The College warmly congratulates Polly Barton whose translation of Butter by Asako Yuzuki has been named Waterstones Book of the Year for 2024. Polly came to Queen’s as translator-in-residence with the Queen’s Translation Exchange in 2023 for a series of events exploring the translator’s voice. We asked her to tell us about the challenges of translation and what she enjoys about her work.
Congratulations! How does it feel to have your work recognised in this way?
It’s a surprise! This is particularly because Waterstones Book of the Year is not a title that I immediately associate with translated fiction. For exactly this reason, it’s been so great to see the range of different people with whom the book has resonated. It was quite an emotional moment for me when I came to Oxford this week and saw the Waterstones window display of the book. The display included lots of comments from booksellers across the country talking about why they like the book and what it means to them. Often as a translator, my work is so solitary: I can press send on a piece of work and it’s easy to forget that people are out there reading it and being affected by it. Having recognition and feedback from readers and booksellers is therefore very meaningful to me.
For many people who pick up Butter, it won’t occur to them that the novel was not originally written in English. The ‘translator’s invisibility’ is often talked about and is perhaps particularly poignant in moments like this. What do you do to address this phenomenon and make yourself a ‘visible translator’?
My name is on the front cover of Butter and I’m mentioned in a lot, though not all, of the articles and social media posts about it. Ten years ago, that wouldn’t have happened so I think we are seeing progress. Personally speaking, I am mostly just happy that it is doing this well, but I think it’s important for the industry that the role of translator is recognised. Raising awareness is about having conversations with people in publishing and making sure that the translator is acknowledged where it’s not already happening. The more popular translated literature becomes, and the more people are interested in the translator, then the more opportunities translators are given to emphasise how important it is for them to receive proper working conditions and the credit associated with them. The #namethetranslator campaign has had a lot of coverage in the news and shows that having the translator’s name on the front cover is part of a bigger picture relating to material conditions about copyright and royalties.
Do you work with an author when translating their work?
It varies a lot. I have just come back from two months in Japan and while I was there, I met the author of Butter for the first time as we had not been in touch when I was translating the novel. It’s not always that way. If I have pressing questions that I need to ask an author, I will be in contact with them if I can but this isn’t always possible, for example when you are translating the work of authors who are no longer alive.
Long Japanese sentences do not necessarily have a subject but one is always needed in an English translation so how do you overcome this particular challenge?
Usually, if you are a good reader of Japanese, then the intended subject will be obviously implicit in a sentence. The real issue is when a subject had been omitted in a context where it’s deliberately vague. What I often do if I’m stuck wondering about this is ask friends who are native Japanese speakers. Sometimes if I ask three different Japanese speakers about the same sentence, I will get three different answers! Then I have to go with my instinct. When translating is done well it is a really intimate form of reading, a very close way of engaging with a text. What I’ve noticed happens is the first time I read something I have so many questions about the meaning but then naturally, over the six-month process of steeping myself in the world the author has created, by the end a lot of answers become clear on an intuitive level. When I have absorbed myself in the author’s style so thoroughly, it becomes easier to see what they are intending to say.
Are there any other Japanese language-specific translation challenges?
The Japanese language is composed of three different scripts and sometimes the Roman alphabet is included on top of that. This variation can be used to create something that is very visually rich, interesting, and complex. There are times when I’ll work with texts in Japanese which employ this visual variation to such creative effect that rendering this in the letters of the Roman alphabet alone can feel quite flat. Japanese also has the second highest number of onomatopoeic words of any language (after Korean). If a native Japanese person is describing what it feels like to eat a certain food, there’s about a 99% chance that they will use an onomatopoeic word and, commonly, they will string several of them together at once. The result of this is a visceral and immediately understandable description that’s very evocative. Translating those words into English and making it still feel as full of character is definitely a creative challenge.
When did your love of languages begin?
I liked languages at school but my mum was a linguist and I resisted it to start with. I didn’t do any languages at A Level and at University I studied Philosophy. It began when I went and taught English on a remote Japanese island straight after graduating. I spoke no Japanese when I arrived. If I had realised before going how extreme that was going to be, I may not have gone! It was a sink or swim situation so I spent a lot of time in the staffroom studying Japanese in between English lessons and fell in love with it.
What was the hardest part about learning Japanese?
The thing with Japanese is because one of its three scripts is made up of around 2,000 characters, the reading is very difficult. There is so much learning to do in order to remember the characters because there are just so many of them. I didn’t set out to become a translator. I had this goal which was to be able to read a book in Japanese. It took so long to reach that point and then suddenly I was there and I thought, ok, now the goal is to translate one!
What do you enjoy most about your work?
There’s honestly not that much that I don’t enjoy about it! I love all the different aspects of it and the whole process of translation brings me a lot of joy. I think the thing I love the most is the fact that my love of reading is so central to what I do. I get to seek out books that I really like and then spend six months deeply engaging with them and becoming part of their journey across the world. It’s exciting and an honour for me to get to do it.
Can you tell me about the regular ‘Translation Exchanges’ you run at Queen’s with the Queen’s Translation Exchange?
Yes – these are translation surgery masterclasses open to anyone at the University who has an interest in languages. Everyone who comes brings along a particular problem or issue that they are struggling with. This can be something very specific, for example one word that they are not sure how to translate, or it can be a more general challenge, such as someone struggling to know how to deal with a particular tone when translating a piece of writing.
The thing I like to stress to attendees is that it’s a surgery where everyone is a physician. We sit around a big table and it’s multi-lingual so sometimes someone might be translating from a language that no-one else in the room speaks. What’s extraordinary is the amount everyone can contribute in spite of this. Often the solutions and suggestions that people provide are so ingenious and creative and I think you can see the fun that people are having during the process. That’s important because the best translations are produced through a spirit of playfulness and fun. If the original work is written with joy, then you need to bring that joy to translating it if it’s going to be a delight to read in the way the original is.
Can you recommend a book?
The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia. It’s a difficult book to summarise but it’s essentially a love letter to London told from the perspective of an asylum-seeker. It’s an extraordinary book told in just one paragraph. The author is originally from Eritrea but spent his childhood in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia and then came to the UK during his adolescence, so English is not his mother tongue. The writing has a poetry and urgency to it; he said he wrote it in three weeks on his iPhone and it has a feeling of coming straight from the subconscious. I think it’s the book that has left the biggest impression on me this year.
