Why I Translate

By acclaimed poet and translator Andrea Jurjević

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Want to write better poetry? Start translating it.

It’s not unusual for writers around the world to work as literary translators, too. The practice is more common outside of the US, but here, too, we have great poet translators, such as Forrest Gander, Arthur Sze, John Keene, Jennifer Grotz, Don Mee Choi, Aaron Coleman, Johannes Goransson, etc.  

That said, the reason I started translating had little to do with following tradition. As I completed my MFA studies and my first book, I got a little anxious. What if there were no poems left in me? How would I sustain my writing practice without the workshop? How could I possibly continue writing publication-ready work without my mentors? More than anything, I wanted to avoid plateauing as a poet—mining the same themes in the same predictable ways. In addition to wanting to grow, I also wanted to keep the momentum of writing. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the authors I’d soon be translating would become my teachers and that the practice of translation would facilitate a continuous growth for me as an artist.

I think the reason we translate is the same reason we write—to experience something beyond ourselves. I also believe that we make art for the same reason we make love—to feel more alive, to go beyond the rational, to step inside the elsewhere.

Yes, there is an erotic nature to the process of writing—we cross the edge of the real and enter the realm of the imagination. And imagination yearns to experience the mystery of life. She is wild and therefore erogenous. That’s why, I imagine, inspiration feels a lot like lust.

We write to forget ourselves—our worries, stresses, frustrations and our desires. And even when we choose to make sense of our actual life on the page, we engage our imagination. The mind is not restricted by the physical, and the page is a safe space. We are free to write as we like.

Or not. Our imagination and our writing ability is restricted by the limits of our sensibilities and skills. This is where translation comes in. Translation is an invitation for writers to experiment, get out of their comfort zone, and get in the habit of expanding their abilities and aesthetics.

To be clear: translation is not necessarily a natural gift that multilingual people share. Professional literary translation requires discipline as well as talent. However, engaging in translation as a writing practice requires inquiry and deep immersion in someone else’s work. It also requires knowledge of the source language and culture as well as excellent skills as a poet. To translate a poem is to liberate the unity of meaning (including rhythm, tone, and the overall reading effect) from the source language, carry it in one’s mind, and then alchemize it into another language. The task involves a series of challenges and choices. Translation, therefore, offers continuous opportunities to push beyond our habitual ways of writing.

Shortly after completing my MFA studies, while visiting my family in Croatia, I read Adio kauboju, a novel by Olja Savičević. I immediately felt the desire to share it with my friends back in the States. However, I couldn’t. The novel didn’t yet exist in English. I read other books by Olja and reached out to her expressing my interest in translating her poems. While her prose had been widely published in a number of world languages, her poetry wasn’t. In fact, she didn’t have a single poetry collection in English. (Why? Publishers favor prose. Prose pays a little. Poetry doesn’t.) There was an opportunity for me. And I am incredibly grateful Olja gave this baby translator a chance.

After working on Mamasafari, a prose poetry collection of Olja’s, I found a fantastic publisher, Lavender Ink/Dialogos from New Orleans, and told Olja I wanted to continue translating poets from “back home.” Soon my inbox was busting with inquiries and manuscripts from our region. I have since translated numerous projects, ranging from poetry books, short stories, and plays. The translation practice has enriched and inspired my own writing, and the people I translated became my teachers.

The genesis of my relationship with works in foreign languages is older than my first attempts at translating literature or my arrival to the US. I grew up in Rijeka, a port city on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, or what back then was the former Yugoslavia, a multiethnic communist country in the southeastern corner of Europe. Most of the media I have consumed throughout my life has been in translation, from British music and Italian cinema to German novels and Sanskrit epics. This consumption did not make me a translator, but it did influence my view of the world and my sensibilities. America is incredibly diverse, albeit in a different way, but despite its cultural diversity, the US keeps its literary borders tight. Only 3% of all books published in the States are in translation. And that’s incredibly dangerous. What’s the risk, you might be asking? The risk is literary or cultural parochialism. Feeding of xenophobia and nationalism. Also—getting full of ourselves.

Translating exposed me to a more diverse range of literature. It taught me more varied ways to write, take risks, make use of form, broaden my creative borders and work my poetic muscles. It made me highly aware of syntax. It expanded my notions of what makes a good poem—notions that during my MFA years were largely based on American poetry. The turning between languages allowed me to see my own work more clearly and showed me how to get out of my own head and break free from the confines of my own writing tendencies. It gave me a heftier toolkit and more confidence. In addition to reading widely, the immersion in bringing poems from one language to another was the best instruction I as a writer could have. And unexpectedly, translation gave me a new habit: a practice of inquiry and reciprocity.

If we write to forget ourselves, we translate to forget our writer selves. Translation is writing with significant limitations that leads to incredible liberation. Writers who translate not only have a dedication to “their” literature and themselves, but to other literatures and other authors, too.

Love, Andrea