WFR: What kinds of fiction or stories did you read and watch growing up?

Dempow Torishima: As a child, I liked stories with illustrations, like Doctor Doolittle, René Guillot’s Un petit chien va dans la lune, works by Edogawa Rampo, and so on (I was enthralled by the things that rose up between the words and the pictures), and I think that is also related to my present style of writing.

In my teenage years, I got really into strange, unique works of Japanese fiction, such as Kyusaku Yumeno’s Dogra Magra, Mushitaro Oguri’s Murder at Black Death Mansion, Shozo Numa’s Yapoo: the Human Cattle. In particular, I was strongly influenced by the word-plays, images of body modification, and so on in Yapoo: the Human Cattle.

After that, I started reading a variety of novels from a variety of countries (regardless of genre), and as you might expect, I really liked the ones with strong conceits and high levels of the absurd. These days, I like Can Xue, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Seth Fried. I’m also drawn to authors like Yoko Tawada and Yuko Yamao, who are very particular about the words they use. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Hisashi Kuroma’s translation style shocked me with its copious use of kanji neologisms and ruby text.

(In Japanese books, ruby text—tiny phonetic characters printed next to kanji characters—is sometimes used to indicate the pronunciations of difficult kanji. I use it to create wordplays, double-meanings, and so on. Still, from the time I was first published, I’ve been told those effects are impossible to replicate in English. )

As for movies, I like directors such as David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jan Švankmajer, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but even within that group Cronenberg looms large, and has influenced me strongly in terms of both visuals and speculation.

WFR: What writers or storytellers do you look up to the most, in regards to setting models for your own writing?

DT: So many names come to mind that it’s hard to narrow it down. For every work I write, I’m inspired by a different author. I’m drawn to authors who draw as well as write, like Edward Carey. As for contemporary Japanese authors, Toh EnJoe and Yusuke Miyauchi are always stimulating.

WFR: How would you describe your personal aesthetic in your own words?

DT: To the extent that it’s possible, I try to put myself in a state where my perceptions of beauty and ugliness, and right and wrong, are a blank slate, and write using only the subjective viewpoints and knowledge of the beings that live in the world I’m writing about. Just as novels with a contemporary setting don’t include explanations about refrigerators, as much as possible I try to use only descriptions to show the things that are self-evident about them. My ideal is to write something like a translation of a novel written in another world.

If I use pre-existing nouns to express various things in that world, somehow the impression just doesn’t gel, so I use the meanings and shapes and sounds of kanji characters (with ruby text) to coin terms appropriate to the appearance and content of those objects (and sometimes I’ll also cram a completely different meaning into a pre-existing noun). To me, neologisms are like sets, props, and special makeup effects in film art.

WFR: Is there such a thing as “too weird”? If someone tells you something you’ve written is “weird” is it usually a compliment?

DT: At the time Sisyphean was released in Japan, I was told it was untranslatable, and the fact that it can now be read in English is itself “too weird,” which makes me very happy. I’m truly grateful that thanks to the long, hard efforts of translator Daniel Huddleston, this has become a reality.

“Weird” is of course a compliment as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes I see comments like, “It’s too gross; I can’t read it,” or “I feel sick at my stomach,” but at times like that, I try to remember the words of John Waters, who said, “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.”

WFR: Sisyphean is incredibly original and surreal. Can you tell us how it came together? When did you start working on it and where did you get the idea for it?

DT: I started writing “Sisyphean,” the title story, in 2010.

I think the misery of having to work for a long time at a company that had bad working conditions, coupled with all the turmoil I’d been bottling up because of my commercial illustration and design work, just broke out all at once, like the Great Dust Plague. The barrel burst. And when I looked around me, I saw lots of people suffering from outrageous demands of their jobs, and thought that by using the techniques of SF and fantasy novels, I might be able to make that present situation apparent. So I set out to create a work where the novel itself would function as a work of installation art on the extremities of labor.

Up until then, I had created stories and pictures as separate things, but it kept feeling like something was half-baked about both of them, as if something very important was missing. Before I started work on “Sisyphean,” I realized that by putting both of those things together, I might be able to achieve a synergistic effect. It was a vague idea, but at that point I intended to put greater weight on the illustrations, and produce a work that was like a visual story.

At first, I made a lot of sketches and expanded the image in my mind, and then after drawing a number of illustrations, I started writing. Prior to “Sisyphean,” I had experimented with writing a surreal dictionary-novel that was just a string of annotations upon annotations, sort of like a hybrid of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, and that technique came in handy for describing the world of “Sisyphean.”  I was going back and forth between words and pictures, completing both with one another, and while I was writing, I started giving more and more weight to the sentences. (Rather than me writing it, it felt like I was excavating fossils buried in deep underground strata, or weaving it together from fragments of the excavated fossils as I turned them up, down, left, and right.) In the end, I went way over the page limit for the short story competition, and I believe my efforts to condense that text, paring multiple lines down to one, must also be connected to my present style of writing.

After that, using the overstuffed setting of “Sisyphean” as a base, I wrote the other stories going backward through the ages, changing things up with each one, until at last in 2013, I was able to bring it all together in one book.

As for ideas, the idea of the “Descent From Heaven” in “Cavumville,” for example, came to me while I was watching a scene of snow being removed from roofs on TV once, and imagined what it would be like if all of those snowflakes were bugs. Most ideas sneak up on me quietly, at unpredictable times and from unpredictable directions. I get a lot of ideas by attaching plausible explanations to wordplays. When I’m doing that while writing, I sometimes feel like I’m going on and on trying to keep some lies I’ve told consistent.

WFR: In terms of your artwork, what artists and artworks have influenced you? Have you been influenced by manga at all?

DT: Hieronymus Bosch, Arnold Böcklin, Odilon Redon, Max Ernst, Max Klinger, Léon Spilliaert, and Zdzisław Beksiński…when I start listing fantastical painters I like, there’s no end to them. In terms of direct influence, though, I’ll say the paper architects, Brodsky ＆ Utkin and Albín Brunovský.

I’ve read a lot of manga, but that’s influenced me more in terms of content. As for patterns and designs, I’ve always been enchanted by those drawn by Daijiro Morohoshi.

WFR: What’s next? Is there anything you’re currently working on?

DT: After Sisyphean was published, my collection of materials on the setting was released as an e‑book. Aside from that, I’ve mainly been writing novellas and short stories.

There was a jailbreak story about a prisoner who’d been sentenced to have his body changed into an earthworm-like form, a story I contributed to an Ultraman anthology about a special cleaning company that disposes of all the monsters Ultraman defeats, one for Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME! anthology about people who live in a building that keeps falling forever through a multilayered city, and one that describes daily life in a Japan where pseudoscience is a fact of life.

Presently, I’ve got an illustrated story called “One Hundred Views of a Hallucination” being serialized in Hayakawa Publishing’s SF Magazine. I’m also in the process of revising my first long-form novel, which I’m aiming to have published sometime this year. The story begins in the age that follows the human race’s extinction at the hands of murderous organisms, which are defensive weapons of formerly free-floating celestial bodies which the human race had colonized. Having lost their sense of purpose, these killer organisms have staked out turf like yakuza, and are living their daily lives when an inexplicable change begins to occur in their society, and they come to understand the human race’s scheme—it’s that kind of story. I hope everyone will be able to read it someday.

The post Sisyphean: An Interview with Weird Scifi Author Dempow Torishima appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This year marks the first time that The Twenty Days of Turin, written by Giorgio De Maria in 1975, has been translated into English. Its translation couldn’t be any more timely: De Maria’s novel, partly a reaction to the violent fascism that plagued Italy during the 1970s, perfectly reflects the bleak political landscape and uncertain times we find ourselves in today. De Maria was quite the visionary in many ways—his work anticipated the rise of social media and reality TV decades before their advent. We talked to Ramon Glazov, who translated De Maria’s Twenty Days, to gain more insight into the book, how he translated the text, and the author’s fascinating albeit troubled life.

Weird Fiction Review: Can you give us a brief summary of The Twenty Days of Turin? Why should people consider reading it?

Ramon Glazov: The Twenty Days of Turin is a lost gem of European weird fiction, written during Italy’s “Years of Lead” in the late 1970s. That was a very violent, paranoid time when dozens of communist and neo-fascist groups were waging terror campaigns involving kidnappings, murders and public bombings. The chilling part was that many of the fascists were backed by the authorities and were off-limits until it was too late. People were scared of being killed as soon as they stepped out of their houses and also scared that the government wouldn’t be on their side. It became a taboo-ish topic to speculate about too loudly, and to write sci-fi or fantasy about it was nigh unthinkable.

In The Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio De Maria took that situation and fused it with cosmic horror. His stated goal was to write an “allegory,” but he went beyond that and ended up creating his own disturbing mythos from scratch. In his world, hateful entities feed on the sanity of Turin’s citizens and massacre them every night as they mill around in an insomniac fugue. The protagonist, an amateur investigator, tries to decipher their motives and suspects they have human accomplices.

Some of the things De Maria dreamed up seem eerier now—and closer to life—than when the book was first published. For starters, he predicted that a phenomenon similar to social media would overtake our culture. He knew virtually nothing about computers; his novel doesn’t mention them. Still, he anticipated that society would desire something like Facebook—even if his version works through pen and paper. What De Maria gives us is a creepy force that exploits people’s loneliness to suck up their private information, which is to say, their souls.

Loserdom and terrorism, of course, go hand in hand. We know that too well now, and De Maria saw it too. The rampaging demigods he creates manage to be terrifying and pathetic all at once. It’s hard to think of Lovecraft’s deities as losers, but De Maria’s entities have that added level of bleakness. They’re omnipotent, nobody dares challenge them, yet they’re losers—much like humans who carry out gun massacres, only magnified in scale. That’s the part of the novel that really shook me.

WFR: It sounds like the author, Giorgio De Maria, had an interesting albeit troubled life. Can you tell us more about the author?

RG: I’ve been told by his daughter, Corallina, that De Maria only became a novelist because of a tragic incident in his life. He started out as an enormously talented pianist, trained at Turin’s top music school, the Conservatorio. For kicks, he used to write very brutal sacrilegious songs and perform them at weekly salons for his oddball literary friends. He was also, according to his friend Emilio Jona, fond of sleight of hand tricks to show off his manual dexterity…

Then, around 1960, when he was in his mid-thirties, he developed a cramp in his hand that killed his piano career. Nobody ever figured out if it was psychological or purely physical, but it became one of his life obsessions. He would spend long hours in front of the piano trying to force his hand to play again. So when he took up writing, it was in a state of exile from a previous calling, and this pain comes up again and again in his fiction. One story of his, “The Death at Missolonghi,” imagines a situation where Lord Byron is cursed by a supernatural power that strips him of his ability to write. It explores the anguish of a character who’s suddenly cut off from his destiny and feels like a depleted shadow of himself. The Twenty Days of Turin has an amateur musician protagonist whose recorder is linked to the state of his soul.

In the 60s, De Maria moved from song writing to theatre scripts and novels. He was working for Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI-TV, and got commissioned to write a dystopian teleplay called “The Appeal” (Prova d’appello). The script described a game show where death row inmates can get pardoned if they persuade the audience that they’re charming and wholesome. Viewers at home phone in their verdicts and the inmate lives if the clap-o-meter hits 110. Basically, De Maria thought of reality TV before reality TV—with the poor condemned protagonist trying to act sociable while he’s frightened for his life. The broadcaster cancelled the program, claiming it was “not appropriate for our scheduling, though it might be a good work, insofar as it envisages a repressive and terroristic use, with apocalyptic prospects, for this very medium of television.”

After the 1970s, De Maria had a mental breakdown and turned to Catholicism. I’m told he didn’t write much literary work after that and was a bit too odd for the Church’s liking as well. He would rant about archangels walking the streets of Turin and things of that order. The last phase of his life was rather sad and reclusive.

WFR: How well known is The Twenty Days of Turin in Italy? How about Giorgio De Maria? How did you personally discover it?

 RG: When De Maria began his writing career there was still a thick line, drawn by middlebrow cartographers, between “literature” and genre fiction. Writers had to choose one or the other. Even a respected author like Primo Levi—who moved through many of the same circles as De Maria—found it daunting to get into sci-fi in 1966 after he was already famous as a Holocaust memoirist, and did it under pseudonym. It didn’t matter that some of those literary authors, including De Maria, were privately huge fans of pulpy sci-fi and detective stories. De Maria was with Turin’s literary set, not the sci-fi set, and this was hard to break past back then.

As a result, even though his fiction during the 1950s and 60s included telepathy, futuristic surgical procedures, alternate histories and ghosts, De Maria, to my knowledge, never once published a story in an SF/F magazine. Most of his work ended up in Il Caffè, which was a literary journal—Italy’s equivalent to The Paris Review.

The Twenty Days of Turin wasn’t marketed as sci-fi, nor as giallo, nor as a horror novel. You won’t find it listed in the huge Vegetti catalogue of Italian sci-fi titles, for instance. It was “literature,” but with more pulp in its DNA than was normal for Italian literature at the time.

So it was an incongruous book by the standards of its era. In 1977, a leftist author like De Maria was supposed to be didactic, to write fiction that had a “social purpose” and end the story with a left-wing moral that wasn’t too hard to puzzle out. A “serious” social issue like terrorism wasn’t viewed as a legitimate subject for weird fiction or sci-fi or pulpy mystery stories, which weren’t considered “serious.” De Maria ran against all that. The Twenty Days has a dark, ambiguous ending and it’s very obviously about terrorism—which speculative fiction at that time hardly touched.

Its cult following in Turin can be divided into two categories of fans. First, you have the literary subculture De Maria rubbed shoulders with. Some of the critics who’ve championed the book, like Pier Massimo Prosio, come from the same generation as De Maria. Then you have a second group, mostly sci-fi fans, who encountered the book as teens and became obsessed with it ever since. A lot of them are Generation Xers with a taste for Lovecraft, Ballard, Cronenberg, thrash metal, graphic novels and so forth. Luca, the friend who introduced me to The Twenty Days, belongs in that category. I’ve also stumbled upon readers younger than me—undergraduates who got the book recommended to them by their creative writing professors.

Turinese are private people who tend to stick closely to their own circles, so many of these fans went for decades without knowing how many other fans there were. Two years ago, when I was going through the process of locating the De Maria Estate, it emerged that Luca had actually met the author’s son Domenico without realising it. They’d hung out together as teenage truants and listened to Black Sabbath in De Maria’s house at the exact time he was writing The Twenty Days. Luca only discovered this when Domenico recognised him forty years later!

This September, the book will be re-released in Italy by the Turin publishing house Frassinelli. Now here comes one of those eerie coincidences that follow De Maria’s work. The Frassinelli company was founded in 1931 by the typographer Carlo Frassinelli. It turns out that Carlo’s son, Giancarlo, was murdered downstairs from the De Maria family home! He lived in the same apartment building and knew De Maria’s wife because they were both occultists belonging to Turin’s “Gurdjieff Circle”—people who followed the teachings of the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff. Giancarlo was regarded as a “guru” within the group, but ended up paralysed after a stroke. He was stabbed to death by his carer, a nervous young man, and people around him suspected that he’d deliberately incited the kid into doing it—a kind of suicide by proxy. This has no connection to the publisher’s decision, since Frassinelli Edizioni is no longer owned by the Frassinelli family, but it’s spooky nonetheless.

WFR: In your introduction to The Twenty Days, you make an interesting connection between the Library and social media. This is rather interesting because the book was written some 30 years before the advent of social media. What is the Library in The Twenty Days of Turin and how does it relate to social media and blogging in our current age?

RG: Try to picture an evil alliance between 4chan, Craigslist and the Catholic Church. That’s the Library.

It emerges as a type of reading room where people can submit their handwritten diaries or peruse the diaries of others. Nothing like it existed when De Maria was writing, but today it’s everywhere: crowdsourcing, amateur content, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, DeviantArt and the like.

De Maria was interested in the darker implications of such a phenomenon. The loneliness, the perversity, the rage… His Library ends up accumulating all the nastiest, most shameful things that people want to vent and purge: the true sludge of their souls. And those people find themselves with the horror that that stuff is on public display, that the Library might dox them to anybody for a trivial fee.

Even after the Library’s first incarnation leads to an epidemic of massacres, lonely citizens are still tempted to do it again. That’s the pitiable part. It’s enticing to vent your miseries, to have a place to spew that soul-sludge. When De Maria’s narrator first encounters the remains of the original Library, it’s a huge, disgusting pile of mouldy paper. Later, the book gives us garbage and human waste as a motif. It’s the most literal form of “shitposting” imaginable.

To make it doubly twisted, the Library is endorsed by the Church as a goodwill initiative. The building that hosts it is a real place in Turin, the St Cottolengo Little House of Divine Providence. It’s a charity hospital notorious in Turinese urban folklore for supposedly housing “monsters”—patients too deformed to see the light of day. The word “Cottolengo,” in the local parlance, has become a bit like “Bedlam.” An apt place to keep a proto-4chan!

WFR: What was the process like in translating The Twenty Days and what sort of challenges did you run into?

RG: Italian gets stereotyped as a “musical” language. With De Maria this is truer than usual. He began as a musician and in some of the novel’s finest scenes he still thinks like a musician. My favourite example is the chapter titled “The Voices.” The narrator visits an occult researcher who claims to have a tape recording of the book’s terroristic entities conversing over the airwaves. The scene is all about build-up—not just dramatic action but crescendo, decrescendo, diminuendo. It starts mildly enough, then an eerie soundscape develops as the recording plays. Harsh subterranean noises evolve into vowels and consonants, then syllables, then words, then sentences, until we can hear a chorus of malicious creatures arguing and plotting massacres. It’s an awful lot like an orchestral movement, and throughout it De Maria makes full use of the Italian language’s onomatopoeic potential. Translating that, finding the right-sounding English for the job, took heaps of work.

WFR: The Twenty Days of Turin was written during the 1970’s which was a time of political unrest in Italy. I believe there was a neo-fascist coup and also a radical left-wing paramilitary group. What was the political scene like in Italy during the 70’s and how did it influence The Twenty Days of Turin?

 RG: When the magazine Sipario interviewed him in April 1978, De Maria had this to say:

“I believe that the scope of the fantastic… is the most suitable one for conveying a reality as complicated as ours. […] It’s no coincidence that The Twenty Days, which seeks allegorically to portray the violence that reigns over my city, has even caught the notice of journalists, and not just literary critics.”

The Twenty Days keeps the political context implicit rather than mention it in the open—and with good reason. While De Maria was writing, people were being kidnapped and murdered on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis: judges, journalists, politicians, union figures. Terrorism was hard to discuss, except in circuitous ways. Even book reviewers who wrote up the novel for La Stampa shied away from using the ‘t’-word. The closest they got to that was through coy phrases like: “a book dipped in the stream of cruel and timely metaphors.” As late as 2009, De Maria’s obituary in the journal Studi Piemontesi praised The Twenty Days without ever mentioning the Years of Lead. It put all its emphasis on De Maria as a fabulist, an heir to Poe, an imaginative writer in the nineteenth-century mold. That’s the diplomatic way to champion something truly weird and risky: making it appear traditional.

What De Maria captured best about his political surroundings was people’s evasiveness and silence when they’re faced with a horrendous reality, the many ways they blank out and rationalise what they’re seeing. He observed how his fellow Italians reacted to the mundane traumas of terrorism and imagined how the same society might respond to cosmic threats “one cannot even mention… without feeling reason crumbling.” It’s not a reassuring picture.

WFR: What sort of literary influences played a part in Giorgio De Maria’s work? I believe you listed The Trial by Kafka as one in the intro.

RG: His tastes ran mostly towards nineteenth century romanticism and fantastic literature, plus a few German-speaking modernist authors like Kafka, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann. Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus—about a composer who deliberately infects himself with syphilis because he believes madness is the source of genius—seems to have fascinated De Maria early in his career. He said in one interview that reading Kafka was a “revelation,” so I suppose that’s where his passion for “weirdness” came from. According to his daughter, his other big loves were Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, along with sci-fi and adventure fiction in general. In the Sipario interview, though, he claimed to have a low opinion of Italian fantastic literature, calling it “a very feeble tradition.”

To answer the biggest question many readers might have: I can’t be certain if De Maria was familiar with Lovecraft, though he might’ve encountered Lovecraft’s stories in 1960s magazines like Urania, which ran translated sci-fi for Italian audiences.

WFR: You talk about Turin in your introduction and it seems like a very disquieting place. It definitely adds to the unease the reader feels when reading The Twenty Days. Can you talk more about the setting and how The Twenty Days manages to be such an unsettling story?

RG: Dozens of things collude to make Turin spooky. It’s an out-of-the-way city in the northwestern corner of Italy. Its baroque architecture gives it an odd look that inspired surrealist paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. A curious number of famous writers have either committed suicide in Turin or suffered mental breakdowns there.

The city has a long history of occultism. While De Maria was writing his masterpiece, Turin was the home of Gustavo Rol, who was either a genuine X‑Man or the greatest faker in history. His reported feats included teleportation, mind-reading, bringing statuettes to life, summoning the ghost of Casanova so Fellini could question it for film research, terrifying Mussolini by correctly predicting the date of his death and other disconcerting party tricks.

What’s important is that these Turinese occultists don’t typically look like shroom-heads or characters from Harry Potter. It’s a culture where well-mannered individuals in boardroom attire might also happen to hold séances or do even weirder things in private. Gustavo Rol’s following contained a large number of top professionals and even the town’s leading psychiatrist. Lorenzo Alessandri, a painter considered to be the “Black Pope” of Turinese Satanism, played down his notoriety and claimed he was just a regular Catholic.

In a city where so many wholesome, conservative-looking people led double lives, De Maria found a perfect backdrop for his uncanny tale.

WFR: I find the cover to The Twenty Days to be rather fascinating. Can you tell us more about it?

RG: The image is based on a lithograph by the iconoclastic Belgian illustrator Félicien Rops titled Satan sement l’ivraie or “Satan Sowing Tares.” It refers to a parable in the Book of Matthew that compares Judgment Day to a wheat harvest, where God will gather up the “wheat” (his followers) and burn the poisonous “tares” that Satan has sown in the field.

The cover of the novel’s original 1977 release used a version of the same image, but I haven’t been able to find out whether it was chosen by De Maria or his publishers.

I note in my introduction to the book that wheat harvests in Europe traditionally happen in July, and this is also the month De Maria picks for most of the supernatural violence in the story.

The post Interview: Ramon Glazov on “The Twenty Days of Turin” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marian Womack

James Womack studied Russian, English and translation in St. Petersburg, Reykjavík and Oxford. Amongst others, he has translated works by Alexander Pushkin, Chéjov, the Strugatski Brothers, Ivan Turgenev, and Sergio del Molino. His first collection of poems, MISPRINT, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He was recently selected for the prestigious PEN-Presents European Translation Project. His versions of Vladímir Mayakovsky, Vladímir Maiakovski and other poems, will be published by Carcanet in October.

Together, the Womacks run Ediciones Nevsky/NevskyBooks, a Madrid-based small press specialising in European & Spanish slipstream in translation.

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The translation team of Marian Womack and James Womack recently embarked on several translations for The Big Book of Science Fiction, out from Vintage this summer. Continuing our exploration of “strange SF,” we’re happy to bring you this exclusive interview with the Womacks—about translation and about science fiction. We’ll also be posting their translation of “The Ruins of Granada,” an early classic of weird SF, which could not be included in the Big Book of SF for space reasons as well as their new translation of Sever Gansovsky’s classic “The Day of Wrath,” which brilliantly updates Island of Dr. Moreau themes.

What has been the hardest translation job for either or both of you—into English?

Silvina Ocampo

James Womack: I find translating SF/F particularly difficult in general. At its best—and I would say that a lot of the stories we have translated for this book are among the best—it is a genre that is constantly wrong-footing the reader, and so your work as a translator is initially affected by your being wrong-footed as a reader. If you are translating stories set in worlds that are either fascinatingly different from or interestingly oblique to the ‘real’ world, then a lot of the handholds that you have with straight-down-the-line realist fiction just don’t exist. That said, within the stories we translated for the Big Book, I found Dmitri Bilenkin’s ‘Where Two Paths Cross’ tough because of the different perspectives within the story and the deliberately ‘alien’ vocabulary.

Marian Womack: TBBOSF has given me the chance to reencounter the Argentinian author Silvina Ocampo in a new way. She’s not only an author I am in awe of, but, together with Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter, she is a part of my personal corpus of imaginative and frighteningly clever writing. She excels at surrealism, which is such a difficult type of writing, so easy to do badly. Her language is endlessly inventive, her metaphors thought-provoking. She’s not the easiest of authors to translate, but the enjoyment inherent the challenge—the possibility of achieving results above the norm—makes the process that much more enjoyable.

Do you have a philosophy or central thought about what translation should be that guides you?

James: Nothing very interesting: pragmatic faithfulness, I suppose, in a very broad sense, and depending on what I consider ‘being faithful’ to mean in any particular context. Sometimes you need to reproduce certain formal aspects of a work; sometimes the literal meaning of a passage is absolutely paramount, no matter how clunky the translation sounds in English. And to try if possible not to be led too far by convention: sometimes things that are standard speech or standard literary locutions are just what you don’t want, and you have to fight against them.

Marian: I don’t want to sound too mystical here, but translation for me implies embodying an author’s voice, appropriating it for a short period of time, and so I can see an almost mediumistic quality to it. I certainly spend a great deal of time before starting a translation studying the author’s style and idiosyncrasies, her/his use of language, and rehearsing her/his voice. The transmutation process has to be faulty, that’s the nature of the act, but one can only hope to be as faithful as possible. And feeling that you are finally ‘embodying’ an author’s voice is rewarding.

At what times do you work together and when alone on translations? For example, do you, Marian, contribute to the Russian translations, too?

James: It’s a fairly collaborative process. We both read everything we translate, and edit together, no matter who does the first draft.

Marian: We are very old-fashioned in this. I like to think about us like a wife-and-husband team. When we started collaborating in these projects, around 2008, I had ‘some’ Russian, and James had ‘some’ Spanish. We have both grown on the way, as translators, both separately and as a team. But I find that the way our brains work mean that we can almost ‘side-read’ the other person. It’s like playing a duet; we inhabit the same space when we are working on these projects.

When you’re re-translating a famous work, like Casares’s “Squid in Its Own Ink”, is your process any different?

James: The advantage of there being a history of translations of a particular work is that you can do research before starting your own version: seeing how other people have dealt with problems is a good way of giving you ideas of how to deal with them yourself. Obviously, without plagiarizing or copying previous work, but there are times when previous translators have got something right in a way that seems to you both neat and unalterable, or at least gives you a roadmap to help you find something neat and unalterable of your own.

Marian: I’m the opposite; I prefer not to look at anything! It’s the same with writing: I have to read poetry if I’m working on a short story, non-fiction if I’m writing a novel. I am very easily contaminated. To me, approaching an author of that stature does not change my normal work process. But I’m very shy by nature, and have to try hard not be overwhelmed by an individual’s literary stature.

On the Russian side, what special barriers are there when translating Soviet-era work? I know you translated Bulgakov into Spanish, and some translators of Bulgakov into English have left out the Soviet-era referents.

James: I think I’ll answer this one. There is a strain in Soviet-era work which revels in localia, in specific particularly satirical details, but the best stuff overcomes this, and may even make a virtue of the obscurity and obfuscation out of which it was forced to grow. I’m thinking of scenes like for example the theatre show in The Master and Margarita, where the fairy gold conjured up by the devil transforms into illegal foreign currency. But Soviet debates about currency speculation are a background to this scene rather than its main point, and Bulgakov can be read with great pleasure even by people with no knowledge of the context. Or else, knowing just how virulent anti-religious propaganda was in the Soviet Union helps you see how transgressive as well as original Bulgakov was being in his retelling of the story of the Crucifixion, but it’s not something you absolutely need to know. There is a great deal of what the critic Lev Losev called ‘Aesopian language’ in Soviet literature, but it is a common element to Russian literature in general: writing which tries to speak between the lines, past the censor, to a public better-skilled at exegesis. Lots of this is, yes, untranslatable, but also a lot of it is of minor importance, reinforcing the already-visible main thrust of the work. One writer whom I would be scared to translate is Andrei Platonov, for whom absolute ambiguity is a fundamental creative principle, but luckily the translations into English, largely by Robert Chandler, are amazingly good.

When faced with a choice between fidelity and sense for a modern reader, which way do you go?

James: Sense. There is a lot to be said for interpretative translation. On a basic level, when a character says ‘On a clear day, you can see for twenty versts’, I find it generally makes more sense to me to have him say ‘On a clear day, you can see for a dozen miles [or even just ‘miles’]’ rather than give a footnote to explain what a verst is or else say ‘On a clear day, you can see for 13.2 miles’.

Marian: Sense, absolutely. Although verst is an interesting example to have chosen: Spaniards are used to the term, and it is even accepted by the Real Academia, the Spanish institution concerned with the ‘purity’ of the language, so for translations into Spanish we can actually leave it as it is.

Did you have a personal connection or commitment to any story or stories in particular that you translated for the Big Book of SF?

James: As publishers in Spain, we have brought out a book by the Strugatsky brothers, and are going to publish another hopefully next year, so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to do some of their work into English.

Marian: I am personally very fond of Silvina Ocampo’s work, and would love to see more of her stories translated.

Were there any surprises during the translation process for Big Book of SF?

James: I didn’t know anything about Sever Gansovsky before translating his story ‘Day of Wrath’, and he is a major discovery. The story itself is wonderful: astonishingly nihilistic for a Soviet-era writer, and very visual in its description of a Winter’s Bone-style backwoods Russian countryside that hasn’t had enough focus in Russian literature in general. And I’ve gone on to read a lot more by him, and he holds up very well. Worth translating more of; worth telling the world about.

Marian: I have to agree with James. And from the perspective of a small press publisher which started specializing in Russian, I have become aware of some amazing Russian SF authors I hadn’t previously read. Russian SF, and Russian literature in general, never ceases to amaze me; you are discovering new things every day.

Are there any personal favorites not yet translated into English that you would love to see in some future anthology?

James: On the Russian side of things, there are a number of contemporary writers whom I think are worth anthologizing. To name just one, Dmitri Kolodan is a fantastic young author: his novella Time of the Jabberwock is an inspired retelling of the tropes of Carroll’s Alice in a very different context.

Marian: I will give a Spanish example, if I may. Perhaps I’m being biased, because she’s one of our authors (and, full disclosure, a good friend), but I certainly think there is no one writing as well and with such variety nowadays as Sofía Rhei. Her output is breathtaking, from poetry to children’s writing, to speculative fiction and fantasy stories which explore her interests in linguistics and meta-literature, to adult fantasy novels, and the breath of her creativity is immense. I am quietly sitting in a corner waiting for the explosion to come, when everyone realizes that she is a genius.

In your role as publishers, writers, and translators, can you explore for me what you think the future of science fiction holds? How will SF be different in ten years?

James: Very briefly: publishers are getting more interested in writing from outside a straightforward Anglophone market; more books originally written in languages other than English are being noticed; translators are stepping up to the plate in what has been seen as their secondary job—but which might in the long run turn out to be the more vital side of their work—of suggesting to publishers authors who might be interesting. The difference will come from globalization, books that are reports from the frontline rather than armchair tourism.

Marian: From a Spanish perspective, the major change that we are seeing is that women are started to be more visible than before. It is still a struggle to get women in this cultural space—the recent nominations for the Ignotus Awards, a major Spanish SFF and horror prize, didn’t have a great number of women; but the general consensus was that there were ‘a few more’ than the previous year, so we are progressing, but it’s still a very steep mountain to climb. It is still difficult to convince a Spanish reader to pick a book by a woman, even if she’s had twenty five-star reviews. I can see that the tide is slowly turning, and I’m sure than in a decade female voices will be ‘mainstreamed’, but I’m not sure it’s happened yet. Not talking now in particular about female voices, but picking up on James’s answer, SF will change dramatically when new practitioners are exposed to diverse voices in general as a normal thing, and can count them as members of their own influential ‘canon’. It will be wonderful to see.

The post Translating Strange Science Fiction: An Interview with Marian and James Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.