I have to read and correct everything in hard copy - can’t assess what I’ve done solely on the screen. I compose my translations as I go, then print out my drafts and give them a final polish before delivery. Being naturally unable to contact him, I corrected it on the assumption that he’d have been grateful!) No, I don’t make multiple drafts. I once caught one out in a bad bit of continuity.
I’m regularly in touch with Walter Moers, for example, but my only contact with the onetime bestselling author Hans Helmut Kirst, sixteen of whose novels I translated including Night of the Generals, was a brief letter from him thanking me for my efforts. How does the translation process work for you? Are you generally in contact with the author? Do you go through multiple drafts? Are you approached by publishers about translating or do you try to pitch them? Incidental note: I didn’t translate Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, though I did do his Momo. I enjoyed the challenge, Jonathan Cape liked what I’d done, and one thing led to another until I was being offered so much translation work by several publishers that I chucked my City job and have devoted myself to the keyboard ever since. Around halfway through those ten lucrative but uncongenial years, a cousin of mine who happened to be a director of the venerable publishing house of Jonathan Cape said to me, “You write decent English and have a knowledge of German and French, how about trying your hand at translating a book for us on the side?” The book was a juvenile novel for which I earned the princely sum of £70.00. I started life as a classicist and won an open classical scholarship to Oxford, then spent ten years in a commercial job in the City of London. John Brownjohn: In an age when translation has become an academic subject in its own right, I hesitate to admit this after translating the better part of 200 books from German and French, but I came into the trade quite fortuitously. Mad Hatter: You've translated many books of all genres (History, Biography, Fantasy) including the classic The Neverending Story. FREE FICTION | Kameron Hurley's God's War and Infidel.On Retiring One’s Bloody Beloved Characters by Kam.INTERVIEW | John Brownjohn on Walter Moers and Tra.
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