Love Virtually: An Interview with the Translators
All around Europe – and beyond – from Sao Paulo to Shanghai to Amsterdam to Jakarta, men and women of common and serious intent are burning midnight oil and working all hours sent to bring Love Virtually to the wider world, to render in clear and current vernacular the bestselling novels of Herr Glattauer. With the rights sold to thirty-five countries, it has to be one the of most comprehensively translated books since the Larsson trilogy.
At MacLehose Press we’re doing things slightly differently (as far as we know!). The translation of Love Virtually, and its sequel, Every Seventh Wave, has been a joint effort undertaken by two translators who just happen to husband and wife. Jamie Bulloch and Katharina Bielenberg have just finished translating Every Seventh Wave, so have managed to find a few minutes to speak with Vivienne Nilan. Additional questions from Paul Engles.
Vivienne Nilan: Are there any particular issues when translating from German to English, especially in e-mail-speak?
Jamie Bulloch: The letters in Love Virtually are written quite conventionally, they don’t use contractions or smileys or take shortcuts. It’s very much about language and the possibilities of word-play, about taking an idea, a written image and extending it, teasing out meaning or inference. It was more complex than either of us had expected for something which is ostensibly very conversational, but it was also huge fun.
Katharina Bielenberg: The character Emmi is even more fond of elaborate compounds than the average German, so that was a bit of a challenge. Sometimes they worked in a straight translation, but too many would have sounded absurd in English so sometimes I chose instead to find another way instead of using a string of hyphens.
Vivienne Nilan: Were you always able to find alternatives or did you have to sacrifice parts of the text?
Jamie Bulloch: Where a joke or a pun couldn’t possibly work in English, we tried to find another as a substitution. This was one of the most enjoyable parts of the process. Sometimes it would take days until we hit upon it, we’d just have to let it sit for a while.
Vivienne Nilan: What are the the advantages /pitfalls of translating as a team?
Katharina Bielenberg: Initially we had this idea that we would approach the translation like a game of chess, an open Word doc with each of us responding to the email that had gone before. But of course this would have taken three times as long to produce a text – it would have been like translating in real time. Then we considered working on our texts separately, but Emmi and Leo are constantly referring to what each other has just said, so we would have had to backtrack quite a bit to get it right. In the end one of us would do a chapter and email it to the other to fill in the gaps, but there was still the need for a lot of cross-referencing.
Jamie Bulloch: One of us could pop downstairs and make lunch, happy in the knowledge that work was still proceeding!
Vivienne Nilan: Who makes the final decision when/if there’s a difference of opinion
Katharina Bielenberg: When we’d finished our draft we sat down and worked through the whole text for the first time together, quite a rigorous process during which we were able to be completely critical and objective about each other’s efforts. We’d bandy ideas about, but we’d know immediately when one or other of us had hit on the solution. Very satisfying.
Jamie Bulloch: I suppose we know each other pretty well by now, which helps; we didn’t feel we had to be polite or tread delicately around each other’s translation.
Vivienne Nilan: What attracted you to this book?
Katharina Bielenberg: It’s beautifully structured and totally compelling, with each chapter leaving you on a cliffhanger. I would defy anybody not to want to read more on. Daniel is brilliant on the complexities and psychology of love, but he has such a light touch, and there are aspects of the book that everyone can relate to, which gives it a kind of universal appeal. Parts of it are quite frivolous, others deeply serious. It’s very funny, clever, can be frustrating but then the frustration falls away as you round the next corner. It’s quite a rollercoaster.
Jamie Bulloch: I love the fact that it can be devoured in a single sitting. The ending makes you gasp, but then there’s the sequel to look forward to [Every Seventh Wave is published in July this year].
Paul Engles: Where did the idea of translating the book together come from? Do you know if the other publishers of the book in the any of the thirty-five countries are repeating the trick (not necessarily husband and wife)?
Katharina Bielenberg: Christopher (MacLehose) and Jamie had come up with the idea separately, but simultaneously, just after we acquired Love Virtually and its sequel. Unlike Jamie, I’m not by any means a full-time translator, but this seemed an opportunity not to be missed. I’m not aware of others having done the same, but several of the other editions were underway before we got started.
Jamie Bulloch: I thought it might be quite a fun experiment. We work broadly in the same field, but it’s not often that our work coincides, let alone overlaps. Our children thought it hilarious and they’ll enjoy reading the books when they’re a bit older. We know that the first foreign editions to be published used only the one translator – unless you ARE married to the person you’re working with it could be a logistical nightmare. This way we managed to fit it around other work, so much of it was done after hours with a bottle of wine.
Paul Engles: Can you think of any other translated books that have used the dual approach or would have benefited from it?
Jamie Bulloch: I’d love to know how Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge shared their work on the Asterix books, amongst the finest translations in the English language! It can be such a laborious process, much more difficult I would have thought when the roles are less clearly defined.
Paul Engles: In Love Virtually the path of true love does not run smooth: there’s a lot of squabbling and fighting. Did translating their travails make you bicker as much as they do?
Jamie Bulloch: You’d better put that question to my wife…
Katharina Bielenberg: No more and no less. I think we have an easier time of it , and I’m quite relieved having spent some time in theirs that our relationship is less complicated than Emmi and Leo’s. I’d like to think Emmi is a little more temperamental than I am, Jamie may disagree.
Paul Engles: Having spent so long immersed in Love Virtually, would you now be worried if one or the other suddenly started spending a suspicious amount of time on the internet?
Katharina Bielenberg: If there were enough hours in the day… No, I spend far too much time at my screen already. Funnily enough two friends who read early proofs of Love Virtually confessed to a intense and secret e-mail correspondence at one time. I think it’s much more common than we would think, which is why this book will strike such a chord. You can be whoever you want to be…
Paul Engles: Katharina – did you fall at all for Leo? Jamie – for Emmi?
Katharina Bielenberg: Like Emmi, I thought he was most amusing when he was drunk. He doesn’t have an easy time with Emmi, why is she/am I putting him through this?…
Jamie Bulloch: Emmi’s not my type! (I’d have to say that, wouldn’t I?)
