Kira Josefsson is a translator who works between English and Swedish. Originally from Sweden, she has lived in Finland, France, and Canada before settling down in New York City. In addition to her translation work. Josefsson also serves on the editorial board for Glänta, a Swedish magazine that covers arts and politics.
Her most recent translation is Antiquity, the debut novel by Hanna Johansson published in the U.S. by Catapult. We caught up with Josefsson to learn about how she tackles translating novels, what interests her about politics, and what titles she’s working on next.
What are the first steps you take when you first begin to translate a book?
At least with fiction, it’s a straightforward process: I open the PDF of the book (I prefer working with a PDF over a printed volume), open an empty Word document, and start typing. My first drafts are very messy; I think of it as putting down the clay which I spend subsequent drafts shaping. Oftentimes I have not read the novel—or at least not all of it—before I start working, so the first draft doubles as a getting to know the text. With Antiquity it was a little different; Hanna and I had met before and I was really curious about her debut novel. When it came out I was bowled over by her prose and the slippery, meticulously crafted narrative, and I knew immediately that I wanted to translate it. With her permission in hand the first steps in this case were, instead, to figure out how to pitch it to potential publishers.
What is the relationship between the author, the text, and yourself?
I think of translation as a collaboration across space and time, even when you can’t speak with the author. The novel is Hanna’s; my task is to remake it in English. My primary relationship is with the text, but of course working so closely with someone else’s thoughts and ideas means stepping into their mind a little bit—channeling their intentions as you understand them. In a pair of essays published in Astra Magazine, Kate Zambreno and her Swedish translator, Helena Fagertun, write about the strange intimacy that exists between an author and her translator. The translator spends so much time thinking about the author’s words (I have entire lines from Antiquity lodged in my mind) that it’s easy to feel that you’re intimately familiar with the author, too. An author’s work, however, is not the same thing as her person, and the author often knows next to nothing about her translator. The atmosphere of that relationship can be similar to waking up with someone after a one night stand: you’ve been catapulted into some kind of closeness, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll get along as people. It’s exciting to find out, and often, as in this case, you get lucky.
With Antiquity specifically, what was the most challenging aspect while translating the work?
It’s a luxury to work with prose as polished and gorgeous as Hanna’s. I think the biggest challenge was understanding some of the geographical relationships of Ermoupoli, the town where much of the novel is set. The narrator and Olga spend a lot of time on a set of docks by the water, and I didn’t understand how those were positioned vis-à-vis a rocky hill on which the narrator sometimes walks. I did a lot of googling, and Hanna went chasing through her research folders for pictures taken when she spent time on the island. As an author she hadn’t needed to photograph this particular detail of the landscape, but she managed to find a few snapshots that happened to include the rockface and the docks in the turquoise water.
Outside of your translation work, you also write on US events and politics for the Swedish press. What draws you to these topics? What are you currently working on?
I have a background in political science and am very interested in the way community (and society more broadly) functions here in the US versus in Sweden. I grew up in Sweden and moved to New York eleven years ago after having lived in Montréal for several years. You always hear about how individualist the US is, but one of the most striking things for me when I moved to North America was actually the vibrant landscape of grassroots groups and organization. Paradoxically, that doesn’t seem to exist as much in Sweden, perhaps because the government has historically provided for much of people’s needs; there, we’re not used to having to fend for ourselves. Unfortunately the dismantling of the Swedish welfare state has really accelerated in the last decade or so, and I think there is a lot to learn in that context from what’s going on here—both in terms of organizing against repressive politics and from looking at the US as an example of what a society that divests from social policies to invest instead in police, prisons, and the military looks like. This writing helps me understand my current home better, too. Last year was mostly about translation for me, but my partner and I are currently working on a piece about translation and desire (she translates from Spanish into English) that will be published in Erotic Review sometime this spring.
Are there any works you’re translating that we can expect to read in the future?
My translation of Judith Kiros’s O, a book of poems that is a sort of alternative production of Shakespeare’s Othello, is out from World Poetry Books in September this year. Judith Kiros is one of Sweden’s most exciting contemporary poets, and this is the first time she’s been translated into English. I’m really excited about that, as well as a novel—also a debut—called Shade and Breeze by the brilliant Finland-Swedish author Quynh Tran, to be published by British Lolli Editions. It’s a series of vignettes centered around a boy and his family in a town in Ostrobothnia that’s both eerie and funny, sharp and loving. I have never read anything like it.
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