Why we should read translated novels, with author Georgi Gospodinov

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Why we should read translated novels, with author Georgi Gospodinov’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Over the past year, our literary editor Fred Studemann, has been reading a lot more than he even usually does. He read 134 books over about eight months. That averages out to about a book a day, and all of it was in service of one task: being a judge for the International Booker Prize.

Fred Studemann
I mean, the sheer volume of books.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Fred Studemann
And you just think, how can I do this? And I rang someone up who’d been involved and they said, basically, you know, if you’ve got a day job — and I thought, yes, I have. And if you’ve got a family — yes, I have. And if you got, you know, very little time and I don’t know much about this, you must be mad. (Laughter) Thankfully, thankfully, there were other people who made me see the wisdom of doing it, which is certainly the right thing to do.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The International Booker is given in Britain, but it’s one of those rare prizes that matters all over the world. Because each year it honours a fiction book that was written in another language and then translated and published in English, which means that Fred got to read stories from dozens of countries — Mexico, Cote d’Ivoire, South Korea . . .

Fred Studemann
I mean, to me, the most mind-blowing thing of doing this whole thing was just stepping out of the world I normally inhabit, the sort of largely this anglophone literary world. You know . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Fred Studemann
. . . without being too pretentious about it and just going on this mad journey and seeing lots of different perspectives, even making you question what is a novel.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

The book that won the International Booker comes from Bulgaria. It’s called Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. It’s a story about a man who develops a sort of cult following by creating homes for people with dementia that look and feel exactly like the years they grew up in. It allows them to literally live in the past. But then suddenly nostalgia takes over and everyone starts to want to live in the past, and politicians start to co-opt these time shelters. So the novel also becomes a critique of modern populism.

The other thing that’s unique about the International Booker is that the winner now shares the prize with their translator. And that’s because good translation is hard. It takes a lot of skill to get the true essence of a book right in another language.

Fred Studemann
Well, I think it’s sort of overdue because, you know, it’s not that long ago when translators would actually sometimes not even be properly credited. But you know, there was a time when you wouldn’t necessarily even see their name in the book or it’d be in very small print tucked away with all the, you know, the trademark details.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Fred Studemann
And that has changed. And now the push is to get them greater recognition.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today my guests are the International Booker Prize winners: Georgi and his English translator, Angela Rodel. We talk about the novel and about the process of translation, and we talk about how a small language — spoken by just 6mn people — has a lot to teach the rest of the world.

This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I don’t know about you, but I actually don’t read a lot of contemporary books in translation. I read some of the classics, like All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey, things that we consider part of the canon. But reading a translated book that was written recently about world events that I’ve personally lived through was really interesting because Time Shelter is responding to Brexit and Trump and populism in Europe, but all from a Bulgarian perspective — so from an entirely different angle. I also found it really broadening and exciting because reading it felt like I was in on a secret. Time Shelter wasn’t written for me. It often describes a culture I don’t know that much about, so I got to kind of peek into a culture talking to itself, and I really liked it. It just unlocked an entirely new category of literature for me. It made me want to be in on more secrets for more cultures I don’t know that much about and get their perspective on the world that I live in.

Georgi and Angela, welcome to FT Weekend. We are so thrilled to have you.

Angela Rodel
We’re happy to be here. Thank you.

Georgi Gospodinov
Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I would love for listeners to give them a sense of the plot of the book if they haven’t read it. So the narrator is a man without a name, really, but sort of has your name, Georgi, and he meets this mysterious therapist named Gaustine. And Gaustine loves the past, and he believes in it as a form of therapy to, sort of like, exist in a certain time in the past. And he starts these dementia clinics where people can live in areas where they hold very vivid memories because he thinks it’s good for them. And then the clinics get very popular and people who don’t even have dementia want to live in certain areas, like they want to live in 1972 or the ‘50s, often for different nostalgic reasons. And then unsurprisingly, you turn the page and all of Europe is doing it. (Chuckle) Like, politicians co-opted an entire country, start dressing in traditional national clothes and living in the past too, and re-enacting it. It asks a lot of questions about whether the past is good and beautiful or dangerous. And anyway, what do you think? What would you add? What would you change?

Georgi Gospodinov
Thank you. So now, yeah, even I understood the novel. (Laughter) But yes, this is a novel about how we can bring the past to us, and how dangerous could be this moving of the past in our days, this flop of the past in our days. So this is a novel which started with the clinics of the past, but finished with this referendum of the past. And yeah. It’s a novel about the slight poison of the past, actually. The discrete monster of the past.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I found myself underlining a lot of lines in the beginning, just beautiful questions about how the past gets made and how we’re constantly producing news in the present that becomes the past, and how we make collective memory, and, you know, how stories in the past help us explain to us who we are. There’s something romantic about it. And a lot of that romanticism resonates with me and I imagine resonates with many readers. I often feel a longing for the past. But then when it took this turn and reminded us that living in the past can be a dangerous thing, I was curious about that conflict for you, Georgi. Like, how do you feel about that conflict between the past being good and the past being bad?

Georgi Gospodinov
You know, actually it wasn’t an easy book for me at all. It wasn’t easy because, as a writer, I really would love to stay in the rooms of the past, in the afternoons of the past. Because past is full of senses, it’s full of sounds. It’s full of stories, actually. The future is empty. And that’s why I like to stay in the past. But after 2016, this conflict appeared again and again. Something happened in US and in Europe and, you know, it was connected with the election of president Trump and also, in Europe, with Brexit. And actually you could see then how the past could became propaganda.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
What happens once the plot moves outside of the dementia hospitals is that each European country starts voting, in referendums, on what decade it wants to go back and live in. Italian citizens choose the ‘60s, their dolce vita — the golden time of Fiats and Fellini movies. A lot of other western countries choose the ‘80s. Sweden has a hard time picking a decade it wants to live in because so many of them were happy. Gaustine and the narrator are both from Bulgaria, and Bulgaria’s referendum causes major unrest, so much that the narrator has to flee.

Georgi Gospodinov
I thought, OK, let’s do this. If you want to live in the past, let’s imagine what will happen if you make these referendums of the past. Because the election of Trump and also Brexit, they were kind of referendums of the past, and it was very hard work actually to . . . I had to invent or to imagine the nostalgia of Spain, Italy, Portugal, Romania, every European countries, and to predict which decade they will choose.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Angela, I know that you started translating the book before it was finished because it was so anticipated, because the English-language publishers wanted a taste of what was coming. And I imagine that means that you were one of the book’s early readers. How quickly did you feel like, OK, this really has a potential for a non-Bulgarian audience, this is telling a universal story?

Angela Rodel
Yeah, no, I, actually Georgi was very cruel. He didn’t let me read the whole book. (Laughter) He only gave me an excerpt. So I don’t think I was one of the very first readers. He kept me hanging like many other, many other excited readers. But I had actually worked on his previous novel, Physics of Sorrow. And so that novel as well, although it was maybe more Bulgarian, again, even then, it’s clear to me that Georgi, his thinking, his vision goes so much beyond the local literature. I mean, a lot of his stories as well deal with these really deeply human questions, but always through a very personal lens.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. There were some scenes where the narrator is sort of explaining what it’s like to be Bulgarian, and it feels like the narrator’s speaking to other Bulgarians. But he is also sort of explaining it to me or to someone who doesn’t know. There’s this scene where he’s sitting in a café in Zurich and he’s speaking Bulgarian with another woman, and he says, “We were chatting away breezily, enjoying the advantage of a small language with the assurance that no one will understand you as you gossip about everything.” And that one of the topics of conversation always is the, quote, “eternal sorrow and misfortune of being Bulgarian. For a Bulgarian, complaining is like talking about the weather in England — you can never go wrong.”

Angela Rodel
You know, that wasn’t all in the original. We did slip in some stealth glosses here and there, but we try to keep it very limited. And that’s why Bulgarians, I think, love Georgi’s work so much is that it does feel like he’s talking right to them about a shared past. I mean, everybody grew up under socialism, of a certain generation and, and so there is this kind of intimate tone that I think really resonates with Bulgarian readers, that they immediately recognise the references that he’s making. But they’re also done in such a way that it doesn’t exclude the foreign reader.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You used a word that I don’t know — gloss? It was like something like a . . .

Angela Rodel
A stealth gloss.

Lilah Raptopoulos
A stealth gloss. What’s a stealth gloss?

Angela Rodel
It is a very handy tool to offer the translator because it’s not very fashionable to put footnotes in literature. I think that the dominant feeling nowadays in the industry is that it pulls the reader out of the text. But there are certain things that are just going to be confusing. And so a stealth gloss is like putting the explanation of what a term or what a word means in the main text, and hopefully the reader will think it was there in the original and not realise that they’re being explained to and thus not be pulled out of the text. So the stealth gloss is a very important tool for the translator these days.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, that’s brilliant. Interesting. Thanks.

Georgi Gospodinov
(Inaudible) Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, please go ahead.

Georgi Gospodinov
It wasn’t easy at all for translation also because when you try to build different eras, you should use the specific language. The language of 1960s is different from the language of 1980s, and this was something that Angela did in a very good way. And also we had other very funny moments in the translation. Maybe Angela would tell about the disco and ‘80s. (Chuckle) Yeah, because when you translate, you translate not only the text. You translate the context and sometimes the Bulgarian context and the US context, it’s quite different.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Angela Rodel
Yeah, no, it’s funny because there is a conversation between two of the characters about, you know, ‘80s being the decade of disco, and I was like, “Wait, it was the ‘70s.” I was born in 1974, remember as a very young child I’m dancing to the Bee Gees, to Saturday Night Fever. And it’s very, you know, associated with the ‘70s in the west and in the US. And Georgi said, well actually, we had this conversation, it turns out it didn’t quite make it across the Iron Curtain as quickly as it made it across the Atlantic. And so basically it really was, for Bulgarians and for people in eastern Europe, ‘80s is really what’s associated with disco. And so that, it actually worked out really well because the way that phrase came up was within a conversation between two characters with direct speech. It gave us a little more flexibility, just slip in a stealth gloss there to say, you know, kind of contextualise that this wasn’t that Georgi doesn’t know what’s going on musically in the past, but it’s just that it really was experienced in a different way. That genre had a different association in the east.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. Georgi, I’d love to know what’s important to you about the translation process.

Georgi Gospodinov
For me, what’s very important is the sound of the sentence, the rhythm of the sentence, to be the same in the different language, in the foreign language. I must admit that I kind of smuggle poetry into prose. Actually you can read, yeah, there are hidden poems in the novels . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
You said you’re a smuggler of poetry into prose? That’s beautiful.

Georgi Gospodinov
Yes. It’s maybe a kind of trick, because publishers don’t like to publish poetry, so that’s why I decided to write novels that are like poetry, (laugh) like a big poem.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I was thinking about the style of writing as well when I was reading. And you’re right, it really is poetry, and sometimes it feels like drafts and you sort of just . . . you begin to trust wherever the narrator is going to bring you, even if you’re not totally sure if you’ll understand where you’re going. I’m curious what you wanted the reading experience to be like for a reader, especially as the book develops. I don’t want to give it away. But by the end of the book, this whole reality becomes kind of too much for the narrator and the style starts to reflect that.

Georgi Gospodinov
For me, what I want is my stories or my sentences, or my words to be able to unlock the memories, longings in the readers that live far away from me that never had my experience. So because it’s a book of memory, I believe that if I find the right words and the right sentence and the right smell and the right sound in my stories, I will unlock the same memory in someone, even if he never had this memory, you know, because sometimes we have memories about the things that never happened to us. Sometimes the things that never happened are more important than the things that happened to us.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. That feels especially poignant for a country that was stuck behind the Iron Curtain for so many years. And your answer makes me wonder, like, what do you think the world can learn from this book? What can the world learn from reading about populism from a Bulgarian perspective?

Georgi Gospodinov
OK. There are some things that could be said down in Bulgaria. So I could say them in Bulgarian, that if you want to have the Bulgarian answer, the Bulgarian is feasible, Bulgarian words. You prefer to tell it in Bulgarian because . . . or not?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sure. So you would like to explain it in Bulgarian and then Angela can translate. Is that, is it? That sounds great.

Georgi Gospodinov
Yeah. (Speaks in Bulgarian)

Angela Rodel
So what’s Bulgarian about the novel isn’t actually all that different from what’s happening in Europe and around the world.