Between 2020 and 2024, writer Julia Kornberg and translator Jack Rockwell worked collaboratively on a co-translation of Kornberg’s 2021 novel, Atomizado Berlín, now out as Berlin Atomized with Astra House. What follows is a dialogue between them about the evolution of the novel and its translation over that time period, as well as themselves as writers and translators.
Jack Rockwell: Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd… I like to make Deleuze and Guattari jokes, or just quote them with a careful veneer of irony, and this is one of my favorites that kept coming up as we translated Berlin Atomized together. You’ve been working on this book for years now. How has it felt to interact with past versions of yourself as you’ve revised the text?
Julia Kornberg: I love it—this one is for the theory bros. At this point there are several “lives” of Berlin: there’s the book I first wrote in 2016 (eight years now, though it feels like a decade), which I submitted to the Ficciones award, then there’s the book that I worked on with Club Hem and Scaraboquio in Argentina and Mexico respectively (are there slight differences between both?), and the book that we worked on together, the first translation, and then the Astra edition, which was also edited by Deborah Ghim. Finally, there is a kind of post-post-Berlin, the re-translation of the changes made in the English into the Spanish, which my brilliant friend Eugenia did. All of these accumulate and somehow they don’t torture me—there’s something quite reassuring in knowing that you can still alter and fix up elements of a book, even if it’s out in the world. It makes publishing less daunting. But how did it feel to you? The guy who worked on the first sample in 2021 is very different from the professional translator I know today.
J.R.: Hah! That’s nice of you to call me a professional. I would say, first of all, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s also been grounding. Berlin Atomized has been a throughline during a period of my life when a lot of things have changed. It’s also been great to keep coming back to the book after working on other translation projects, to see how my preferences as a reader and translator have changed and how they’ve stayed the same. It was nice to be able to update and correct a sentence here and there in Berlin, but mostly I’m proud of our gutsy younger selves for experimenting and taking risks with things like multilingualism, dynamic voices, and sheer fun in the translation.
We’ve changed, but the book has too. How do you think the translation process transformed Atomizado Berlín? Obviously there were the several rounds of editorial interventions you mention above. But I’d also like to hear you speak more about how the passage from Spanish to English, with the two different sets of restraints and possibilities each language provides, has impacted the novel.
J.K.: One of the great blessings of working in English and Spanish at the same time is that English is not a very forgiving language. In Spanish, you can kind of write whatever you want, and if it sounds nice, that’s okay: the prose redeems it. When I write in Spanish I really take advantage of this—one of my mentors once told me I write “by ear,” sounding out the words, because I care more about how the sentence looks and sounds than whether it makes sense or not. To me this is not a good thing, and it’s why I find it really hard to edit myself sometimes. But luckily English is not at all like that, it is a language where meaning matters a little bit more, and if you don’t make sense you end up looking foolish. So when I go from Spanish into English (and by now I self-translate or translate with you everything I write) I have to force myself to look at language in this other, less forgiving way, and it helps me edit back into Spanish, making my prose less embarrassing. Have you noticed that, too? Or am I completely off the mark?
J.R.: I would agree that English is a less forgiving language than Spanish in the ways you mention—its demand for clear sense, its inability to ride as far on pure sound and rhythm (though of course there are always exceptions). But, on the other hand, Spanish has a little more ability to ride further on sound and rhythm, which I think is one of the reasons I was drawn to reading in Spanish in general, and your writing in particular. I like the boundlessness of it; I’m not temperamentally very attracted to rules, and the more I write and translate in English, the more it seems like such a rule-bound language.
Speaking of language and composition, Berlin Atomized is full of quotes and references to writers, philosophers, musicians, and so on. All of your writing is, in fact—your short stories, and now your next novel which we’ve started to translate, Las fiestas. I’d love to hear more about how these textual fragments enter your composition process. Do you start from the quotes and work outward? Or are you working through narrative problem-solving and then you happen to feel the draw of a certain piece of someone’s language? Or is it something else?
J.K.: I think this is sadly a flaw of my writing and not a positive feature of style! I am going through a (decade-long) phase in which, when I write, quotes and passages come to me naturally, maybe because I like to read before I start writing, and maybe because there are certain sentences and phrases that just get stuck in my mind. In everyday life, too: when I need to reach for a feeling or an idea, quoting comes embarrassingly naturally, and I have to repress it to avoid looking like a dick. Having said that, I am a big fan of modernist writing, and I think that there’s something beautiful about being able to echo other writers and artists whose work is meaningful to me. Why try to say it yourself if, say, Bob Dylan or Copi or Borges said it better? I like it when literature can play with pre-existing literature, de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing, making it your own, bringing it to the contemporary moment… as annoying as it is…
Also, I’m curious: when I do that annoying quotey shtick, do you translate the quote yourself? Or do you find a preexistent translation you like?
J.R.: That depends—on if I recognize it as a quote, for one! I’ll never forget looking at the manuscript for the first time in a while in 2023 and finding the place where I’d first translated “una educación sentimental” as “an emotional education.” That line must have gotten translated in 2021, when I guess I didn’t know Flaubert had written a novel called Sentimental Education… So that was a quick fix. In general, with quotes, I want to make sure the English-language reader will recognize them, so unless there are specific aesthetic or other needs to the particular sentence we are translating, I’ll probably go for an existing translation. But knowing your density, there are probably other quotes I translated into English without even knowing to look! Hopefully you caught some of those in your work on the translation…
You translate yourself, and we translate you together. Do you ever translate other writers? With or without their input? Into English from Spanish, or vice versa, or other languages?
J.K.: I translate very little! I’ve translated short stories from German here and there, and essays written in English into Spanish. Have you played with other languages recently? Do you think working in several languages, for a translator, is a good thing?
J.R.: I think it depends on what you want to do with the translation. I’m slowly picking up some German and French, and for fun I’ll sometimes translate poetry from Portuguese, which I can read with a dictionary, though I can’t speak it at all. But I wouldn’t publish those translations, in part because they’re not serious, and in part because I think it’s important to know a language very well before making public-facing translations with it. In a class at Iowa, the translator Aron Aji once told us that one of the most important features of a given work of literature is how it stands in relation to all the other usages of its language of composition, literary or otherwise. One of the things a translation can do is replicate that relation; that is, create a new literary work with a similar stance towards the translating language as the source text has to its own. To me, that’s the highest possible challenge a translation can aspire to, and also one that requires an enormous lived dedication to both languages involved. Spanish and English are both so enormous and wonderful that I think I’ve got my work cut out between the two of them, for now.
These days, it seems like sometimes you write and publish in English, sometimes you write and publish in Spanish, sometimes you translate yourself, sometimes others translate you… How does the process of selection between languages happen in your composition process? Is it very intentional, or more unconscious? Does it change between genres, forms, lengths, times and places?
J.K.: I try to take advantage of both. I love writing criticism in English, because it feels like a genre where there are still a lot of people at work and where you can still have a dialogue (RIP the Latin American review supplement). I can only write fiction in Spanish, but translating and self-translating helps a lot. I’ve been meaning to ask you, by the way: how does your own fiction writing help you with translating? And vice versa?
J.R.: I’d say, first and foremost, my own fiction practice (which at this point is still mostly a private enterprise) interacts with my translation practice by kind of sharing desk space in a larger workshop for voices. On any good day of the week, you can catch me up there, tinkering away at one thing or another… I think all translators should write in the genres of their practice, even if they don’t publish, and vice versa. As translators, writing helps us see inside the heads of our writers: practicing the moves writers make can help us better understand how to replicate them in our translations. Similarly, working on translations can be a way for writers to pull a literary work apart from the inside out and see how it is working on a sentence-by-sentence level. It’s certainly not the only way to do that, but I think it’s a really valuable one.
Right now, we are beginning to co-translate your next novel, Las fiestas. I expect it to be every bit the same collaborative, dynamic, intra-lingual-editorial process (thank you, Karen Emmerich) as our work on Berlin Atomized was. It’s probably a little soon to be looking beyond Fiestas, but I know you’ve got some other projects up your sleeve. What’s next?
J.K.: I think writers should be coy again, so I’ll just say: I have a very Jewish book of short stories in the works, and a much longer, less Jewish project of five interconnected novellas, which might take me the next several years. How about you?
J.R.: Sounds amazing! Can’t wait to read them… As for me, I’m always working on a million things at once, which is kind of a problem sometimes. I’d try to be coy too, but as a translator, I feel the need to put some of my authors on: I’m working on some really cool short stories by the amazing Daniela Alcívar Bellolio, poetry by Maricela Guerrero, and of course my old friend José Lezama Lima, one of the strangest (and most wonderful) writers who ever lived… And hopefully much more, once I can find the time for it all!
