Plumbers in the palace
A charming and fascinating chat between author David Malouf and his most-suitably named translator, Robert Pépin.
As a writer, you are often rather intimidated by the translator because in some ways the translator knows the text better than you do. You might have done six or seven drafts of it, but in a way you don’t have to worry about it in the way that the translator does. Everything on the page becomes for him a question and a problem as it isn’t for you. And because he’s made it a question and has had to answer that question, he often knows the text much better than you will ever know it, and especially he knows all those little secrets about the text that you hope that no one is ever going to discover.
You’re writing really for people to read at a certain kind of reading pace, and even if they’re reading the book more than once there are some kinds of questions that the rhythm and tone of the book will prevent people from asking, but not the translator. So you feel that he’s got behind you and knows all the ways you are fudging things, all the ways you are disguising the things you can’t do because you have to do it in another way.
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