Sommaren 2012 intervjuade Will Heyward översättaren Chris Andrews, som översätter Roberto Bolaño till engelska, i BOMB Magazine. Intervjun handlar visserligen inte bara om att översätta den chilenske författaren, men Roberto Bolaño står helt klart i centrum. Det är en väldigt bra intervju som ovanligt ingående och detaljerat diskuterar översättandets konst.
”Will Heyward One of the novelists you’ve translated, Roberto Bolaño, has a lot of readers across the world, in part thanks to you. He’s known for his incredible range of voices, forms and styles. How do you render that in English? And how do you think he does what he does?
Chris Andrews The first thing I should say is that there are always losses and shifts in translation, and Bolaño is no exception. But I do think that his style comes through relatively strongly, whether it’s me translating him or someone else. When I read Natasha Wimmer’s translations of his other books, I feel like I’m straight back into the world of Bolaño, and I don’t feel any resistance or drag or loss. That is partly because some of the key stylistic features in his work are quite large-scale, like the head-long sentence that keeps rolling on via coordination, for example, with, and, and and, and and. And sometimes the challenges are syntactic. For example, in a book like By Night in Chile, the sentences don’t just extend themselves by coordination, but also by subordination, and that requires some rearrangement of the order of the elements.”
Om bara några månader kommer Chris Andrews studie ”Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe” (Columbia Univ.) ut. Det är den första studien i sitt slag, åtminstone på engelska, och vi tror att det här kan bli sommarens amerikanska fackbok.
Ola Wihlke
BearBooks 