‘I consider mothers to be the ultimate round-the-clock translators’
Jennifer Hayashida has translated Elin Cullhed's award-winning Swedish novel Euphoria, which is based on the life of Sylvia Plath, into English. Here she shares lessons learned from her work with Scandinavian Fiction contributor Rushnan Binte Amin.
How did your journey as a translator begin?
I grew up bilingual: My father was a third-generation Japanese American, from Honolulu, and his family spoke standard English, Pidgin English, and some Japanese. My mother is from Sweden but has lived in the US on and off since the mid-1960s. I grew up between these languages and contexts, and I was always negotiating which language to speak, with whom, and to what end. In that landscape of languages, I quickly understood how they co-exist and are entangled with one another – emotionally, politically, linguistically. The poet and translator Don Mee Choi writes: [I was] born with a tongue with a task to translate. I only started translating literature mid-way through my graduate work in creative writing, when one of my instructors, the poet John Yau, encouraged me to see where my bilingualism could take my practice as a writer. My father had just died, and translation was a way for me to remain engaged with my writing while also allowing space to mourn. I suppose you could say that translation felt like a kind of ritual, safely bounded by virtue of there already being a text to constrain me.
Reflecting on your experience translating Euphoria, what aspects of working with the novel posed unique challenges during the translation process?
I think the biggest challenge was the fact that Elin Cullhed, the author of Euphoria, was working with a form of exofiction, drawing upon Plath’s biography and writing in a kind of speculative paraphrase. As a result, translating the book into English also meant that I was, in some ways, translating some of the text back into its source language, as a kind of unintended back translation. In that work, I of course wanted to remain loyal to Elin’s undertaking and had to be extremely mindful of not accidentally getting too close to Plath. There was also the issue of how some of the prose is characterized by a kind of frenzied stream-of-consciousness: The translation needed to hew to enough grammatical conventions to make clear that it was correct, but not so many that it would slow down the pace. I was very fortunate to work with Elin and the editors at Canongate, all of them thorough, generous, and thoughtful interlocutors throughout the process.
How do you navigate situations where expressions or concepts in Swedish may not have direct equivalents in English?
Because I translate in both directions and most often work with contemporary poetry, I have a relatively fluid relationship with how the different languages operate – how they can be made to talk to (or argue with) each other, so to speak. I also often deal with how they are already contaminated by each other: Both are Germanic, of course, but there is also the reality of American English, in my opinion, always being in motion and quite malleable. Generally, I have greater trouble making Swedish cooperate with American English terms, since different histories of migration, violence, and identity are inscribed upon American English than they are upon Swedish. I’m also less interested in equivalence than I am in remaining loyal to the text’s poetics or way of operating. Drawing on Choi again: Even if there is no mirror image in the target language, what kind of distorted reflection could still do the same job as the expression in the source?
Could you share any memorable insights gained during the translation of Euphoria that have influenced your perspective as a translator?
The work of translating Euphoria made me think of all translation as a form of paraphrase, the work of translation as repetition with incremental difference. I also thought a great deal about the experiences the translator may bring to bear upon her work, her rigorously experiential reading of the text at hand: To translate the fictionalized struggles of a brilliant female poet in the 1960s – a working mother contending with a spectrum of patriarchal violence – reminded me of how the optics of the lives of artists who are mothers may have changed, but many of the quotidian challenges remain the same. The scenes where Ted shrugs off parenthood and simply walks upstairs to his studio, where the novel makes clear how naturalized it is for his artistic work to be fused with his being, really resonated with me, whereas Plath’s character has to frantically toggle between modes assigned to her by society at large. These observations are not peripheral to the work of the translator, since there is of course a gendered history of translation – where the invisibility of the translator is heightened due to her status as a woman – but also the fact that I consider mothers to be the ultimate round-the-clock translators, constantly de- and reconstructing language and feeling in an effort to tend to the one doing the speaking and make sure that the child feels seen and heard.
Jennifer Hayashida is a writer, translator, educator, and artist who explores the themes of loss, memory, and dislocation through her work. Her first collection of poetry, A Machine Wrote This Song, was published in 2018. Jennifer translates between Swedish and English, with a focus on feminist and anti-racist texts. Her recent translations include works by Ida Börjel and Don Mee Choi. Currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Gothenburg, she researches experimental literary and pedagogical forms, using translation as a focal point. Jennifer was born in Oakland, California, and spent her early years in both Stockholm and San Francisco, completing her undergraduate studies at the University of California. She has been honoured with awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, and the Jerome Foundation.