Staging Translation: An Interview with Asymptote

I recently had the great pleasure and honor of being interviewed by translator Sarah Timmer Harvey about translating A Fist or a Heart, Jill!, and various other odds and ends. The full interview can be read in Asymptote, here. An excerpt:

STH: A Fist or a Heart is set in the theatre world; Elín works as a prop-maker for theatre and film, and your translation of this particular milieu is so beautifully rendered. As I was reading it, following the characters as they scrambled behind the scenes to pull together a stage production, I was reminded of how similar this is to the work of the translator. A translated novel is often the result of months, if not years, of the translator working behind the scenes to produce a flawless translation of the original text, work that is frequently underappreciated by the reader in the same way that a prop-maker or set designer’s role is regularly overlooked by the theatre audience. Can you relate to this?
LK: I’ve never thought of translation like this before, but I like the metaphor, not least because props and stage design are actually some of the most tangible aspects of a stage production—they’re literally visible to the audience in a way that stage direction is not, but if they’re working well, you often don’t really think about them. Translator visibility is a funny thing—on the one hand, you (I) don’t want to make a translation “about you”; arguably, the whole point is to be a vehicle for someone else, for their writing and work. At the same time translation is a deeply creative, active process to me, so it feels weird to regularly be asked things like: “Don’t you want to do your own writing?”, and to still be having regular conversations with people about “loss” in translation, about why it is that translators are necessary at all when so many people in the world—in my case, Icelanders—are fluent in English.
What we do as translators does often seem to fade into the scenery because people often don’t realize what an enormous part translation plays in the everyday world. I’m thankful for the fundamental visibility I’ve been given by the people (authors, publishers, other translators) I’ve worked with; just being named is a big deal. I was over the moon when I found out that A Fist or a Heart would have my name (prominently) on the cover—it’s definitely not a given.