You know the one about the girl driving her dad to the euthanasia clinic. He was dead set on going.

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Literary translator Sinéad Crowe first encountered German author Lucy Fricke’s novel Töchter at a literature and music festival in Hamburg. Lucy was reading aloud, and Sinéad was struck by the audience’s laughter and Lucy’s gallows humour.

Sinéad bought the book immediately. Reading later, she wondered if she could find a publisher “willing to take a risk on a German novel that dared to be funny.”

Elsewhere, translator Katy Derbyshire was thinking along the same lines: how to open a fresh channel of remarkable contemporary writing from Germany… Their stories were about to merge.

Sinéad Crowe is the English-language translator of Lucy Fricke’s novel Daughters, published in September, 2020. The novel is notable for being one of the three inaugural titles from new publishing imprint V&Q Books - a branch of Berlin publishing house Voland & Quist Verlag. The other siblings, both translated by Katy Derbyshire, are Paula by Sandra Hoffman and Journey through a Tragicomic Century by Francis Nenik.

Daughters is a hoot: a travel caper through Europe en route to a euthanasia clinic. At heart it’s a story about friendship, but I always perk up when novels include writers and translators as characters. Narrator Betty is a writer who, unlike Ernest Hemingway, she’s at pains to point out, writes lying down. In Italy, she meets ageing writer Wolf, who translates for her during a police interrogation. Betty suspects him of smuggling her story into his desiccated imagination, suspects even the accuracy of his translation.

But beneath all this fun, is a real translator. So, here now, speaking for herself, not in any way fictional or suspect, is literary translator Sinéad Crowe discussing her work on Daughters and aspects of translation.

Interview with Sinéad Crowe, literary translator

Let's set the stage. In the novel Variable Cloud by Carmen Martín Gaite, Sofía and Marianna begin each of their letters with a description of place: to orient the recipient and set the scene. Let’s start here too. Where do you write? Do you have a room with a view? What tools are to hand?

These days, I translate at the dining table in the living room of my little flat in Hamburg, which looks out onto a courtyard with a few huge trees and some very noisy birds. I’m not really satisfied with my workspace right now, as I find it difficult to separate work from leisure. Plus I’d love a little more social interaction. Translators have a reputation for being reclusive, but Covid-19 has made me realise that I am actually quite a social animal! So at some stage I’d like to find a shared office space with some like-minded people. 

On the table beside me I always have my diary, a notepad, the Oxford English Dictionary (two volumes), an ancient Collins German dictionary, the Oxford American Writer’s Dictionary, and a Duden dictionary of German idioms. To be honest, though, I do most of my research online.

In the translator's note at the end of Daughters, you mention that you have read the novel countless times. How do you approach a literary translation project? What is your workflow? How useful is reading aloud?

I read Daughters through twice before I started the translation: once for fun, the second time to refresh my memory after I’d signed the contract to translate it. I usually do about three drafts: the first time I work from the source text, translating sentence by sentence. The second time, I try to step away from the source and work with just my own draft to make sure that it flows well. The third time I check through my translation, comparing it sentence-by-sentence with the source text to make sure I haven’t missed or misinterpreted anything.

I do read aloud some passages from both the source text (where I sense there is something special about the language) and from my translation (where I have a feeling that the sentences may be a little clunky, for example, and need sharpening up). After that, of course, there are a few rounds of revisions with the editor and proofreader. I really enjoy translating dialogue; that was definitely my favourite part of Daughters. I had such a clear idea in my head of the characters and how they speak to each other.

How was your working relationship with Lucy Fricke? Were there aspects within Daughters which you consulted her on?

It was a joy working with Lucy Fricke, as she was hugely supportive without being controlling. After I’d finished my first draft, I sent her a list of questions, most of them asking her to double-check I hadn’t misinterpreted her or put words in her mouth. I also worked quite closely with her Spanish and French translators, María Tellechea and Isabelle Liber, who were working on Daughters at the same time. It was fascinating to find out about where we had shared challenges and where their languages presented translation issues that didn’t occur when translating into English. You can find out more about these in the next issue of the translation journal Toledo, which should be online by the end of October 2020.

In an interview alongside Rachel McNicholl on the co-translation of Pierre Jarawan's The Storyteller, you noted: "I learned so much from [Rachel's] feedback, particularly in terms of little linguistic quirks I wasn't even aware I had." What are those quirks? How do you catch these when working as the sole translator?

Being Irish, one thing I’m always worried about is avoiding slipping into Hiberno-English, especially when translating dialogue. Daughters was supposed to be translated into British English (whatever that might be!) so I didn’t want the characters to sound too Irish. I was lucky enough to work with an excellent editor, Katy Derbyshire, who spotted a few slips into Irish slang.

Are the best translations invisible?

No, I don’t think so. I don’t believe in removing all traces of “foreignness” from a text, nor do I see any problem in readers being aware that they are reading a translation – I mean, they are, so why try to hide that? I don’t believe that translators should be invisible, either, which is one reason why it was so great to work with V&Q Books, as it gives greater prominence to its translators than many other publishers. 

Do you ever feel ownership of particular phrases or passages?

I think “ownership” would be overstating the case. It’s more that now and then I feel a quiet sense of satisfaction at finding a neat or creative solution to a translation challenge. I also get a little buzz at moments when the English language has resonances that don’t exist in the German. To give one example, one of the chapters in the source text of Daughters is called “Abschied von den Vätern” (literally “Goodbye to the Fathers”). Now, earlier in the novel there are several jokes about Ernest Hemingway, so I decided to translate the chapter title as “A Farewell to Fathers”, an allusion to A Farewell to Arms that doesn’t exist in the original, as Hemingway’s novel was published in Germany as In einem andern Land (In Another Land).

In literature translators are sometimes portrayed as meddling with the text. Massimo Carlotto reveals in The Fugitive that he inserted social messages into his translations of Italian photonovellas. Valentina Gavril kills her translator for altering characters in Rose Tremain’s The Way I Found Her. In Lucy Fricke's Daughters, narrator Betty wonders whether Wolf is “secretly embellishing the dialogue” as he translates. How do you feel about these kinds of portrayals?

I wonder if Lucy was expressing some deep-seated anxiety about being translated?! Actually, if anything, I imagine most translators would be tempted to strip back rather than embellish. Translators tend to be extremely close readers, so we notice unnecessary repetitions or redundancies that even an editor might miss. 

Finally, do you still read for pleasure or has reading novels become a busman's holiday?

I absolutely still do read for pleasure, though probably not as much as I ought to – but then after a day of translating in silence, it can be nice to switch on Netflix to engage with a different kind of storytelling - and to hear human voices again. I feel pressure to keep up with what is being published both in Germany and in the English-speaking countries, which is a pretty much impossible task. But once I get stuck into a good book, I enjoy reading as much as I ever did, if not more so, because my appreciation for the writer’s craft keeps growing.

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Many thanks to Sinéad for her time. Sinéad Crowe comes from Dublin and has a PhD in German theatre. She teaches at the University of Hamburg’s Institute of English and American Studies and translates remarkable writing from Germany.

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Wondering what to read next?

• Lucy Fricke’s Daughters was published in English in 2020 as one of the three inaugural titles from new publishing imprint V&Q Books. The original novel, Töchter, won the Bavarian Book Prize 2018. Check out a review here. “The interplay between beauty and decay forms much of the sadness in the book, but also much of the devil-may-care humour.”

• Does a publisher read for fun? Publisher and literary translator Katy Derbyshire has the answer.