Behavioral Scientist Reads
The podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture, and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become.
Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.
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Behavioral Scientist Reads
Episode 4: Found in Translation
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What goes into translating a book from one language to another? How do you preserve something when your task is to change everything? What do translation and travel have in common? And why is translation, like travel, such an elusive concept?
In this episode, we speak with Jennifer Croft, the English translator of Flights, about the craft of translation and her work as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. For her work on Flights, Jennifer Croft won The Man Booker International Prize with Olga Tokarczuk in 2018.
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For a list of the authors and books discussed in the episode, and a look at some of the postcards from Jennifer Croft’s memoir, Notes on Postcards, head here: https://bookclub.behavioralscientist.org/episode-4-found-in-translation/
Episode 4 features translator and author Jennifer Croft. The episode was produced and edited by Evan Nesterak, and it was mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.
Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.
Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.
Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.
Today on Behavioral Scientist Reads, we have a very special guest, Jennifer Croft, the English translator of flights, who is also a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Here she is reading from her memoir Notes on Postcards.
SPEAKER_00I grew up in Tulsa, the daughter of a geography professor from rural Kansas who'd never been to any of the places he taught about because he'd never had the money to travel. And maybe also because, as a person from a town too small to show up on a map, he was frightened of anything bigger or more foreign than Tulsa, happier to sit at home or in a classroom or leave through an atlas, palm a globe. Maybe my father was reassured by points, by grids, by miniatures and order. Or maybe my father was simply happy anywhere, unlike me. From an early age, I needed to travel, to be in the world. I became a translator in part to transform the places I most wanted to go into the sources of my income. From Tulsa, I moved to Iowa City, where I studied translation, and then Warsaw, then Krakow, Chicago, and Paris, and Buenos Aires, where I thought I'd live forever, and where I did live for seven years, and where I hope I'll live again someday, and then Los Angeles, and then New York. I couldn't help but move because I loved moving. I loved being in motion. There was little I loved more than seeing a place for the first time, than getting off a plane and breathing in a place for the first time, its distinct humidity and smells. Coming up from an underground station and turning around and around on the sidewalk, trying to absorb all the dimensions of a city, its towers, its skies, its trees, the way people walk there, the cars, and how they drive. It was like sleeping with someone for the first time, finding out the animal phenomena beneath their civilized veneer. Except that in cities, I could also be invisible, or so I let myself believe. Among the beauties of being in between is that it doesn't count. You can sing off-key by yourself in the car, and no one will ever know the awful songs you love to sing off-key to. You can freely adjust the contents of your nose in the elevator. You can drink two little bottles of wine on the plane and watch romantic comedies. You can be invisible to yourself because self is a static construct, and you are dynamic, in motion, passing through an environment that dwarfs you, a moving part of something else. Translators are go-betweens. Translators know originals are no more definitive than translations, and that all the joy and excitement and splendor and truth is always in the process of happening in between. Write something down and it's a static construct. Think about it, and it comes back to life.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Stephanie Tam.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Behavioral Scientists 3.
SPEAKER_01The podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become.
SPEAKER_02Hello, Stephanie. Hey Evan. As you know, we just heard from Jennifer Croft, and I feel she's someone to whom we owe a significant debt of gratitude. Not only did she translate the book into English, she spent more than a decade lobbying English language publishers to take the book on. And without her, I'm not sure we would have discovered this book.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Jennifer Croft. I'm so grateful for her work on flights and excited you got to speak with her. And she's not only a translator, she's also an author.
SPEAKER_02That's right. I think she's the first author who I've read their translation work, their fiction, and their nonfiction. So at the start of the episode, we heard her reading a passage from her new memoir, Notes on Postcards, and it weaves together this history of postcards with her journey as a translator, a writer, a daughter, a sister, and a mother. The book will be published in November 2026, and although it's billed as a memoir, in my view, like Flights, it's very genre-bending. I actually felt the experience of reading it was less like that of a memoir and more like spending an afternoon at a museum. Like if the History Museum and the Modern Art Museum shared a wing, notes on postcards would be the perfect exhibit there. It's intimate and personal, and it's this singular perspective like you'd get from an artist. The entries are short, almost postcard length. There's ellipses or jumps from one memory to the next, so you've got to fill in the gaps, much like when you tour a museum or when you read a postcard and kind of create a story based on the image on the front and the message on the back. And so she's combined this personal story and singular perspective with the history of the postcard, which is this medium that is both designed for mass communication, but at the same time is intimate as well as exposed. You know, anyone can read somebody else's postcard. And in the memoir, she's curated some of the postcards that she felt were particularly interesting and unique and spoke to her. And of course, travel and postcards go hand in hand. So it all makes for a combination that wasn't like anything I've read before. And I think that's one of the highest compliments you can pay an author or an artist.
SPEAKER_01That sounds fascinating. It reminds me of one of my favorite hybrid books, Victoria Chang's Dear Memory, which is also pitched as part memoir, part poetry collection, but it's really so much more. It's also this genealogy of grief and memory, composed of a constellation of letters, marriage licenses, immigration documents, and family photos.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, one of the great things about Reading Flights is that it opens you up to reading non-traditional books and formats. It's like we've developed a new muscle over the course of the book club. I find myself perhaps even more drawn to these kinds of works now. Speaking of which, I also want to make sure I mention Jennifer Croft's novel, The Extinction of Irina Ray, which you'll hear a bit more about in the interview. It's this creative mystery that centers around a missing author and her eight translators. Both her novel and her memoir explore what it means to be a translator and reveal a lot about this liminal space where translators exist. Reading both of the books really opened my eyes to this craft of translation I realized that I didn't know much about and very much took for granted. So when I spoke with Jennifer Croft, I really wanted to get into the world of translation and learn more about what goes into it, including her work on flights. And I hope you enjoy the conversation.
SPEAKER_01I'm looking forward to listening.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much for having me. And I should say thank you for translating flights into English and your years of advocacy work to get it published. There's an alternate reality where I never get to pick up the book and it doesn't have the impact on me and other readers the way that it has.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I appreciate your appreciation. I actually hadn't looked at the book in a little while. It was published in 2017. And because you invited me to do this interview, I picked it back up, and it is a masterpiece. I'm so glad that it came out in English as well as in many other languages.
SPEAKER_02I was trying to think of an analogy that adequately captures how powerful the work of translation is on the one hand, and yet how invisible it is on the other. And the best I could do was that of an airplane pilot. And so if you'll allow me to unspool that a bit, you know, there's essentially no chance I would have traveled to certain places in the world without them. And let's let pilots represent everyone else involved in making these trips happen. And I count some of the distant places I've lived and traveled as being the most meaningful and formative times of my life. But how I actually got there, I almost take it for granted. I mean I couldn't tell you the pilot's name or what they looked like. And thinking about your work as a translator, when I look at my bookshelves now, I see so many of my cherished authors who I know only through translation. Leo Tolstoy, Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, Parr Lagerquist, and I could go on. And now, of course, Olga Tokarczyk too. And what an impact all of these translators have had on my life, and I don't know a thing about them. Um, aside from Tolstoy's translators and you, I don't think I would even know their name to thank them. And so translators are connecting two worlds that otherwise might not come together. So as a translator, how do you think about your work and the role you play not only in an author's life, but in a reader's life?
SPEAKER_00Hmm. I think in general that translation is co-writing. So I do believe that every translated work is a co-authored work. And I think that's so important because it brings to the fore the translator's abilities and talents and genius potentially, but also the translator's immense responsibilities. Everybody always, including myself, tries to come up with the right metaphor for the translator. And I have had pilots do special things during flights, but I always end up in the destination that I'm supposed to end up in. But if you compare those translations of Tolstoy, you'll see that they're quite different. Or look at the translations of the Odyssey, for instance. And just now looking at my translation of flights, I saw many sentences that I felt I would write differently now, you know, 10 years later. So I think I've advocated for translators' names to appear on book covers because we choose every single word. It is really important which translator you go with. It may impact your ability to even like a book. Like if you're choosing between different translations of the Odyssey and you don't know that Emily Wilson's exists or whatever your favorite is going to be, you might end up coming away totally cold from that text. And so I think it's almost as important as the author herself for the foreign language reader. It's really important that you have a good translator that you feel you can trust because that is the person who's writing every sentence that you're reading.
SPEAKER_02What metaphors have you played around with for the role of the translator? I'm curious.
SPEAKER_00I've never heard yours before, but there's a similar one of translators as bridges. People like that idea that translators are connectors. I think that there are metaphors from the performing arts that work pretty well. Like you are the musician who is performing the symphony that was written by somebody else, but there's so much in your performance. I mean, the audience's appreciation depends on your performance. Um, actors, translators as actors, I think that also works pretty well. Like I say, I don't think there's a perfect metaphor. I think translation is a really elusive um conceptually process because it is and is not writing.
SPEAKER_02Well, why don't we try and dig into something concrete in this elusive concept of translation? And why don't we talk about flights? And I imagine as a translator, one of the most significant decisions you have to make is that of the book's title. And obviously, the direct translation of the original in Polish is different than the English translation. So I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about the title as a decision you made as a translator, or did you make it with the author? Did you grapple with other titles potentially? I'm curious about that as an example of trying to get into the decisions that a translator has to make and the their thought process.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. No, I I love that question. And I've also just kind of been struck over the course of my career so far by the ways in which the title is treated differently from the rest of the text. It's almost like a, it goes into more of the marketing department. It's like a logo or something. It's it's it comes out of the author's control once the book has a publisher. So like my own books have been retitled by publishers. And I have always like a lot of fun playing around with titles. In this case, the book was originally titled by somebody else at the Polish Book Institute, Runners. And that was the provisional title with the publisher until the very last minute when I finally came up with flights. But I always hated runners, which is a literal translation of the Polish original, because in English it just kind of connotes like jogging. It's a pretty mundane word. It doesn't really convey any of the magic of the book. And the original bieguni, it has the root of running, bieg, but it actually refers to an 18th-century Russian Orthodox sect cult that believed that there was evil everywhere, all over the earth. And the only way you could escape that evil was to run away from it, basically. So to be constantly in motion. And obviously, this book is about motion being constantly on the move, whether it's the things inside our bodies that are in motion or circulation, or whether it is human beings moving around the globe. And so I ended up feeling that flights was a more versatile way of thinking about that. Yes, flying in a plane is kind of as mundane as running, but then there's also like flights of fancy and flights as in fleeing, which I thought was really important. So I just felt like it might be a more evocative title, and I suggested it to the publisher. Olga loved it immediately. She's always very supportive of her translators. So yeah, that's how that happened.
SPEAKER_02Were there other parts of the book or other decisions you had to make that you remember grappling with the original Polish and what it might mean in English, or not being able to translate something and having to sort of replace it? You know, I know I think in another one of your books you say puns are untranslatable. Take us into that sort of your desk at that time, if if you can think back that many years ago to kind of some of those decisions.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, there are some things that are consistent throughout her work, and some of them are just Polish language, being Polish language. For instance, the order of every sentence has to change a ton when you translate it into English. And that always bothers me when I'm doing it. I mean, I do it at this point almost automatically, but there's a wonderful essay by the translator from German, Susan Brnofsky, about syntax in translation, the order of the words, and thinking about how the author planned this journey. Also, each sentence can be thought of as a kind of journey that the reader is going to take with the author. And there's a specific destination that the author has in mind. And we often have to lose that. German also has like a very specific word order that is different. And in Slavic languages, the word order is really flexible because of the very well-developed grammar, which English has lost. So the words change their ending depending on what their function is in the sentence, which frees the sentence up so that it can be not in any order, but in different orders, and you can emphasize different things by playing with that. That's something that I got rid of basically when I was translating flights. And looking back, like I mentioned when I was looking at the sentences now, I felt that one of the things that I, one of the ways in which I've changed in the last decade is that I maybe feel more confident about being a little bit less conventional. So in flights, which was one of, I mean, it was, I wanted it to be Olga's breakthrough book. And publishers had been telling me for a long time that it was too confusing and that, you know, the structure of it is so chaotic and it wouldn't really appeal to readers. So I was really going for a conventional, standard English way of expressing things. And so I think I made the order, for the most part, of the sentences feel really natural in English. And I'm not sure I would have done that so consistently if I were translating it now. And then there are other times when Polish doesn't need to say certain things. The sentence can be much shorter, but I felt that a word was missing for an English language reader. So I added it in. And I again, I'm not sure whether I would always make that same decision now. But, you know, it's always a question for the translator: where is your primary allegiance? Is it to the author? Is it to the original language and culture? Is it to English? Is it to the English language reader? And on and on. So we're torn in so many different directions. And I think I was very worried about the English language reader when I was translating this book.
SPEAKER_02Does that decision of where to calibrate yourself as a translator change book by book? Or is it something that's more of a personal style of the translator or one that develops over time? I'm curious how you personally calibrate yourself and then how other translators might think about it as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think for me, definitely my approach depends on the project. Even if it's by the same author, authors are also evolving over time and changing their approach. For me, it's a process of really familiarizing myself with the text, immersing myself in it. You know, ideally, I would have a fairly long time or some time with the book before I start translating it. And then kind of deciding okay, how can I do this justice in English? And what does that mean? I want to faithfully represent the author's project, but I also want people to be able to read it. So that's always the balance. I can see that it could be very interesting to completely preserve that original syntax or whatever, especially in a shorter text, but that isn't what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to kind of help move an author's career in a more international direction. I'm trying to bring really interesting books to readers who otherwise wouldn't find them, like you said. Um, so it's a I'm a little, I feel like I'm a little bit more on the practical side of translation than the theoretical side, maybe, or the experimental side.
SPEAKER_02Terrific. Well, thank you for sharing some of that about flights. I'm curious, as a reader of flights, if you have a favorite section or a section that is especially memorable to you even all these years later.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I love the structure of this book. You know, she calls it a constellation novel, which I think is such a brilliant idea. And the whole book is about our sort of pointless search for order in the world, in the same way that we seek patterns in the stars in the sky. So I love the whole thing. I love the way it comes together. My favorite Olga Tokarchuk is always the fiction Olga Tokarchuk. She, I find her so mesmerizing. Like I instantly fall under her sway when I start reading the Kunitsky stories. There's Kunitsky One, Two, and Three. And she says at the beginning of this book that she trained as a psychologist. And I think you can see that in everything she writes, but especially in her fiction, she's she has this surgical precision when it comes to her character's thoughts, and it works so well. Well, for me, and she has this very lyrical, kind of rhythmic way of writing. But she manages to convey so much tension and suspense and heartbreak. And the same is true for the story flights. And in both cases, they're about people feeling like they need to run away from their family for what for different reasons, and they center on different characters. One character is being fled from, and the other character is fleeing. She's just an absolutely brilliant writer of fiction. And those are such intriguing and kind of delicate stories. I think those are my favorites.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for sharing your sections. I think when I first encountered those sections, they were probably some of the most mysterious as a first pass in the in the sort of collection of the novel. You know, you're you're kind of bouncing around shorter sections, and then you get to Konitsky and it's a longer section, and all of a sudden you someone's lost on an island and you feel lost. But they're the ones, I especially flights, the the section in the center of the book of the woman fleeing her family, I think over time as you revisit them, they sort of gain a deeper meaning or you see see new things in them. I want to shift gears a little bit because, in addition to your work as a translator, you're also a writer of both nonfiction and fiction. And your novel, The Extinction of Arena Ray, um actually taught me a lot about translation as I was reading it. And so, and just to give some readers some quick background, essentially in the story, we follow a group of translators into a primeval forest on the Polish-Belarusian border for a translation summit with their beloved author, and they've arrived to translate her Magnum opus. The summit quickly turns into this chaotic mystery, which I won't give away here, but we can say that the main characters in these novel are these eight translators. And as we follow them through the story, we get these mini revelations into what it's like to be a translator. So I want to ask about a line in the opening of the novel where one of the translators is speaking and she says, I quote, We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word. And so I'd love to know what this line means to you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, this novel is written from the perspective of an unreliable narrator who has been translated by an unreliable translator. So I guess this is just a disclaimer that I may or may not share all of the sentiments. I mean, I don't share all of the sentiments of the narrator, Amelia. Um, but I guess what I wanted to get at with that sentence is the kind of inherent heartbreak for the translator, especially the translator of a book that she really loves. Like, you know, I think I've kind of been alluding to that a little bit in thinking back to my translation of flights. I haven't really talked about this book in in a while. And so I think my perspective has changed, like I said, and I see things that I would have done differently. And that just puts me right back in that process of like, oh, here's here's this thing that I love, and now I have to make it all over again myself, and it's going to be the same, and it's also going to be totally different. Which this is what I was saying about translation being conceptually elusive. I mean, it's it's an impossible task. And so you can think that every word is perfect in the original text. I mean, usually we don't think that every word is perfect. There's always something we would want to change, but um, we don't want to change every single thing, but that's what we have to do. That's the whole job, but that's our entire function is to change every single thing. And it's, you know, it's exciting, and then it's also terrifying. It somehow reminds me a little bit now, again, so many years later, of watching my I have twins who are now four years old, and I watch the way that they change, and it's so exciting. But then also I feel like a little bit of heartbreak every evening when I'm putting them to bed, thinking like tomorrow you're kind of going to be a different person. Like your vocabulary is changing so much so quickly. Your size is changing so much so quickly. Everything about you is shifting constantly, and I'm eternally losing the you that I loved today.
SPEAKER_02Well, that actually is a good link to another line that I love from the book, which you you've alluded to both as you were speaking, and then also in your experience of being a mom. And that is, and I quote, a translation is a new experience of something that is essentially fundamentally the same. When I read that line, obviously travel has been on my mind and movement, especially as as we've been reading flights, but I couldn't help but kind of see travel in that as well as translation. And so, you know, essentially a lot of the things we're doing when we travel or visit a new place is exactly what we do when we're in our home country. We look for coffee, we look for wine or beer, or we go for a meal, we try and see people, we see the view, whatever it might be in the place. Um and I don't know, it kind of occurred to me at least that I had a connection to travel there. And I'm curious what that line means to you, and also if if there are any links in your mind to travel, or if if I'm on my my lonely island here.
SPEAKER_00No, I mean it's such an interesting question. And the this question of like, what is travel? What can travel do and what can travel not do is very much baked into flights. And I think it's something that those of us who love to travel have to think about a lot, you know, like why are we making this kind of sacrifice of the environment in order to experience some new thing? And it in a way, it's the opposite goal from translation. If your goal as a translator is to hopefully convey some of the old thing, try to be as close to it as possible. Your goal as a traveler might be to do something that is completely new to you. Even if it's coffee, it can be a totally new experience of coffee. This reminds is reminding me of a conversation that I had in my um writing fiction class at the University of Tulsa yesterday. This is our first week, and somebody was suggesting that every single book is the same book. Lion King is Hamlet, it's all the same. And we had to kind of have this conversation about what do we mean by sameness? Um, these are really, it's a very different experience to watch The Lion King from going to see Hamlet. And it can be a very different experience to go have pick up a coffee in Prague and go down to the river and read a book versus driving through a Starbucks. Um, hopefully that feels like a different experience to you. And I think we have to acknowledge that that's part of the reality of translation as well. Maybe we're conveying the essence, but we've we've changed. I don't like to use the word lost because it's connected with this whole series of misunderstandings, I think, of what a translator is capable of doing and not capable of doing. But I think we experience a sense of loss sometimes. What I try to do with that is compensate for whatever doesn't work. For instance, a pun. I try to find another place where I can make a language-based joke or something similar. But no matter what, we're changing we're changing everything, like I said.
SPEAKER_02Very elusive, this whole concept of translation and I think travel to. Well, you just brought up something that I wanted to ask about. We're very familiar with the term lost in translation. And for anyone who's traveled to a country where you don't speak the primary language and you've tried to do something and horribly failed because of the language barrier, you know, you kind of can viscerally feel the embarrassment and the frustration from that. But I wanted to kind of flip that on its head and say, what do you think is found in translation?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I think that's going back to why I think it's so important to put a translator's name on the book cover. I think, like when we go see a film, we expect to see multiple names in the credits. We expect there to have been a productive collaboration where each person brings their own expertise to the project. And so I think ideally, what gets found in this very peculiar relationship between two people or potentially more is this particular kind of resonance. You're experiencing what the translator noticed the most. You're experiencing what meant the most to the translator. And so it's kind of like a there's a filter on as if you're looking through a lens. There's kind of a filter, and you really have to trust the person whose filter you're seeing. It's their vision. And I think that can be wonderful. Like we, I use filters on my photographs before I put them on Instagram, you know, like that that can strengthen the original. It can kind of downplay certain things that might feel less important, and it can really intensify some other things that that the author maybe didn't emphasize enough in the original. So, in a way, here we have like the similarities between translator and editor. And translations usually do not get edited for content. You know, they're published in an original language. In many publishing cultures, they don't get heavily edited either in the way that they would in the United States. So Olga might send a thousand-page book to her editor, and they do like a spell check, and that's it. And so the translator might, in collaboration with the author, make some kinds of edits, but also might just much more subtly shift the text in some way.
SPEAKER_02Pulling that thread a little bit more on some of the things that, as again, as I was learning more about translation through your work, you know, we're talking to you as a single translator from Polish to English for Olga. There are also a bunch of other translators who are in your same position going into a different second language. I always thought of translation as this sort of the manuscript arrives, you lock yourself in a room, translate it. Of course, you have to make some decisions, and I'm oversimplifying here, and then it goes out into the world, and that's it. But you know, something that your novel, The Extinction of Arena Ray, brought up that I thought was really interesting was this idea of translation as a sort of collaborative effort. And so I'm curious if you could break into some of my assumptions and perceptions of what translation is versus how it actually looks in the world, and maybe even some of the more interesting. I don't know, you mentioned Gunter Grass and you mentioned Murakami having translators coming together at the same time. And so I'm just fascinated to learn more about this sort of collaborative aspect of translation that seems like such a singular activity or even a duo at the most.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, we could say the same thing about writers' groups and writers' workshops, including like informal writers' workshops, that turn what would otherwise be a pretty solitary, even more solitary than translation, because in translation, you're automatically in conversation with at least one other person who's written the text. But I think there are situations that lend themselves to translator-to-translator collaboration. And Olga is so generous with her translators. It has been important to her to get them together. And she actually, since winning the Nobel Prize, has organized and funded her own translator summits, not really anymore to talk about her work, but to invite her translators to come together just to be in community and to think about Polish literature kind of more broadly with some talks by literary critics and other authors and so forth, which I think is just such an amazing and magical thing to do in her home in the country. I haven't gotten to attend one of those because of the aforementioned tiny terrorists with whom I live. But before that, I went to three gatherings of Olga's translators, and that did result in this, in the basic idea for my novel, The Extinction of Rina Ray, even though the author Irvina Ray is a horrible person and in no way related to Olga. But I needed a more, I didn't want just like a bunch of nice people sitting around having nice conversations, which is what those gatherings were actually like, because that wouldn't have been an interesting novel. But we did get together in different cities in Poland. Some of it was funded by this Polish Book Institute, which is a government-funded agency that is intended to promote Polish literature and culture in the world. And it was really great to just hear other people's ideas. It's amazing to kind of dedicate yourself so exhaustively to one text, and you do feel like it's just yours sometimes. Like, especially when I was translating the books of Jacob, I worked on it for so long. And mine was one of the first translations, and I just felt like almost reluctant to let it go out into the English-speaking world because it was mine. And at the same time, I was in conversation with the German translators of the same book and the Swedish translator and the French translator. And I had the French translation, and we all have this Facebook group where we can ask each other questions like, I couldn't find this reference. Did anybody else find it? Or how can you translate the seemingly untranslatable Polish thing into a non-Slavic language? Whatever. So everybody is so supportive of one another. And I think that's generally like a characteristic of the translator. And I know that Murakami's translators do get together, not necessarily with his involvement, but they do get together annually if possible. I think the longer the author's career is, the more likely that is to happen, particularly if they are a relatively nice person. If they're a horrible person, maybe less so. But yeah, I think it's such a wonderful thing to have a translator community. And there are organizations that promote this too, like the American Literary Translators Association gets translators together annually to talk about their work. And it's a it's a really great thing.
SPEAKER_02Something else I learned that kind of broken assumption about translation for me from you is you know, you're working in multiple languages. I always again assumed you just had a specialty in two languages, or maybe three, and maybe the languages were similar, and you kind of worked and traveled in amongst those, and and that's what it took. But can you tell us about the language you're translating to and from and also writing in and how you came to those languages and what it's like to work between very different ones?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. I loved talking about that. There are a lot of translators who translate from similar languages. Like you said, there are a lot of people who speak both French and Italian, or Spanish and French, or whatever, who maybe grew up speaking multiple related languages. And there are certainly people who really specialized in a single language and a single literary culture. I actually started out in Russian. I was obsessed with the Russian language and Russian literature when I was a teenager, but I grew up speaking only English. And so I kind of knew all along that I needed to live in a country where my translation language was spoken in order to become fluent enough and kind of natural enough to be able to properly translate. That's how I felt. And I went to Moscow when I was 18. I did not care for it. And I also happened into a Polish class shortly after that. And so I dropped Russian. Polish took its place in my brain. And I started working with contemporary Polish writers. Then I started working on a PhD in comparative literature, and I was casting around for, I thought maybe I would work on German stuff because there's a natural connection between German and Polish literature, just based on geographical proximity. But I ended up getting interested in a Polish writer named Vitold Gombrowicz, who is one of the most important writers in Poland in the 20th century. And he accidentally immigrated to Argentina in 1939. He went on this all-expenses paid cruise where he got to be like a distinguished writer and intellectual at a very early stage in his career. And then the Nazis invaded Poland while he was there. So he stayed for 23 years. And I was so curious about the impact of that on him. He continued to write exclusively in Polish, but his work became kind of weirder and weirder. He was notoriously misanthropic. And I just I went to Argentina because I wanted to try to imagine what his life would have been like there. But I got to Buenos Aires and I completely fell in love with it. Like I instantly felt like, oh, this is the place that I've been looking for my entire life. Everything makes sense here. I'm I fit per it's like a I'm the last puzzle piece here. And it's just like everywhere that I have gone before was just me trying to find this one place. And so my focus shifted and I started, I mean, I didn't speak Spanish then. So I went back as soon as I could and started studying Spanish there. And I ended up living there for seven years, and I do definitely want to go back. But my relationship with Spanish was so different from my relationship with Polish. My relationship with Polish was more academic. I had learned Polish at a university, and I really focused on, you know, having like perfect grammar, being able to write and read perfectly. In Argentina, I didn't have that limitation, maybe. And so I learned Spanish by speaking with people who became very close friends. And my attitude towards translation was also different there. I felt that it was important for me not only to translate contemporary writers, I was finding, but also to actively participate in a literary community that I respected and loved so much. And so I wrote my first novel in Spanish. I kind of came up with a concept that I thought I would be able to pull off in Spanish, which begins and mostly continues in someone's childhood, the childhood of a person who ends up coming from Oklahoma and going to Argentina. So the Spanish sounded weird, but it ends up making sense as part of the project. And yeah, I don't translate into Spanish, but I am primarily now translating from Spanish.
SPEAKER_02Just so I have it correct, you're doing Polish to English, you're doing Argentinian Spanish to English. You wrote your first book in Spanish and then also created an English version. Do you also do Ukrainian as well?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I did study Ukrainian. Harvard has this amazing program to study Ukrainian, and I always was really interested in Ukrainian, but I never got to live in Ukraine. I married a Ukrainian who grew up in a part of Ukraine where people have until now primarily spoken Russian, which is the city of Odessa. So he's also a translator. He translates from Russian. He has also been studying Ukrainian. But we felt that maybe by working together we would be able to translate a Ukrainian children's book that was brought to us by Elsewhere Editions, which is a wonderful publisher of children's books. And so that we did that. We would both like to translate more from Ukrainian, but we need the situation, we need Russia to get out of there and for Ukraine to be. A peaceful and wonderful nation as it always has been before, in order for us to go there as a family, hopefully someday.
SPEAKER_02One thing I heard you speak about in another interview was your husband is primarily translating dead authors, and you're primarily translating living authors. And I'm curious if you could just tell us about what the similarities and differences are as as you're dealing with dead and living authors.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, the joke that he always makes is like this way they can't complain about his translation choices. My thinking about it is that because I grew up speaking only English and I'm very concerned about being responsible and making sure I get things right, I feel like there's always this there's always going to be a kind of distance between me and Polish or Spanish. Whereas Boris, my husband, grew up speaking Russian and he still speaks Russian every day, multiple times. He doesn't have that distance. So he can have a different distance, which is between in the hundred years between 2026 and 1926. His favorite time period is early 20th century, especially 1920s. He just loves those styles and themes. And so he's really into that. And he is, whenever he can, he gravitates towards texts written in the early 20th century. But he also does love. He works with Andrei Kurkov, who's a great writer in Ukraine, and they have a wonderful close collaboration and friendship. So it's not that he refuses to collaborate with the living, but I think, yeah, it just to me adds a layer of difficulty that I just don't feel confident that I can necessarily tackle credibly. Yeah, I I mean, I think in my case, I also do like the idea of helping someone's career as they're developing it. And I guess the results are just more tangible. Boris cares a lot about bringing writers back from oblivion, and that is such a a noble thing to be doing. I've worked more with women writers. I want to support women who are maybe earning less money than they should be, and they're just less famous than they should be. And yeah, I just want to bring awareness to people who currently need that.
SPEAKER_02Terrific. Well, let's let's shift gears because you have a new book out that combines travel, language, writing, and your own personal journey into one package. So this is, of course, notes on postcards, and it's this really creative memoir that incorporates postcards and the history of postcards, but also your own sort of growth and journey as a translator, as a daughter and a sister, and also as a mother. So I'm curious why this sort of format of memoir combining all of these different things. I'm curious how they all kind of come together for you.
SPEAKER_00I think for me, postcards were the way that I maintained relationships once I got to start traveling, which I always wanted to do, and I started doing really early, but I also felt quite guilty about leaving behind my family. By the time I started leaving the country when I was 18, my father had been diagnosed with leukemia. My sister was continuing to have a lot of health problems. She had had two brain surgeries by then, and she had developed lupus and some other conditions. So it was much harder for them to travel. And, you know, I was also very close to my grandmother. She wasn't in great health at that point. So I wanted to stay in touch with them as much as possible. And postcards were a great way for me to do that. I felt like, first of all, very liberated by the images on postcards. When I was starting out with postcards, it was just like representations of the places where I was sending the postcard from. And having that image there kind of frees you up to talk about other things. You can convey a sense, some sense of what you're doing and where you're doing it without having to say a word. And then you can dedicate your words to how you're feeling and how much you miss the person. And so I always thought that that combination of text and image was really interesting and really powerful. And I always wanted to spend more time thinking about it. And I was offered the opportunity to write this book. At the time in 2020, it was going to be more about travel and postcards exclusively. That was during a pandemic when most people were less able to travel. And then editors changed and things changed in my life. As I was trying to write this book about postcards, I was also going through miscarriages and then quite a difficult pregnancy. And so this new kind of relationship that I had never experienced before, I had obviously never sent postcards to my kids when they were in the womb, nonetheless became very relevant to just the ideas of what we can and cannot communicate to other people, what we can and cannot understand about other people through language, through images, and through other means. And so I kind of expanded the focus of the book because of that.
SPEAKER_02I think something that was interesting to read in the book is that it's not only about staying in touch with your family as you're traveling, it's also how you and your husband met, which I thought was a very cute story. So I don't know if you want to relay that, but I thought it was also interesting to hear this was a way that postcards almost like operated into the future, which I thought was something unique for them. So I'm curious if you could share that story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's such a wonderful way of putting it. And it's a wonderful way of tying the different conversations we've had together. But yeah, in this, in the case of me meeting my husband, they opened up a future, but also by going further into the past, because as I mentioned, my husband is really interested in the early 20th century. I had started being really fascinated by some of the images on early 20th century postcards. They are so different. They're often humorous, but in ways that we may or may not find humorous now. For instance, with the twins, there's there's so many postcards of men learning after the fact that they have twins, obviously, no ultrasounds in 1902 or whatever. So they learn that they have twins and they threaten to shoot the doctor or the nurse who's just told them that, or they collapse onto the floor. And there are there are all of these like themes in early 20th century postcards, like women are allowed to propose to men on leap day. And there are humorous postcards about that, romantic postcards about that, seemingly to serve as the proposal itself. So I had started to become fascinated by this already, but really it was Boris, my husband, who kind of opened my eyes to the range of these early 20th century postcards. Our first date was to a flea market called the Melrose Trading Post in Los Angeles, where he grew up after the age of eight when he immigrated. And it's set up in a high school parking lot, the parking lot of Fairfax High, where he went to school. And there's this one postcard vendor who comes every three weeks and he sells for exorbitant prices, these absolute masterpieces of postcard history. And so, yeah, on our first date, I started looking with him at those. There are a lot of postcards that are very tactile in ways that current postcards often aren't. There was a whole series of daisy postcards where you got to pluck the petals off the postcard and it would supposedly tell you your future. So it would tell you like when you were going to get married or who you were going to fall in love with, what your fate would be kind of generally. And I remember that being kind of a funny way of starting our relationship and wondering like, would I end up with this person who seems so great? And also thinking about wanting to form a family at that point, being a little bit conflicted about where I wanted to live. I had just come from Argentina. So the kind of playful desire to know the future of these postcards was a big part of our early relationship.
SPEAKER_02That's lovely. And for anybody who's listening in LA, they can maybe go check out the flea market. Is it still around? Do you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. The Melrose Trading Post is every Sunday.
SPEAKER_02So I would love to know what's a book that, if folks have really connected with flights, what's another book in translation that they might pick up?
SPEAKER_00So I always go back to the night that flights won the Booker Prize. And I really thought the prize was going to go to a book called Vernon's Subutex by a French author named Virginie Despont, translated by Frank Wynne. I loved that book so much. Obviously, I loved Flights more, but I read that book and I was absolutely enraptured by it. And I've read it a few times since then. And I just think it's such an incredible book, but it's also such an incredible example of a relationship between a writer and a translator that really works so spectacularly. It's like watching a pair of professional tango dancers who've been working together for 20 years and they're just kind of like going all over the floor and spinning and whatever. And it just looks like you can't even understand how they're moving in this way. I really love that book, and I don't know why it didn't get more attention in the US. Again, it's called Vernon Subutex, and it's the first volume of a three-volume series. So I think people who enjoyed flights would also enjoy that. It's also a little bit fragmentary. It's sort of building in a more linear way to its conclusion, but it switches from perspective to perspective to perspective. And the perspectives are very different from one another. And I think it's, yeah, it's brilliant.
SPEAKER_02And if people were going to discover another book of yours that you've translated, which one should they pick up?
SPEAKER_00I really love a book of short stories that I translated called A Perfect Cemetery by an Argentine writer named Federico Falco. It's five short stories. The three in the middle are almost novella length, and they work so beautifully at that length. It's like watching an entire film. It sort of feels like you've been immersed in an 800-page novel, but you can read it very easily in an afternoon, in a couple of hours. And they're so moving, and they have such a great, kind of dry sense of humor, and they are also so rooted in the environment of Córdoba, Argentina, where Falco is from. They're sort of quiet, but they make a huge impact on the reader by the end of the book. They accumulate a lot of emotion as they go, and the characters are so well drawn. And like I say, they're very funny, but also really moving.
SPEAKER_02What are ways that readers like me, who are having a mini epiphany about how valuable translators are and have been in their lives, what can we do to support, I think what is such an interesting creative exercise of having ideas travel essentially. And what can readers do who kind of want to support more of your work and work like it?
SPEAKER_00I think if you're a reader who is enjoying work in translation, a great thing to do is share the translator's name when you talk about the book. If you're posting on Instagram or Twitter, a lot of translators are on social media. You can tag us or just mention us. And I think that's a great way also to kind of remind publishers that this is an important component of the books they're putting out. If you're also a writer, or if you are just in a situation where you know a writer who publishes in another language, it's great to collaborate. I think every writer should be required to translate a book before they get to publish their own book. And yeah, if you can publish like a short story with someone or help them write a poem again in English or whatever, I think I'm all for kind of collaboration and maybe some provisional translations. As we know, there's a thousand translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Flaubert, and that's great. And it's great to just kind of get the ball rolling as early as possible. So if you can translate, you should translate. And if not, it's great to just talk about the translator.
SPEAKER_02Terrific. All right. Well, I now want to ask you the three travel questions from flights, which of course you can interpret literally and metaphorically. They are, and I don't need to tell you, but I'm gonna repeat them for the sake of everyone listening. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? And where are you going?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I'm from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I am coming from right now. You're I'm talking to you from my office at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And where I'm going is a mystery to everyone. But as I think I've said already, hopefully back to Argentina at some point when it's feasible to do so. Terrific.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for being here. And it was such a pleasure having this conversation about translation. And thank you again for bringing Flights to us and for all your other literary work.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for having me and for all these incredibly thoughtful questions. I loved this conversation.
SPEAKER_02Stephanie, in addition to the podcast world, you're immersed in the literary world as a writer and an editor. I'm curious, what is something new that you learned about translation from Jennifer?
SPEAKER_01So I did not realize that there were translator conventions. The extent of how much collaboration happens to bring a book into another language was fascinating. And it brings a whole new light to the ideas that writing or translation is, on the one hand, this solitary process, and on the other hand, always in conversation. I also really liked your discussion on the different analogies and metaphors for how translation works. It's almost like the process itself requires conceptual translation into these other domains like flying a plane or performing in symphony or acting in a movie. And something I found interesting was that idea of following the work of a translator as this curator and filter or even a guide. You know, if you've particularly liked a book in translation, seeing what else the translator decided they want to devote their time and energy to could be a really nice way to discover new literature.
SPEAKER_02I love that idea. You know, it's almost like visiting a country or a city where you know someone who lives there. You kind of get into the local flow so much easier. It's a completely different experience than when you're trying to figure out where you should go just based on reviews or guidebooks. Dropping in somewhere completely new with no expectations also has its perks. And obviously, you won't know someone every place you want to travel to, but in my opinion at least, there's really nothing like having a local to guide you through a place, especially if it's a place where you don't speak the language.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm definitely with you on that.
SPEAKER_02Okay, I have something else to share with you. In my conversation with Jennifer Croft, you'll remember I mentioned a few examples of authors who have had a huge impact on me, but I only know them through translation. Leo Tolstoy, Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, and Par Lagerquist. And so after my conversation with Jennifer Croft, I thought it only right to find out more about the translators. Cool. What did you learn? So I looked through all the books I have by those four authors, a total of 31, and I counted a total of 24 translators. And I find that just incredible. But for only 12 books was the translator or translators listed somewhere on the front or back cover or the spine. And that was mostly for Tolstoy. Of the 10 books I have by him, eight lists the translator or translators. The other instances where the translator appears on the cover was twice for Milan Kundera, once for Jose Saramago, and once for Par Lagerkvist. And I'd love to name all of the translators and tell you something about them, but the episode would be twice the length. So instead, I'd encourage listeners to take a moment to select one of your favorite translated works from your bookshelf, open it up, and find out who the translator was. Maybe even do a search and see what else you can learn about them and see what else they translated. So one translator I'll mention just as an example is Giovanni Pontiero. He was a Scottish-Italian translator who is best known for his English translations of authors writing in Portuguese. I actually discovered him through the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, and I absolutely love Saramago's writing. And so pulling on the thread of Giovanni Pontiero's work, I found out that he also translated Clarice Lespector, who is a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer, who, as I went down the internet rabbit hole about her, seems to have some incredible work and quite an incredible life. I'm sure our Brazilian listeners will be familiar with her writing. So if you have any advice on what book to start with, please send your recommendations. How about you, Stephanie?
SPEAKER_01I think this is a great idea. One of the most recent books I read in translation was Zo Xin Liu's The Three Body Problem. And the translator, Ken Liu, is also an incredible sci-fi fantasy writer. So both of them are fascinating creators, and I'd love to learn more about and read more of their work.
SPEAKER_02This is so cool. To me, the act of translation seems symbolic of the best of humanity. Strangers collaborating across languages and borders and cultures on an artistic project. Also, others can join in the project as readers to interpret and reinterpret the ideas. Especially when the author is trying to uncover something new about who we are and who we can become, it feels essential that this interpreting and reinterpreting can happen across languages and borders and cultures. Okay, I'm getting a little sentimental, but this idea of collaborating across borders and cultures is also a good segue to this week's discussion question.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's not really a question so much as an invitation. So as we're preparing for the final event, we would like to put together a special collection of digital postcards to mark our shared journey as a book club. We'd like for you to send in a travel photo and a couple lines about where this book and our time together has taken you. So, in other words, we're returning to our starting travelers' questions with a twist. Where has our journey taken you? And where does it make you want to go next? We'll use your postcards to map out our journey through flights at our final celebration.
SPEAKER_02We look forward to hearing from you.
SPEAKER_01This episode was produced and edited by Evan Nesterak.
SPEAKER_02And it was mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys. Thank you to the Kahneman Treesman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible. You can subscribe to Behavioral Scientist Reads on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can also find us at behavioralscientist.org and our dedicated book club website, bookclub.behavioral scientists.org, to discover all our episodes, extra material, and leave feedback. Don't forget to rate and review the show. It will help other people discover the podcast. See you next time.
