Melina Panagiotidou

Hello, Mrs. Panagiotidou. Thank you very much for being here, and for agreeing to give us this interview.

I thank you very much for your being here and for inviting me for an interview.

Let’s start the discussion on translation from the beginning. How did translation come into your life, was it a lifelong dream of yours?

No, not at all. It wasn’t a conscious one, at least. I always read a lot, because I liked it. My studies had nothing to do with reading, so I guess I salvaged it as a love of literature. At some point, but completely unconsciously, I started translating as part of the job I had at the time. But they were non-literary texts, and then bit by bit… I remember the first moment I translated. I had read a short story by Mario Vargas Llosa that I liked very much, and quite spontaneously I said, “I want to translate it”. And then one thing led to another. Sporadically, for many years, and much later there came a moment when I said, “I don’t want to do any other job anymore, I want to be a translator when I grow up”. But I was already old enough by then. That’s how I got involved. So from 2000 onwards, I decided I’d be translating literature exclusively.

So you’ve had a several-year run in translation. You’ve translated Don Quixote. What would you say “to translate” means to you? What does translation offer you that’s won you over?

It would probably be easier to answer “What does translation require?”, so what I consider I have, to some extent. I think it requires a lot of empathy, to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, in space, in time, in style. The translator has to be very receptive. If they’re not receptive, they cannot translate. They must have a visual imagination, because without it, again, they cannot translate. They must have a good ear, because the discourse is still – or must still be – to a large extent sound, rhythm. And what translation gives me is the satisfaction of the work itself, the satisfaction of getting to know something different. Translation de facto means dealing with the Other. That’s it, I’d say.

Judging from what you have translated, what would you say the major problems or difficulties a translator faces in the translation process are?

I think these are related to the kind of book one is translating. What I consider very important is if a translator realizes that they cannot make contact… What I’m saying is that for me at least, the contact that I feel I make with the text happens in the first reading. That’s where a first relationship is established, or not established. Translators, no matter how good we’re supposed to be, can’t translate everything. That’s not the case. I think, to the extent that one can have the right to choose, because that’s an issue, too, it’s very important to be able to translate texts that they already identify with, that affected them in some way. Besides that, the problems are… There’s a very wide range of problems. They might have to do with vocabulary… Mainly, I’d say they could be summed up in the problems that have to do with understanding what the author is saying. That’s not a given fact. It might be about vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics, syntax, it’s all very important. There’s a second level, which is understanding what the author means. These are two different things. One level is what they say, and another, different level, is what they mean. And in some even more difficult cases, the translator has to guess what the author might possibly be implying beneath what they mean. I think it’s an extremely complex profession both as a process, during the act of translation, and in the side things it requires. What I’ve always said and still believe, is that whatever a person does, however irrelevant it may seem, at some point in their life, it’s going to come in handy. In translation, every single thing will be useful. Even the most seemingly irrelevant things, for sure.

Is there any text you have translated that you’ve found especially difficult, or that you’ve had to use all the things that you had previously found not so useful, perhaps?

Let me say something else first. Translators are horrible scroungers, they are like ticks, they cling on to anyone who may have any knowledge they don’t have, and is suddenly required during a translation. For example, my brother is a musician. I’ve drained him, so to speak, regarding some things, especially baroque music, precisely because I couldn’t understand what the author was saying, nor what he meant. So there is a multitude of victims around, which we exploit. Beyond that, anything: Other foreign languages, painting, which is a topic, indirectly or directly, very closely related to literature and comes up very often in texts, music… Anyway, the difficulty of translation is not finding a solution, because you will find a solution. It’s identifying the problem. If you can’t identify the problem, you’re never going to find a solution. That’s where we translators get our fingers burned sometimes. Every area of knowledge can come up, even cooking, everything, you name it. Whatever you’ve done in your life, there will come a time when you’ll encounter it in translation.

Great. Let’s move on now to translation as a profession. What are the greatest difficulties a translator faces in professional circumstances?

First of all, their relationship with the publishing house and their fee, right? What I always say, I’ll say it again, it’s ok, repetition is the mother of all learning, is that translation is one of the oldest professions in the world, but also one of the least lucrative. Translation has never been well paid in Greece. One of the reasons, I understand, is the very short print run. Another reason, however, is that I’m seeing no real or systematic effort on the part of the state, to create a stable and ever-expanding readership. And I wouldn’t blame this on the publishers – not that some of them are not culpable. I just think that in the last few years of the recession we haven’t been talking about fees, but about labor that’s almost for free, which is presented as paid, and it’s insulting for any working person.

So what is the relationship between a translator and the publishers?

I’m not going to talk about my own experience, because I’ve been out of the market for about 12 years because of Don Quixote. I mean, I’m not well versed in current goings-on. Last I remember, there are few remaining publishers who really respect the translator, respect the language, respect their own profession as regards the books they publish. And, I’d like to hope, I’d really like to, that they at least respect the profession itself, the fees that they pay. I hear that various publishing houses either don’t pay any fees or they pay fees that I think are insulting to any human being, not only translators, insulting to any working person.

And as far as the relationship with editors is concerned, do you consider text editing necessary?

I do, yes. Not necessarily because… I don’t usually have mistakes, misunderstandings, and so on. I consider it necessary in the sense that usually, at least in my case, the editor is the first person to see my text – after me – so they are the second pair of eyes, which I find very useful, because they notice what is still too close to my own translating eyes for me to be able to notice. In general, my collaboration with editors has always been excellent, culminating with the editor of Don Quixote, who also had to deal with a very unclassifiable and difficult text. It was a fortunate collaboration, really. For me, at least, yes. Let me add something else, I’m also quite – how shall I put it? – I don’t exactly follow the current grammatical rules, so there are various negotiations, let’s put it that way, and I also don’t follow the rules of punctuation. I follow the punctuation I think is dictated by the rhythm of the text. So, it is good to have an editor one can work with and follow some norms that I do not follow, as it seems.

In conclusion, how do you see the future of the translation profession, especially in Greece, in the coming years?

That’s difficult to answer. Really difficult.

Are you optimistic?

I’m not optimistic about anything concerning this country. So it would be an exception to suddenly consider that I am nevertheless optimistic about translators. Let me say, judging from myself, I don’t generally know what’s going on in the field, that as far as I am concerned I attribute a lot of responsibility to myself, individually, for the fact that I am also one of the people who has not yet managed to cooperate with others in order to create a broad, let’s say, representative body that can actually raise some issues, exchange views, be able to discuss with publishers, anything at all. It’s an issue that we’re extremely fragmented almost in a cloister. And we’re the ones to blame for it. I’m predominantly including myself. Other than that, what makes me optimistic is that, to a large extent, the quality of translations is clearly improving, although we can never know under how much pressure a translation is done, because it seems that deadlines are becoming suffocating now, and translation, especially of literature, is, I think, a profession that defies time. I am optimistic about the quality of translators and the quality of their translations. But I think my optimism, as far as I can see, ends there.

We would like to conclude with a word of advice. The advice you’d give a student who wants to go into translation professionally.

To think long and hard in introspection about how much they want to do this thing. And to know that this desire will cost them, as every desire does, especially if we talk about something as difficult as translation. They will have the satisfaction of doing something they consider creative, or at least recreative, but will give them that satisfaction. It has to balance out. That’s what I would say. And I wish the best of luck to all young translators.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Good luck in everything.