An interview with Abigail Wender (Poetry ’08)
2008 poetry alum Abigail Wender was recently interviewed for New Books in German. Read an excerpt of the interview, in which Wender discusses her translation work, below:
Angela Hirons: You mentioned in an email that you see the translation process as a ‘collaborative’ one. Can you talk a little bit more about this? Is that a collaboration between yourself and the author, or more widely between yourself, the author, the editor and copy editor?
Abigail Wender: I think the collaboration is first with the text itself. What is its context and history? and more specifically what are the patterns and threads in the text? The Bureau of Past Management has so many intentional repetitions of words and syntactical chunks (as usual, forever and ever, in the past, essentially, and so on) – initially I just tried to notice these and understand what the patterns were.
I was lucky enough to work with Iris Hanika on the translation’s early drafts, which was a collaboration of another kind. The difficult, satiric chapter titled ‘Past Management’ would have been extremely hard for me to translate without our conversations about what the book meant to her and why she’d written it. The emotional engine of that chapter is fury; I’m not sure I understood that. Iris and I had so many conversations about the differences between German and English words, the nuances and references; it was helpful, of course, and also deeply fascinating to discuss the work with her.
The final manuscript was also a collaboration with the editor (Katy Derbyshire) and copy editor (yourself). I’ve worked as an editor and a copy editor and am grateful for the chance to have those discussions and corrections. It’s very easy to get something in mind and not see where you’ve made a mistake as a translator. Both you and Katy helped make the translation a better book.
Read this interview in its entirety here: https://www.new-books-in-german.com/collaborative-work-translating-and-copyediting-the-bureau-of-past-management/
