Wet concrete

This piece was originally published in The Perfume Society’s magazine The Scented Letter.

I remember much of my adolescent life as spent outside; the streets were fascinating, the freedom of walking them alone was new. The route from school became increasingly convoluted, and outings to the cinema or for a spot of shopping provided excuses to just be, and walk, in the city, by myself.

Looking at the city was important, but – of course – cities smell, too. During my urban Polish adolescence there wasn’t much in the way of hay, or rose gardens, or raspberry crumble. There was the foliage of the bushes that grew outside our tenement (I liked to crush the leaves with my fingers for their damp greenery), sharpened pencils, and second-hand cigarette smoke. I was already interested in perfume, and I stored away my reactions to my mother’s Dolce Vita (sunny but also somehow stand-offish), my crush’s CK Be (intriguing, non-obvious), my classmates’ Vanilla Fields (omnipresent, vile).

In the mid-nineties my city was changing a lot, and I don’t think any smell embodied those changes better than wet, freshly poured concrete. Just like Edinburgh has its golden stone, Katowice had its concrete – not only in its infamous Brutalist architecture from the fifties and sixties, but also in new builds, being cheap, plentiful and robust. I’d stop by construction sites, listening to the churn of the concrete mixer, interested in the geometry of bare pipes within the hollows of unready buildings, but also to inhale the scent. I loved something about it; perhaps its mineral, soft but disciplined quality, or its suggestion of the swimming pool, or the way it reminded me of a pebble picked up at the seaside. Or – now that I think about it – the feeling it carried of things being remade, or renewed.

There’s something intriguing about that particular group of substances which seem like they wouldn’t have a smell, but do; the cool, slightly salty, spacious odours of shells, damp stone, the desert rose crystal my aunt had on her shelf. I’m certain they have something common on a chemical level, and while I don’t know for sure what it is, I’m aware it’s a difficult note to replicate in perfumery. I was briefly thrilled to learn about Comme Des Garcons’ Concrete, but (excellent bottle apart) it was nothing like the real thing. The name of Starck’s Peau de Pierre was promising, but it didn’t deliver either. It seems like I can’t replicate that scent on purpose: to get a rare whiff of that strangely refreshing note I have to find myself in the right place, at the right time – circumstances have to create it for me, and I’m all the more thrilled when they do.

I treasure my sense of smell; it allows me to experience the world in a way that never seems to be too much. I get tired of sounds quickly, my vision is overwhelmed by hours in front of screens – but smells are, for some reason, almost always welcome. Even the underlying strain of rubbish and weed of summertime London tells me something about it. I believe that in a life oversaturated with sights and sounds, smells allow us to read the world differently, can tell us stories we wouldn’t have picked up on otherwise. I’ve let those stories draw me onwards, into writing my MA thesis about the smell of spices in literature, into giving a keynote lecture at the 2017 annual conference of The British Society of Perfumers (about scents in literature, again), and co-organising a related event at the British Library in 2018. Following my nose and researching what it’s telling me has been so rewarding, and it’s led me to navigate all sorts of spaces more adventurously.

Much has been written about the ways places smell. The unfamiliar scent of the air hits you the moment you leave the plane, the island you fell in love with always welcomes you with wafts of frangipani. We feel that those place-smells show us an essence of the place, some truth about it. The truth of my adolescence in almost-post-industrial, post-communist Poland was transformation. And when I catch that whiff of wet concrete today, I’m there again – young, alert, hopeful. Much has been written about the ways places smell. The unfamiliar scent of the air hits you the moment you leave the plane, the island you fell in love with always welcomes you with wafts of frangipani. We feel that those place-smells show us an essence of the place, some truth about it. The truth of my adolescence in almost-post-industrial, post-communist Poland was transformation. And when I catch that whiff of wet concrete today, I’m there again – young, alert, hopeful.

Goblins by Jen Calleja – a few thoughts

Full disclosure: I’ve known Jen for a good few years. We’ve interviewed each other, worked together and gossiped over Korean food. This is probably not an impartial review, if a review is what this is. Hey ho.

I knew I had to have Goblins as soon as it was out, being a fan of Jen and Rough Trade and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle. What a combination of contributing energies. Jen immediately goes deep into her own childhood, working from the pamphlet’s central idea that a goblin has no shame. There are slightly inappropriate puppets and the facts of a pupating, little-girl body. There’s compassion there directed towards creatures in fairy-tales that we are supposed to see as ugly, foreign and transgressive, and what’s even more excellent (and the whole point) – compassion towards those exact parts of herself, and of people close to her.

The pamphlet’s themes are many and varied, but perhaps unsurprisingly it’s translation that caught my eye. Jen’s views on it are also refracted via puppetry, but the analogy isn’t a stretch at all: “Translators are like ventriloquists, but we’re also the ventriloquist’s dummy. We do the voices, but our every move is guided by the texts we translate. Can you tell it’s our voice every time?” I’ve been asking myself a question along these lines. It’s not even “translationese” I’ve been worrying about sometimes; it’s “Dziuroszese”, my idiolect, my personality, the books I’ve read and the books I want to write, the cadences of my favourite lyricists – can my translations transcend that? Do I want them to?

The little goblin girl grows up and starts encountering male, powerful goblin kings, those who would lure and displace her. The interplay between rejecting that lure and allowing yourself to be hooked by it is something I remember from my own goblin teenagerdom: “you can’t tell whether you’re bewitching them or they’re bewitching you”. Later, Jen’s references move from children’s (?) entertainment to gobliny art; the third and last section, Goblincore, focuses on music. Here her own experiences as a maker and performer give the writing a particularly lived and meaty quality, and the moment when she goes past focusing on her own perception of how others perceive her, and lands squarely in pure experience and self-possession, is triumphant.

I feel like there are two impulses to the pamphlet: one is a jaunty jab to the side, a reminder to do your thing and move with freedom; the other is that, just like in fairy-tales, it’s important to be able to tell the difference between creatures who are truly evil, and those who have just had a tough time, those who pretend to subvert and those who really do. The pamphlet is excellent on what might broadly be termed justice: being clear-eyed and unafraid to see things for what they are. It is crisp, mischievous, companionable, with the slight bitter aftertaste of truth. You’ll want to down it again and again, for courage.

Goblins by Jen Calleja, with brilliant illustrations by Rachel Louise Hodgson

Rough Trade Books x Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, 2020

The Tactility of Translation; The Translation of Tactility

Originally published in Asymptote.

There’s joy in repetition

—Prince

In January 2020 I was due to speak at the British Library. It was a Holocaust Memorial Day event, and I was there to talk about my co-translation—with Anna Błasiak—of a book entitled Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, the wartime diary of a young Polish Jew, Renia Spiegel. The third speaker at the event was artist and writer Edmund de Waal, whose astonishing book The Hare with the Amber Eyes I read when it first came out. Half preparing for the event and half procrastinating, I watched Make Pots or Die, a documentary about de Waal’s work.

De Waal spoke about his work as evidence of spending time—how he places his pots in the vitrines in which they’re displayed very quickly and it’s almost always wrong or almost right, and then he needs to come back and look at them, look at them for a very long time, because there’s an enormous difference between almost right and right. The process struck me as familiar; as a translator, I think about the weight of a comma. I put it in, I take it out, I put it in, I take it out, I put it back in. I put a semicolon at the end of a sentence instead of a full stop, change it back to a full stop. I switch the second and the fifth words around. I change a noun to its diminutive, reconsider.

Once I had that thought, de Waal’s pots started to look like drafts. Perhaps he’s iterating. To me, every pot within an installation looks like a re-translation of a word, sentence, thought, text. The vitrine, taken together, is a mind subtly improvising on a theme. The difference is that in a de Waal vitrine, the audience can see many iterations, many expressions of a thought, if this is what they are; the reader of a translation only sees the last version, the one the translator (and, possibly, her editor) deemed the best, whatever that means.

What would a translation look like if every draft of every sentence, or even of just one sentence, was present at the same time? Unreadable, of course, but for a translator—how informative, how interesting. De Waal: “Repetition isn’t about repeating the same thing. It’s about minute differences between each moment, between each sound, between each object that you’re making.” Having to appreciate every shade of a sentence, calibrate every word choice so that meaning, register, mood, rhythm, emotional effect all work, and putting all those carefully chosen words in an order that suits the sentence, the paragraph, the whole book—all this makes translation seem impossible, but as some point you make the decision. You place pot A next to pot F and slightly behind pot R, and then lean tile N against pot V and somehow, you’ve arrived.

In 2016, I had the pleasure of participating in the writing and literary translation summer school held at the British Centre for Literary Translation at UEA. I was a part of the multilingual prose group, led by Daniel Hahn, who translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and French. We spent a fascinating week tormenting texts, unpicking their seams and checking what’s inside. I think the best summary of what we did happened early in the week; we were looking at a passage of Harry Potter, translated into all the languages we had within the group (probably seven or eight) and trying to back-translate them into English, look for traces of the original in the translations. Once we arrived at what we thought was a competent back-translation, Danny read us the actual passage from JK Rowling’s book. At a previously much-discussed juncture, a comma appeared where we had decided there wouldn’t be one; when Danny read out, “comma,” the whole room gasped. We’d have probably clutched our pearls if we’d been wearing any. We also cheered when it turned out that there was a “bobble hat” in the original passage, as we’d guessed. This evidence that we’d sensed something about the text that allowed us to make the correct linguistic choice was exhilarating—felt like a slam dunk. Those moments when details slide right into place happen with straightforward translation, too, even where there’s nothing to check against: just the original, the blank page, and the translator’s knowledge, experience, intuition, artistry.

Two other perfect examples of the benefit in looking at subsequent translation drafts of the same sentence also came to me through Danny. When tweeting for the TranslationTalk account, he made two threads which showed the progression of his thinking about two short passages; the first sentence from a book by Juan Pablo Villalobos, and the opening paragraph by José Eduardo Agualusa. To me, those two threads show what translation is. It’s thinking about meaning, register, rhythm, grammar, syntax, considering the tiny scale of the word or the larger scale of how a sentence works within a larger passage, or (as Danny mentions in the comments to the first thread) in the context of the next pages, where the sentence returns. It’s second-guessing your own decisions and re-arranging the words, attending to their tone until they resonate correctly. This is that all-important “slow, incremental change” (de Waal’s words)—the weighing of an adverb against an adjective, and looking again at all those commas.

***

Still, there’s more to the process, of course; in the documentary, De Waal also speaks about the music he listens to when working, commenting: “Doesn’t it make you want to make things?” The most beautiful moments of the process of translation occur when I’m buoyed up by the propulsive structures of Portico Quartet or the sea-waves of Michael Nyman’s soundtrack for The Piano, and the rhythm of the sentences and keystrokes just flow. Sometimes, as I write, I feel like swaying, like a musician at her instrument. I’m not sure I can produce a good translation on the strength of that inspired, fluid process, that intoxicating beginning—but it’s the best feeling.

What do the hands of translators do? Our bodies are libraries which store vocabularies of touch, movement, contact, gesture, withdrawal—which bring us some of the most affecting moments in literature (and life), so we’d do well to be attentive to them. I’m always happily interested to hear other translators talk about how they use their own bodies when translating: re-enacting fight scenes in their source texts, for example, to make sure they’ve got the placement of the limbs right, or reading their final drafts out loud, so that the ear and the mouth and the breath tell them when something needs changing. Richly, vividly translated body language is, to me, an important part of building a resonance between the book and the reader; our own bodies, as translators, inform that work.

But apart from the materiality of translators, I’ve been thinking about the tangible realities of translated matter. During the British Library event, we talked about the book as object; in the case of Renia’s personal diary this would have been especially relevant. Anna and I never saw the original—we translated a PDF of the Polish edition, published in a small print run by Renia Spiegel’s Foundation. I wonder about it now, though; how it would have felt to see her handwriting mature along with her poetry and prose; to be able to see whether she pressed her pen more strongly on the page when scared, or worried; to study her doodles, some of which were reproduced in the Polish edition. Suddenly I have a strong urge to put my palm on her diary—perhaps as a gesture of companionship, consolation. The institution of a manuscript, as in a handwritten text, might be almost lost to the process of publishing, but in this case the manuscript was (is?) everything. I think about Renia’s hands hugging her diary close in the Przemyśl ghetto. Seventy-eight years after she was killed, I catch myself hugging the big hardback edition of mine and Anna’s English translation of her words.

***

The book I’m translating now—Marcin Wicha’s Things I Didn’t Throw Out (forthcoming from Daunt, title provisional)—thinks deeply about objects and what they tell us about the people who owned them. Specifically, about the author’s mother; the book was written in the wake of her death, and is a clear-eyed recollection of her built around the items, phrases, and values she left behind. The objects in his book are deeply embedded in a specific time and place: the Poland of communism and transformation. I remember going on a holiday to Bulgaria with William Wharton’s Last Lovers (probably when much too young for it)—the memory of the foiled texture of the cover, sometimes peeling a bit in the corner, means that I now know intimately, haptically, what Wicha means when he describes the covers of that particular Polish publisher. The plastic of my aunt’s rotary phone, slightly matted by years of touch, dust and grease, is what I can almost feel under my fingertips when Wicha talks about trying to get through to someone at the water board so that his mother can shout at them about a water shortage. I’m not saying this sort of knowledge is necessary for producing a good translation, and of course there are texts which don’t lend themselves to this approach; I’m saying it adds to my sensory lexicon, and that, in turn, informs my actual vocabulary.

“[. . .] to build intimacy with another person is to become ‘close’ to them. [. . .] the root of intimacy [is] an understanding of the other’s background and history, and so too of their personal motivations and desires,” writes Sophie Collins in her excellent essay entitled “Erasing the signs of labour under the signs of happiness: ‘joy’ and ‘fidelity’ as bromides in literary translation.” In it, she proposes “intimacy” as an alternative to “fidelity” in literary translation. “In terms of approaches to translation, then, ‘intimacy’ surely describes work that exhibits such closeness, meaning that an ‘intimate translation’ might be one that exhibits a heightened contextualisation of its source text for the reader.” I can’t help but think that this “heightened contextualisation” can only be amplified by a solid grounding in the material reality of the source text—which the translator might choose to, if it’s possible, acquaint herself with, and how its world might feel under her hands and around her body.

This attention to the source text is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. A strong factor in a positive evaluation of a translated text, whether in reviews or literary prize verdicts, seems to be its readability, its self-sustainability in its target language. It’s broadly understood as desirable that a translated book reads “as if it was originally written in English.” But I’d like more focus on the source text—although that might be a tall order in a reading culture which is frequently monolingual. After all, the task of reading the text is just as important for the translator as that of writing it again. Perhaps because I grew up within the language I translate from, not into, I feel the source text tug at my sleeve. It can bring up my own memories, familiar realities, textures, smells. I feel I want to remain close to (intimate with?) both the source and the target texts, to hold hands with both, leaning this way or the other as my judgment of the process and its outcomes dictates. And maybe, through that, meet the English-language reader halfway too, having stretched her a little.

***

I’m translating Wicha’s text from the Polish hardback edition—beautifully, austerely published by Karakter. The book rests on a tablet stand, and the pages are held open by bulldog clips. Their grip is quite strong and they leave blunt bitemarks on the tops of both margins of my book. Turning the page becomes a tiny ritual of unclipping and re-clipping; I get into the habit of pressing my fingertips to the bitemarks, to smooth them out a tad, but mainly to reassure myself of my presence within the book. This is how much I’ve done. This is progress. This is work, time, reflection, effort, and (hopefully, eventually) effortlessness.

Revisiting old friends

Everyone who is in love with perfume probably has a story like that: the one that got away, that was discontinued and never came back. I was given my one and only red-and-gold spherical bottle of Le Feu d’Issey (by Jacques Cavallier for Issey Miyake, 1998) when I was a teenager. My first reaction was a wrinkled nose: I smelled Nivea cream and carrots. It took me a while, but I got there – I got to love its strangeness, its kooky seductiveness. Now that I think about it, I might have been a bit too young then to be wearing it, but maybe not – maybe it was a perfect companion for my protean, precocious youth. Let’s not go there.

I used up that one bottle and, excited to try new things, forgot all about Le Feu. A good twelve-fifteen years later, when the perfume mania was already in full swing, I remembered it and tried to search for it, only to find out it was gone. No bottle I could find cost less than a hundred quid, many were much more than that. I’d check a few places now and then, to no avail.

Recently I’ve been into scents I remember from my youth; I got Kenzo Jungle L’Elephant (still an absolute banger) and am in the market for Aqua Allegoria Pamplelune, and perhaps Kenzo’s Le Monde Est Beau. They’re high school and early uni for me, discovery and newness, summery, bold scents. I didn’t really examine this urge to revisit those old favourites until a conversation on Instagram made me look out again for Le Feu. There it was, a used sample on eBay – a perfect amount to see whether we’d still recognize each other, whether that particular acquaintance and I still had chemistry. It was my first ever auction, and the excitement of winning it was almost too much – absolutely the best 1.5 quid I’ve ever spent.

Smelling it again was dizzying – not only because the scent itself is bizarre, but also because (as someone very close to me said) ancient connections between synapses started firing. There it was, that solar, strange, lovely thing. It’s still sweet, spicy and carroty – I’m surprised nobody on Fragrantica mentioned them, to me the infamous “baby vomit” note is clearly carrots. Or is it the coriander? Initially Le Feu was spicier and more intense than I remembered, almost nutty. I got a distinct whiff of the thin brown membranes covering walnuts. Then a weird, peppery rose came through. There is a consistent, slightly sour note there, so I can imagine it being very much a love/hate scent. The drydown is gentler and sweeter, down to a slight pina colada note. It’s sensational, rich, kaleidoscopic.

I have the sample on my desk at all times, and give the nozzle a sniff every now and then, just to remind myself that I’ve found it again, that what I thought was gone forever is back, however fleetingly. It feels like reconnecting with a piece of myself, like continuing a conversation interrupted ages ago. Le Feu was on the market for a relatively short time, so I don’t think it would have been reformulated (happy to be corrected here), but my memories of it weren’t, as it turned out, as clear as I’d thought and the sample might have been oxidising in someone’s drawer for years. Still, the spark of recognition is there, like seeing your old friend’s gait in the crowd and knowing instantly it’s them.

I emigrated from Poland to the UK seven years ago. Being here now is, for a few reasons, difficult, and it’s occurred to me that in missing my youthful fragrance loves, as brash as some of them were, I wanted reassurance. I cherish the friends I’ve made here, but there’s something special about the friendships that date back from Poland, from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. It feels like the people who knew me before I left, and who know me still, have the true measure of me. I love meeting them to see how they’re doing, what they’re up to, what they love and struggle with – but also, secretly, to confirm to myself I’m still the same person, whatever that means. Encountering Le Feu again was a little like that; I could re-settle into myself through my reaction to something well-known and beautiful.

On L2 (“non-native”) translation

(originally published by The Linguist magazine, issue 56, 1, February/March 2017)

There are many names attached to the practice this article discusses: L2, non-native, bilingual or inverted translation. They all describe translation out of one’s ‘native’ language into a ‘non-native’ one. The terminology is still in flux, and as my inverted commas suggest, even the most basic terms defining the practice are disputable. I will use ‘bilingual translation’, although this term is not without its problems.

Bilingual translation has not been extensively researched and, maybe partly for this reason, it provokes a frisson of disapproval, at least in the literary translation community, which is my background. Nonetheless, it is widely practised, especially from ‘smaller’ languages, as the limited number of native English speakers able to translate from them encourages others to act as ambassadors of the literature.

I became interested in bilingual translation when I moved to London after working for a few years as a literary translator into Polish, my native language. Four years ago, I attended the London Book Fair’s Literary Translation Centre for the first time. During a discussion following one of the events, a German audience member mentioned that she wanted to translate into English. Someone sitting next to me whispered, “But why would you want to do that?”. This was the first of many instances I witnessed of bilingual translation being treated as whimsical at best, and gross incompetence at worst.

This bias has demonstrable consequences: bilingual translators I have spoken to report being denied work on the basis of their nativity status or nationality (although one said a publisher changed their mind after reading a sample of her work), and seeing translation grants advertised that only invite applications from ‘native-speaker translators’.

Disapproval of bilingual translation seems to stem from a belief that, if a translator comes to a language later in life, she cannot inhabit it fully, cannot use it with the flexibility and nuance required of a competent translator. It is the same assumption that prompts many English language schools to advertise teaching posts only aimed at ‘native speakers’ – sometimes regardless of whether they have relevant experience or a teaching qualification.

Silvana Richardson delivered an eye-opening plenary on the issue of native speakerism in EFL (English as a foreign language) teaching during the 2016 IATEFL conference.¹ She cites research analysing whether students really prefer native-speaking teachers. What emerges is that both native and non-native teachers are perceived to be competent, each with unique strengths.

Parallel research to verify whether editors and readers can differentiate between translations provided by native and non-native translators would be very interesting. Can we attribute any sharp points to a non-native mis-rendering? Or can these be due, just as often, to the texture of the original text or the work of a native translator? Maybe it is impossible to tell the difference.

Language ownership

Literary translation is less professionalised than EFL teaching. A diploma is still not a requirement for a successful career – many eminent translators say they “fell into” the profession. If we, as an industry, are content to accept this democratic approach, the issue of language ownership, frequently conflated with national identity, seems to become critical.

I propose that distinctions such as ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ are becoming irrelevant. Richardson notes that the very idea of ‘second language acquisition’ can be more usefully reframed as ‘plurilingual development’. The PETRA-E Framework for Literary Translation, developed by eight eminent scientific institutions to map out five levels of competence for literary translators, from ‘beginner’ to ‘expert’, does not mention the translator’s linguistic status once.² Instead, even for the most advanced levels, it mentions pragmatic manifestations of language skill: “can justify choices made in translations”, “can write publishing reports”, “optimal creative ability”.

Both an informal survey of bilingual translators I conducted, and a panel about non-native translation I organised and chaired at this year’s London Book Fair (LBF),³ were expressive of an open-minded, descriptive, pragmatic approach to language use. My respondents emphasised the importance of the quality of the text produced over the identity of the translator. When discussing the latter, they were alive to the complexities involved, keen to add nuance to our understanding of how we come to use languages, and supportive of the translator embracing all the national and linguistic aspects of their experience. After all, as one of the participants of the LBF panel pointed out, issues such as mixed parentage and international upbringing (not to mention migration to a target-language country) blur the native/non-native distinction.

A large number of my respondents did not define themselves as bilingual translators – just as translators. That does not, however, invalidate their various identities, linguistic histories and individual preferences – which all translators have.

During the LBF seminar we discussed translation as creative writing, focusing more on the similarities than the differences between these two artificially separated groups: ‘native’ and ‘non-native’. All translators, Maureen Freely noted, are writers, and all benefit from enhancing the tools they use to write, for example experimenting with voice, register and style. As translators we try to travel back and forth between languages, understanding what language is and exploring the things that lie beneath. Furthermore, all translators need to find their niche, the texts they find most rewarding to work on – whether it is smooth Oxbridge diction or the deliberately fractured patois of a first-generation immigrant – but also be flexible enough to accommodate other styles.

Retiring the dichotomy of native versus non-native would help to do away with the impostor syndrome and the lack of confidence many bilingual translators struggle with. This can even lead those with foreign-sounding surnames to use their English married names, or pseudonyms, so they are not rejected out of hand by editors and clients. Interestingly, some bilingual translators I interviewed considered this ‘impostor syndrome’ to be an asset, as it made them second-guess and deeply analyse their linguistic choices.

Collaboration vs chaperoning

Co-translation is widely proposed as a way of integrating bilingual translators: they provide the first draft of the target text, and then a native speaker of the target language produces a final version. While some of my respondents work like this – one says she “can’t imagine working in any other way” – this is only one form of co-translation.

My view is that, while all translators can find co-translation stimulating, more sociable, and more rewarding, considering the quick verification of their proposed solutions, the suggestion that a bilingual translator should necessarily want a chaperone when engaging with a language is not helpful and, again, assumes a hierarchy of language competence that has not been verified.

The bilingual translator may have acquired her target language later in life, but if she approached the process seriously, she would have spent years decoding the rules that govern the language, learning from various teachers and possibly doing some teaching herself, diving headfirst into the literature and culture. The difference is that the process of expanding the user’s linguistic repertoire happens consciously, not via the osmosis granted to the ‘native’ speaker.

This is not to say that either way of acquiring a language is better – and there are endless other ways between those ends of the linguistic spectrum. It is to argue that, if they are all rooted in a deep, passionate interest in the language, in continued professional development, in keeping the translator’s voice rich and flexible, then they are equally valid and neither should disqualify the translator from engaging with the language in active and creative yet rigorous ways.

Notes

1 See http://bit.ly/1XxfxDH . Checked 13/1/17

2 See http://bit.ly/2iVbtSu. Checked 13/1/17

3 See http://bit.ly/2fVJF0d. Checked 13/1/17

Oh dear

You know what it’s like. You create an online space for yourself, you love it intensely for a while and everything about it is very important, and then real life hits you in the face and then it’s a year later. It’s all good though – I’ve just been busy with finding my place in London, finding ways in which I can become useful, learning and doing new things. I’ve had an excerpt of my translation into English published by For Books’ Sake, of Sylwia Chutnik’s punchy Hustlerettes. If you prefer your translation the other way round and more subtle, three of her poems in my translation saw the light of day in Artpapier. New Statesman ran my feature on Polish politician and activist Anna Grodzka.

But the biggest adventure has been becoming Free Word Centre‘s Translator in Residence. It’s such an amazing opportunity – it pushes me to my limits, what with the fact I also have a job in a publishing house, but hey! I’ve written a reading list for them, held an event on contracts for literary translators, will hold another one, on women’s voices in international literature, on March 10th, and then there’s the big one – my own seminar at the London Book Fair. I also experimented with co-translation for the first time, with the brilliant Anna Hyde: we worked on Irit Amiel’s very short story for Holocaust Memorial Day. After interpreting for the Polish cult activist “Major” Fydrych, I wrote on the relevance of orange dwarf hats to Polish politics and translated reportage on Chechen refugees in a Polish school. Also, bizarrely, I was interviewed by the incredible writer and poet Wioletta Grzegorzewska, who was nominated for the prestigious literary award Nike this year for her oneiric yet gritty childhood novel “Guguly” (forthcoming in English from Portobello, in Eliza Marciniak’s translation), for her series of talks with Polish writers, translators and poets who now live in the UK.

So here’s the linkdump that is now my professional life. Curious to see where that takes me.

“Plexus” – Kaori Ito and Aurélien Bory at Sadler’s Wells

The setting is stunning, but simple: there are thousands of thin ropes stretching from the ceiling to the floor, forming a sort of cage; there are simple light effects which change the mood from intimate to inhuman, from erotic to religious; there is some dark fabric; and one dancer. Sounds are minimal – some beats and the amplified heartbeat and stomping of Kaori Ito’s feet.

The ropes provide a completely unique environment. Ito’s interaction with them has an incredible range – she hurls herself against them violently (at the same time showing that the platform at which the ropes end is separate from the stage, so she can make the whole structure swing ponderously), she walks among them, almost naked, using them and the light as curtains that allow glimpses of her nearly naked body, she climbs on them, she allows them to support her weight in acrobatic contortions. The sheer versatility of the setting, the lighting and Ito’s absolute mastery of her body add to a narrative which, depending on how pessimistic you feel, can be anything from a meditation on our imprisonment between bars of surveillance to a hopeful story of finding new identities and possibilities within that imprisonment, of learning to dance regardless of constraints.

As a performer, Kaori Ito has great stage presence and is unbelievably expressive; aided by the light, her movement is in turns reminiscent of The Quay Brothers’ stop-motion animation figures, jerky and hectic or acrobatic and seductive. I have seen reviews that accused this performance of being emotionally distant, but I didn’t think that was the case – there are elements of horror there, of fighting against the passage of time, of finding moments of grace and harmony. Even though constrained by innumerable obstacles, hers is a beautiful struggle.

“(…) the first truth is in the earth and the body.”

Clarice Lispector

Finally read Clarice Lispector. Specifically – Near to the Wild Heart (translated by Alison Entrekin, published by Penguin Modern Classics). I’d had her on my list for a while now, but I don’t think I was prepared for the way this book impressed me. The reader follows a young woman called Joana from childhood to adulthood; she is unsettling, whimsical, independent. We see her evolve and try to communicate with others: her widowed father, her hateful aunt, her husband Otavio, his lover Lidia. We glimpse Joana as complex, willful, fascinating to others, submerged within her self.

Plot-wise there’s not much; conversations, states of mind, a flow of emotions. Alison Entrekin had her work cut out for her – translating this sort of gossamer language is not easy. What emerges, however, is a book that I’m sure will stay with me, because a weft of razor-sharp observations runs through the warp of subtlety. Lispector is masterful at naming experiences and feelings that are on the knife edge between the conscious and the unconscious and that I, for one, have felt, but never seen them described – never thought they could be described at all.

While I haven’t got enough Portuguese to appreciate the original, I felt Entrekin’s translation pulsed with a rhythm in which nothing jarred, in which the hazy and the precise interplayed beautifully. If reading the book takes a lot of work, translating it must have been very difficult indeed – Lispector uses language in a way that’s entirely her own. In an interview, Entrekin says: “(…) with Clarice the big challenge any translator faces is allowing her to be herself. This is easier said than done.” I found it very easy to trust the translation and accept that the unusual prose does exactly what it should; the amount of underlined passages in the book attests to that. There are esoteric moments, but I believe this has nothing to do with the quality of the translation – rather with the fact that both Clarice and Joana focus on things which are not exactly run-of-the-mill.

Near to the Wild Heart is a dense, short book, an invitation to a world that is intensely personal, but allows for moments of radiant recognition.

“Digital Revolution” at the Barbican.

The Digital Revolution exhibition does something interesting: it enables you to interact with technology through the medium of the computers of the age. So not only you can see Apple computers from the eighties; you get to play games on them. There’s Pong on a machine whose only feature is a knob you turn to move your paddle up and down. There’s Tetris on ancient Gameboys. The effect is pure joy, or at least it was for me – to see technology so obviously outdated yet still serving (some of) its purpose is exciting because it’s unusual. Spurred by Moore’s law and planned obsolescence we replace, update and upgrade, while equipment from twenty years ago might still fulfil its purpose.

Seeing ancient games and programmes in their original ecosystems is the joy of the old technology; experiencing the seamless way in which it enhances and changes (bodily) reality is the joy of the supermodern. There are many cliches about wearable technology and all the ways in which we approach transhumanism – in itself a controversial idea. The examples shown at the exhibition were memorable and interesting mainly because they transcended those cliches by emphasising the human, the personal, even the spiritual. It was uncanny to see my own silhouette with huge raven wings, moving in time with me (Chris Milk). The story of how Not Impossible Labs and Zach Lieberman devised a pioneering apparatus for creating graffiti using only eye movement – for a paralysed friend – shows that technology does not have to limit our creativity and enclose us in a virtual bubble, but can do precisely the opposite. Pauline Van Dongen‘s garments incorporate solar panels; the idea that your dress can be a source of green energy is mindblowing. Katia Vega‘s Kinisi, LED-assisted make-up which reacts to the wearer’s facial expressions, is an alluring human version of bioluminescence.

That, and more, is technology which engages emotions, solves problems, expands the body and enables us to think and express ourselves in new ways. It can be touching, poetic, sensual. It seems like there’s myriad experiences we’ve never had before that will become possible. If you’re excited by that thought, go to the Barbican – you have until September 14th.

Marina Abramović’s “512 Hours” at the Serpentine Gallery.

You queue for a while. You get in, leave your bag in a locker and put on noise-cancelling earphones. You leave the world behind and enter the quiet white gallery.

 There are three rooms: one is empty; one has chairs and desks with little piles of grains, as well as cots; one has more chairs and two big, low plinths. People sit, stand, lie down on the cots, sit at the desks playing with the grains, walk the length of the empty room very slowly. Once you’ve had a look around, you quickly accept the unspoken rules; you’re on your own, but you adjust. I did have an urge to run zigzags among the people shuffling along in the empty room, but let go of it – there seemed to be a lot of trust going on there, so much so that once I joined the walkers, I could do it with my eyes closed. This, in a city where keeping your eye on your surroundings is so important, was an interesting experience.

 Marina and her assistants interact with the participants; they take them by the hand and lead them to other parts of the gallery. Initially, this too seemed strange to me – I disliked the idea of interrupting what could be meditation. After a while, though, this interaction turned out to be quite gentle and I have seen people decline. An even more controversial part is that sometimes the assistants lead you to one of the plinths and stand there with you, holding your hand and breathing. Their gesture is like an invitation to dance, but it’s a dance of standing still with your eyes closed, with a stranger by your side.

 It’s difficult to describe the experience, as it’s so personal and mostly about what you bring into it. I found the containing space quite safe and the interplay of aloneness/voluntary togetherness welcome. The limited amount and intensity of stimuli may be unsettling, I imagine, but I thought it was restful. You can spend as much time as you wish in the space; when I left, it turned out I was there for two hours, although when inside time seems to become a bit less important.

 And then I bumped into Marina in the loo. I loved the suspension of the everyday that the event invites – but reality calls in the end.