Calleja’s other books have all dealt with translation in different ways. In her novel in verse, Vehicle (Prototype, 2020), a group of researchers work on an event called the Isletese Disaster in a dystopian but not entirely unimaginable future where xenophobic ideas about language and identity have taken hold. As the novel progresses, their research disappears piece by piece, and is eventually trapped inside a language that everyone has lost the knowledge to speak. The novel explores the political uses of translation and a xenophobic culture’s suspicion of translators—of people prepared and able to communicate with those who have been othered. Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode (Rough Trade Books, 2024), a partner memoir to Fair, looks at the idea of the goblin in the cultural sphere and reads like an explosion of networks in a goblin-riddled nether world—like the Upside Down but everything is laced with goblin green. Calleja carries the image of the goblin over to Fair with a discussion of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. She argues that it would not be incorrect to translate a version where Gregor Samsa awakes as a goblin rather than a giant insect. It would definitely lead to a very interesting translation of Kafka’s famous novel (I would very much like to read this version, please).
Besides her own writing, which also includes Dust Sucker (Makina Books, 2023), a stunningly beautiful book-length poem, and her wonderful short story collection I’m Afraid that’s All We’ve Got Time For (Prototype, 2020), Calleja has translated over twenty novels from German. Among other accolades, she has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for her translation of Marion Pochmann’s The Pine Islands (Serpent’s Tail, 2017) and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award for her translation of Michelle Steinbeck’s My Father Was a Man on Land and a Whale in the Water (Darf Publishers, 2018). Inspired by her Maltese heritage, Calleja also runs Praspar Press with Kat Storace, which publishes Maltese literature in English. As a guide to the world of literary translation, I suggest, you could ask for no one better.
And so to our interview. Taking my inspiration from Fair, I invite you to join Jen and I for our chat about her new book, translator rights, activism, AI, the power of collaboration, and the inevitable distraction of words.
It is a sunny Friday afternoon in Edinburgh, and we are meeting between Jen’s two Book Festival events. We have taken our seats in a bright Scandinavian-themed café just by the Meadows, a stone’s throw from the Royal Mile, which is jam-packed with performers and tourists all here for the Fringe Festival. Jen sits across from me in the middle of the warm café, and there is a dictaphone on the table between us. We have tested it to make sure it works, and we have our coffees and Swedish pastries in front of us. Come and join us—there are a couple of free chairs, and we can recommend the cardamom buns. I’ll just press record . . .
—Sarah Gear, Assistant Interview Editor
I really enjoyed reading Fair—it is such an innovative description of life as a translator. The book also gave the impression that the decision to learn a language and become a translator has shaped every aspect of your life. Is this the case? What does being a translator mean to you?
I think it makes me want to be a clear communicator and deep listener, very curious about people and forms of creativity and collaboration. But it also makes me think about assumptions, biases, the things we take for granted, and to question everything, every interaction and connection. Or maybe I always did that, and learning another language and translating were the outlet for these compulsions.
At the core of my novel Vehicle are the two main options as I saw them when I was at a crossroads in my youth deciding what to do as someone interested in languages: becoming a spy and covertly listening or becoming a translator and listening/communicating in collaboration with the person speaking. Literary translation, translating journalism, etc. is holding hope for dialogue and understanding that is face to face.
I love that idea, and I understand what you mean about the advice to become a spy—when I finished my language degree, the careers advisor suggested that I join MI6.
Yeah, the same. I had that MI6 moment. It’s kind of what Vehicle is based on. I was doing my undergrad in literature, and I was on an online dictionary, and I started getting ads pop up saying, “Have you got what it takes?” I was really intrigued by one of these ads, clicked on it, and it was a questionnaire. At the end it was an advert for MI6. I filled out a little form, and I got invited to this very covert meeting, which was a recruitment drive for MI6. The whole experience really galvanised me to think, “I don’t want anything to do with this.” This isn’t me. Even at age 21 it made me feel really uncomfortable. They were also only really recruiting people from Oxford. They were bussing in a lot of people from Oxbridge, and I felt like an anomaly. The whole thing was very strange.
Absolutely. I never made it quite as far as that, but suspect I would have been a terrible spy—but, like you, this was not something I was even willing to consider. Can I ask, at the event just now, you made a comment about learning languages being a political, radical act. Could you expand on this?
I was thinking about access to languages, about who gets encouraged to learn languages. I don’t think people at private schools are discouraged from pursuing the arts or pursuing the humanities or writing or languages, whereas I think more and more within state schools, there’s a push towards science and technology.
I think we’re put off learning languages right from the beginning, which doesn’t match reality. You have people all around the world who are multilingual. You have children who can pick up languages incredibly easily, and even people in adulthood—there’s always been that myth that after a certain time you can’t really learn more languages. I think this discouragement of language learning in the UK comes from a place of national exceptionalism and xenophobia. There isn’t a provision for children who are multilingual in schools. You have a very monolingual education, and there is a real lack of support for learning languages. It’s not by accident that language learning is being forcibly removed within the UK.
I think you’re right. In Scotland, at least, languages are no longer compulsory after the age of 14, and so many students just give up, believing that it’s “too hard” or won’t lead to a job. Do you see translation and writing as a vehicle for activism then? What does it mean to you politically?
I ask myself that question all the time, really, because some days I think that writing an experimental novel is activism, and translating literature is a really profoundly political statement. And then other days I think, well, it’s just stories. Do stories change anything? But I like that idea that we can translate books or write books that might inspire somebody to do something, or change something in their own lives, if not the world. I think we put a lot of pressure on literature and translation that other art forms don’t get. But then again, we’re always hoping that theatre or visual art will change the world.
I don’t have the answer. For me, what comes to mind when we talk about activism is really this question of pay. I think my activism at the moment is rooted in trying to revolutionise payment models. I’m hoping in the near future to be able to actively work towards actually changing things in that respect. So my activism is more to do with workers’ rights than whether art can change the world.
And the arts, as we all know, are being hugely impacted by AI at the moment. How does AI affect your work as a translator? Should we be pushing back against it?
If you use AI there’s a loss of process—art process, theatre making, translation. I think we have to be the generation of talking about process. So just ignore the idea of product, and just obsess over how are we getting there, what do we gain from process, personally, creatively, what do you learn when you go through process? Process is where you build knowledge. Just going from A to B without process, you gain no knowledge, no human experience. You gain zero opportunity because you are not having to engage with anybody else—there’s no collaboration. That’s why in Fair it was really important to me to make process visible. For myself, it is also very fun to see that I have learned to do these things. I often get asked whether I can translate quicker—and the answer is no, but I know what options there are. I know the process, but I don’t know the answer . . .
I was having an interesting conversation with someone in the signing queue just now who was doing her A-Levels in the 1980s. She feels like that idea of patience and time to learn a skill has been eroded. I think that’s so true across everything—making, music, art and then languages. In Fair I was trying to describe the night hours of just trying to read German poetry. You have to go through a stage of hermitude and isolation. You can obviously do it with other people, but at the beginning you have to spend time doing something yourself in order to gain the skill.
I can absolutely relate to that! And I can see that’s what Fair all is about—the process, the difficulties, the skill involved in translation. Having explored these things so deeply in the book, do you think the process of writing Fair has changed your practice?
I think it made me, like, fall back in love with translation. I have had people say that the book comes across very angry sometimes, and I think I did write it from a place of anger for the most part, and then maybe softened it in some respects. But I think it did make me fall back in love with translation and realise how much I know. Even this example now, you press a button, and I can talk about it very easily. Every time that I have worked on a translation since I wrote Fair, I’ve felt really happy that it’s a thing I do, and that I feel I am quite good at.
But also, the big question in Fair is if I will continue to translate. At the moment I am just in a real bind with myself—what’s the answer, and when will I know what the answer is? Do I just keep going until it isn’t tenable, or do I hope that it will work out? I am in a very unique position in that all my work is freelance. There are translators that have jobs, and I think, as I explained in the book, I’m incapable of doing another job. I have to just write things. I’m kind of made for instability. But I don’t believe that means I shouldn’t be paid fairly.
And that passion for what you do shines through in your work. I’m interested—when you talk about not carrying on, is this because of the pay? Is it an economic issue primarily?
I think mainly economic. Also, every time I do a book it’s a lot of energy. Sometimes I think, do I really want to work on a translation for another two years? It’s very tiring. But also, what else will I do? I mean, I really enjoy it, and you can’t make people pay you more. People always find reasons that it's impossible to pay you more, and I’m just really tired of that conversation.
I have done some research about pay. The English Artist Union’s payment model is inspiring. It’s utopian about how much artists should get paid. They should get paid a day rate based on experience, how long they’ve been doing it. They should get a raise. And it’s just this amazing tool for an artist to actually show somebody, an organisation, this is how much they should be getting paid. Whereas the guidelines published by the Society of Authors, the Translators Association, are very stagnant, and are based on what publishers are willing to pay—so it’s just a feedback loop, it’s just stuck. It benefits publishers way more than anyone else.
I work with small publishers, and I work with massive publishers, and I’m not expecting small publishers to pay me loads of money. I don’t want loads of money. I’m not driven by profits—otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this job. But if I work for a publisher that I know makes huge profits, and they’re not willing to pay any more than bare minimum, it’s bad manners. It’s saying they’re not interested in investing in you and in translators.
Fair definitely reveals this precarious, often chaotic side of the translation industry, and it’s highly instructive, too (your “mental questionnaire” over whether to accept a translation job is inspired). Did you intend it, in part, as a guide, or even exposé, for emerging translators?
I’m speaking directly from my own experiences, and I tried not to include anything that I felt was really that much of an anomaly, based on so many conversations I’ve had with other translators over the years. But I wanted to be honest and transparent so that others starting out or who’ve been doing this for a while can refer to it for encouragement or validation. I couldn’t make the book for everyone, but I was imagining my fellow translators alongside those who aren’t translators. The ideal reader might be publishers and funders and reviewers.
Why are they your ideal readers?
Hopefully, if they read the book, it might make publishers and reviewers and funders think about the power they have to materially change translators’ lives. And maybe that idea that we’re human beings. It can be really hard to be self-motivated, to be working 24/7 without any kind of safety net. That’s why I say we translators should be being paid danger money, because we have to give up a lot. I know everybody has to give up a lot, but I think there is a difference between freelancers and people that are on salaries with other kinds of benefits. It can feel very risky, and it feels more and more risky, and eventually I will stop. Other people will stop. Then there won’t be any experienced, passionate literary translators. Literary translators won’t exist unless they come from monied backgrounds or don’t have to rely on a job. That then perpetuates this idea that literary translation is just a hobby, when actually it should be properly paid.
How should translators, especially at the start of their careers, reconcile this right and need to be paid with the fact that some publishers will ask them to work for free, or only offer them royalties (which, as we know, often amounts to the same thing)?
It’s like anything. If other people are getting paid, you should be getting paid. It’s your work, it’s your time, and obviously it’s your choice if you want to get paid and how much you are willing to fight for that payment. But we should think about everyone else. When I’m mentoring translators and they say, I’ve been offered this job for free, should I do it? You know, you have to weigh it up. It’s very hard to say you have to think of everybody—it might be really tempting. When I started out, I did do a short story for free, or a poem for free, but that’s very different to translating a book for free. You have to think about the next person that comes along after you that wants to be paid.
There are publishers out there that only work with emerging translators, and they say it’s because they want to help translators, but it’s because they can offer them really bad rates, and then they’ll just move on to the next one. So unfortunately, there are predatory practices that go against the idea of fair payment. At the same time, it’s obviously a personal choice—I would never shame anybody for making those decisions, because you have to make the choice that feels right for you.
You’re right—I can understand why it would be tempting to translate a book in exchange for recognition at the start of your career.
I would like to ask you a bit about translation method and theory—which is something you explore so beautifully in Fair. I especially loved the story about your supervisor, Translation Studies scholar Theo Hermans, who used Jennifer Aniston to illustrate his philosophy of translation. He advised you that it’s okay to be visible in the text as a translator by arguing that sometimes people watch films because they like to see Jennifer Aniston in them, even though she is a different person each time, and that you should think of a translator’s role in the text in the same way. It made me wonder, how do you think you appear in your texts directly?
Fair is a partner book to my other memoir, which came out last year, Goblinhood. I was trying to have references across both books. In Goblinhood, I bring up translation, and then in Fair I bring up goblins and puppetry. I think the connection is really my interests, the way that I see the world.
I think the biggest thing with memoir, and the hardest thing I find, is being vulnerable. The first draft is all, “These are all the amazing things I’ve done,” but then the next thing is saying, “Okay, these are the mistakes I’ve made.” That can be quite difficult—to admit where you’ve been wrong, or admit your biases, which take a long time for you to judge. So that’s the funny thing about being really open and transparent and taking a risk. And there’s that risk that some people read it and think you’re really annoying, and then other people will be like, “Oh, this person’s being very honest.” Vulnerability can link with people. People like seeing someone being vulnerable, I think.
Did you set out to be that open?
Yeah. I think when I started writing columns the thing people connected with the most was me being open and sharing emotion. That seemed like a catalyst, because you can be an expert in something, you can tell everybody facts, but the thing people mainly connect with is another person speaking—that’s what I like reading. And the subject is beyond the point. Even if a reader just likes the voice in Fair, and maybe doesn’t take anything away about literary translation, I think that’s also okay. I did think a lot about not wanting the voice to be too irritating. The Times of Malta did a review which was very nice, but said I was sassy. I thought that was very funny—I was trying not to be sassy. That’s the risk of having a character, because it’s not me, but also it is me.
I really appreciated your honesty in Fair, and could definitely relate to some of your experiences reading and trying to understand a foreign language. For that reason, I found your book really reassuring!
I always think that I’m probably the only person that’s experienced something, and then it always turns out I’m not. It can be really scary, thinking, “Well, I’m a translator, but I make mistakes all the time.” You know, my grammar is terrible, and I love telling people that, because it makes them quite reassured. You don’t have to be this perfect linguist, this perfect writer, you can just be like, I'm just going to do it anyway.” And I keep doing it.
You’re so right, because, of course, a perfect, “correct” translation does not exist . . . Thinking of translation theory, when I was reading Vehicle, it put me in mind of various theoretical approaches to translation—translation microhistories, translation as activism, the visibility of the translator in a text for a start. Did you have translation theory in mind when you were writing the novel?
Vehicle is an experimental memoir, that is, it is looking at different experiences in my life. It’s about that idea of collaboration, and the importance of collaboration between author and translator, but also within a creative structure like a band. In Vehicle, I was more looking at the idea of creativity and translation as soft power—the idea of the band going on tour, and how they’re told to change because they’re going to be cultural ambassadors abroad. I was trying to jam in quite a lot of knowledge about literary translation as collaborative practice. I was looking at the researchers, the academics, and really talking about how subjective research and translation is—that’s a huge concept in Vehicle. They’re all looking at the same thing, but from completely different angles, different traditions, different knowledges. For example, one of the researchers can’t speak Isletese, the language of the people they are studying, and how different it is to what other researchers do.
So Vehicle is about trying to find that parallel between academic research and translation, and then also fandom. That’s what links everything: the band and their fan base, how the researchers are like fans, because they’re all obsessed with this historical event, and all claim expertise over it. And then they have to do this DIY storytelling with each other about it [because their research starts to disappear]. And then it’s about the idea of translator as fan—in a sense, a translator is always like a fan. You’re always in this position of admiration, but you are also emulating the author.
I hadn’t thought of translation—or academia in fact—as a form of fandom before, but—this could be a new avenue to explore in Translation Studies! I’m really interested in the idea of translation as a vehicle for soft power—can you tell me more about this?
I learned so much from working at an organisation promoting German-language literature abroad, going behind the curtain of the structures that support translation as soft power, where you have state funders working with independent juries choosing who gets translation funding. There are conversations between state funders who want to promote a very specific idea of a culture, and then readers and agents and people in the UK who have a different concept of what that culture should be. Often one individual can make or break the whole perspective of a funding body. If you have a funder who believes that the purpose of translation funding is to uphold a certain image of a culture, then it means that you get a subtle pushing towards traditional, conservative writing, usually from a homogenous group—so white, middle-class, male writers—and that’s also reflected in prize culture. You’ll see that in many countries these biases play out in prize lists, cultural funding, and in a novel’s promotion.
In all my years of translating, I’ve never been asked to translate a non-white author. So those biases are really deep. Publishers will be influenced by what novels have translation funding, and who is being promoted on the international circuit. In the UK, especially because you have publishers that don’t speak other languages, they find information via specific routes. That’s why pitching novels for translation can be quite soul destroying. As translators, we read very widely and come across authors that are nothing like the kind of German-language writer people might expect. But because these novels don’t fit the expected model, they're not supported, and they’re unlikely to be commissioned. Though that’s not across the board. I tend to translate, or be asked to translate, experimental, innovative writers, predominantly women—for example, Michelle Steinbeck, a Swiss author who is also from a working class background. So there are these anomalies, right? I found that Swiss and Austrian writers are the more innovative and have got more support, because I think they have more of a history of innovation and experimentalism, whereas German literature is still very conservative and very traditional.
So there is still plenty of work to be done in challenging publisher and funder practice. I wanted to ask, given the kinds of texts you work on, do you find that your own experimental prose influences what kinds of texts you are asked to translate?
Completely. People often comment that I write in all genres—I do poetry, essay, memoir, fiction, and that can be quite rare. I think it’s because when I was starting out, if someone asked me to write a story, or a poem for this magazine, I would say “Yes, I can!” Early on, I did everything because I never wanted to say no. And then the same thing happened with translation—“Can you translate this piece of experimental theatre? Yes, I can!” So now nothing scares me. I also love using all of those genres together. That’s why I write hybrid work. So maybe that’s my reputation: translating weird things and writing weird things. That’s what kind of gets my brain fizzing—the kind of book that’s meta, poetic, where there are many different threads. That’s what I want—I want it to be really extreme.
The weirder the better! I love that. Thinking about mixing genres, about that variety, I wonder if that plays into the importance of collaboration for you? You write about it a lot in Fair and Vehicle. Do you see your work as challenging the stereotypical idea of a translator working in a room alone?
Yes, I suppose so. I think there is a lot of sitting alone in a room, and that suits me very well, because I am an introvert. I think that is confusing, because I speak at public events, I play in bands. Also, working with authors as a translator is very intensively extroverted, having to be front facing. But it’s also having to collaborate, with a shared goal and with a structure in place. Not every translator wants to be public facing, and not every translator is interested in forming relationships with authors. Everyone is different, but the way I see translation is as a human collaboration. You know, it’s not a test. Someone’s telling me a story. I’m going to have to retell it. And I think it motivates me that it is this human-to-human thing—that chance that you might actually meet somebody for life.
That collaboration also comes from playing in bands and doing things like collaborative writing and projects. I think it’s amazing to be forced to work with someone else. If you’re doing it all on your own, you’re missing an opportunity to be challenged, or to find solutions that you’re not capable of finding by yourself. I’ve only done collaborative translation on one sample with my friend Theodora Danek, and it was just amazing, getting to see how someone else’s brain processes the text, and doing that in real time, and then compromising—much like when you’re making a song with the band, where you’ve both got a slightly different vision, and you’re going to have to work really hard to get to that point where it’s finished.
And I suppose that links back to the importance of process in translation and the arts in general. In Fair, especially, you have written about collaborating with the authors you translate, asking them about their texts when something is unclear. How does it feel to open yourself up to this exchange?
It’s very vulnerable—having to ask the author questions can be vulnerable. I’ve had authors who are confused at the concept of questions. I had one author who I mentioned in Fair who told me, “It’s all in the text,” and found it bizarre that I would have questions. They didn’t really understand how ambiguous things might be. I think it’s because the author was thinking of their text as perfect, like everyone would read it and everyone would get it the exact way that they had written it down. It was a very weird experience. It felt like they probably thought I was a terrible translator, because I had questions about the text.
But there are authors who are open to readers, open to translators, and the idea that you’re making something together. I’ve had opposite experiences where I’ve asked questions and the author’s been really excited by that, but then they’ve gone, “Oh, the other translators didn’t ask me anything!” And then they get a fear that this other translator definitely wouldn’t have understood this thing you’ve asked about. So in some way, asking questions teaches authors about what a translation process might look like.
It has been so interesting speaking with you today, Jen. For our final question, I would love to ask what advice you would give to a literary translator just starting out?
I guess Fair is all the advice I have. As I say in the book, what’s important is that idea of translator as storyteller. I’m the one telling this story to the best of my abilities based on a story I’ve heard elsewhere. I think that just really hammers home what I’m always thinking about. I imagine readers gathering around—it’s quite a romantic image. I think it is based on my childhood watching the programme The Storyteller, and going back to that idea of just sharing and telling stories and telling anecdotes and really picturing it as that.
So even though it might be a complex book with many layers, subtexts and subplots, it always comes down to me thinking about how best I can tell this story and really drawing on everything I know and all the tricks of storytelling to be able to do it. It’s about never obsessing over the book as text, the book as words. It’s really thinking about it as a story, as a whole. Never falling for the red herring of words and letters, but the stories underneath the words. It is quite a freeing concept.
