Sofía Lindqvist-Arriaga works from a small apartment in Barcelona's Gràcia district, at a desk facing a blank wall. Views, she says, are a distraction; the only landscape she needs is the page. Born in Gothenburg to a Swedish mother and a Chilean father, she has spent twenty years translating Scandinavian fiction into Spanish, including several novels that became unexpected international successes. Translators rarely become public figures, but her name now appears on book covers in the same size type as the authors she translates.
People often say that translation is impossible. Do you agree? “Completely. And then I do it anyway, every day. Every language divides the world differently, so no sentence ever passes intact from one to another. Something is always lost and, if you are lucky, something is gained. The fantasy of a perfect translation is like the fantasy of a perfect marriage. It is not the point. The point is the long conversation, the compromises, the moments of unexpected understanding.”
What is the hardest thing to translate from Swedish into Spanish? “Silence. Swedish fiction is full of it: pauses, things left unsaid, conversations where two people talk about the weather for a page because they cannot talk about their grief. Spanish is a more generous language, more expressive, more willing to say things aloud. The temptation for a translator is to fill the silences, to explain. That would be a betrayal. My job is to make Spanish readers comfortable with a kind of quiet their own language resists.”
The visible translator
Your name now appears prominently on covers. Why does that matter? “Because translation is authorship. Not the same authorship as the novelist, but a real creative act, full of decisions no one else could make in quite the same way. For a long time, publishers treated translators as invisible, as if books simply appeared in another language by magic. Making translators visible is partly about fairness and pay, but it is also about honesty. Readers deserve to know whose voice they are hearing.”
A translation is a love letter written in someone else's handwriting.
Is there a word you have never managed to translate? She laughs. “Many. But the one that haunts me is a Swedish expression for the particular melancholy of a summer evening when you know autumn is coming. Spanish has no single word for it. I have used a different phrase every time it has appeared, depending on the rhythm of the sentence, the character, the season in the book. Perhaps that is the only honest solution: to translate a word again and again, and never the same way twice.”
How has machine translation changed your work? “It has changed how people think about translation more than how I do it. Machines are very good at information, and literature is not information. A novel is rhythm, tone, the weight of a pause. I use tools sometimes to check a technical term, the way I would use a dictionary. But the essential work, deciding what a silence means and how to carry it, is still a human act. I suspect it always will be.”
What are you working on now? “A short novel by a young writer from the far north of Sweden, about a woman who returns to her childhood village to care for her dying father. It is almost entirely made of silences. I have been working on the first chapter for three months. Some days I translate a single sentence and then delete it in the evening.” She glances at the blank wall. “It is the best book I have ever been given. I am terrified of it.”
