This interview can be read in Interpret 11.
Angela Rodel won the 2023 International Booker Prize for her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter. The news arrived on the eve of Bulgaria’s Day of Alphabet and Culture, the Booker ceremony livestreamed on the phones of a new generation of readers, and the prize celebrated across the Balkans. Her adopted country’s best-known translator of prose, the humour, strangeness, and depth of Gospodinov is now clear in English, and her version of The Physics of Sorrow is soon to be reprinted in the UK. She spoke with our editor, James Appleby.
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I wanted to start by talking about music. You’re a singer and, in dusty corners of YouTube, you can find videos of your performances with the Tambura too. What’s been the role of music in your life and work?
It was my path to Bulgaria and Bulgarian culture. When I grew up I sung first in choirs and then in punk bands, and I was a freshman at Yale, and there’s this Bulgarian Slavic Chorus. Dissonant harmonies – they use a lot of Eastern techniques – very drone-based, not Western harmonies. You get this style that was like nothing I’d ever heard. I went to the first meeting and I was like, Oh my god, screw this Western choral, I want to sing like that!
This was like 1992, so there wasn’t the internet, and there weren’t a lot of Bulgarians in the US, so we had these old records and we tried to work out how to make our voices sound that way. You’re singing these super-tight harmonies, and you can feel the sound waves beating, and it’s a transformational experience. You get these really cool five-six-seven-part almost-like-jazzy harmonies, but using this very traditional style. And the rhythms – they do 5/8, they do 16/8, 11/8 – and the dance! As a translator, it absolutely helps to be keyed into the intonation of a language, to the rhythm, and to keep your ear attuned.
Dissonant harmony fits both the music that you love and the translations that you’ve worked with. What is it that attracts you?
Major seconds, minor seconds: most times in Western harmony you run away from that. But when you’re actually singing them – I mean, if you’re sitting across from another woman, singing loud, you can, like, feel… such an intense energy and vibration. Your sternum is… and it can put you in an altered state. Learning to be comfortable with something that’s so unusual to the Western ear, maybe that opened my mind: yeah, we don’t need a resolution. With Georgi’s work, you have a fragment here, a fragment there, and maybe it doesn’t follow the hero’s journey, and he doesn’t go through his dark night of the soul and come out the other side. That isn’t the only way for things to resolve, just like we don’t need to resolve our music with a nice major triad. We can hang out at these weird dissonant intervals.
Gospodinov’s Physics of Sorrow is narrated by a child who can step into the memories of others, with the book making reference to his ‘pathological empathy’. What do you think of the idea? Is it a credo for translators everywhere – or even a risk?
Good translators have that empath in them, but we also need strong emotional boundaries so we don’t get sucked into the neuroses of empathy, feeling everyone’s pain so acutely that you can’t work with the text. But it’s not easy: people translating texts from Ukraine and Palestine right now, I can only imagine how they must be struggling.
Of course in grad school we read The Death of the Author, and then you become a translator and you discover, actually, the author is alive and well, and has very strong ideas of what they meant and where the text should go. Again, you have to establish some kind of empathetic dialogue, but you also need a distance. Translators, especially those of us that are established, need the self-confidence to tell an author no. Authors are an amazing resource, and it’s unethical not to talk to them if they’re accessible and willing, but there is a moment when you’re like, this is a creative team, and I really feel this solution is better for the text as a whole. Authors might have a high mastery of English and strong feelings, but that’s where we bring value as translators, respecting opinions but making decisions for the good of the work.
Speaking of the importance of the team, it’s impossible not to bring up the International Booker. How has your life changed since receiving the award?
Oh, it’s been… it’s just been so fantastic. When I walk down the street in Bulgaria, people will stop me and thank me – and, you know, translators are used to being anonymous. We think, if we do our job well, no one will pay attention to us. So after twenty years in Bulgarian culture and literature, to have that sense that people appreciate your work, that’s been really nice.
Bulgarian literature until very recently was not seen as super sexy or interesting. When I went to publishers, first they were like, Hmmm, and now they’re like, What’s new in Bulgarian literature? People are thinking, ok, here’s this world-class author who seems to have come out of nowhere – what else is hiding in that little black hole?
When I trained as an interpreter, we were told to follow our speakers into whatever field they chose. I was struck by the references to quantum physics in The Physics of Sorrow – how much do you enjoy following the author into areas of knowledge so different to your own?
Oh, I love it. We translators are pedantic by nature. Like, we find one word and we go down a three-four-hour rabbit hole, and that detective work is one of the things I love about our work. Georgi is going down a lot of rabbit holes too – neuroscience journals and slaughterhouse guidelines – so he often points me towards what he thinks I should read. But with my new project, The Case of Cem, the author is no longer with us. And I went down some really interesting rabbit holes… the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes the Hospitaliers… the whole structure of that organisation… how to figure out the titles of the different ranks in English… if you don’t enjoy that kind of thing, probably translation isn’t for you. That’s an important part of the mindset of the translator, to be a rabbit-hunter.
Interviewing translators, many feel we’re in a golden age for our area of work. The idea of the golden age appears repeatedly in Time Shelter – are we in one?
Absolutely! But I don’t know if it’s the Golden Age before the Dark Night of DeepL and Google Translate. Did we catch that last train?
If the quality plummets because translators aren’t being paid what they should be paid, then that Golden Age will quickly come to an end. But I’m staying positive, because we have such access to information. And I’ve played with these online translators, and they’re helpful, but they can’t replace us in register, cultural knowledge, historical context. That’s where the human factor still makes the difference.
And in a Golden Age, you have to talk about a new generation of readers. Maybe until ten-fifteen years ago, if something was translated, then it was second-hand. B-list. But this whole new generation has grown up on K-pop, on Squid Game, on the idea that there’s cool content not in English. They’re like, Ok, what’s out there? Sure, it’s in Bulgarian – why not?
Another interviewee of Interpret is Jennifer Croft, translator of Olga Tokarczuk. Both of you are interested in the ‘constellation novel’ and you both have a very close sister relationship –
I was reading her memoir the other day, and I was thinking of how similar our early lives were.
People used to call you and your sister the same name – as if you were the same person! Is this a coincidence, or is there a serious link between the sibling and the sense of the double in translation?
Nobody has ever asked me that before, and now that you put it to me… we were talking about empathy. You grow up always resonating with this other person… always, like, attuning your mind and your energy… and maybe that… I would say there might be something to it! You’re always taking into account this other person’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, speech – that might be part of the training of a translator. Because you’re one of three, right?
Four!
Helps those neural networks develop, eh?
Or those neuroses. [Laughs.] You were saying that you’ve just published a new translation, so what else can you tell us about The Case of Cem?
Vera Mutafchieva! The best-known historical and the best-known female novelist in Bulgaria. Hard-drinking, always pictured with a cigarette, the founder of Ottoman Studies in her country. And that’s a fraught topic in the Balkans, where the dominant historical narrative is the rejection of the Ottoman Empire.
Mehmet the Conqueror dies unexpectedly, and the usual rule is that the oldest son becomes the sultan and everyone else gets strangled. But Cem, the second son, escapes to Europe, where he becomes this pawn of European power. It’s certainly an analogy for the Cold War: Mutafchieva’s brother was a defector to France. And it’s super relevant, for example, in the case of Ukraine, with this threat from the East, and the Europeans, instead of uniting, can’t get their shit together. And you never hear the voice of Cem himself – he’s like the voiceless Balkans.
To finish, I wanted to come back to a line from Physics of Sorrow: ‘Only small things can be everywhere.’ Do these small moments of translation add up to change in a world of so much conflict?
That’s my belief: that my own work will move the needle a tiny bit. One of the things I do when I’m feeling torn or distraught – especially about what’s happening in the Middle East – is to try to read some literature, so I know who those people are. A personal story, yes, it’s small, but it’s also the biggest thing we have. A good personal story, well-told, has something about it that every human being can resonate with. A small thing which can rise to the highest level – I have to believe that.
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You can follow Angela Rodel on X @rodel_angela and find out more about her translations of Georgi Gospodinov at the link below.
Rodel’s translation of Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem was published in the UK with Sandorf Passage on March 15th, 2023.
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