This is Part 2 of my conversation with Kasper Salonen whose poetic and translation influences include Arto Melleri, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Zach de la Rocha, Eminem, Federico García Lorca, Aaro Hellaakoski, Ted Hughes, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Matsuo Bashō, and William Carlos Williams, Kersti Juva, Ritva Leppihalme, Juhani Lindholm, Parkko Publishing, Tarja Roinila, Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Herbert Lomas, Anselm Hollo, as well as KAOS, a translation community. In Part 1 of our interview, Salonen delved into his journey to translation, the process of literal translation, and how he navigates the cultural nuances of the craft.
Salonen is one of Harri Hertell’s translators. I witnessed Hertell perform his poems alongside Radmila Petrović in October 2023 during the Frankfurt Book Fair. I was enamored by the seemingly impossible task of replicating a poem’s symphony in another language.
The Creative Translation Process
When I inquired about Salonen’s creative process and to describe a typical day, he reminded me, with a chuckle, that there are no typical days for a “freelance artist-philologist-poet.” “I am neurodivergent, and finding a balance between the hectic and the serene moments in my life is very important to me,” he says. “Deadlines and proper/generous compensations motivate me in my work; but so does the message itself, which I’m being asked to transmit as a translator. And I live right next to a lake in Southern Finland, so strolling in the forest and on the shore is part of any truly fulfilling day for me.”
Salonen tells me he keeps several journals and copious notes on his phone. “I write in fragments and ideas in the moment, or in one big breath from start to finish, or a combination of these. Every single moment is full of poems. The ones that materialize are the special cases that beg to be born.”
I asked how Salonen communicates with authors during the translation process, and how he manages any differences in interpretation or creative choices. “While translating a living writer, good chemistry is key, and a playful yet respectful dialogue,” he says. “I make sure to communicate that whatever first draft I send along is a raw translation, which may yet undergo intensive editing or might be great as is.”
Salonen stresses that he invites and encourages questions at this point in the process because his clients are primarily Finnish speakers with varying degrees of English fluency. “Often I take on the additional role of a linguist or consultant when explaining my reasoning for a certain translation solution,” he says because he has to be able to defend his choices while remaining open to identifying errors that result from an informed perspective and dialogue with the author.
He admits that navigating this process when he becomes attached to the text that is now also infused with his voice is a challenge. “When the original author is no longer with us,” he adds, “the psychological journey is much different! The departed cannot critique my choices, so the onus is on me (and potential co-editors) to do them justice.”
Lost in Translation?
As a German native writing in English, I often find myself looking for idiomatic expressions or coming up against untranslatable cultural concepts. Early in my writing journey, I often viewed these as shortcomings but recognize now that they can also give a unique style and voice to my writing.
In a lecture “Reading Like a Translator” Damian Searls emphasizes that the essence of reading like a translator is intricately connected to the philosophy of perception in three ways. Initially, reading serves as a mode of perception, wherein we “see” words on the page or screen (or hear them in the case of audiobooks) and subsequently process the information. This kind of perception, he argues, is not medium-neutral. Art has the potential to alter our perception of the world, acting as a catalyst for renewal of how we view the world.
And “a third way that perception is relevant,” Searls says, “is a kind of analogy for reading, especially reading with the intent to translate.” He asserts that perception represents our fundamental framework or representation of the duality, illustrating the concept that we exist here, facing something external in the world. Translation is interactive. It requires collaboration with authors as the crucial ingredient in ensuring that the translated work aligns with the author’s intentions.
Searls explains that “we don’t perceive a world that is out there, separate from us, we perceive and live and move within this world as part of it. […] A text that we translate isn’t being brought somewhere, say from German to English. There’s a more dynamic interaction, a more dynamic interplay and translation between the self and the other, the source and the target the author and the translator.”
In my exchange with Salonen he left me with the impression that he shares this view. He says, “When people refer to something being ‘lost in translation,’ it often occurs to me that translation is not really about loss and gain; it’s about curiosity and meaning-making, through both commonalities and contrasts in language and culture. Even my greatest translatorial challenges are joys to me, and the final manifestation of any text occurs in the minds of those who experience it. Seeing people’s live reactions is also very rewarding.” He adds that the pinnacle is when he has the opportunity to perform the finished translation into his spoken word performances on stage in front of an audience.
The Cultural Lens of Translation
As Searls asserts above, reading like a translator is linked to our perceptions of the world we live in. I asked Salonen how his own cultural lens and experiences flavor the stories and poems he translates. “A phenomenon I find funny as well as challenging is that of “faux amis”, or lexical false friends (which may also represent the above-mentioned culture bumps). Innocuous and commonly used source language words that carry widespread dubious connotations or innuendo in the target language sometimes can’t be helped.”
Salonen explains that in the Finnish language the word for “a cloud in the sky,” is “pilvi” which is the same word colloquially used for “cannabis” in numerous Finnish sociolects. “Being high is ‘olla pilvessä’, which can also simply mean ‘cloudy weather.’ This is a random fact rap artists and poets may craft into metaphors.” He adds that “this which may be so self-referential as to be untranslateable, so usually a translatorial substitution or innovation is required in such cases of verbal punning.”
Salonen reminds us that language is evolving “at a greater pace than ever in history” and stresses the importance of examining the various cultural biases, habits, or other potentially problematic conventions we may sometimes perpetrate. “Being aware of contextual and tonal varieties is crucial for quality communication,” he states. “There is a lot we can say with nearly invisible preferences, and by making conscious interpretations about the meanings and vantage points being conveyed.”
To illustrate his point further he highlights another example from the Finnish language. He explains that Finnish doesn’t have a grammatical gender, but instead refers to all people in the third person singular as “hän” versus English which makes use of “he/she/they.” “This has occasionally posed intriguing and important challenges in my translation and proofreading work, which were all resolved with the author or editor, “ he says. “Such choices are indeed up for public critique, once the translation is published.”
Artificial Intelligence and Translation
These days, it seems impossible to discuss any form of writing and editing without incorporating AI. With translation apps in the palm of your hand, I wondered how this technology affects artists like Salonen. “I think I’m already losing work to AI, in both technical translation and in voice-over,” he says. “I’m uneasy but still excited about the future of machine learning, which is arriving as we speak, and will likely soon tell us more about the nature of communication and consciousness.”
In a recent article in the Atlantic titled “The Last Frontier of Machine Translation” Jeremy Klemin writes, “Most studies find that neural machine-translation models can translate only about 30 percent of novel excerpts—usually simple passages—with acceptable quality, as determined by native speakers. They struggle because, at its core, literary translation is an act of approximation.” He continues, “Translators often have to sacrifice literal meaning for the greater good of the piece. But AI is less adept at making such compromises and at landing on creative solutions that, although technically less correct, preserve aspects of a book that are hard to quantify: voice, spirit, sensibility.”
Klemin hits an important point. In Write Away, Elizabeth George states “that the voice of the point-of-view character is not your voice unless you are the character. So, the voice of the point-of-view character is not your way of speaking and it’s not your way of thinking. […] It comes from the character analysis you’ve created. A character’s voice comes from his background.”
Subtext and voice are the elusive soul of storytelling. They are the story’s subconscious or as Charles Baxter defines it in The Art of Subtext, Beyond Plot, subtext is the “subterranean” of the story. They are less accessible to machine translation. Some may contend that AI has not reached that point yet. The question remains: will it eventually reach that point, and should we permit it? However, that might be a topic for another discussion at a later time.
Salonen hopes that tools like AI “will amount to greater peace and equity everywhere in the world, in all industries and social spheres.” He says, “Accessibility is intrinsically important to translators, so a technology that improves linguistic accessibility seems like a positive move, as long as we try to manage it with care.”
The Future of Literary Translation
Salonen emphasizes the importance of cultural dialogue across the world, asserting that understanding each other as global citizens is essential, and it is impossible without translators. “While I make no definitive assertion about whether future human translators will be augmented or supplanted by emerging technologies, I do believe in the potential for a balance.”
Salonen hopes that publishers particularly those focused on literal translations do not come under any more political pressure as, he states, is currently occurring in Finland. His wish for the future of translation is that more literature will find its way into the world in the form of “never-before translated language pairs” and “that we are able to kindle trust and curiosity in one another, across the world, through art and collaborative friendship.”
Advice for Aspiring Artists and Translators
Salonen’s advice for aspiring translators and artists is, first and foremost, to have fun. “I suggest becoming familiar with both following your dreams and paying your dues, so to speak. If art or translating is a spark within your soul, follow it and nurture it, find time for it, try things and welcome even failures as opportunities. But reality also involves routines and responsibilities, and sometimes circumstances just won’t go your way, or you may have to take on jobs that seem uninteresting or too difficult. The spark […] can become buried by stress and expectations. Trust in the process, and sparks will fly.
He quotes from the afterword of his upcoming book Unspoken Words: Selected Poems of Arto Melleri (Enostone Publishing): “Another intent of mine was to leave at least some of Melleri’s work for some other future translator to potentially take on and transform into English or any other language, without any prior versions in existence. It really does feel quite like making an archaeological discovery; like finding and naming some unique fossil or star.”