'I took a big risk with this translation': 10 Questions for Saskia Vogel by Sherilyn Hellberg

To celebrate that Saskia Vogel’s translation of Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm is shortlisted for the 2023 Bernard Shaw Prize, translator Sherilyn Hellberg quizzed Saskia about all things Strega and translation. We hear about why translating the novel felt both intimate and risky. The Bernard Shaw Prize is a biennial award for translations into English of full length Swedish language works of literary merit and general interest. The prize is named after the author and dramatist, whose Nobel Prize went towards a foundation for ‘the promotion and diffusion of knowledge and appreciation of the literature and art of Sweden in the British Islands’.

How did this translation come about?

Like the best things, it was a series of chance encounters. The editor of Swedish Granta assigned Johanne to translate a piece I had written for the magazine, and a couple years later, she handed me Johanne’s first novel Natten som föregick denna dag (2017) and said I’d love it. She wasn’t wrong. Like Strega, it worked a special sort of magic on me. And I’d been paying attention to Johanne and Olga Ravn’s ‘School for Witches’, which takes young women’s and children’s voices as a starting point for a writing workshop. Johanne kindly shared the reading list with me, which I’m still working my way through. I ended up translating an extract of her first novel for the Two Lines journal, and waited eagerly for the next one. I translated a sample of Strega and Denise at Lolli emailed me to discuss the project. (I’m grateful to the translators who recommended me to her for this project.)

You’re also a writer – how do your writing and translation practices interact?

They’re very intertwined. Translating novels took away a lot of fear I had around writing. Writing a novel felt impossible – the way a novel expands in the mind, the worlds that unfold. A novel seemed boundless to me, but translation drove home the fact that it’s really just a fixed number of words. And then there is the silence between lines, line breaks, the space between scenes and chapters. Translation helped me understand the work that these silences do.

I notice that the more I translate, the more confident I feel as a stylist. And how any time spent working word to word is among the greatest pleasures I know.

Also I’m quite a targeted reader when I’m working on a writing project – i.e. I read to a theme or through an era – but part of my practice as a translator is to frequently reexamine my reading practices. There’s a nice push and pull between the two impulses.

Johanne Lykke Holm translated your novel, Permission, into Swedish. How do you think this influenced your experience of translating Strega? Do you think closeness – to either a writer’s work or to the writer as a person – affects the process of translation?

Strega feels like one of the most intimate translations I’ve done. I felt so close to the text and grateful to Johanne for her trust. And for engaging with questions such as, if your book was a fabric what fabric would it be? (Polyester…)

For me, it has been important to at the very least say hello in person to the writers I translate. There’s something about having a personal impression of the writer that grounds me when I’m translating. I think it has something to do with how my relationship to the text shifts and changes as I translate. It’s a pretty roily process, one that moves between cool analysis and blind love.

What books – or other works of writing or art or otherwise – influenced the way you approached the translation?

Books and writers that came via Johanne, such as Hiromi Ito and Frank Wedekind. But also Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young Girl. I think I’d be referencing Alex Quicho’s work on Girl Theory if I were translating the book now. I thought a lot about the films that the book was compared to, especially Suspiria, which is an old favorite of mine. Anna Biller’s The Love Witch. And what felt like an upsurge in popular interest around astrology. When I work on a book, it feels like the world conspires to feed me with texts and impressions that relate somehow.

Your translation felt uncannily close to the original Swedish, and I appreciated how you sometimes used more Swedish constructions or idioms. These choices always felt deliberate, like a way of conveying the strangeness of the original. Were there moments you were tempted to ‘domesticate’ or ‘normalize’ the translation? How do you determine the right level of linguistic strangeness in your translations?

I took a big risk with this translation. It takes some features I’ve frequently noted in contemporary Swedish style (short sentences, fragments instead of full sentences, body acting, for instance) to an uncanny place. Based on previous experience, I could imagine how editors in Anglosphere might respond to this style (their red pens smoothing it into something more aligned with certain norms), and so I did my best to communicate my vision for the book in translation. I feel really lucky that the editors I was working with were available for dialogue and were receptive. I suggested doing almost a literal translation, and then for them to help me keep an eye on the line between the book’s hypnotic, quivering strangeness and something that breaks the spell. In practice, it was very precise work — mindful of when, if at all, to turn two short sentences into a compound one, for instance. In a different book, a choice like this wouldn’t necessarily feel like a make-or-break decision, but here it did.

In an interview with her German publisher, AKI-verlag, Johanne Lykke Holm describes her project as a kind of “writing from inside the prison” that girls and women are trapped within. How did you think about translating this sense of entrapment?

This theme came up in her first novel, which took place in a house by a forest. I remember the house being a metaphor for the patriarchal structure in which they live. So this seed was planted by the time I started work on Strega. Your question makes me think of how I translated the body. In the book, the young women’s hands are like a character of their own, which meant a careful considering of when to use ‘the’ or a personal pronoun, thereby modulating how connected or disconnected the reader imagines the characters being to their body as a whole or in part.

Strega deals with the many forms of violence – physical, linguistic, social – that girls are subject to. In your opinion, can the practice of translation be feminist too, and what does a feminist approach to translating a book like Strega look like?

What a good question. I think it comes down to supporting the integrity of the text and the author’s choices. And thinking about the book’s theme of labor and discussions around translation as a career in general: making sure the conditions for translating the novel are fair and those involved are properly compensated.

The claustrophobic setting of Strega feels somewhat placeless and dislocated, only vaguely tethered to a European context by its licorice candies and almond cookies. Were there aspects of Strega that felt especially Swedish or Scandinavian in ways that were difficult to translate?

Perhaps there’s something Swedish about way the mother pays attention to her child at the end of the novel? A sense of the child as a person with agency.

Generally, I tried to cultivate a sense of a familiar no-place or any-place rooted in a sort of red cocktail cherry, stale air, ornate dream of a bygone-but-still-present fantasy of Europe, specifically Northern Italy. I also thought about spa towns in Austria, cuckoo clocks and gingerbread, the way the mountains meet the sea in Trieste and the idea of what’s in those mountains, specific places offering specific experiences that are part of the local imagination, but always thought of as elsewhere.

Are there other translators whose work inspires you?

This theme came up in her first novel, which took place in a house by a forest. I remember the house being a metaphor for the patriarchal structure in which they live. So this seed was planted by the time I started work on Strega. Your question makes me think of how I translated the body. In the book, the young women’s hands are like a character of their own, which meant a careful considering of when to use ‘the’ or a personal pronoun, thereby modulating how connected or disconnected the reader imagines the characters being to their body as a whole or in part.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been writing about desire and pornography – I imagine it will be a book. Some of my early thinking is up on Granta.com, an essay in two parts called “Beyond Deep Throat”.

In January, a project I’ve been dedicated to for a number of years is finally being published: Linnea Axelsson’s epic novel-in-verse Aednan that follows two Sámi families across a century – with themes of colonial trauma, language, the fight for self-determination, and the land.

Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel, was published on 1 November 2022. Purchase your copy here.

SASKIA VOGEL is an author and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Permission (2019), her debut novel, was published in five languages and longlisted for the Believer Book Award. The Swedish edition was translated by Johanne Lykke Holm. She was Princeton University’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence.

JOHANNE LYKKE HOLM (b. 1987) is an author and translator. Nominated for both the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature, she is establishing herself among the most promising up-and-coming literary authors in Sweden. She has also translated Yahya Hassan, Josefine Klougart, and Hiromi Itō into Swedish.

Lolli8 December 2023