Carlos Fortea (Madrid, 1963) has taught translation at the Universidad de Salamanca and currently teaches at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is the author of the young-adult novels Impresión bajo sospecha (2009, reprinted in 2022), El diablo en Madrid (2012), El comendador de las sombras (2013), and A tumba abierta (2016), and of the novels for adult readers Los jugadores (2015), a finalist for the Premio Espartaco de la Semana Negra de Gijón, and El mal y el tiempo (2017). He has also translated over 150 books from the German. His translation of the biography Kafka (2018) by Reiner Stach earned him the Premio de Traducción Ángel Crespo, and for his translation of Walter Kempowski’s novel Todo en vano he received the 2021 Premio de Traducción Esther Benítez. His latest book is the essay Un papel en el mundo: El lugar de los escritores (Trama, 2023).
Eduardo Suárez Fernández-Miranda: “Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.” These words from Goethe dignify your profession. How did your interest in translation begin?
Carlos Fortea: It began by mystake… I can explain. When I was very young, I was only interested in being a writer. And I thought, back then, that this did not include translation. Sure, I thought it was a suitable job for a writer, a “day job” with which to financially support your literary vocation—that is to say, a “paraliterary” job. And that’s why I decided to go into it.
I was entirely mistaken, and I didn’t take long to realize it. Mistaken in every way. In the first place, because it was not a paraliterary job; it was literature. I didn’t know at the time—because it was not something that was said aloud back in those days, for one thing—that translation is a literary genre. What’s more, a very absorbing literary genre of tremendous intensity. I started translating unaware that it would become the focal point of my life, no longer in financial terms, but as a writer. I paid the heavy price of discovering that, when your job is to recreate someone else’s style, it becomes much more difficult to develop a style of your own. It took me many, many years to publish my own creative work from scratch.
On the other hand, I discovered that this genre compensates you richly. Because it makes demands of your abilities that you would not demand on your own initiative. Because it pushes you further in your relationship with your own language.
E.S.F-M.: Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas said, “Creative experience, critical experience, knowledge of several languages, and my having translated novels, short stories, poetry, and art books gives me a certain right to consider myself a translator.” Do you think there are two kinds of translators: those who translate as a profession, and the writer-translators? Might this influence how translation is done?
C.F.: As I suggested in my previous answer, the question itself comes from a mistaken notion, the same one I held many years ago. There are not two kinds of translators because translating is writing, and translators are writers, whether or not they write some other literary genre other than translation itself. That’s why, whenever I’m asked, I call myself a “novelist and translator,” not a “writer and translator,” which is redundant. No, there are not two different types of translators.
E.S.F-M.: Do you believe in a theory of translation? Taking into account the words of the great translator from German, Feliu Formosa: “I shall not clain, like José María Valverde, that I do not believe in translation theory because I do not think one can deny a discipline that exists as the need to reflect on the act of translating.”
C.F.: Nor would I deny the existence of theory, for the same reasons put forward by Feliu Formosa. Translation theory has existed since the first time someone started mulling this over, and what’s more, over the past hundred years, it has developed extraordinarily. Sometimes the fact that translators don’t feel comfortable with a good number of theories gives the false impression that we all reject theory. We don’t reject it. The fact is, in many cases, we find that it’s too far from practice—an enriching thought, but one that lacks any hands-on application. The way I see it, a lot of work remains to be done in order to bridge that gap.
E.S.F-M.: A high percentage of books published in Spain are translations. Is translators’ work as the ushers of other countries’ cultures properly valued?
C.F.: No, it is not properly valued, by publishers or by society. We are talking about highly skilled labor that demands many years of training and keeping constantly up-to-date, plus a whole series of hard-to-grasp “extras” that differentiate certain translations from others, just as certain novels are differentiated from others. And the reading public is unaware of this. The number of readers who, when buying a book, look and see who translated it—not to mention the number of readers who actually care—is very small.
For many publishers, sadly, translation is first and foremost an expense. They see it as a necessary evil, when really we’re talking about an essential element by which to bring the creative writing done in other languages to our own, sometimes with tremendous consequences. The authors of the Latin American Boom admitted that their literature would not have been the same had they not read Faulkner, and many of them read him in translation. What would have happened to Spanish-language literature if our colleagues had not opened that door?
Luckily, this is changing, bit by bit. Our work is making bigger and bigger waves, but there is still a great deal more to do. Not only when it comes to recognition, but also when it comes to remuneration.
E.S.F-M.: Speaking of which, sometimes the translator himself proposes the publication of a book written in another language. Which German-language authors do you think deserve to be published by our presses?
C.F.: That’s a really hard question… because, on the one hand, German-language literature is not poorly represented in our own panorama, and, on the other, some books already exist but have not made an impact. Sometimes an extraordinary writer like Wolfgang Koeppen, whom I had the honor of translating in the early 2000s, goes more or less unnoticed, even though he’s a giant of letters. Authors from former East Germany, like Stefan Heym, have not made their way to us because the country where they wrote no longer exists, and it ceased to exist in a context of disgrace that wiped away its writers, often through no fault of their own. I won’t mention more names because I can’t claim to be familiar with each and every one, but I’m very pleased with the current—extremely important—efforts to revive the work of twentieth-century women writers, who did not have as much of an opportunity to be translated and make themselves known. Mascha Kaléko, Marlen Haushofer—who is extraordinary, but nobody knows her—and Bettina von Arnim, if we go back to the nineteenth century.
E.S.F-M.: You were president of ACE Traductores. Can you tell us a little about that association?
C.F.: ACE Traductores was founded forty years ago, when a group of colleagues led by Esther Benítez came together within ACE, the Asociación Colegial de Escritores de España (Spanish Collegial Association of Writers), as an independent section of book translators. They realized their work-related concerns had more in common with those of writers than with those of translators working in other areas, with legal, scientific, or technical texts, and from that starting point they developed a two-sided focus on raising awareness and gaining recognition that lasts to this day.
Forty years later, the association to which I belong is a source of pride for all of us. We’re still fighting for our rates, but we’ve gained legal recognition as authors, generalized contracts and authors’ rights, and widened and improved training for our young colleagues. In the midst of the Great Recession, one of the White Books the association put together found from the results of a sociological study that translators who were in the association were dealing better with the crisis than those who weren’t because they had access to more information. I see that as proof that we’re serving our purpose.
E.S.F-M.: Twenty years ago, the Spanish press Siglo XXI Editores published Kafka: Los años de las decisiones, one of the volumes that make up the monumental biography by Reiner Stach, which now forms part of Acantilado’s catalogue. How did you tackle the translation of such a lengthy work?
C.F.: This would be the perfect time to say it was a Herculean task and all that stuff that sounds so nice, but the truth is that it was one of the most enjoyable translations I’ve ever done. Because Reiner Stach is a great writer. His biography of Kafka has a wonderful narrative pulse, and such an enthralling amount of knowledge and side stories that you end up knowing a great deal more about Kafka’s life after reading it than before. It was exhausting, of course. The notes alone took up hundreds of pages (now that was tough…), but I saw it as an adventure, with ineffable moments when emotion got the better of me. The part that deals with Kafka building his body of work is required reading for any vocational writer, and the story of his later years is almost impossible to read without getting a lump in your throat.
E.S.F-M.: You’ve also translated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Walser, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger—writers from different eras, with different styles. Is it difficult to transfer that “patina of time” to our language?
C.F.: That’s a good example of what I meant earlier when I was talking about translators’ years of training. Jumping from one author’s style to another, and from the sound of one era to the sound of another, necessarily requires an accumulation of readings of your own—and you can’t read them all at the time you get the job, it’s a lifelong task. A result of universal curiosity. Translators make use of everything: what we read in the newspaper and what we hear walking down the street, what the tour guides at castles and palaces tell us and what we hear in lectures. But, above all, we make use of what we read. What we read for pure pleasure, what we read out of necessity, and also what we read by trade. You learn to read as if you were writing (translating is reading while you write), and the words get tangled around your tongue and you taste them. And then they form part of that saliva, that sort of gossamer that you give off as you write and cover the pages with that patina you mentioned.
E.S.F-M.: How would you define the translator’s job?
C.F.: The translator writes. He writes in his own language, and as he does so, he knows he is going to have to push it to its limits in order to say what another, different language says. The translator’s job is to tauten language without breaking it.
E.S.F-M.: Translation can be done through a different, intermediate language. For example, the work of Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki has sometimes appeared in translation to Spanish via English or French. What do you make of such translations?
C.F.: Very little… Translation can’t be done through a different, intermediate language. It has been done, and it’s still done when—maybe because they haven’t looked hard enough, or because they don’t want to pay enough—they can’t find a translator who knows the original language, but the result can never be satisfactory. Because what the translator is translating is no longer exactly the author’s work, but rather the way the first translator read it. I respect my colleagues who have done so, but I disagree with the approach.
E.S.F-M.: For Cátedra press, you translated Los comebarato (The Cheap-Eaters, in English) by Thomas Bernhard, an author whom Miguel Sáenz was translating at that time. How did that job come about? Did Miguel Sáenz give you any advice about how to handle that task?
C.F.: The story of the publication of Los comebarato is very characteristic of what I call the importance of chance in life… I never knew how the job came about, they just pitched it to me and I accepted, starting from the idea—which I still defend, probably with a certain boldness (which I don’t regret)—that authors can have an unlimited number of voices. At that time, I did not yet personally know Miguel Sáenz, whom I saw then and see now, without a doubt, as an undisputed master of the craft. I read all his translations of Bernhard, and it’s possible he influenced my text more than the author himself.
I had a lot of happy moments with that text, but without a doubt the most important one was just that, the opportunity to meet Miguel. I first crossed paths with him at a symposium on Thomas Bernhard, a couple of years after Los comebarato was published. I felt quite intimidated when I stepped up to greet him, but I found him to be the most generous of fellows. We’ve been friends ever since.
E.S.F-M.: Is there any other writer you’d like to translate?
C.F.: Well… More than writers, I’d like to translate certain books. I’d like to translate the memoirs of Stefan Heym, which is a beautiful book with the “defect” of being very thick. I’d like to translate Jenny Erpenbeck again; my translations of her work have only been published in Argentina. I’d like to translate Döblin again, and purely for pleasure, even if it’s totally unnecessary, do a new translation of Stefan Zweig’s Amok…
E.S.F-M.: There have been great Hispano-American translators. Juan José del Solar, José Bianco, and the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante all come to mind. In translation to Spanish, should all of the “accent” that might come from the other side of the Atlantic be lost?
C.F.: Of course not. That’d be crazy. The richness of language is the richness of its accents; there is not just one Spanish, there are many. I came up as a reader with Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Ignacio Aldecoa as my main examples—they still are—and I can’t say any one of them has given me more than any other. What all three of them gave me was a feeling of absolute comfort when reading in these three variants of the language (and then in many more).
Now, when it comes to translating, we obviously write in the mode that feels most proper to us. To attempt anything else would be to risk slipping into caricature. In my classes, I don’t correct my students when they use a Latin American variant; I just point out to the group that it is such a variant. We have to see it as normal that Argentine translators write in their own mode, Mexican translators in theirs, and we Spanish translators in ours, to mention just three variants of the great many that exist. And, if I may, we should aspire to intermingle them, which is not the same as what they call “neutral Spanish,” which nobody really speaks. We have to dare to use the words of others, to make them our own. It may be a long process, if needs be, but it has to be intentional.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
