Three recent novels explore the idea of translators as traitors to themselves.

NOVEMBER 27, 2024

Of all the clichéd puns with a stale odor of wisdom about them, few can beat “traduttore, traditore.” The similarity between the Italian words for “translator” and “traitor” seems to convey an obvious truth: Because languages are irreconcilably different from one another, anyone proposing to bridge the gap between two tongues must be a fraud. Translation is the swindler’s perfect cover, since most readers are unlikely to spot the shortcuts, the errors, or the outright omissions of a poor translator. If they could, they would be reading the original.

The French poet and critic Joachim du Bellay, who made this play on words in his 1549 Defense and Illustration of the French Language, complained in the same work that translators “seduce ignorant readers, showing them white for black.” The idea that there could be something simultaneously erotic and abusive about an act of translation was not new. In Middle English, “glosen” was the verb used for glossing, commenting on, or interpreting a text. It also meant to deceive, or to flatter someone.

As I read three novels with translators as central characters, however, I wondered if translators are not in fact traitors to themselves. The translator is most approved of when least visible. Her task is to erase any trace of her own voice, her opinions, her style. It is to be a vehicle for the story, not the story itself.

A bevy of scholars is waiting in the wings to correct me. They will note that, as early as the 1980s, the literary scholar Barbara Godard left traces of her thinking in her translations of French-Canadian literature. Her prefaces and footnotes comprised a feminist refusal to hide behind the source text.⁠ The scholars will surely also direct me to postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, who pointed out in a 1993 essay that Anglophone translators of feminist writing from all over the world flattened the works they translated into “a sort of with-it translatese” that amounted to a form of benevolent colonialism. And yet, in most situations, this fact remains: The translator must disappear.

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“Maybe I should have been a spy,” thinks the protagonist of Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery (2023), “but I ended up amounting to little.” Hard to imagine that this nameless woman could become even less visible, but that is the novel’s story. The Nursery follows a literary translator living in an anonymous American city as she prepares to have a baby, free falls into a postpartum depression and is haunted by thoughts of harm and the memory of her own childhood alienation. Her well-meaning husband John is mostly useless, but he does know when to hide the knives. Her one sustaining relationship is with Peter, the crotchety upstairs neighbor whose frequent complaints about the baby’s noise gradually turn into daytime visits. Peter is mourning his wife of more than 40 years, so he understands what it means to lose a version of yourself.

The translator is most approved of when least visible. Her task is to erase any trace of her own voice, her opinions, her style. It is to be a vehicle for the story, not the story itself.

“Has there ever been a description in literature of what it entails to change an infant’s diaper?” Trapped in the endless, enervating cycle of caring for her daughter, whom she calls Button, the narrator loses track of the time of day, her own past, the meanings of words. She strains to feed and soothe the baby, who “makes disappointed sounds, large and unkind.” Editors write with offers of assignments, but the woman who once sat at her desk at home, happily translating Swedish novels about cancer, overdoses and dying family members, is long gone. Instead, she googles her intrusive thoughts — “can you die from sleep deprivation,” “how common is wanting to kill your baby” — and recalls the word for “milk” in 13 languages.

Molnar captures the isolation, despair and mind-breaking tedium of early motherhood with scrupulous precision. She is admirably unconcerned with making her narrator likeable. There are no saccharine bursts of motherly love to soften her portrayal — Button mostly remains a burden. Instead, caring for the baby returns the narrator to the time of her own helplessness. As a teenager in Sweden, she was about to make out with a boy when she got a phone call informing her of her mother’s death. At school the following day, the boy mocked her for leaving him unsatisfied, and called her “miffo.” The slur became her nickname, and she didn’t speak for a month. “I think about how the Swedish word miffo (‘mı.fō) has been used to suggest a disability, someone always out of place,” she reflects, “deriving from missfoster, with miss being ‘missed’ or ‘failed’ and foster being ‘fetus’ — essentially, a monstrosity.”

Molnar shows how a fresh psychological wound can pull open the scar of an older trauma. The narrator begins to see Miffo as her inner monster, ready to shake a baby or worse. Lacking a mother to guide her, she struggles to fill her new maternal role. “Does a mother have language?” she muses at one point before giving birth, “Can she grow her own mother tongue?” The rest of the world seems oblivious to the intensity of her mourning for the woman she once was. After a failed attempt at sex, she tries to explain to her husband how detached she feels from her body, like an empty box. He makes a joke about throwing a sausage down a hallway, and assures her that her body will bounce back. “I can’t stand that everything John says is a quote,” the narrator thinks, “a handful of scripted words that are easy to say for the sake of saying something.”

The woman who once sat at her desk at home, happily translating Swedish novels about cancer, overdoses and dying family members, is long gone. Instead, she googles her intrusive thoughts — “can you die from sleep deprivation,” “how common is wanting to kill your baby” — and recalls the word for “milk” in 13 languages.

Depression makes the narrator feel invisible, but as a translator, she relished being in the background. “I don’t mind standing in someone’s shadow,” she says, noting that she likes being able to give something to readers without the pressure of making it herself. “And if a mother’s work is mostly work that is unseen, then translating is perhaps more mother-like than I have given it credit for in the past.” Another quality that translation and motherhood share is the inevitability of failure. The narrator obsesses over the things she is doing wrong as a parent, but as a translator, she relishes the impossibility of rendering a word from one language perfectly into another. In her work, she knows how to make choices, to improvise. “I have also caught myself slicing out a sentence or two to make the translation, if not the original work, ‘better,’” she confesses. “Adaptation is my partner. Negotiations are necessary.”

The Nursery’s characters feel only partially drawn, as does the narrator. This seems less stylistic flaw than a deliberate representation of the fog around her. The story, too, is hard to follow at times, echoing the out-of-time haze of parental exhaustion. We sense the narrator’s rage (and perhaps Molnar’s) at the costs of motherhood, and the way it erases the individual, her dreams, her labor. In a sharp passage on domestic work, she lists all the tasks she does that the world does not care about: cleaning and folding endless loads of laundry, nursing, changing blown out diapers, wiping butts and chins and diaper pails and couches. This is not, historically, the subject of great art or serious thought: “The very thing that brought us into this world and its conditions are spat upon.”

The narrator of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies (2021) is also nameless, immigrant, and grieving a parent. Unmoored in New York City after her father dies and her mother moves to Singapore, she arrives at The Hague on a one-year contract to work as an interpreter at the International Court of Justice, where she mainly translates between French and English. She is homeless, in a profound sense: Her family moved so much that her childhood memories are of “arriving and then leaving” rather than of a place where she belonged. Without family, without any connection to a place, the interpreter seems easy for other characters to overlook. Even Adriaan, a man she starts dating in The Hague, spends most of the book in another country, trying to woo back his estranged wife.

Unlike literary translation, which allows some space for creativity, the work of a court translator requires rigorous adherence to the original. At the same time, it has to be done on the fly, rarely allowing for preparation or revision.

Unlike literary translation, which allows some space for creativity, the work of a court translator requires rigorous adherence to the original. At the same time, it has to be done on the fly, rarely allowing for preparation or revision. The narrator prides herself on her “extreme precision.” Court interpreters have to convey not just the words, but the tone and demeanor with which they are said. “A sliver of unreliability introducing fractures into the testimony of the witness,” she reflects, “those fractures would develop into cracks, which would in turn threaten the witness’s entire persona.” The trial is a kind of theater, but the interpreters are out of sight, in a booth, tasked with invisibly continuing the show, no matter how horrific its content.

The narrator receives an assignment to serve as interpreter for the former president of a West African country, now on trial at the Court for accusations of ethnic cleansing. The defendant’s lawyer tells her that she is useful to their case: “Your reaction helps us understand what the emotional effect of the evidence and the testimony is likely to be. To some extent we are too inured.” The more time the narrator spends with the former president, the more she sees things from his perspective, reacting with sympathy when the trial proceedings shift against him. “I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable,” she thinks. Only after she translates the testimony of one of his victims does her face reveal her discomfort with the former president’s crimes. In response, he turns against her, throwing her silent complicity with her own government’s violence in her face. (Kitamura never tells us which government this is.) Like the protagonist of The Nursery, the narrator of Intimacies imagines herself invisible; the former president’s accusations suggest that the choice to be invisible is not a neutral one.

Kitamura’s propulsive, emotionless prose gives Intimacies a thriller’s suspense, even when the narrator is buying a used book or waiting in her married boyfriend’s apartment. The main character is drawn flat, and with so little backstory, that it is easy to accept her sense of herself as a mere tool in the hands of others. When she decides to continue her relationship with Adriaan at the end of the novel, it is not clear if she does so for love, or the promise of a home. She thinks about telling him how she felt while he was away, but ultimately swallows her words and lets him speak. Is this a happy ending? She remains the perfect translator, passively adapting to the will of a charismatic man: “I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.”

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Perhaps the idea that translators are slippery and treacherous is at its core a fear of anyone who understands multiple languages. The person who can smoothly move between two cultures is loyal to neither, at least so goes the unspoken prejudice. Or: A person too skilled at reading others becomes unreadable themselves. At the start of Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s novel Taiwan Travelogue (2024), translated by Lin King, a fictional academic named Hiyoshi Sagako explains that she has been asked to write the introduction for the book’s (also fictional) new translation from Japanese to Mandarin Chinese. Hiyoshi is a “wānshēng,” Japanese by blood but born in Taiwan during colonial rule. “The wānshēng are homeless, casteless ghosts,” she tells us. “However, there are perspectives to which only ghosts are privy.”

Aoyama’s growing possessiveness toward Wáng begins to take on an erotic tinge, and she tries to convince her unwilling translator to leave her fiancé and elope with her to Mainland Japan.

In her “introduction” Hiyoshi explains the whole story, including how to read it. In 1938, Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese star author in her 20s, goes on a government-funded lecture tour of Taiwan. The trip is really propaganda, meant to support’s Japan’s colonial expansion policy, and the naive Aoyama sends home a series of unremarkable essays to be published in Mainland Japanese papers. But years later, Aoyama writes a novel about her relationship on this trip with Wáng Chiēn-hò, a Taiwanese schoolteacher with a knack for languages who was hired as her interpreter. Hiyoshi’s introduction is to this novel which, she tells us, is probably half lies. One thing is clear, however: Aoyama Chizuko is “one of the colonizers within the story.”

The core of Taiwan Travelogue, which won this year’s National Book Award for Translated Literature, is a culinary journey through Taiwan, taken by the ravenous Aoyama and facilitated by the ever-patient Wáng. “I had a monster’s appetite. But Chi-chan had barely batted an eye,” writes Aoyama, using her nickname for her interpreter. Aoyama believes she is getting to know the island by eating each dish, in every possible variation. She eats dorayaki pancakes in a train, compares the relative virtues of short and long-grained rice with braised pork, and wolfs down a banquet’s worth of Taiwanese-style curries.

She also believes she is getting to know Chi-chan. Delighted at the other woman’s ability to arrange for her to have any meal she desires, Aoyama ignores the many signs of her interpreter’s resistance to her attempts at friendship. “The feigned anger on her cherubic face was wholly ineffective as a scare tactic,” she writes. Aoyama forces Wáng to eat nearly as much as she does, sometimes physically shoving food in her mouth. She complains that the other woman’s smiles are not real, her face “like a Noh mask.” Aoyama’s growing possessiveness toward Wáng begins to take on an erotic tinge, and she tries to convince her unwilling translator to leave her fiancé and elope with her to Mainland Japan.

“At times I even felt as though she could read minds, effortlessly detecting the most minute changes in other people’s moods and attitudes and quickly offering an appropriate response in kind,” reflects Aoyama. “Was this all thanks to her aspiration to become a professional translator?” She enjoys Wáng’s company as long as she is subservient, but calls her a honeypot and a demon when her proposal is refused. As the story evolves, it becomes clear that Wáng resents Aoyama for trying to impose a friendship on her that can never be one of equals: As Aoyama’s employee, Wáng is not free to share her true thoughts and feelings. When Aoyama carelessly describes colonial Taiwan as a “raw jade” polished by the Japanese Empire, Wáng can only hint at her displeasure.

Both of Taiwan Travelogue’s protagonists are unreliable translators: Wáng conceals her true self, and Aoyama makes up articles about Taiwan for a Japanese readership as ignorant as she is. In a postscript to the novel, supposedly written by Wáng, we learn that she translated Aoyama’s book into Mandarin Chinese years after its original publication. Wáng recalls Aoyama’s impossible, nearly abusive demands for endless meals, but also the offer of marriage that came afterward. “In that moment,” she reflects, “I felt as though if I had been willing to blindly follow this person, to marry her, perhaps I really would have found happiness.” Unlike the narrator of Kitamura’s Intimacies, Wáng finds a way to exert her will: She turns down Aoyama’s invitation but does eventually chronicle her own version of their complex love.

Against the old truism that translators have unfair leverage over others, these three novels reveal the powerlessness of the translator. The narrator of The Nursery, who has spent years translating depressing Swedish novels, imagined that she could keep a distance between herself and the dark aspects of life. Early motherhood reveals to her how vulnerable she is to that darkness. Kitamura’s narrator likes to see herself as an impartial member of court, simply carrying out a service — but the former president destroys her carefully constructed sense of self. And though Wáng may believe herself to be maintaining her independence in the face of Aoyama’s demands, she ultimately realizes that while she can rebel against her boss, she cannot fully separate from her. In the end, the translator arrives at a surprising betrayal — her own exposure.