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I guess both of these articles are a couple of weeks old now—but do things really count if they happen in August while all of Europe is on vacation?—but I still want to share them since both are really interesting and feature two great translators and friends.

First up, has a nice profile of Danish translator K. E. Semmel, whose most recent publication is his translation of Naja Marie Aidt’s

How did you know you would become a translator? How did you become a translator?

I didn���Ĵ�ý�t really start out wanting to be a translator, I know that much. I started out wanting to be a fiction writer���Ĵ�ý�and I still write fiction, it���Ĵ�ý�s what I do when I���Ĵ�ý�m not translating (I���Ĵ�ý�ve been writing the same novel for eight years!). It wasn���Ĵ�ý�t until I was living and working in Denmark that I decided to translate. I really enjoy reading Danish literature, and puzzling out issues of translation. I found myself reading books in Danish and translating words and sentences in my head. At some point I thought: why not give it a try? So I found one writer whose work I really liked, Simon Fruelund, and got started. Oh, actually, there was something else that came first, I think: I went up to Danish poet Pia Tafdrup at a reading in Washington, DC and told her I really wanted to be a translator. She graciously let me translate a few of her travel essays, and they got published in various places (Aufgabe, dirtcakes). To be honest, I can���Ĵ�ý�t remember which came first. But from those two writers my translation life gathered momentum. I also owe debts of gratitude to Russian translator Marian Schwartz���Ĵ�ý�who actually took time out of her schedule to talk to me, a nobody, on the telephone, and to encourage my translation work���Ĵ�ý�and Danish writer Anne Mette Lundtoft, who recommended me to translate Norwegian novelist Karin Fossum���Ĵ�ý�s The Caller. [. . .]

What���Ĵ�ý�s your pet peeve about the translation/literary industry?

Probably the biggest pet peeve I have, though, is related to reader responses of translated texts. I���Ĵ�ý�ve had people ask me what I think of Stieg Larsson���Ĵ�ý�s books in translation. I���Ĵ�ý�ve not read those books, in either language, but invariably I���Ĵ�ý�m told that they���Ĵ�ý�re not well translated. They���Ĵ�ý�re bumpy. Or clumsy. Or whatever. I don���Ĵ�ý�t quite know what to say to that other than, Can you read Swedish? It���Ĵ�ý�s true that a smoothly flowing text will make you forget a book is translated, but the book may not have been so fluid in the original. It might���Ĵ�ý�ve been bumpy or clumsy or whatever. The translator might have, in other words, chosen to hew closely to the original. Maybe the books weren���Ĵ�ý�t well written in Swedish? I have no idea. But the general assumption often seems to be���Ĵ�ý�when readers dislike something���Ĵ�ý�that the translator is at fault, and I find this troubling. The translator is often ignored if it���Ĵ�ý�s a great book, and pilloried if it���Ĵ�ý�s a ���Ĵ�ý�bad���Ĵ�ý� book. How many times do you see, say, quotes by Tolstoy or some other famous, oft-cited foreign author without any attribution of the translator���Ĵ�ý�s role in the quote? Too many.

Fair enough! I wonder if Franzen’s German readers are all “hey, this book is flat and boring! Must be a bad translation” or if they realize that, well, it’s Franzen. (Sorry, that one’s gratuitous, but I can’t help myself right now after reading that followed by )

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Over at the translator and Amanda DeMarco has a “Translator’s Note” in which, well, I’ll let her explain:

A translator must naturally take certain liberties with other people���Ĵ�ý�s words in order to wrest the most truth into the text. In this essay on translation, composed strictly of quotations, I have taken the liberty of replacing select words and phrases with ���Ĵ�ý�translation,���Ĵ�ý� ���Ĵ�ý�translator,���Ĵ�ý� and the various verb forms of ���Ĵ�ý�translate.���Ĵ�ý�

I have also committed untold infidelities.

What follows is exactly that. Here are a couple of examples:

Precisely there where you are not ���Ĵ�ý� that is the beginning of writing, but I hate traveling and explorers; the soul has to stay where it is. Translation makes the strange familiar. Essentially, it makes everyone a tourist in other people���Ĵ�ý�s reality and eventually in one���Ĵ�ý�s own. Remembering my country, I imagine it, and though every man is not only himself, all alone is all we are.

And I cannot explain the action of leveling, why a translation should all boil down to one uniform substance, a magma of interiors. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. Because all identification with characters, deeply conceived, is an impertinence ���Ĵ�ý� an affront to the mystery that is human action and the human heart. The voices of the narrative come, go, disappear, overlap; we do not know who is speaking; the text speaks, that is all: no more image, nothing but language. What is inevitable in a work of art is the style. It is what is sequestered.