Krystalli Glyniadaki

First we’d like to ask you if it had been a lifelong dream to become a translator.

No.

Would you like to tell us how it came about?

In a strange way. I had learned Norwegian in England just because I liked the language, not to ever use it in translation. I liked the sound of it, then I liked to read in this language etc. I had Norwegian friends and I liked to listen to them and to be able to talk with them. When I came back to Greece from England I was looking for a job and while having a coffee one day, the store next to the café was closed. I asked the café owner, “What kind of store will this be?”. He said, “A bookstore”, Very nice”, I said, “That’s what I’ll do, I’ll be selling books”. “What kind of bookstore?”, ”Polis Publications.” So I sent a CV to Polis Publications to sell books at their future bookstore. The publisher replied, ”I cannot hire you in a bookstore that doesn’t exist, but I saw in your CV that you speak Norwegian”. I had written “average Norwegian”, because it was average and he gave me 15 pages of Gunnar Staalesen and said, “Translate them!”. I replied, “I don’t intend to translate, I don’t want to become a translator”. “Translate them, please, I need a translator. I translated them, he was excited and gave me my first job. By chance, that is. And to tell you the truth, when everything fell apart and I had no other job, I could actually make ends meet by translating from Norwegian.

Unbelievable. So what did you think of translation before getting professionally involved? And to what extent has this changed now that you are a professional translator?

Look, in the past I didn’t think about it at all. I was reading translated books and I wasn’t thinking about the translator, I was thinking about the author. I didn’t even pay attention to their names. Now I do. Obviously, a new world was born. 

Is there a translator that you admire, that you hold up as a role model? 

These are two different things. I may admire someone, but to “hold up someone as a role model” means that I want to imitate them. For example, I admire Maureen Freely. She’s the English or American translator – I can’t remember exactly – of Orhan Pamuk. I can read Orhan Pamuk in Turkish and he is not the Orhan Pamuk that people read in the Anglo-Saxon world. Orhan Pamuk is closer to the Greek translations. But Maureen Freely really elevates him. That is, her translations are better than the original. In the same sense that the poems of Nâzım Hikmet are better transwritten by Ritsos in Greek than the original poems. Ritsos did not speak Turkish. They roughly told him what Hikmet was saying and he rewrote the poems as Ritsos. I admire these two examples, but I don’t want to imitate them. Precisely because I am a professional translator, I prefer that the author’s voice is heard more than mine. Now, a translator as a role model? I recently happened to read a translation of Norwegian literature. I had read the original and then I read its English translation. The Norwegian author is called Roy Jacobsen, the translator is… Don… anyways, he is the former translator of Nesbø, who stopped translating Nesbø, because now he translates Knausgård. Don Patterson [Editor’s Note: Don Bartlett], together with another one are two co-translators. And why is this amazing? Because they have managed to render a dialect, the dialect of northern Norway, which is very characteristic. They have rendered it very cleverly using a Scottish dialect. And so they have really transferred the soul of the book into English. This is chapeau, hats off to them! This is a role model. I’d like to be able to imitate that.

How do you feel when you translate a literary piece of work? What do you enjoy about translation? What does it offer you?

Many things. Of course, it also depends on the book, right? I really enjoy translating teenage literature, because it flows easily and I have fun with it and I have to find smart solutions to the puns that foreign writers use extensively about teenagers, clever puns. Because I am a poet, I really like the fact that I constantly work with the Greek language, transforming it, re-kneading it. It’s like doing daily language exercises and it helps me a lot in my writing. I get tired when it’s a book I’ve accepted to translate in order to make a living. But what can we do? There are these cases too. Sometimes I don’t like the book very much, or I don’t particularly appreciate the author. It doesn’t happen often, but it has happened a couple of times. Yes.

Do you have any other professional occupation besides translation? Poetry, of course. Anything else? 

Poetry, yes, it is a profession in the sense that I regularly publish poetry, but poetry doesn’t pay. I am in charge of copyrights at Estia Publications, that is, I have a regular job of nine to five, because otherwise it doesn’t work out. There are only a few translators, who make a living exclusively by translating and the reason is not that… Okay, some publishers pay more, some pay less, others have long payment terms, but that’s not the problem. The thing is that the levies are too high. May I be a bit blunt?

Yes. 

Well, imagine you get 4,000 euros for a book, okay? You have worked for 4 months and you get 4,000 euros. This “4,000 euros” sounds very nice to you. Be careful, though. You are a freelance translator. Subtract 24% VAT and 20% withholding tax from your fee. How much is left? 100% minus 44%, 56% is actually left, i.e. around 2,200. And you have worked for 4 months. If you are in the lowest category of OAEE, the Insurance Organization for Freelancers, or EFKA as it is called now, you pay 600 euros every 2 months, so it’s 1,200 in 4 months. 2,200 minus 1,200 equals 1000, divided by 4, you earn 250 euros per month. Your friend who works at a Public store earns more. Sorry I’ve ruined your dreams. We hope this is not always the case, but such things happen, too. 

Are you a member of a professional translators’ association?

No.

What is your relationship with the authors you translate?

Do you mean if I talk to them?

Are you in contact with them, do you communicate, if you have a question?

Yes, with many of them. When I face translation problems, because I don’t understand something or maybe the author has overlooked something – this has also happened to me – something had escaped the author’s or the editor’s attention and I said, “Guys, there’s a mistake here, it’s not May, it is June”, or something else, even more significant. I contact the author’s agent or publisher, I ask my question and usually the author himself or herself answers me and we start a conversation. The problem is solved and often corrected in the next edition of his or her book in Norwegian or English.

What are the difficulties of translation? Have you ever come across a cultural element or a tradition which was difficult to translate while rendering it into Greek?

Yeah, sure. One of the translation obstacles is…the local dialects, not only the dialects, but also folklore elements of a language, e.g. proverbs. There may be a Norwegian proverb that can be perfectly translated in Greek – I can’t think of one right now – something that they say and we say it as well, but our proverb refers to a specific region of Greece with a specific history etc., so you cannot use it in the translation. I’d like to give you an example, but I don’t have anything in mind right now. How is this Greek proverb, “What do you have, what I’ve always had”?

What do you have, Giannis? What I’ve always had.

Well, this… – sorry guys, I couldn’t remember it, I’m a bit dizzy from the heat – this expression also exists in Norwegian. It is not exactly the same, but it is translated that way. But Harry Hole cannot say, ”What do you have, Giannis? What I’ve always had.” It’s not possible, guys, sorry, you have to find another way to say it. This is one difficulty. And then, there are dialects. Norway is full of dialects, every city, ok not every city – it’s not like Italy where every city has its own dialect– but Norway also has many dialects. Oslo and its greater region have their own dialect, western Norway has its own dialect, southern Norway too, central Norway has another one, northern Norway another one, Lapland has a different one. So what are you going to do with all this? Should I translate one with a Cretan accent, the other one with a Peloponnesian, the third one with a dialect of Thessaloniki, and another one with a Pontic dialect? No way. So, most of the times, you translate ”he said with that kind of accent”, e.g. ”he said very hoarsely, as everyone from Tromsø speaks”. Such are the difficulties of literary translation. If we talk about philosophical translation I can tell you other things.

How do you deal with criticism of your work? Is there any?

I’ve never received any negative criticism, but this means two things: either my work is so indifferent or it is as quiet as a translation has to be, so that they are only concerned with the author and not with me. I haven’t faced any negative criticism from critics or readers, but people may be too shy to tell me, who knows? It would be nice to have translation criticism. 

You are translating from a language, which is not very common for Greeks to learn, there aren’t many translators from Norwegian, as you explained, when you talked about how you started translating. Do you think that editing is necessary? Are there editors who can do this job? 

Of course. Look, in a language like mine, the editing is different than in a language like yours, German. Because in the case of your translations from German, the editor can read the original, in my case the editor cannot read the original text, so they’ll focus… They will be an editor of Greek literature. They’ll examine if my Greek is fluent, correct, if I’ve written any nonsense, things like that. They won’t be able to compare the original text with my translation. Maybe that’s why I haven’t received any negative reviews. I don’t know. Unless they read another translation, e.g. in French and compare mine with the French or the English translation, if there is one. But editors are always essential. They are essential to the writers themselves, let alone to the translators. 

Who decides on the titles of the books you translate?

We usually keep the same title. If the title differs, we discuss it with the respective editor, i.e. with the respective series director. Nesbø’s Leopard is not called Leopard in Norwegian, it is called… Pancerne serce, which means “a heart with spikes”.

“Agathia” in Greek.

“Agathia”, thank you. I think a lot in English, I’m bilingual, so… Since the book had been a huge success in English as The Leopard, Metaixmio Publications decided to translate it as Leopard in Greek, just to give you an example. It’s usually me that I suggest the title. There was another time that my choice was not selected. I read Norwegian literature for an English publishing house, I don’t translate for them, but I am one of their professional readers, that is, I suggest whether they should take on a book or not. I recently read a book called … Translated from Norwegian into English it would be… “Nature versus nurture”. That is, if something is by nature or if it is acquired. Right? “By nature or acquired”, is, let’s say its Norwegian title. And the translator, the one who will eventually translate it, has given the title Wills and Testaments, because it has to do with various inheritances. I had no idea what the publisher was thinking of – who is actually one of the greatest English publishers, Christopher MacLehose– but he probably knows better than me. In cases of such an experienced publisher, you say, “Ok, fair enough”.

When you write poetry do you think as a translator? That is, how would one translate this… 

No, poetry is… I don’t write prose, I cannot speak. Maybe if I were a novelist, I would think about it, but poetry has so much to do with the rhythm, with the melody of the language, in which you write, that you can’t think that you’re writing in another language at that moment; whether I write in Greek or in English, I am directly inside this language. You cannot think ”How would I translate it?”. Poetry isn’t usually translated, it is transwritten.

Are you generally optimistic about the future of translation in Greece? 

Certainly. Why not; Not in terms of money, I don’t know about that. What am I telling you now? In terms of quality, yes. And I see more people learning foreign languages well and wanting to translate. And it is a great thing to be a small country with a limited language. As bad as it is for our novelists who don’t have translators abroad, it is just as good for readers and translators, who have a lot of work from abroad.

Thank you very much.

I thank you. And I wish you all, best of luck!