Posts featuring Kristín Eiríksdóttir’

Staging Translation: An Interview with Larissa Kyzer

When you translate someone whose work and style really meshes with your own sensibilities, it’s this all-enveloping blanket . . .

Larissa Kyzer is a translator’s translator, which is to say that in addition to her award-winning work as an Icelandic to English literary translator, Kyzer has firmly immersed herself in the international translation community, and is dedicated to creating space within the industry to “actively invite more people, more voices in.” As co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee, in 2019, Kyzer launched the Jill! reading series, a bi-monthly event highlighting the work of women and non-binary translators and authors. Following Larissa’s recent stint as Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University, we corresponded about the origins of Jill!, translator visibility, sneaking Icelandic words into English texts, and why translating Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s outstanding novel, A Fist or a Heart, felt like a “gift.”

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, January 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Your translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s novel, A Fist or a Heart, was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize in 2019, and was included in Library Journal’s Best Books of 2019. What drew you to Kristín’s writing?

Larissa Kyzer (LK): Although I’d long been a fan of Kristín’s work, getting the opportunity to translate it feels more like kismet. I’d read her first novel, Hvítfeld (White Fur) as a student at the University of Iceland—it’s still one of my favorite Icelandic books—and I also loved her collection Doris deyr (Doris Dies) so much that early on in my translation studies, I attempted to translate her short story “Evelyn Hates Her Name” just for the fun of it. At the time, however, that was still beyond my capabilities. For one, my language skills weren’t up to snuff yet, but more than that, I also just really had no idea how to even get started translating something in earnest.

Fast forward a few years to when I was finally starting to get my professional feet under me and was asked by the Icelandic publisher Forlagið to translate a sample of A Fist or a Heart for the upcoming Frankfurter Buchmesse. The sample really caught people’s attention, and I was lucky that Gabriella Page-Fort at AmazonCrossing was willing to take the leap and allow me, still an emerging translator, to translate the whole book. Since then, I’ve translated a couple of Kristín’s poems, as well as two short stories—including, I’m proud to say, that same short story that not so long ago felt like a nearly impossible challenge! READ MORE…