Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge on How Co-Translating 'The Boy' Drew Them Closer

The boy’s story begins when his mother’s ends. Having spent his childhood in seclusion with his mother as his only companion, he suddenly finds himself alone, and somehow understands that in order to survive, he must find other people, find a way to join them in living. He knows the buzzing of insects, the silvery glint of the waves of the sea. He knows how to read the weather on the horizon, how to build fire from nothing. But he knows nothing of society, of customs, of borders.  

He will never learn to speak, but the people he meets and especially those who take him in along the way will teach him countless other things: how to be a showman, how to love, how to fight. One day the boy will end up back in nature, his true home, but he’ll have to live through the war before then, through its tragedies and deaths, its violence and its friendship, its boredom and its consequences.

The boy’s story is also the story of France and the French people in the decades surrounding World War I, but these macro themes are approached on the micro level, through each individual sentence. This book is the amalgamation of thousands of sentence-sized revelations. The author’s phrases are brisk, to the point, bare, and yet they glimmer. He does so much with such economy of words. His descriptions are searing, concise, contained. There are no baroque metaphors or flowery descriptions in this book. The boy has no use for them. The war has no use for them. And yet the beauty of the author’s descriptions jumps off the page.

This way of writing made Marcus Malte’s The Boy an easier book to co-translate than some others. There are always so many choices packed into even the barest of sentences, but the specificity and the voice here were so compelling and commanding; there was not a lot of room for argument. We started by splitting up sections, and agreed to check in at various points to make sure our voices and tones matched up. This quickly proved to be unnecessary. Malte sets the tone from the first page, the first sentence, the first word. The orbit of his narrative pulled us to the same axis every time.

Translating The Boy was energizing, each sentence a surge, a neat package to put on the page, each phrase its own gift. No long sentences that leave a translator exhausted by the end. Little jolts of electricity at each page. Smaller plot points stacking on top of each other to add up to this opus, this stunning and astounding commentary on war and society and humanity. On what people do to survive in societies that appear destined for nothing less than utter destruction. On the toll that individually experienced horrors have on an entire generation of people. It’s only a matter of time before we start to turn on each other. What else to do but return to the woods?

Co-translating often involves Skype conversations, emailed questions, hours-long phone calls, winded debates. But this was different. The two of us share a home. Our co-translating involved shouts of ideas across rooms. Plopping down on the couch to run through a series of flagged questions over breakfast. A drowsy debate as we fell asleep, sometimes forgetting the solution we’d come up with in a state of semi-slumber. Track changes comments of simply “Will explain what I mean tonight over dinner.”

There was also less politeness. What might have been “Hm. Not sure I agree with you here. We could ask a third party?” turns into “Trust me on this one—my version is correct.” What is often “Okay, I’m fine keeping the phrase you want here, but then do you mind if we change what I wanted in the paragraph above?” becomes “Fine—you win here, but I’m changing what I wanted in the last paragraph.” And we can laugh about mistakes caught while editing rather than maintaining the facade of professionalism.

There is also more intimacy. Learning from comments and specific word choices how the other person thinks, or speaks. Noticing that Tom often uses the word “moment” in conversation and seeing it appear in the translation where Emma would have written “instant.” Picking up that Emma often uses Frenchisms like “corner of the street” instead of “street corner,” and so Tom starts to point this out in their day to day lives so she is more conscious of it on the page. Seeing that Emma crosses out words that make her cringe in their bookstore’s newsletter and in her translations, whereas Tom continues to insert them in both. Noticing that Tom hates to discuss work in the morning, but Emma can’t think clearly once the sun goes down. There is so much you can learn about a person from watching them recreate words on a page, observing how they mimic worlds and study characters. They say translation is the closest kind of reading, the nearest you can get to a text, or an author. We say co-translation might be the best way to draw nearer to each other.

Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge are the translators of Marcus Malte’s The Boy. They live in Providence, Rhode Island, where they co-own Riffraff bookstore and bar.

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Authors Around the World: Uzbekistan

An exile like the Uzbek literary icons he mentions in this interview, novelist and journalist Hamid Ismailov fled his native country under threat of arrest in 1992. He spent time in Moscow and Paris before settling in London, where he lives now. Since departing Uzbekistan, he has played an active role in drawing attention to its troubling political circumstances, largely through his work with the BBC. However, Ismailov says, “Uzbekistan is the last place people are likely to talk about me.”

Although his work remains banned in Uzbekistan, Ismailov has found audiences all over the world, and has published not only in Uzbek and Russian but also in English, French, German, Turkish, and other languages. The Railway, a masterful novel Ismailov composed before his forced emigration, is out this month from Restless Books.

In this latest installment of Restless Books' Authors Around the World interview series, Ismailov speaks with us about the habits of the itinerant writer, the “island mentality” of a landlocked nation, and the Uzbek roots of The Arabian Nights.

1. Describe your preferred writing spaces, whether that’s when you’re in London or when you lived in Uzbekistan or the places you lived in between.

My writing space moves with me. One part of me comes from a nomadic background when you mount on the horse whatever you need for your survival. So all I need is a square meter and a pen and paper (or any replacement for them, like a Blackberry). All my life I write not because of a certain circumstances, but despite them.

2. As a writer, what’s the most inspiring thing to you about Uzbekistan? About England?

In both cases the language and people, their literature and history, then the geography. Brits and Uzbeks (and also possibly Japanese) are strangely similar in their makeup. The British and Japanese “island mentality” is quite widely researched and described. Less known is the Uzbek “island” mentality in the very middle of the Eurasian continent. The country is locked from all sides either by impassable steppes or deserts or the steep walls of mountains. Those who have been to Uzbekistan might remember the main monument on the central square of the capital—a globe with one country on it. Guess which country?

So bringing everything together, maybe deciphering these mentalities is the most inspiring thing for me.

3. What aspect of living in Uzbekistan is most difficult to convey to people from elsewhere?

The fact that you are living not in real life, but rather in a Kafka novel, and yet you consider and sometime shout that you are living real life.

4. What’s the first book you would recommend to a visitor to Uzbekistan who wants to understand the place?

The Railway for the background and A Poet and Bin Laden for the latest. It’s not an advertisement for my own books, but rather practical and pragmatic advice. Unfortunately there are no translated books, unless you read Russian. But even so, I’d recommend the same books.

5. What is your favorite idiom in Uzbek or Russian?

Too many to mention. I’m not a monophiliac person, who can easily choose his favorite this and that. What I love is interaction between this and that, be it colors, words, idioms, nations, civilizations, etc. There’s a famous tongue-in-cheek saying in Uzbek: “What’s the point in the greatness of the world if you have narrow shoes?” So my take is the opposite: “What’s the point of putting on narrow shoes if the world is so great?” So both literally and figuratively I love to walk barefoot. 

6. What’s the literary culture like in Uzbekistan? Who are its literary icons, past and present?

Not many people pay attention that the narrator of One Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade and her listener King Shahriyor are situated in Samarkand, one of the cities of modern Uzbekistan. So that is the land glorified by the biggest of lived poets and storytellers.

The greatest poet of all time, Hafez, said in one of his iconic poems:

That beautiful Shirazi Turk, took control and my heart stole,

I'll give Samarkand and Bukhara, for her Hindu beauty mole.

Of the same city of Samarkand the great English playwright Christopher Marlowe wrote that Tamerlane's “shining turrets distressed heaven.”

There’s something our literary icons have in common, though. Nearly all of them—Alisher Navoi (fifteenth century), Mashrab (seventeenth century), Abdulla Qadyri, Chulpon, Usman Nasyr (all twentieth century)—were either exiled or executed during their lifetime. So acknowledgment comes in our culture mostly when you are dead. Not a very encouraging prospect for the living authors…

 7. What do most Americans misunderstand about Uzbekistan? What do most Uzbeks misunderstand about America?

I guess that common people look at the geography and the size of the country and put this or that country accordingly in their mental charts. I’m sure that Uzbekistan is pretty low in those people’s tables. What they might not know, the fact that every nation and ethnicity in the world considers itself as the focal point of the universe. Mind also that the Uzbek and British ran empires much bigger by territory than the contemporary United States!

But that might be my—an Uzbek’s—misunderstanding about America. 

8. What do you think the leader of Uzbekistan reads?

I know for a fact that he reads the briefings prepared for him by the National Security Service on what is said about him in the foreign press; he reads speeches prepared for him by his speechwriters, some of whom luckily are or were good writers. I guess he read some Russian novels when he was young, but I can’t imagine that he read, reads, or will be reading any Uzbek fiction.

9. What’s an apt metaphor for being a writer in Uzbekistan?

Die before your death, or even better: die before you were born, with a disclaimer, that it’s my take. Others might have different views, especially if they still live in Uzbekistan.

10. Tell us your favorite local joke.

Just to reinstate the point that I’m not a monophiliac I’ll give you this one:

Mulla Nasreddin found himself in between two arguing people who asked him to judge who was right. Mulla listened first to the first person and said, “You are right!” Then the other person brought his arguments and Nasreddin said to him, “You are right too!” Mulla’s wife listening to them, interfered, and said to her husband, “Look, stupid man, if one is right, the other must be wrong, or the other way around!” to which Mulla Nasreddin replied, “You know, you are right too!”

Authors Around the World: Cuba

Authors Around the World is a new series from the Restless Blog through which we’ll be bringing you interviews with global authors about the places they hail from.

With us in this first installment is Cuban author, photographer, and blogger Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo. Now a resident of the United States, OLPL (as he is known) is the webmaster for the blogs Lunes de Post-Revolución and Boring Home Utopics and the author of Abandoned Havana, a book of original photographs and short essays about Cuba, out now from Restless Books.

Here, OLPL talks with us about what Americans misunderstand about Cuba (and what Cubans misunderstand about America), what the Castros read, and "the beauty" of the island's "barbarity."

1. Describe your preferred writing space when you’re in Havana and how you write while you're away from home.

A very old house where I lived last year in the corner of 66th and 23rd streets, in the famous Buenavista neighborhood. After midnight, when neighbors remain silent, and Havana is as mute as its capital letter H in Spanish. Now, my homeland is my laptop. My preferred space to write is, by force, my own body. There's no home anymore for me. I hope my literature will take advantage of such intense isolation, instead of complaining from "northtalgia" as many Cuban-American writers do.

2. As a writer, what’s the most inspiring thing to you about Havana?

The beauty of its barbarity, the rhetoric of its ruins. Tons of tender details in the time of totalitarianism. People. I miss looking people in the eye and reading what's hardly hidden for me as a writer: how perverse and how naïve they can be. I haven't departed in many ways. If I realize I'm not there anymore, I will stop writing all of a sudden.

3. What about living in Havana (or Cuba) is most difficult to convey to people from elsewhere?

We are not there. Take a look at Cuban official suicide statistics, for example. We are anywhere else. Please, do not give credit to half a century of Castros administration. It's our fate as irreplaceable imaginary island.

4. What’s the first book you would recommend to a visitor to Havana who wants to understand the place?

Hopefully, Milan Kundera's novels and short stories. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for sure. Kundera is not only actual in Cuba today: he comes right from our futile future. Given that the Nobel Prize is denied to him for being obsoletely anti-communist, The Cuban Ministry of Culture should award him with our National Literature Prize.

5. What is your favorite idiom in Spanish? What is the most difficult word or phrase to translate from Spanish, and how would you define it?

I'm an idiot with idioms: all of them seem out-fashioned to me. But the most difficult word to translate from Spanish is a name: Rosa María. I dare not define it.

6. What’s the literary culture like in Havana today? Who are its literary icons, past and present?

There is literature and there is culture in Havana today, but there is no literary culture at all. Castroism has made it impossible for Cubans to create credible icons anymore. That's one thing we should be grateful for ever after these never-ending years of Revolution.

7. What do Americans misunderstand about Cuba? What do Cubans misunderstand about America?

Americans ignore that Cuba is not the victim in this equation, but the imperialistic radical right-winged State monopoly.

Cubans know more of America than most Americans: We feel that this is the country that has come closest to the concept of communism. That's why we keep coming here to the point that our population is now decreasing.

8. What do you think the Castros read?

I can publicly guarantee that Fidel Castro has never read a single book written by a Cuban author (while in university, he memorized many José Martí's quotes only to imitate his speeches). And Raul Castro reads Fidel Castro. That's it.

9. What’s an apt metaphor for being a writer in Cuba?

Absolute white, snow blindness, Alaskabana, a deserted desert, Habanalliteration, and other metafossil metaphors….

10. Tell us your favorite local joke.

There were many jokes in Revolutionary Cuba involving Fidel and the American and Soviet Presidents. But nowadays we laugh much less in Cuba. Then, the last joke I ever heard on the Island was kind of a post-modern meta-joke:

Fidel and Gorbachev and H. W. Bush suddenly died at the same time. They found themselves at hell's gates and the Devil cannot believe his own eyes: "What?! I guess now you are gonna tell me this is just one of those old Cuban jokes."