Saraband Books spoke ‘For Women in Translation Month 2021’, the award-winning translator Antoinette Fawcett about her experience of translating SHOCKED EARTH by Saskia Goldschmidt.
In this wonderful article she gives us an inside view about the questions a translator is confronted with. From replicating the feeling of the novel to individual word choices, you can read about it in this blog.
“It’s nearly three months since Shocked Earth, my translation of Saskia Goldschmidt’s novel Schokland, was published, and I still feel excited and overwhelmed by the reactions I’ve had from a variety of readers, and especially from people I don’t know at all, like Helen Vassallo, on her Translating Women blog. Helen was one of the first people to review the novel and what she said was so affirming that it made me jump with joy. Although it may seem strange to say that I was pleased to read that the novel had moved her to tears, I really was overjoyed that her emotional response mirrored my own. I also wept – and laughed, and spluttered with anger, annoyance and frustration – as I was translating the novel, and not only in the early stages. That is down to Saskia Goldschmidt’s masterly creation of plot and character and her dramatic sense of dialogue, action, and scene-setting.”
Continue reading at the website of Saraband >>
Shocked Earth is the story of a farming family in Groningen province. We meet three generations of the Koridon family: Zwier, the grandfather, a quiet and undemonstrative man who nonetheless is capable of deep affection; Trijn, his daughter, who never wanted to work on the family farm but after an ill-fated bid for freedom returned and never left; Femke, Trijn’s daughter, who wants to move into organic dairy farming but meets intransigence from her mother. After some background about Trijn’s childhood, her disastrous bid for independence via an ultimately abusive relationship with Femke’s father and her subsequent return to the family farm, the main focus is on Femke in more or less the present day. Femke wants to turn the farm into an enterprise that will “work with nature rather than against it”, while Trijn is adamant that this would be a sure path to financial ruin, and Zwier is reluctant to abandon the traditional methods that have shaped his life’s work. Femke is introverted and reserved, but when she meets Danielle, an “offcomer” who shows her what desire is, it is “as if a small animal had broken free inside her.” Needless to say, Trijn is about as enthusiastic about Femke’s romantic choice as she is about her plans for the farm, and the two women skirt around each other with shards of resentment and unarticulated reproaches constantly driving between them.
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