Though many translators who work on books by living authors have satisfying working relationships with them, you don’t often hear about it on an international stage: the Kundera and Albee horror stories take occasional showy pride of place. What’s exceptional in this situation is the relative calmness of all concerned: Colmer’s confidence when faced with a panicked author and what may indeed have been some very tricky translation questions, Bakker’s obvious pleasure about the course of the editing process. And we worked on it, I had some comments, and then David had counter-arguments, and so on. But for the first time I read a translation of one of my novels before it was sent to Harvill Secker. I thought: one cannot translate this novel, there is far too much language-stuff in it, and it is about the translation of an English poem into Dutch! So I contacted David and he stayed very calm and said: “That’s my problem, relax.” He is wonderful. How closely do you work with your translator, David Colmer?īakker: For this novel very close, because I woke up one night, almost two years ago now, almost in a panic. He tells it like this, in an interview with Tasja Dorkofikis on the PEN Atlas blog:ĭorkofikis: Your novel is translated from the Dutch.
When Colmer began to work on The Detour, Bakker had initial doubts about the possibility of translating it at all. In fact, when Bakker won the IMPAC for his previous book, The Twin, in 2010, he was quoted as saying that it wasn’t until he read Colmer’s translation of it that he realized that “it really is a book, and I am a writer.” But, to close observers, it might also seem like a natural outgrowth of the apparent warmth of Bakker and Colmer’s relationship.
This all makes sense for the IFFP, which is awarded only to fiction in translation, and is also one of the few prizes, along with the IMPAC, that splits the prize money between author and translator. But that’s just what’s happened with Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker, his translator David Colmer, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which went to The Detour (titled Ten White Geese in the US) this week.
It’s even rarer to have the author standing behind the translator. It’s relatively rare that, when an author wins a major international prize, the main news stories on it show a photo of the author and their translator. Gerbrand Bakker and David Colmer: happy together Gerbrand Bakker and David Colmer: happy together » MobyLives
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