Description

Mark Polizzotti's polemic 2018 essay collection Sympathy for the Traitor, as its press blurb states, "invites us to sympathize with the translator not as a 'traitor' but as the author's creative partner." At this trimester-end New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation gathering, Stephen Epstein will give an informal and personal overview of his experience in translating Intan Paramaditha's Gentayangan: Pilih Sendiri Petualangan Sepatu Merahmu (The Wandering: Choose Your Own Red Shoes Adventure), the winner of Tempo Magazine's award for the best Indonesian prose fiction work of 2017, and his relationship of translation and creative collaboration with the author.

Other topics that Stephen will touch upon are comparative observations on translating two different Asian languages into English, the recent controversies that have emerged as Indonesia literature increasingly appears on the world's stage as the 2015 guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair and market focus country at the London Book Fair earlier this year, and the extensive use of quotes from English-language song lyrics in his translation of Gentayangan. He will also address a somewhat unusual question: how do you translate if you begin to suspect that you yourself are feeding into the inspiration for one of the characters whose dialogue you are translating?

For an overview of this remarkable novel before the session, Stephen urges a look at Tiffany Tsao's review. The work is being supported by a PEN Translate grant and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and and will appear with Harvill Secker in the UK and Arcade Books in the US in 2020.