the expansion of these major languages, western ones, the more paths are carved. The language idiom of the profession of translation will change. It will be similar, but with a different subject matter. Translators won’t translate from English or French, but from other languages.

In closing, what would be your advice to someone who wants to be a translator?

To think twice about it. Unless, from the start, they navigate towards peculiar languages. Like those. Forget about… Any more it’s plain to see. Learn unusual languages, ones that are out of the ordinary, which harbor a certain culture, and so on and so forth. There are many up and coming ones. Chinese is definitely a language that’s interesting, and carries a culture and major technological advances. Japanese, as well. So let’s have fewer French and Italian learners, and English, which is now learned on the fly, so to speak, and move toward something like that. So we can have – even in literature – original and direct transplants of writings. Because lately I see, when perusing publishing catalogs, they say, “Translation from Finnish”, “Translation from Estonian.” There are some who now translate from languages like that, which used to be unheard of. Everything used to be translated from French mainly, and then English, whereas now… Portuguese, for example, there are many who translate from it. And so on. Sort of like that.

Thank you very much for the discussion.

Thank you.