Dimosthenis Kourtovik

Thank you very much for being here and for agreeing to give us this interview. It’s a great pleasure for us.

I thank you for the invitation. It’s unusual to invite a translator for an interview.

That was the purpose of the whole project. So, let’s start from the beginning. How did translation come about in your life? You translate from so many different languages.

Since you are from the Department of German Language and Literature, I was thinking of telling you how I learned or rather what was the stimulus for me to learn German, because everyone in my house was English-savvy. I come from a family that grew up in America. They were Greeks from America, and I listened to a lot of English. Well, at fifteen, my mother made me face the following dilemma: “Which language do you want to learn?” I was learning French in high school, so the choice was between English and German. English, no way, it was a teenager’s reaction to family power, and, for that reason, I said “German”. In the first year of German courses, I fell in love with the German teacher. It’s a very good motive to learn a foreign language well. Since then I used to regularly fall in love with our German teacher at the Goethe Institute every year and that’s why I was the best student.

And after German, how did translation and the other languages, this whole journey, come about?

First of all, the other languages were the result of… Of course I had to learn English on my own at some point, because you cannot do without it today. The other languages were the result of a rather perverted curiosity for languages that were kind of exotic at the time, such as Finnish or Norwegian, Scandinavian languages, or Slavic languages that were sort of forbidden back then. While in Germany, in order to supplement my meager income as a student, I worked as a night watchman and had to stay up all night, which was difficult after a hard day – we did various things – so I tried to find a way to stay awake. I started reading detective novels, thinking that the plot and the suspense would keep me awake. I realized very quickly that the opposite was happening. The plot was standardized, so I fell asleep. And then I discovered those amazing foreign language learning methods of Langenscheidt, “30 hours Italian”, “30 hours Russian”, etc., which, like most German things, were very organized. In 30 lessons you were given a complete overview of each language, along with a contextualized vocabulary in dialogues. Are you aware of them, are they still on the market? The last time I went to Germany, I looked for them, but they didn’t exist. I didn’t find them in Berlin. No, they don’t exist. Until a few years ago, however, they were still available. Now with the internet, maybe these methods have changed. However, they were amazing, because they kept me vigilant. First of all, they maintained my curiosity at a very high level; I kept saying “what’s next, what’s next?”. E.g. this is how the auxiliary verb “to be” is conjugated in Russian. The verbs of the first inflection? Let’s see what’s next. I was looking for comparisons between one language and the others I knew, as well as Greek, to see through the convergence – not comparisons, convergence – [they sound similar in Greek] and through the discrepancies the similarities or differences in the psychology of the peoples. It seemed very fascinating to me. So I completed my Spanish. Then I thought, ok I’ll start with Polish, then with Swedish, etc. Regarding your question about translation, it may have existed as an interest as a repressed desire or latent interest, ok, I’ll call it interest but, of course, the stimulus was purely external, practical. At 22 I needed… Actually it was not so practical, I forgot to say it was romantic to a great extent, for the following reason: at 22 I was very much in love with a Finnish woman. Finnish was the 3rd or 4th language I learned because of this relationship. And this Finn lived in Finland. I lived in Greece. We were both university students, each in their own country, which meant we could only see each other twice a year, in the summer and during the Christmas holiday. Besides, it was difficult for me to travel, both because of the junta and because I hadn’t done my military service. But above all, it was difficult because I had no money. In order to earn some money to make my first visit to Ursula, as this lady was called, I agreed to translate a book which was actually written in English – it was a socio-political study – for the publishing house Kalvos. Back then, Kalvos was one of the enterprising publishing houses that were founded during the dictatorship, aiming, though, to revive the flattened intellectual movement in Greece due to the dictatorship. They assigned me this book in its German translation, because my English wasn’t very good then. And I translated it, handwritten, of course, with my scribbles, which drove the printer to despair. He said, “I give up, unless you pay me double, because this gentleman’s handwriting is illegible and he has made so many corrections one upon the other, so it’s an indescribable confusion”. But I earned 4,800 drachmas, which was the cost of an Athens-Stockholm ticket. Ursula used to spend Christmas with her family based in Stockholm, to answer your question, how come the Finn was in Sweden. And that’s how I started. It seemed that the people in charge liked the translation. They said that this young man is very promising. He may be a dumbo and not know how to write, he writes messily, but he has talent. And I continued. The first translations were, of course, from German. Various books. I also compiled the first, I can say, anthology of post-war German novelists in Greece, an anthology that I compiled myself, meeting in some cases… not in all, but in several cases the respective authors in Germany, where I was due to postgraduate studies. This is how it all began.

Through all this experience you have gained, what would you say that “to translate” actually means? What does translation offer you?

Besides love. Love is an external stimulus. The internal stimulus is not just one, but many. If – as I imagine, it applies in your case, as well – you have a real interest in translation and not a purely practical interest, as was in my case in the beginning, that is, first of all, if you love literature, because I imagine most of you will be involved with literature, so if you really love literature, if you love specific authors or specific literary movements, then translation is a fascinating challenge because you have to… What you love, what you’ve loved and read in the original, you wish to share it with the public of your country and your language which, of course, is not so simple. Translation is not a one-to-one process as in mathematics, correspondence is not one to one. You can’t just take the dictionary and… as I naively believed as a child, when I didn’t speak any English at all at the age of ten, but I was interested in dinosaurs and my mother had bought me some books about dinosaurs in English, cunningly thinking that he is interested in dinosaurs, not in English, but, since the book is in English, it may push him to learn English. I didn’t want to deal with English, but I thought, ok, what’s English? I’ll look up the word in the dictionary, I’ll search for “is”, “it is”. And I couldn’t find it, because, of course, dictionaries don’t conjugate verbs. So there were many things I didn’t understand. But I guess you didn’t go through this infantile process and you know very well that, in translation, a dictionary is the last refuge. You mainly need to understand the spirit of the author. And the author’s spirit isn’t their sensible attitude, it’s not just their writing style. Well, it is actually the style, but style is a lot of things combined together. Style is rhythm, style is meter. Even in prose, prose also has its rhythm. Style is the many levels that the author’s discourse may have. A phrase can be heard or read as something simple, understandable, and can indeed be understandable. But this is the first level, understood by everybody. However, there is a second level, with obscure allusions, with intertextual references to other works of world literature. Or, maybe, the author uses cliché phrases, but they don’t use them because they believe in them, rather because they want to mock the clichés or, on the contrary, because they want to underline and at the same time to mock their own inability to overcome the cliché. Umberto Eco gives a good example, saying that the phrase “I love you” as part – or the main part – of a love confession has become a cliché, mainly because it is repeated over and over in romance novels. And he refers to a well-known Italian writer of the genre, 50 years ago or more, called Lala [Editor’s Note: Liala – female writer], who wrote such novels prolifically and constantly wrote “I love you”, “oh, I love you” and such. Umberto Eco talks about the dilemma of a young man who wants to confess his love to his girlfriend and he says, “If I tell her ‘I love you’, it will be another banal cliché, like the one in Lala’s novels”. And he finds the solution by telling her, “As Lala would say, I love you”. He expresses his love and at the same time he mocks the means of expression, the way of expressing his love. These things are – so to speak – on the agenda of an elementary good author, and the translator should be able to pick up on them. Of course, they can be taught by a very capable professor. Do I talk too much? You may interrupt me.

No, please go on.

They can be taught in part. However, the translator learns them mostly through the dictates of their own sensitivity and, of course, through their experience. You cannot understand everything in the beginning. However, your sensitivity, which I imagine is sharpened, can help you make many detours to achieve the desired result. Two months ago I had a wonderful experience. Mrs. Bairaktari invited me to a postgraduate seminar at the Department of French Language and Literature in Athens. And I was amazed. The students were, of course, at your age, but I was amazed at the degree of their sensitivity. They knew things, they understood, they felt things, which I may have gained after several years of translation experience.

Wonderful. Talking about the translation process, you’ve mentioned the challenges of style, rhythm, language. Is there a text that was particularly difficult for you? Does an example come to mind? Or is there something that makes you say every time “At first sight, it seems difficult to translate”?

There are some words, which, mainly through Latin, have been incorporated into the vocabulary of most, Western at least, languages. We have a different language tradition. These words are very common today, internationally. However, they are difficult to translate into Greek. A typical example is the word “demokratia”, the word “Republik”, “republic”, “république”, etc. In Greek, both “Demokratie” and “Republik” are “demokratia”. And that, of course, leads to confusion. That is, when you say “the Democrats” but you mean “the Republicans”, “die Republikaner” this can be confusing. Such confusions, in fact, can be exploited by an opportunistic politician, or high-ranking military officer – I’ll give you an example – just to muddy the waters. Dictator Papadopoulos – you probably know that we had a military dictatorship in Greece from ’67 to ’74. Well, at some point, due to a failed coup d’etat by the king’s followers in 1973, dictator Georgios Papadopoulos took the opportunity to abolish the monarchy, the kingship and wanted to ratify his decision by a referendum. Announcing at the same time the abolition of the monarchy and the holding of a referendum for ratification, he closed his speech by exclaiming, “Long live demokratia!”. If you had to translate this… this exclamation, this motto into German, what would you say, “Es lebe die Republik!” or “Es lebe die Demokratie!”? He played precisely with the ambiguity of the word. He tells you, I’ll technically mean “Long live the non-monarchical regime!”, but the dumbos may think that I suddenly became a democrat and I’m no longer a dictator. Such ambiguities in the reverse process, i.e. when you translate from German, French, or English into Greek, cause great dilemmas. I can sincerely tell you that such words, which don’t have an absolute equivalent in Greek or cause ambiguities, were and are my biggest translation obstacle. Another example is the word “sex”. We use the word “sex”, but, as you know, “sex” in German, French, English, also means gender [filo]. However, the word “filo” in Greek has many other meanings, as well. When we talk about “Geschlecht” or “sex”, and all that, we use the word “filo”. But “filo” can also mean a racial group in Greek, so ambiguities are created. The same happens with the Greek word “ratsa” in the sense of “race”, “Rasse”. In Greek the word “race” may have a biological meaning, as a subdivision of the species, “Rasse”, but it also has many other meanings, which again lead to confusion. These problems should actually be solved by a linguistic conference dealing with this very issue. That is, in cooperation, possibly or inevitably if I may say so, with the academy, there should be such a conference established, which proposes in a more or less binding way, that is, through the establishment of an official opinion, after discussions, that e.g. “Republik” will be translated into Greek like this. Some efforts have been made. A correct rendering would be the word “politia”. Because, of course, Plato’s “Politia” is in German and in all the western and eastern languages “Republik”, Die Republik, La république, The Republic. And that’s exactly what it means. “Republic” is the exact equivalent of “politia”. But, unfortunately, the word “politia” has acquired additional meanings in modern Greek. It is also the “big city”. So it’s a difficult issue. Although attempts were made, even by lexicography, to establish “politia” as a rendition of “repubblica”, they were not successful. But if there were a binding decision by the academy of linguists, translators, etc., as we were discussing before, it could possibly gradually displace the meaning “city” out of the word “politia”.

We’ve discussed the problems of translation and the challenges of the translation process which are certainly many, multifaceted, multileveled. Let’s move on to translation as a profession and to the challenges or difficulties that a translator faces in this area. What are they and how do you think they could be dealt with or how do you personally deal with them?

Look, I’ve always had the peculiarity of dealing with what was useless, what was considered useless. With useless languages, useless professions, useless studies, so I would be a bad advisor in this field. I insist that your initial stimulus for translating should be the love for what you do and not a calculation, a professional expediency, “I’ll do this, I’ll become a translator, ’cause that way I’ll be able to make a living”. In my time no one could make a living from translation. I don’t think things have changed much. Of course, there’s also the interpreting, for example Brussels offers positions for translators, interpreters, etc. but these have more to do with technical translation, with the translation of technical texts, and I don’t know if that is what you are primarily interested in, are you?

There is a broad interest…

There is a broad interest… So you could specialize in technical texts at some point. To tell you the truth, as I see you physiognomically, I don’t consider it very likely, but life has many twists and turns and you never know which way you’ll turn. Of course, I have to say that towards the end of my translation career I was a well-paid translator. And I also used it as an excuse in order to reject translations that didn’t interest me. Well-respected people, many times my friends, proposed that I translate something that I wasn’t particularly interested in or that I had no time to translate and I would say – forgive me for the expression – “I am an expensive whore. You can’t afford me”. It usually worked, but there were cases when it didn’t and I was faced with a great dilemma. The last time it happened, and it was an experience that, I think, is worth telling you. It was in 1994, concerning the publishing house Ideogramma, run by an eccentric man, Christos Darras, who died some years ago. He was a connoisseur of book art and actually of the old typographic art. This man had earned a lot of money in the stock market and decided to invest it all in printing and publishing. He brought old Leipzig printing machines from Germany, which are hard or impossible to find today. He set up a printing house on Ippokratous Street in Athens, he founded a publishing house that published one book a year, but it was meticulously made and it was an extremely special book in the international bibliography. E.g. The confessions of [Editor’s Note: Jean Jacques] Rousseau. You may know it, Mary [Editor’s Note: Bairaktari]. So this man, whom I knew and appreciated and who appreciated me, too, suggested in May 1994 – it’s important to mention the month – that I translate into Greek Lord Byron’s letters from Greece, from his two journeys to Greece – the first when he was very young, in 1809-1811 and the second when he came to Messolonghi in 1823-1824, where he died. I saw the text, he gave it to me in English, I glanced over it, I said, “What a pain, it’s impossible to translate it”. And, of course, I told him the usual, “You know, Christos, I’m a very expensive whore”. And he said, “Meaning?”. My fee at that time was about 50,000 drachmas for a 16-page folio. I don’t know if you understand it, even I cannot turn it into today’s fee, but it was very high, translators didn’t get such fees back then. The usual fee was 10,000 to 20,000 drachmas. And, to make it even more, so to speak, unaffordable for Darras, I told him 90,000 drachmas. Ηe immediately said, “Okay”. On one condition, that I’ll have it ready in three months. “I want to publish it in autumn.” And I found myself facing the greatest dilemma in my whole career as a translator. The money was too much and I needed it, because I didn’t earn that much at the time. It was too much money. I am generally not impressed by money, but this fee impressed me when I calculated what I would earn. On the other hand, I was impressed by the work that had to be done, because I really had to translate it in three, three and a half months. I had to deliver it in September. And, as if all this were not enough, I realized that this translation could only practically be done on a computer, because with the typewriter I had been using until then, I’d have to constantly switch sheets of paper. Plenty of footnotes had to be done with symbols that the typewriter didn’t have, but the computer keyboard did. I had a computer – my wife had bought it for me – but I was an absolute duffer in electronics, I hadn’t learned how to use a computer. So I had to learn how to use a computer in no time. And as if that were not enough either, the only person who could teach me how to use the computer, namely my wife, was leaving for Denmark the next day, as every year, to spend her summer holiday with her family. You can imagine what I had gotten myself into. So she sat down with me the night before her trip to teach me what she could about using a computer. The next day she left. I sat at the computer and shivered. I was writing and saying “now I’ll lose it”, because I’ll press the wrong button. It did happen to me a few times and I had to start all over again. To cut a long story short, that’s how I spent the whole summer of 1994 and the expensive whore paid dearly for her trickery, if you allow me the profanity.

Since you mentioned the collaboration with the publishers – okay, that was, I guess, an extremely special case…

It was an extreme case, yes.

What is in general the relationship of a translator with the publishing field?

Pardon?

What’s the relationship with the publishers?

The relationship is extremely tense. And highly exploitative. You can understand from whose side. The translator isn’t usually able to impose their terms. I told you, towards the end I could, but in the beginning, I had no say at all since my involvement in translation was purely amateurish, as I saw it. Fortunately, I was able to choose the books even at quite an early stage in my career. Moreover, it was a time of idealism and that time has passed. Publishing houses didn’t focus that much on the number of a book’s sales, they cared a lot to see if it was of aesthetic, political, or ideological interest. That kind of things, of expediencies, which weren’t expediencies in today’s sense. But, yes, of course, from the moment that publishing houses became professional, they went beyond the amateur stage, and they also professionalized their relationship with the translators. That is, the publisher’s authority over the translator became much more intense and absolute. In fact, today we are going through a period of prolonged crisis, which did not begin in 2010, especially in your profession. It started earlier. The book bubble has burst approximately since 2005. It’s difficult for a translator to achieve a decent fee for their work. I have no idea what translation fees are like now. I know or, I think, I’m sure they’re unsatisfactory, they’re just as unsatisfactory as they were in my time, which means that the translator still cannot make a living from translation, at least from the translation of literary texts. I don’t know about the translation of technical texts. It may be more possible in this field because of the many institutions that exist now due to the European Union.

And how about editing? Is an editor needed?

That’s a very good question. I didn’t allow my translations to be edited, but I wasn’t right. Because I would have avoided a lot of translation mistakes at the beginning of my career, which are inevitable for someone, who has neither extensive contact with the foreign language – even if it was German that I spoke almost like my mother tongue – nor, of course, a so broad range of knowledge such as that of an older person who has years of experience in this field. An editor would have been needed. Many times the editing was, so to speak, de facto. That is, there wasn’t any appointee to translation editing. It was either the publisher or another colleague at the publishing house, who read the translation and said, “Pay attention to this or that, here it’s not like that” etc. Towards the end, when I was more experienced and I could look over and understand the pitfalls of translation, I did ask for an editor. But an editor as an institution, as a profession, doesn’t exist in Greece. Very few publishing houses have professional editors. I too have played the role of an editor at a late stage of my career. I was assigned the editing of translations. I can tell you I suffered much more then, than when I was translating myself. Because it’s more difficult to retranslate a bad or even a mediocre translation, than to translate the text from the start. I’d rather say to the publisher I’ll translate it from the start – and I think they wouldn’t say no – instead of retranslating something that… I am not saying that it was always like that. But this was very often the case. First of all, the style suffered and if the style suffers, whatever you correct, you cannot correct the style from beginning to end. So I wouldn’t advise you… If we assume that by the time you finish your studies and go out into the professional world the institution of editors will have been established in Greek publications, I wouldn’t advise you to start from this position. You will suffer very, very, very much. Unless you are limited to editing only translation mistakes, and not editing the text as a whole.

Very interesting. Are you optimistic about the future of translation, of the translator’s profession? How do you think it will evolve, especially in Greece?

In Greece. I am optimistic… You hear me say that with some reservation, because before we utter the word “optimistic” or “optimism” today we really have to think a little bit, regarding the way things are. I am optimistic in the sense that as the osmoses between cultures and between more and more cultures multiply, the need for translations will also increase. All kinds of translations. I am also optimistic, because the audience that reads these translations will continue to grow. It’s inevitable. For practical, economic, political, social reasons, you see texts circulating, e.g. on the internet, in a bunch of languages and, if you want to follow up a certain topic, you have to be able to read in at least three foreign languages other than your native. Translations will increase, the need for translations will increase. Maybe – this is a cunning thought I sometimes have – maybe translations will become easier in the future, because it is precisely the interaction of languages that leads to similarities. Having fifty years of experience in the field of translation, I see that many international terms – forget the example of “Republik” – but other international terms, which in my time, in the ’70s and earlier were difficult to translate into Greek are used today as loanwords. An example is the word “pub”. Nikolaos Politis, not Nikolaos… my mind got stuck, the author Politis…

Kosmas.

Kosmas Politis, right. Apart from being an excellent writer, he was also an excellent professional translator, that is, he earned his living from translation. He got stuck in the word “pub” once and he kept translating it as “kapilio”. Well, a “pub” is not a “kapilio” [old word for an often seedy pothouse]. I don’t know how the public perceived the word “kapilio” then, what they imagined, they certainly didn’t imagine anything pure and clean, in a moral sense, they imagined who knows what. Today there’s no such issue, you write “pub” in Greek. There’s no need to make a complete list of all the terms of foreign origin, which have now been integrated into Greek and are easily used in translations. But I think this trend is going to spread more in the future, so it might be easier for you to translate from, let’s say, German than it was in my time. I have given an example related to terminology, but it’s not just terminology that is slowly being assimilated between languages, it’s also the style. There are also influences on the style. I notice this in many languages – mainly, of course, from English – the influence of style in Greek, the influence of Anglo-Saxon humor on the younger generations, who write literature, but also on those, who do not write literature. There is, in other words, a cultural diffusion, of course, mainly from the dominant languages to the smaller ones, and to a lesser extent the opposite, which can also make translation easier. I notice, for example, the great influence that style has – I’m not talking about terminology – the style of English to German, to speak of two dominant languages. I mean, I see texts, novels, even newspaper articles in German, which would have been almost incomprehensible, not linguistically, but they would have seemed, so to speak, stylistically alienated fifty years ago, because that was not the ethos of the German language back then. But the ethos of a language is also gradually changing.

And a closing interview question. What advice would you give to a young person, to a student, who wants to work professionally in translation, who has this dream?

To keep having it as a dream. And you may interpret it as you wish.

Thank you very much.

I thank you.