When asked by strangers what it is that I do for a living, I usually recourse to an identification with the translator—rather than the writer, the artist, or even a certain dog’s human. There are a number of reasons for this. Translation, as a profession, is a service that helps bridge difference. The general consensus on translation, or «good translation», tends to be that it is an act of self-effacement in creative work. The latter ascription being a hopeful assumption—for many, and presumably many more with the advent of machine translation, translation is another form of mechanical reproduction, mindful mimesis at best. In any case, the work is complete once the translator disappears from view, her voice harmonising perfectly with that of the author she translates, or apes. Positioning myself within the field of translation, a kind of no-man’s land (the gendering is fortuitous) of ideally inconspicuous and thus inoffensive service work, I communicate to the other: I come in peace.

It depends on the context, of course. In the United Kingdom, where only 17.5 % of the population is estimated to speak at least two languages fluently, there is a certain aura around translation that doesn’t proliferate in the same way in, say, Berlin, where knowledge of a second language is often taken as a given.¹ The recent publication of two English-language novels by authors perhaps best known for their work as translators signals a shift in attention given to, or perhaps just demanded by, translators as producers, or even writers in their own right. This attention pivots on an idea of translation as a metaphor.

I recently had a conversation with someone who said they were going to begin an artistic research project on the translation of local vernaculars into modern-day, dominant languages. When I asked if they would perform the translation work themselves, with which I assumed a working knowledge of the source languages they sought to work with, they said they would enlist «linguists» to support their research. It seemed to me that the artist had no interest in the labour of translation (which is fair enough) but only the fact of its implementation as a symbolic gesture. Conversely, I once visited a temple in Vienna seeking to learn the language of my paternal grandmother, where the only person around who spoke German was a young boy who proceeded to translate between me and his elders. Feeling slightly uneasy at my own employment of this child’s labour, I proffered that he was a «guter Übersetzer». The idea of this little toil having such a name seemed to bemuse the boy. He didn’t see the conversation as anything but a means of producing understanding between otherwise mutually unintelligible adults.)

The prevailing metaphors of translation—as something magical or alchemical, simply there upon conjuring; or else birthed by an overly-attached surrogate—obscure the specific labour-quality of translation. They render the work even less material and real as it was when it was just invisible; or else they draw too close a comparison with the reproductive work that it is unfit to perform. The two novels I’ll discuss—The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft and The Long Form by Kate Briggs—relate and relate to translation very differently. Croft’s work is arguably ensconced in fantasies of translation as a biological metaphor for something like literary autopoiesis, while Briggs’ novel does not narrate translation directly. Instead, its account of the mundanity of caring for a baby while reading and considering of the novel simply invokes translation through the paralleling of these processes. Translation reappears throughout the novel as a vital process—not a biological process, but an immeasurable and yet intelligent effort to sustain life; conveying the world to an impressionable mind; of making something new again.