Ioanna Avramidou

Good evening.

Good evening. 

Was it your dream to be involved in translating?

Not at all. It wasn’t my intention. From a young age, I always imagined myself to be an elementary school teacher. But I graduated from the Department of Greek Philology. And even when I was still in school, I was very interested in language. I remember that as a child, even before elementary school, when I was conquering a new word, I felt joy, happiness. Then in junior and senior high school – in my time they were separate – , I loved ancient Greek and Latin very much, and especially translation, it gave me great joy. I hadn’t thought about it, though. When I graduated from university, I took various exams, because I wanted to go abroad and I found myself at the Department of Translation and Interpreting in Corfu, where I was taught, I learned what translation really is, although the texts were mostly technical rather than literary. We were taught the translation technique, we also had language courses. The most basic thing in translation is to know one’s native language. Even if one knows the foreign language passively – although it’s good to have an experiential relationship with the language from which one translates – , but even if one has a passive relationship with this language, they can translate when their Greek is very good, I think.

What is your relationship with the languages you translate from?

I have… I came into contact with French from a very young age. I’ve lived in a French-speaking area for about thirty years, I have an experiential relationship with French, and German was my choice, because I really liked the language. I really liked German from the beginning, when I first entered the classroom to learn German. I liked it very much. I also studied linguistics in Tübingen, I obtained a master’s degree in linguistics in Tübingen, where I lived for four and a half years. I had no other connection with German since then, except through translations and texts.

What image of translation did you have before getting professionally involved and what changed after becoming a professional translator?

I worked for twenty-two years in the European Union as a translator. I translated technical texts, we had legal terminology, economics, agriculture, fishing, and so on. Nonetheless, I didn’t consider myself a translator, because for me translation has always been intertwined with literature. I’ve always felt awe towards the translators of literature, because literature is an endless, vast, open field where you need to have a broad range of knowledge in many different areas. However, the twenty-two years I’ve worked in the European Union also help me a lot in literary translations, because in a novel you can find many technical terms from various scientific fields, and I see how much my experience with Community texts has actually helped me.

What does translation offer you?

Translation.

What do you enjoy about it?

I don’t know, I have a… I work at my age non-stop, although I don’t make a living from translation. At some point I myself wondered why I work like this, with such intensity. That is, I can start at 4 in the morning and stop at 10 in the evening. The book War and War by László Krasznahorkai, which I translated last year and was so successful and much discussed, around thirty reviews were written about it, took me forty days to translate, for forty days I didn’t go out, it was about four hundred pages. I started at 4 in the morning and, with the first sip of coffee, I felt such joy that I would find my heroes. I didn’t care if I would be paid or not. Translation is a passion and just as every passion, it contains the erotic element and every erotic element is also stillborn and we are aware of it. Translation is a life and death drive for me. ‘Cause I wondered many times why I work like this, with such passion, so to speak. We know that a translation, after some years, twenty or thirty, will not correspond to the linguistic sense of the people who will live thirty years later, because language is constantly changing, and so is our perception of literature and so on. And translation follows all these changes. And while we know that the result is stillborn, we nevertheless do it, as when in love, we know that it will end at some point, nevertheless we enter the process.

How do you choose what to translate?

Regarding what I have translated… I’ve been in the field of literary translation for ten years and although I live far from the publishing hub, far from Athens, I have a lot of work. Many publishing houses in Athens assign me translations, but I don’t always choose. In the beginning I did choose, I entered the translation field with my favorite poet Paul Celan, the German-Jewish poet, who has a very particular language, because it’s not German, it’s “Celanian” as I say, and very difficult. I started translating Celan wishing to understand him, it was not my intention to publish it. At some point my husband said to me, “You have to do something with all that”. So, I had a book published while I was living in Brussels. They knew the book in Greece and at some point I received a phone call from the director of the Poietike journal, Haris Vlavianos, who knew my book and asked me to prepare about 30 pages for the Poiese journal, of which he was the director at the time. That’s how I entered the translation field and the proposals started to come one by one. I’ve translated Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, I’ve translated about seventeen, eighteen books, not all of which have been published yet, because now with the crisis there are financial difficulties and…

Speaking of which, what is your relationship with the authors you translate?

The authors I propose that they be translated are authors I love very much and with whom I feel a mental connection, this is the ideal part of translation. That is, to translate authors we love, there goes, so to speak, all you have, you invest all your mental resources in translation. But I also have to accept… Now that they see me as a professional translator – I still don’t see myself that way – , I’m also assigned translations I haven’t chosen. For example, I didn’t feel any mental connection with Heidegger. Nevertheless, it was my moral duty to translate it truthfully; there is an ethic in translation. Whether we disagree or agree with the author on an ideological, moral, political, etc. level, we are obliged to transfer what they say in the translation.

You’ve said that you don’t make a living from translation. Do you have any other occupation?

I’m a retiree. Look, I retired early from the European Union, where the salaries were very high and so is my pension, even though I left in my fifties, while I had to leave at sixty-five – I was a permanent employee. But we worked outside our country and faced many problems, e.g. I didn’t feel very well in the technocratic environment of the EU. Despite the high salary I received, I always wanted to leave and return to my country, where my family was, my points of reference, my friends, everything. So I receive the EU pension, which is very good, and I translate out of love. For me it’s an act of love and a need to communicate with the Other through my translations.

 You’ve mentioned before the many reviews you had.

 Yes.

What is your reaction to the reviews you receive? What’s your attitude towards it, how do you deal with it?

Look, since one translates, they are exposed to both well-intentioned and ill-intentioned criticism. As you know, we belong in a small trade here. It’s a small country, we all know each other, there are dislikes, sympathies. When I read a review, I understand the relationship of the reviewer with the translator or the author. There is a close relationship and such things happen. Fortunately, I’m based far from the hub, far from Athens, where everything happens, so, I don’t know, so far I’ve been pampered by criticism. I’ve also received some comments, there were some comments, which were not negative, but also not very flattering. But it’s good to be criticized because we learn through it. I accept criticism from people who have arguments. Unfortunately, there is no translation criticism, i.e. they write in a short paragraph at the end if it was good or bad without explaining why the translation is good or why it is bad.

What translation difficulties do you face?

Too many. The pitfalls are many. When I translate, I have an image of myself as an explorer who enters a dense and shadowy, uncharted, verbal forest and gropes through. The pitfalls are too many, e.g. one might have a flawed text comprehension that is, not understand the author’s intentions and might not be able to transfer them, one might not perceive the author’s aesthetic, ideological, political views and so on, because the translator may not know very well and may not have an experiential relationship with the language. There are many pitfalls, because words don’t have only the meaning we see on the surface, they also follow underground paths. That’s what I said in my speech today, that the translator must be an earthworm who digs deep to find these underground paths, the semantic paths of words, and to fertilize at the same time, like the earthworm does with its secreted enzymes, the territory of their own language, to enrich their own native language.

Have you come across any cultural element that was difficult for you to translate?

Many times. What gives me the utmost satisfaction is what is called “contextual reconstruction” in linguistics. We come across words and expressions that don’t exist in our own language system, so we can’t find equivalents. Great boldness is then required on the part of the translator. Like Hölderlin, who dared to enrich German while translating Sophocles’ tragedies, by inventing new languages in order to render foreign elements, which didn’t exist in his language, which were not given to him by his native language system. The translator should dare do that. There are many pitfalls. Let me tell you what I have encountered. An experienced translator translated a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann and she rendered two districts of Naples, as humans, as personal names. Posillipo, which was called Pausilypon in the time of the ancient Greek colonies, and Vomero are two districts of Naples. The translator… I don’t know, especially now with the internet, one should do field research, so as not to make mistakes, if they aren’t certain of something. She translated them as male names, which is a terrible mistake. You are students of German Language and Literature, right? You probably know the great German-Jewish poetess, Else Lasker-Schüler, an early German expressionist. In a study, I saw that Georg Trakl met the male poet Else Lasker-Schüler in Berlin. Tragic mistakes. Other than that, idioms, witticisms, irony are the trickiest, proverbs as well. We have to find equivalents in our language. ‘Cause if we translate them… Recently, I came across an expression in a text I am translating, “armoire à glace”, which literally means “ice closet”. In the beginning, I didn’t realize it was an idiom and I translated it literally, but it didn’t make sense in the sentence and then, while searching I found out… – one has to do a lot of searching – that it means a big man, a heavily built man.

So how do you think the translation quality can be improved?

By reading, reading, reading, by studying, and choosing to read well-written texts in our native language. We have people who write in very good Greek and excellent translators. E.g. I consider Iannis Kalifatidis, who has translated Sebald, a very good translator, also Kostas Koutsourelis, who translates from German as well, he has translated Novalis i.a. They do creative translation, that is, they are very bold, they find equivalents. The translator must have, as Antoine Larbaud [Editor’s Note: Valery Larbaud], the translation theorist, said, mental weighing scales next to them, and put foreign words on one plate and its equivalents in the target language on the other, and when both sides of the scales are in balance, they should know that the translation is successful.

Regarding the title, do you choose it?

The title?

Yes, the title. Are you influenced by others?

No, I insist that the title be translated as the author has it. E.g. although the translation is very good and the book is excellent, I disagree with the Greek title Alone in Berlin, of Fallada’s novel. I don’t know if you’ve read it, if you know Hans Fallada. The book’s German title is Jeder lebt für sich allein, which means “everyone lives alone with themselves” or, as Heidegger says, “everyone dies alone”, it’s a very Heideggerian title. I’d have insisted that it remain as it is in German, because the author has a purpose when they give their book a title. We cannot change it just like that, as we see fit.

Are you optimistic? How do you see the translation field? Are you optimistic about the future?

Yes, I’m optimistic. I believe that there are minor languages, there are dominant ones like English, which tends to expand and become the most dominant, a lingua franca, through which everyone communicates, but no matter how well you know a foreign language, it’s not your mother tongue, it’s not your native language. So you will never be able to communicate on a deeper level, but only on a superficial one. And I think the work of the translator is significant and translators must persist, they are the last of the Mohicans, the ones who really preserve their language and the ones who fertilize their language and contribute to the dialogue between peoples and to reconciliation. By understanding the Other, through their literature, you can… When you understand them, you wοn’t attempt, so to speak, to come into conflict with them. You’ll look for common ground and try to reconcile with them, to have a dialogue.

Thank you very much for being here with us today.

I thank you very much and I wish you good luck in whatever you do.

Thank you.