Life in Translation - Peter Bush (Catalan)

The guest for this Episode is Peter Bush. Born in Lincolnshire, UK, He has translated works from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese to English. He spoke about his Translations in Catalan, Prominent authors in Catalan, Translation as an academic Discipline, and his Experience at the British Center for Literary Translation (BCLT).

Bush has been active not only as a translator but also in developing literary translation as an academic discipline by working in the academic world, serving in key literary translation organisations, serving on the editorial boards of literary translation publications, and organising international events and projects.

He was Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) at the University of East Anglia and Professor of Literary Translation at the School of English and American Studies. Bush has held key positions in important literary translation organisations: Literary Translation Committee, International Translators Federation  American Literary Translators Association and Committee for Literary Translation in Higher Education.

Harshaneeyam: Your first book-length translation was in 1986. So tell us about what prompted you to get into translation. 

Peter Bush: I was working in a school in London called Holland Park School, which was a very multilingual school, and I had an advanced class of Spanish, and we'd been reading a book called Campos de Níjar by Juan Goytisolo, and my class comprised students whose grandparents came from Spain or North Africa, and I thought it would interest them because it was written in 1959, and about the poverty their grandparents had been trying to escape from, as well as the Franco dictatorship. They weren't interested! They didn't really respond to the text. So I thought it would be a good idea to do a critical edition with an introduction. And I contacted Juan Goytisolo and he agreed that I could do it. I did it. He liked it. When his autobiography was published in Spain I read it and liked it and thought translating might be a new challenge for me. The suggestion actually came from a fellow teacher, John Lyons, who translates, also from Spanish, but mainly poetry. He's the translator of Ernesto Cardenal.

I started to extend the idea to publishers. Goytisolo told his agent that he wanted me to translate it. And eventually I got a phone call from a publisher, Stephen Pickles at Quartet Books, asking me whether I wanted to translate it. And I said yes. And he asked me to do a 50-page sample because I hadn't published any literary translations. So I did the 50-page sample. And I waited and waited, but didn't get any kind of reply, I thought he must have put it in the rubbish bin. I phoned him one day and said, what about it? He said, oh no, the translation’s fine, we'll be sending you a contract. So that's how it started. Although I signed the contract with Quartet Books, the volume was initially contracted by North Point Press in San Francisco. They did the editing, so my first experience of literary translation was being edited by North American editors. That gave it another interesting twist. This was the initial prompt to get into translation. But if I go back to my childhood, there are various experiences that might have set me up to become a translator. I was born into a rural working-class family, my mother and father spoke non-standard English, which is what I spoke. My first mother tongue, if you like, was non-standard English. And when I went to primary school, I was surprised when my teacher said: ‘You don't speak proper English.’ And then I got a scholarship to go to grammar school, I was the first one in the family to go to grammar school. And the situation was worse there really, because obviously I was surrounded by children who didn't have non-standard English, they spoke, they'd only ever spoken standard English.

Harshaneeyam: How did you get into French and Portuguese translation? 

Peter Bush: One of the things that happened at school is that I had all these issues over English, non-standard and standard, and I had a complex about it… what I got into was Latin, which we started learning in the first year, and I was really good at Latin. And in the school, if you were in the ‘A’ form, that was the top. If you were in the C form, that was the bottom. I was in B and was booted up to A because I was good at Latin and there I enjoyed French. And then I was given the opportunity of doing Spanish or physics and chemistry. I'm not sure why, but I didn't like physics and chemistry, so I thought, I'm good at French and Latin, I'll do Spanish. I had excellent teachers, which meant within the English system that by the age of 16 I was reading French and Spanish literature in the original, say a Balzac novel or Lorca’s poetry. Portuguese was different. When I was at Oxford university in the late 60s, I became involved in a radical socialist group. We had a newspaper, and I worked as a journalist on this daily newspaper. Because I had languages, I ended up being like a foreign correspondent. I read the newspapers and wrote articles on the situation in Spain and Latin America. I also started to read Portuguese and learn Portuguese in order to write articles on the situation in Portugal, where, of course, there was the Salazar dictatorship.

Then after my translation of the autobiography of Goytisolo came out, my publisher, Stephen Pickles, at Quartet Books was very generous. He liked the translation and asked: What else would you like to translate? Why don't you come up with some Latin American authors? We haven't got very much on our list that's Latin American. So I recommended Juan Carlos Onetti, the Uruguayan writer, five, or six novels, and I ended up translating five. So it was really a lucky break in the sense that I got with Quartet Books, that had this wonderful series called Encounters, where they published writers like Thomas Bernhardt.

There was a Spanish author I was interested: Antonio Muñoz Molina. And he had a noir novel Beltenebros. Quartet Books weren't interested in it when I first took it to them. So I took it to Bloomsbury. And Liz Calder, one of the founders of the Bloomsbury Publishing House, asked me to go and have a cup of tea with her at Bloomsbury in Soho Square in London to talk about it. I went and had that cup of tea with her and she clearly wasn't interested in Beltenebros. She had this book by Chico Buarque the Brazilian singer who'd written his first novel. And she said: Why don't you translate this? I thought: I know some Portuguese, but I’m not sure about translating a whole novel, so I said: Let me take it home and read it. Which is what I did, and I enjoyed the novel. And Liz said, translate 40 pages, because there's already an English translation that’s been rejected by Chico Buarque and his publisher in São Paolo, Companhia das Letras, Luis Schwarcz, and also Rubem Fonseca, who had better English than Chico, and was another advisor. Because Chico saw this novel like a baby, it was his first novel, and he was keen to be known as a writer as well as an important singer.

So I did the 40 pages, sent it off, and fortunately Liz and Co liked it. I'd made a few mistakes, but they thought that I'd caught the music of the style and the atmosphere in the novel. So I revisited my Portuguese, which was Peninsular, not Brazilian Portuguese. I got a book and some tapes, and started to build up my knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese. That's how I came to publish a translation of Chico Buarque. Then I did a novel from Portugal. 

 I wrote my first translation when I was 40. But I was a young translator in the sense that I knew nothing about the publishing scene and soon discovered that what you had to be in England and in the United States for that matter was proactive. If you don't take ideas to publishers, if you don't badger, if you don't go to the London Book Fair, if you don't get involved in the whole scene, then you're going to find it very difficult to get contracts. 

Harshaneeyam: The first book that you translated, you said it was edited in North America. What kind of editing was it? 

Peter Bush: There were two volumes of the autobiography and I had a different editor for each volume. The text is a mixture of chronological narrative and stream of consciousness. Goytisolo is a complex writer. There isn’t a lot of colloquialism or dialogue in it. But I do remember there were one or two things to do with sex, and they thought what I had written was too British. I ended up having this discussion over the phone with an editor I didn't know about some quite intimate sexual details. But in the end, we didn't have to come to a mid-Atlantic decision, we found colloquial phrases that worked naturally for both of us.. 

Harshaneeyam: What was your first contact with the Catalan language? 

Peter Bush: I did my first degree in Cambridge in the mid-sixties. My best friend Brian Nield and I listened to music together. And he started reading to me Catalan poets, Jacint Verdaguer and Carlos Riba. So that was my first contact with Catalan literature. At the same time there was a group of Cambridge historians who were very keen on Catalan history and organized a series of lectures on the contemporary history of Catalonia, which I went to. Also, I studied Medieval Spanish. And as part of Medieval Spanish, one couldn't avoid Catalonia, because Catalonia in the Middle Ages was an extremely important kingdom. Because Spain didn't exist as such in the Middle Ages, it was a series of small kingdoms. And the Catalonia was in the 11th and 12th centuries, the most important kingdom in the Mediterranean. It even colonized Rhodes. Maritime law for the Mediterranean was written by Catalans in the Middle Ages.

So I had numerous links to Catalan way back in the 1960s. And then at the end of the 70s, I had an opportunity to go to Spain to live for a year. I wanted to go to Barcelona to live for a year and that was when I seriously started to learn Catalan. But unfortunately I didn't get to go to Barcelona. I went to Murcia in the southeast of Spain. However when I was director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the end of the 90s, I was an active participant in the European network of literary translation national centers and I started to collaborate with Teresa Solana, the director of the Spanish National Centre. We organized joint translation summer schools in Tarazona and Norwich. Then our kind of collaboration at an intellectual, literary level became something else, and we were going to have a child. We had to decide whether we were going to live in Norwich or in Barcelona, we decided to give up our full-time posts as directors of national centers to become freelancers in Barcelona. A bold, if not rash step!

I started living in Barcelona, and I used to go back to the London Book Fair to maintain my contact with the publishing scene in the UK. I would meet up with Simon Smith from Peter Owen, and pitch ideas to him, but without success. Ater I'd been in Barcelona for a couple of years, I got this email from Simon, in which he said they’d just signed the contract for the rights to Quim Monzó’s La Magnitud de la Tragèdia, (The Enormity of the Tragedy) and he asked me if I would like to translate it I discussed with Teresa and I thought, yeah, why not have a go? And my first translation from Catalan was this novel. What I didn't realize at the time was, how important a writer Quim Monzó is. He is one of the leading Catalan prose writers from the 1980s onwards, and he's still writing. Nor did I realize that Catalonia was going to be the country invited to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007, which meant that throughout the world publishers were taking an interest in Catalan literature, and I think this was part of the reason why Peter Owen got interested as well. So that's how I started translating Catalan literature. 

Harshaneeyam: You have translated Spanish and Catalan. How similar are they, language-wise? What are the major differences that you have to look for? 

Peter Bush: All of the languages that I translate are Romance languages. They all have similarities, but they're all very different and unique in their own right. So Catalan is as different from Spanish as Spanish is from French and French is from Portuguese. So in terms of translation, I don’t think it's the intrinsic qualities of the languages that are the issue. The issue is my relationship with, and my knowledge of, these respective languages, which is at different levels. and comes at different times in my developing career. I've translated relatively little from French, but my knowledge of French goes back to when I started learning it at the age of 11, and I studied French when I was at Cambridge. I've never studied Catalan or Portuguese academically. In a sense, translating from those languages brings many elements beyond the normal research a literary translator has to pursue with every project.

It was a kind of a voyage of discovery and exploration of literary cultures I wasn't at all familiar with. And especially with Catalan. It was a kind of revelation, if I can use that word. Because here I was, I consider myself to be a specialist in Hispanic literature and culture and Latin American culture, but I'd never read. Catalan literature. And I didn't know these extraordinary works that existed in Catalan. Of course, you have to consider the backdrop to all this, which is the history of Catalonia. I mentioned the importance of the Catalan language and culture and politics in the Middle Ages. After Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews in 1492, they started to move against the Spanish Muslims (Muslims came to Spain from the 8th century) and expelled the last Moriscos in 1612. After that the Spanish central government worked to take away from Catalonia and the Basque Country the rights that they'd had from the Middle Ages and before. That led to a situation where the Catalan language was no longer recognized by the state, and in fact it was the desire of the central state to eliminate the language and the culture, but they never succeeded. However, they did succeed in eliminating the existence of meaningful published written culture in Catalan from the 17th century. In the 19th century, by which time Barcelona had become the “Manchester” of Spain, and Catalonia was the center of the Spanish textile industry, there was a parallel growth of the Catalan bourgeoisie and the Catalan working class. As part of that expansion of power, there was a move to resurrect Catalan in a cultural sense. So there's something called the Renaixença and people began to write and publish in Catalan again. 

Harshaneeyam: Now, please tell us about some of the important Catalan authors that you translated and their contribution. 

Peter Bush: I should mention three writers who wrote novels about the Spanish Civil War. I'm not sure what the situation is in India, but in the United Kingdom, and the States, when people think of the Spanish Civil War, their literary reference points are George Orwell and his Homage to Catalonia. George Orwell went to fight in the Spanish Civil War and wrote this book when he came back to the UK. Then there is Ernest Hemingway, who wrote a novel called For Whom the Bell Tolls, partly based on his experience of the civil war, and other works with a Spanish content. So people read Hemingway and Orwell and they see the Spanish Civil War through their perspective. I think it is important that works written in Spanish or Catalan by people who experienced the war in Spanish or Catalan, are translated. Some work has been translated from Spanish, but very little from Catalan. I have translated Uncertain Glory, Forty Lost Years and In Diamond Square.

I translated Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales, one of the finest novels written about the Spanish Civil War, or about war, and Sales was a Catholic and Republican. The Spanish Civil War was started in July, 1936, by a fascist insurrection, a group in the army rose up against the democratically elected Republican government and began the civil war. People tend to think of the war as being Liberalism or Bolshevism against Catholicism, but it's not so simple. Joan Sales was one among numerous Catholics on the side of the Republic and his novel is interesting from that perspective. It is also that because he was an army officer and sent to the front in rural Aragon, where he was put in charge of an anarchist battalion. Here was a Catholic Republican commanding a bunch of anarchist soldiers! The novel is set in the countryside but also in Barcelona. One gets descriptions of the hardships of life for people fighting at the front, and struggling to survive on the home front. Uncertain Glory is a novel that has been published in India so it is readily available there. 

Juan Sales had to go into exile in 1939. He went to the Dominican Republic but ended up in Mexico. He came back in 1948 when the dictatorship was still in power; the Francoist dictatorship lasted until 1975, so it was a long period of dictatorship. And he went back in 1948, and started writing his novel of the civil war. Strangely enough, it was published in 1956 in Catalan, under the dictatorship. The Francoist censors said the book should never be published: ‘It's pornographic, it's anti-church, it's obscene.’ Because he was a Catholic and had connections with the Bishop of Barcelona who gave it the nil obstat; it was okay to publish it. So the bishop trumped the dictator, and Uncertain Glory was published in 1956 in censored form. Much later when the French translation was being done, Joan Sales worked with the French translator, Bernard Lafargue, and what they did was restore what had been cut, but at the same time Sales actually added a lot to the novel. So the French translation was really the first full version to be published of Uncertain Glory. He even added to it after that and when there was a subsequent Catalan edition, he published this full version that had come out in French. And that is the version I translated. But Sales was also important because he set up a publishing house called Club Editor, and published the next book about the civil war that I will talk about, which is In Diamond Square, which is set in Barcelona, and written by Mercè Rodoreda: the civil war from the point of view of a working-class woman, Natàlia, who starts off in life in a pastry shop selling cakes and bread.

Natàlia gets bowled over by this young man, Quimet or Jo, who is a cabinet-maker maker, in the Gracia district of Barcelona and they marry and he nicknames her Colometa or Pidgey and they have two children. But he gets caught up in anarchist politics and goes off to the front and is killed. And she's left there with two children, struggling to survive. And he had bought lots of pigeons. He was a pigeon fancier and had this dream of making loads of money by...