With an occasional prompt from chair Paula Morris, an hour of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s talk is like his prose: exhaustive, sometimes exhausting, never guilty of the sin of understatement or restraint, but seldom dull.
Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and its two (so far) companion volumes, The Prisoner of Heaven and The Angel’s Game, deserve that dustjacket cant “international bestseller”. International publishing being what it is, that success has seen the four young adult novels that made his reputation in Spain finally becoming available in English.
If thanks to a member of the audience, Ruiz Zafón talked about an easily forgotten partner in that success: Lucia Graves – a novelist and essayist, fluent in English, Spanish and Catalan, who has translated all Ruiz Zafón’s novels into English. (Perhaps it runs in the genes, as she’s also the daughter of Robert Graves, who was no slouch when it came to translating from Latin and Greek.)
Their working relationship sounds like something out of one of Ruiz Zafón’s own novels.
Graves had come across La sombra del viento in a Spanish bookstore, and took the unusual step of contacting the author’s agent to pitch for the job before the book had even been sold to English language publishers.
American publisher Knopf was keen to farm the book out to a more established translator; Ruiz Zafón was sceptical anyone was up to his work.
“So we decided to test them. Each translator was given a sample chapter, the very first one. And when the samples came back, the editor at the time, he told me, ‘I think they are all bad.’ I read them and said, ‘They’re not all bad, they’re dreadful’ … Lucia submitted her sample, and she said, ‘I know it doesn’t work,’ but at least she knew. None of the others did. She had a closer feel for how my mind worked, and what I am trying to say.”
Ruiz Zafón and Graves established a rather unusual working relationship where they exchange pages. And, most unusual of all, Ruiz Zafón has said he will sometimes write whole new passages if the original cannot be translated to either’s satisfaction.
That’s interesting, you may ask, but so what? Just go to your bookshelves and take a look. You might be surprised how many books in your life – from your first fairytale to the hot new thing in Scandinavian crime fiction – have passed through the hands of your humble translator.
It’s nice to see one of them getting credit from an author who – in whatever language – is such a loud advocate for the written word and the imagination.
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