Translation Slam at Collected Books

Collected Books on the Riverwalk was a charmingly cosy place to be on the final night of Durham Book Festival. Many of the audience members settling in for the Translation Slam opted to skirt around the seating arrangement and take in the bookshelves, or order themselves a warm drink before the event began in earnest.

As a rather short individual in an economically organised space, my view of the Chair, Ruth Clarke, and translators Isabel Adey and Juana Adcock was limited, although I saw plenty of Adcock’s affable smile between the rows of heads. This didn’t undermine my experience, however.

On every seat was a handout featuring a Spanish extract from Layla Martinez’s Carcoma, flanked by Adey and Adcock’s English translations. I found myself scanning the triplet iterations of Carcoma/Woodworm more often than I sought a view of the speakers, making this an intelligently selected event for Collected Books.

Ruth Clarke opened with the amusing admission that this event was “not as violent” as its title might suggest, and that while other translation slams competitively pit translators against each other, this one would feature amiable conversation around the speakers’ linguistic choices. This was a much more appealing format than I expected, and indeed, the lively appreciation between both translators and the Chair made for pleasingly detailed conversation.

Clarke led proceedings by inviting the translators first to share their translation process – Adcock grinningly speaking of a speedy first draft and agonising revisions; Adey preferring a slow formulation – before turning to the handout.

The two speakers responded to each other’s translations, inquiring enthusiastically as to the reasoning behind certain decisions and laughing together over the task of taking the apparently ambiguous Spanish into the more emotionally clinical English language. Not one sentence of the thirty-four in the extract had been translated identically, although Clarke noted the marked similarities throughout both translations. It was clear that a competitive slam would not have worked between these two: Adey praised Adcock for her bold decision to translate 'la vieja' as 'crone', feeling it a more evocative and tonally accurate choice, while Adcock admired the varied synonyms of 'snootiness' and 'pride' that Adey ascribed to differing placements of 'soberbia'.

The event passed quickly, with avid discussion of connotations and cultural specificity, and with easy humour that Clarke, Adey, and Adcock readily supplied. The audience chuckled often, breaking into laughter as Adcock advised to never translate in public, mimicking the frantic hand gestures of one seeking the quality of a movement. Audience questions suggested that, like myself, others found the balance of truthful conveyance with creativity to be a fascinating dilemma.

I left Collected Books reflecting on the infinite variety of language, and pleased to have experienced brilliant snippets of literature that might otherwise have remained unknowable to me. Having never caught a translation slam before, I would happily attend another – ideally one that similarly takes the comparative task as one of mutual interest.