Working with translated fiction is a challenge. I’ve recently been working on two different authors’ manuscripts where neither writer had English as their first language.

Sten Eirik’s forthcoming book, The Intended, is a luxurious and evocative tale of pirates, love, loss and innocence in the Caribbean. His first language is Swedish and he tells the tale of Sweden’s time of empire; he now lives and works in Canada so our first debate was whether we ought to use UK, US or Canadian English to standardise the prose. We chose UK English simply because Canadian and UK have many similarities, and he wanted to hark back to the literature of such greats as Conrad, who himself was Polish but writing in English.

In contrast, Starlight in the Ring by H N Quinnen presented different challenges. The author speaks many other languages and I was also concerned that I wanted to capture and retain the multi-lingual feel of a changing South Africa. The book contains snippets of Afrikaans as well as South African English but again we’ve used a UK stylesheet for consistent spelling.

I am reminded of reading various translations of The Odyssey when I was a teenager. My first experience was the translation made by T E Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia himself. He took a lyrical approach and the book is full of “wine-dark seas” and “the grey-eyed one” (Athena) and so on. It took him four years and there is a fascinating, detailed commentary on the process here.

However when I took a module in Greek and Roman Literature as part of my Art degree, we were given a totally different edition to study. It was a parallel text, with the Greek to one side and the English to the other, purporting to show an accurate translation. I cannot even remember the academic translator. What I do remember is the tedious dryness of the text. There wasn’t a single wine-dark sea, for a start. Athena was always Athena. Somehow they’d managed to strip out all the magic and joy.

There are two aspects to working with translations, and any text that springs from the heart of someone who has many languages within them; there is the accuracy of the words, but there is also the authenticity of the emotion that is conveyed by the words.

Starlight in the Ring is an example where the narrator is a small girl in South Africa; I have walked a difficult line between imposing grammatical rules and allowing the idiosyncrasies to shine through. I hope I’ve stayed truer to T E Lawrence’s example and not the boring world of that University set text.

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