'The smallest translation choices can sometimes have the most impact': A Conversation With Stefania Heim

PEN America features a fantastic conversation with poet and translator Stefania Heim, as part of their PEN Ten interview series. Heim's latest translation project features the poetry of Giorgio de Chirico. From the top of the conversation, Lily Philipott asks and Heim responds:

As a translator, how do you navigate staying true to both the author’s original intention and work, and the rules of the language you are translating their ideas into?
The words “original intention” have sometimes been used as a limiting force in the reception of translations. I find the idea that a translation could ever be “true,” “direct,” or “transparent” to be misguided. Instead, the process of translation can really floodlight the differences in how languages operate, providing a thrilling creative problem to engage. My recent translation project, the writings of metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico, has been super interesting along these lines. Some of de Chirico’s sentences are mind-boggling, completely slippery—even in Italian, where you can push your syntax because word endings maintain connections. These ruptures, what he called “enigmas,” are a central feature of his paintings as well as his poetry. What is the relationship, either grammatically or spatially, between an iron artichoke, a train in the distance, and the goddess Athena? How can one translate syntactical ambiguity without merely adding confusion? It took me years to settle into de Chirico’s cadences, his rhythms, his images, his logics. To find a line in English that could sound the textures of his longings, which are so powerful. Sometimes it meant, for example, (and I really struggled with this choice) adding em-dashes where he just had strings of commas. The smallest translation choices can sometimes have the most impact. And then there was the matter of coming to terms with his other qualities—occasional facetiousness, pedantry, sonic play. Being a literary translator is something like putting a scrim made of someone else’s voice and vision over your own brain, learning to meet aspects of the world through their words.

Read on at PEN America.