Klety Sotiriadou

Welcome, Mrs. Sotiriadou, it’s a pleasure to have you here for Translators’ Portraits.

It’s a pleasure to be here.

Let’s start from the beginning. How did translation come about in your life?

Literary translation. Well… In 1973, I was studying English Language and Literature. I had fallen ill, and one of the books I had to read was Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. I was in a horrible state, and reading her poems – I’d already been writing poetry, and had published a collection in Thessaloniki. I read her poems, and they were exactly what I wanted to say, so I translated them. That was how it started. From then on, whenever I came across a poem that I felt I identified with, I’d translate it, too. I was acquainted with the circle of the literary journal Diagonios, and Ntinos Christianopoulos was a friend, you could call him my mentor. When I published my own poetry collection, I’d given it to him to look over, and out of 156, he trimmed it down to 26. He was a very good teacher. For many years, since 1973 when the collection was published – not all of Ariel‘s poems, but a lot of them – in a bilingual edition from Diagonios Publishing House, poems by Sylvia Plath, as I said, my translations were presented in many literary journals including Diagonios, up until about ’79. In ’79 I got into prose. Meanwhile, Nana Kallianesi of Kedros Publications read a translation that I’d done in ’74 of a short story by García Márquez, and asked me to translate One Hundred Years of Solitude. I told her that the book was too big and I only translated poetry. I didn’t do it, but ended up translating it in ’82.

What does “to translate” mean to you, and what do you get out of translation?

Translation is my hobby and my “perversion”, so to speak. Basically, “to translate” means to participate in someone else’s work that I also relate to. I admit that during my translating career, I’ve had to translate books that I didn’t really like, because it had become a profession for me. My livelihood. More often than not, though, my choices have been very good.

Great. Now, about translation as a process. What kind of problems do you encounter during this process, and how do you deal with them? Have you got an example to share?

Yes, I’d be happy to. I started translating prose in 1979 in a professional capacity, and back then, there was no Google, no internet… Basically, all we had was fax, as a means of communication. So as you can appreciate, any problems a translator encountered had to be solved by using dictionaries, which were sometimes outdated, we didn’t have the abundance that is available nowadays. Correspondence… So much wasted time, and anxiety over possible mistakes. Basically, the book is read two or three times, by me at least. First to see what it’s about, and a second reading as a translator taking notes on the difficulties. I try to find as many translations as I can into other languages, even ones I don’t speak. After that, I do my first writing. I always work, or used to work on an electric typewriter, electronic, after Olympus, and when computers came out, on a computer. I go over it a second and last time, – no more than that – in which I solve the problems I’d encountered. I don’t think that… At some point I reread the text before handing it in, and I always ask to do an initial proofread. After the editor has gone over it once, I want to see what changes they’ve made. Sometimes editors do horrible things. For example, The General in His Labyrinth, by García Márquez, which was the story of Bolívar. In order to convey the era better, I had Bolívar talking – there were very few, not many direct quotes of his – in a simplified form of Katharevousa, the archaising form of Modern Greek, to differentiate the discourse, because it would’ve been ridiculous to have someone so long ago talking in our Demotic vernacular. Well, the editor demolished my text. They completely changed it. I changed it back and asked to see the second edit. They’d changed it again and I changed it back again. Finally, the editor’s version of the book was published, and it was a disappointment, but what can you do? I couldn’t interfere any longer. But there were many problems back then. When the internet was invented, those problems abated.

You’ve translated both prose and poetry. Has there been a text that was especially difficult?

From the García Márquez era, the one that was the most difficult, it took me nine months to translate, was The Autumn of the Patriarch. It was about a fictional dictator who in essence was… I think it was Batista. I might be wrong. No, Batista was in Cuba. I can’t remember right now. The dictator of Venezuela. Ruthless. It was a covert way to satirize authoritarian governments everywhere, not just Venezuela and the three-year dictatorship in Colombia. But it’s four chapters of consecutive monologs, and there are virtually four phrases in the whole book. Four chapters, four phrases, if you can imagine. There are very few periods, you don’t know who’s talking at any one time… It was honestly extremely difficult. It also had many references from coastal Colombia where they use a local idiom, and they kind of have different habits to the Andes and the highlands like Bogotá and the surrounding areas. From Bogotá’s 2,500 meters’ elevation, to the surface, sea level which is where the Caribbean lies. You can appreciate how even the people have a different – how shall I put this? – I’m going to say mindset or mentality. The latter are in an endless summer, and the former in spring or fall. That was the hardest. Another hard one was a book I recently did by Ernesto Sabato, On Heroes and Tombs, because the author is Argentinian and it was riddled with references both to Argentinian history, and Argentinian football. Old school, not contemporary.

And from the difficulties of the process of translation, let’s move on to the difficulties of the profession. As regards to professional conditions, what are the greatest challenges a translator faces, in your opinion?

I basically believe translators in all of Greece need to unite and unionize because there are a lot of problems. The first one being that often you translate, and you don’t… I imagine nowadays, translators sign contracts, even the younger ones. But it used to be that you’d translate, and the fees would be minimal. Around the world, and especially in Europe… I was a representative of the Hellenic Authors’ Society for eight years in CEATL, the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations. That’s where I saw how organized translators were in order to get the appropriate fees per 16-page folio, or per page, and to get paid a certain amount in advance. If you consider that some translators do it exclusively, as a profession, they can’t get paid at the completion of the work. They need something to live on, how will they survive? It’s quite a predicament. So, the first thing is to sign a contract. Secondly, – of course we went through a recession and everything… Everyone’s fees were reduced. But the second thing is that by law, we’re entitled to royalties, a 2.5% percentage, usually. 1.5 to 2.5% of the sales on top of the fee. No publisher ever offers that. Some publishers even make non-payment of royalties a clause in their contracts, which is illegal. We’ve got law 2121/93 on copyright, and it’s excellent. It’s comparable to the rest of Europe and it protects us. But publishers don’t always pay what they should. I know I once requested my royalties for 15 books that were best sellers and had sold over 30 or 40 thousand copies, meaning they’d exceeded my fee by far, and they paid me, but stopped giving me work. And when I asked other publishers, like the publisher of García Márquez, for my royalties, they gladly agreed, and when I’d show up at the start of the year to collect them, they told me that of the Márquez books I’d translated – and I had done 19 for Livanis – they had sold five copies. They’d give me 7 or 10 euro. That just doesn’t add up. My lawyer, who’s a copyright expert, told me to get a certified public accountant. But imagine a translator getting an accountant to audit, to find out how many copies were sold. They’d never get work from a publisher, or anyone else, for that matter. So I didn’t do it. But it’s a profession that… We’re a long way from getting the proper financial rewards.

While on the subject of publishers, what’s the relationship between translators and publishers like, generally? You mentioned fees, or perhaps who chooses the titles?

Unfortunately all that is… Look, there are various tiers of translators. Some translators have been working for years and have made a name for themselves, so to speak. So they can impose, so to speak, some demands. To have their name on the cover, for example. Or to insist on certain wording in the book, or even the book title. But commonly it’s the publisher who chooses the title if they want to change the original. And it’s the publisher who decides if the translator’s name will be on the cover or inside the book. Just like for example… To my books I usually add a preamble, a kind of preface, where I talk about the author and the way I went about the translation. The last two books I did that were published didn’t contain my preface. The excuse they gave was that they didn’t have time to contact the agent. In over 100 books that I’ve translated over the years, the agent never had a say on what goes where and what preface goes in a book. Anyway, my prefaces weren’t included. I thought they were necessary, because they explained what the author did and so on. Just so you understand that no matter how well-known you are, the publisher is still top dog.

What about your relationship with editors? You already mentioned one example. Is editing necessary?

An editor, I believe… Proofreading, yes. Not correcting… Not altering the text. Fixing syntax, or spelling mistakes, that kind of thing. A good editor, in my view, could be a translator’s guardian angel. I was very lucky in Oceanida Publications, where I did many books. I did Allende, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, two books by Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, a whole lot of books. Dionysia Bitzileki was my editor there, who’s no longer living, she was quite old. She was amazing. A philologist. She honestly used to call me about everything, and there were a couple of times that she prevented mistakes. I mean, the editor has to cooperate with the translator. They should be on the same side, not on the side of the publisher. They complement the translator’s work.

What would you say to a young person who wants to get into the “game”, to get into translation?

What I would say… It depends on how much they want it. It’s a job that’s very tiring, with many hours of solitude, very little communication, since nowadays you don’t have to ask anyone. In the old days there used to be a blog… Not really a blog, but on the internet, where we’d ask questions and our translator friends would reply. Anyone could get on and look, and answer if they knew, because back then we didn’t have Google. I would discourage a young person from getting into the profession, unless they have a passion for it, like I do. When I’ve got nothing to do, there are certain books that I’ve always wanted to translate, so I sit down and do that. And I put them out. I translate… Jane Oliver recently died, so I translated a poem of hers, and posted it on Facebook, because I felt like it. That’s the only valid reason. You’re never going to get rich in Greece off translation. Let me tell you something funny. Once, when I was a member of CEATL, I was introduced to the translator of García Márquez in Germany. He was happy to meet me and vice versa, and he asked, “How many homes did you build? I built three”. Because I’d told him I was the sole García Márquez translator in Greece. He’d built three. And I said, “I sold two”. Because… It goes to show the magnitude. So, it isn’t… Translation isn’t a job that will make you rich. You have to have a passion for it.

You talked about some of the difficulties translators face regarding working conditions and the profession in general. Nonetheless, are you optimistic about the future of translation in Greece?

Translators are essential in Greece. In England, very few works are translated. There aren’t many, a very small percentage. Greek isn’t a wide-spread language, it’s spoken by very few. There has to be… Translators are needed so we can read anything that’s published abroad, but we also need translators from the Greek language. And because I believe that you can’t translate into another language if you aren’t a native speaker, those are the translators that are needed the most. I mean, perhaps bilingual Greeks who were immersed in another language since they were children, or expats who speak Greek very well. They’re essential, because we’ve got very good authors, and we don’t have access to publicity, I’ll put it that way. To get these works published in foreign languages. Did I cover it?

Thank you very much for your time, and for this interview.

You’re welcome. Thank you, too.