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 >>
The novel follows the lives of the Koridon family: Femke, her mother Trijn and her grandfather, Zwier, who each have different ideas about how to run their family farm in Groningen province. Femke wants to switch to sustainable growing principles, but Trijn is “convinced that you need to scale up to compete in the world market”. Zwier is reluctant to abandon the traditional methods he has always known. With three generations all living under the same roof and working together, you might expect things to be a little fraught. But the Koridon family is rife with decades-old tension. And if all that familial drama isn’t enough, their home province is experiencing a series of earthquakes caused by a gas extraction operation near their farm.