‘To translate is to be in a permanent state of doubt. Everything could always be otherwise’

Photo: Mads Odgaard Smidstrup

Jennifer Russel translated the Danish author Ursula Scavenius’ book The Dolls into English.

You work with translation in many different forms. Can you tell me a bit about your work and why you think you are drawn to translation?

I think I’m drawn to translation because, to me, to translate is to be in a permanent state of doubt. Everything could always be otherwise. (There’s a quote I wish I could cite properly, something about how a translator can never be right, and an author can never be wrong.) For that reason, a translation is an unstable text, never really finished, definitive, final. I like this openness, this eternal potentiality. We’re always reaching, never quite touching. And yet, at the same time, there’s this very satisfying sense sometimes of finding a word or phrasing that just feels ‘right’. I don’t think this ‘rightness’ can be explained or justified with rational argument, it’s an intuition, something somatic. A bodily falling-into-place. So there’s this paradox: it’s a practice full of doubt, with no right answers, and yet despite or amidst the doubt, there can exist a kind of certainty, or understanding, which is entirely subjective, all gut feeling.

Also, I love the way translation takes me behind the scenes of language, in a way. It’s excavation work, lots of digging. Backstage, I discover the links between languages, the shared roots hidden underground. (I’m nodding to Walter Benjamin’s ‘pure language’ here.) This is obviously especially the case working with Danish and English, which, as Germanic languages, are close kin. The other day, while digging for words to describe depths, I learned that the noun ‘fathom’, as a measurement, originally described the width of outstretched arms, from fingertip to fingertip, and comes from the Old English fæðmian, meaning to embrace, surround, envelop (according to my beloved etymonline.com). In Danish, we also have favn, a noun that specifically describes one’s arms when wrapped around something, and the verb favne, to embrace. So to fathom, in the sense ‘to understand’, is also to favne, to embrace, to grasp. It’s logical, and maybe it’s even a little bit banal, and yet it really just blows me away whenever I discover instances of this; the deep-rooted physicality or tangibility of language when we’re speaking about complex or abstract things. When we’re talking about understanding something, implicitly we’re also talking about wrapping our arms around it. This tells me that the way we humans understand anything is with our bodies, and by means of metaphor, poetry. And that delights me.

Do you remember your first impression of The Dolls?

I had translated a short story from Ursula Scavenius’s previous book, Fjer (Feathers), called Birdland (which you can read here), so I was familiar with her writing, and the sort of universe she inhabits, or the logic (anti-logic?) at play there. Like Fjer, The Dolls is a work that eludes me. On the surface, I think I kind of get it: there are characters – daughters, sisters, estranged siblings, a creepy guardian, a dead mother – there are places – rooms in houses, gardens, the bottom of a well, a church tower, a train compartment – and there are objects – violins, red knee-high boots, a blue glass, a hair clip, fermented food in jars. In this world too, there are refugee centres, people who immigrated, World War II happened and left its marks, there are national borders, there’s a tunnel in Ermelunden Forest which collapsed in 1888. These familiar elements are handles to hold on to, or stepping stones to tread on. But in between the stones there are gaping holes. Or maybe that’s not the right image, maybe the familiar things are puzzle pieces, and when you try to assemble them, they won’t go together. In any case, there’s a deceptiveness to the stories. You read them and think you follow, but then something is off, and you realise the usual laws of logic, of causation, of gravity, even, don’t quite apply. There are strange anachronisms, we find both camera phones and alcoves and spittoons. Many things are simply stated, never explained. A character is in one place, and suddenly they’re in another. Is something yet to come, or has it already happened? You can’t make sense of it in the way you’re accustomed to making sense of things, it all just unravels. And in translating, where I’m taking apart a text in order to create it anew, the sentences, which at first seemed quite straightforward and clear, proceeded to disintegrate entirely, on a very fundamental, grammatical level. It’s a dizzying, destabilising feeling. When offered the chance by Lolli Editions to translate the book, I remember thinking ‘I’ll regret this’, and then obviously immediately saying yes. Not regret as in regret-regret, but knowing what a challenge Birdland had been, how long it had taken me, how each time I returned to the text I understood it differently, I was bound to find myself once again frantically trying to cobble together words in sentences I couldn’t figure out how had ever gone together in the first place. But, crucially, I think this is an excellent position from which to translate. To be dumbfounded, bewildered by a text. Also, it forces me to try and approach the text in other ways, less analytical, more intuitive ways, maybe more basic, through its grammar, syntax, or through its rhythm, its repetitions. I don’t know, this is also speculation, me trying to rationalise the process in retrospect.

A translator is, to some degree, a problem-solver. Something that makes perfect sense in Danish might make less sense in English. Do you recall any specific problems that needed solving in your translation of The Dolls?

In translating The Dolls, prepositions proved really fickle and difficult, and because I found the process so disorienting, they were also really important to try and get right. (And I don’t know that I did!) Is the character slumped over the table, or slumped across it? Sitting in the windowsill or on it? Water trickles onwards, across the plants? Or trickles out? Over them? Flies come buzzing up, from the cellar, through the pipe. I think the prepositions were a means of trying to get a grasp on these bizarre situations; to at least have a spatial understanding of them, to have a clear picture in my head of where things and people are located in the spaces, how they are positioned, and how they move.

Also relating to this spatial positioning but regarding a more distinct feature of the two languages are verbs and tenses. There’s a lot of passivity in the book, particularly the opening story, where the narrator spends a lot of time sitting still, simply listening, watching, observing. It’s happening in the present tense, right now, and it’s an ongoing activity, extending in time. In English, we would often use the present progressive tense to communicate that sense of immediacy and duration, ‘I am listening’, but in Danish, we only have the simple present tense, jeg lytter, ‘I listen’. Instead, the effect is often achieved by adding a verb: jeg sidder og lytter or jeg står og kigger, meaning, ‘I sit and listen’ or ‘I stand and look’. The Danish formulation is perfectly normal and feels fluid; it’s not clunky the way it sounds in English. But in addition to communicating this immediacy/duration, it also positions the subject in a space. We know that the listening/looking body is horizontal or vertical, reclined or upright in the room. This is always something a translator working with Danish has to grapple with, but it was a particularly big concern throughout this book, because when all this looking and listening happens in a room with a trapdoor leading to a cellar in which a sister is living and from which flies come crawling up through a pipe in the floor and there’s a moving Machine outside the window that keeps coming closer until it rams into the house, lifting it up so the floor starts to slope, it seems like an important little piece of information to give a reader who’s trying to wrap their heads around the situation: where is the observing body, what position is it in?

One last fun little challenge that Denise, my editor at Lolli, and I discussed had to do with the insects in The Dolls. The narrator describes a particular moth at length, but it’s the big kind that swarms around light bulbs outside at night, as opposed to the smaller clothes moths or pantry moths you find inside in cupboards, which also figure in the story, and therefore need to be distinguished. In Danish, we have two different words, there are møl, the pests in cabinets, and then there are the beautiful natsværmere, night-swarmers, those nocturnal butterflies. We ultimately decided on ‘noctuid’, which is a more scientific term, and one I assume some readers won’t be familiar with, at least I wasn’t. But you intuit, at least from context, that it’s an insect, and the noct-prefix tells you it’s related to night, and it sounds quite mythical and mysterious. So although I do think English is missing the word night-swarmer, and maybe another, braver translator would just have used that, thereby introducing it into the English language, I think noctuid is also a lovely word, and translation is also an opportunity to dig deep in the storage rooms of a language and dust off lesser-used or forgotten words.

Jennifer Russell is the translator of works by Amalie Smith and Ursula Scavenius. She was the recipient of the 2019 Gulf Coast Prize for her translation of Ursula Scavenius’s ‘Birdland', and in 2020 she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her co-translation of Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild's All the Birds in the Sky. Further co-translations, translated together with Sophia Hersi Smith, of works by Olga Ravn and Tove Ditlevsen respectively are forthcoming in 2023 and 2024.